seeing through a mirror dimly

burr, she/her, artist, i like cats and disheveled men

[burr-ell]

he doesn't miss him. please don't put it in the newspaper that he misses him

[beardedmrbean]

Congratulations on the cat

[thenatsdorf]

[sandersstudies]

My favorite part is when the kitty runs to the window and looks out like “the outside stuff????? It is inside?????”

[strawberryjellystuff-deactivate]

i

i had to

[naamahdarling]

Y’all this is a great video to study to observe the body language of a very happy but also very excited cat.  Lots of people see videos of excited cats doing things like climb rock climbing walls or get on small boats and think they are angry or scared, when they aren’t.  Here’s a good example of happy excitement and tension in a cat where the cat’s pleasure is easy to see.  The cat’s tail is lashing and its ears are going backward and forward like crazy, but the cat is not angry, it is merely off its shits because snow is just incredible.  This is a wildly playful cat which might play-attack a hand or other animal because it is so excited, but not out of anger.  Note the zoomies at the end to burn off some of that energy!

Think about it. When we humans do something fun and very physical, our bodies are often tense, at the ready, and a lot of our body language does look kind of aggressive or even scared. Cats are the same!  Animals at play or investigating new things often show some tension, but tension is not the same as anger or fear!

[knitmeapony]

Home.

When I was sixteen years old, I was a very lost little girl. 

I am tremendously lucky; my family is open and kind, my parents are loving, my church was liberal and warm, my school was progressive and thoughtful.

But I still remember getting teased mercilessly about how much of a ‘boy’ I was, with my short haircut and my t-shirt and shorts at the pool.  I still remember getting mocked for being fat, for being not enough of a girl, for not developing fast enough, for developing too fast.  I still can’t question my identity as a woman too much without cracking into a nasty mess of trauma.  I was nine, and I wanted to be anything but what I was.

I still recall the pastor at our church crying because of the gay brother she lost to AIDS.  I remember people outside of our little circle mocking us for working on his quilt square.  I remember sobbing myself, wondering what I would do if I got infected, wondering if the way I was would kill me before I graduated.  I was fourteen, and I knew that I was going to die.  Young, probably.  Certainly alone.

I can replay in my head when, at summer camp, were were tasked with writing monologues including one from the perspective of ourselves, fifty years in the future.  I wrote a comedy about robot limbs and virtual pets.  My friend wrote about how she would be dead, because something would have killed her.  The world would have killed her. AIDS or violence or the government would have killed her. I was sixteen, and I knew none of us would see the other side of twenty.  Some of us had pills to make sure it was so.

And then I remember this day, this miracle, magical day, when a girl from my youth group, three years older than me, beautiful and queer and proud, just came to my house.  I think she knew, though I never talked about it, I think she could see in me what I was and where I was going. 

We never hung out, but she picked me up and she told my Mom we were just going to hang out, and she drove me to a part of town I’d never been before.  It was a coffee shop, and it had a bookstore, and it had rainbows painted into the fence, and I knew what that meant.  And I was terrified.  But N, she was so cool.  She was so cool and so amazing and so confident and so self-assured.  So I went with her.

She ordered a french press and I had a tea, and we just talked.  About life, and philosophy, and all the beautiful, weird things teenage girls talked about.  And all around me, there were these people I’d never seen before.  There were boys holding hands.  There were photos of women kissing on the walls.  There were shelves of queer studies texts.  There were Polaroids of quilt squares stuck all around the register.

And the longer I was there, the better I felt.  And when we left, when the shop closed, I was so regretful to leave, so grateful to be there – I put every dime of my money in the tip jar.

And when I got back to my bedroom, I cried.

Because that place – it was home.  Home. Home.  It was safe.  For all my objectively wonderful, fantastic life, I had never, not once in my life, felt like that.  I could say anything.  I could do anything.  I could be anything.  

And there were people there twice my age.  Three times!  There were old people drinking coffee, holding hands, buying books, obviously not alone and they were like me.

My mom asked why I was crying, and all I could tell her was that I was going to be okay.  And that was it, that was the whole story.  I was crying because I was going to be okay.  Because there were people who lived beyond twenty.  Because no matter what else happened, there was a home.  I went back, over and over.  When school started, I gave my carefully hoarded pills to someone else, but I also asked them if they wanted to come to the coffee shop with me.

That coffee shop is long gone, and N has moved on and we haven’t talked in decades, but that first trip was absolutely essential to my survival, because it taught me there were places out there that’d feel like home.  Other queer spaces, ones that were quite explicitly so.  Clubs.  Parties.  College groups.  I never really came out, I just started being this person.  The world around me was accepting enough that I could.  And always, no matter what, if the world got too hard, I could find one of those places.  I wouldn’t get hell.  I would be home.

Where you go in, and you see someone like you.  You see a hundred people like you but not like you, old people, successful people, beautiful people, ordinary people.  You feel safe.  You go home.  Because it doesn’t matter what the place is, what people do there, it’s the people, it’s the strangeness, it’s the things you can not see in your mainstream life that make them special.

These places are so important.  And when one of them is violated, even when I don’t know anyone personally affected, I feel like my own home was broken into.  I feel terrified.

My family has been relentlessly, endlessly, constantly under siege since long before I was born.  It will still be at war long after I die.  But there are places like that coffee shop, like Pulse, where I can go to plan and play, to mourn and dance, to be.  

I don’t have some big conclusion for this.  I don’t have one of my usual messages of hope.  I just wanted to say that places like this are important, that we need more of them.  Places like this changed me, and for the better.  Places like this are where my family lives.  And while I will be on my guard, I refuse to be afraid to go there.  I will go home, any time, any city, and there is nothing anyone can do to change that.  The reward is worth the risk.  

If you feel the same – if you can, if you feel safe – please, go to one of these places this week.  Go to a club, go to a coffee shop, go to a mixer or an event, hell, go to a thrift store if it’s an explicitly queer one.  There are a lot of people that are going to be afraid, this week.  Go, please, if you are brave, and make those places weird and wonderful and diverse and home.  

[knitmeapony]

I wrote this in 2016, and I meant every word, and I mean it all over again now. And I’ll mean it every time someone invades our spaces, invades our lives, and tries to make us afraid to be ourselves.

[burr-ell]

SHRIEKING

[norabee]

"If you masturbate you're a filthy gooner" you sound like a fucking nazi and I'm not kidding, why are people so eager to turn into pearl-clutching reactionaries about normal sexual activity

[norabee]

Addendum to this is that if you call normal goddamn women "goonbait" for the crime of Being Women In Public then I think you should get beaten with hammers

"Masturbating and sexual activity in general are not things you should be shaming people for" and "acting like women existing is basically porn is fucked up and dehumanizing" can and should be simultaneously-held viewpoints

[starlitsecrets]

Remember when joining fandom as a younger person meant lurking for a bit and figuring out the vibe and etiquette instead of coming in on day one and calling people weirdos for liking weirdo shit in the weirdo factory.

[burr-ell]

i for one welcome our new lords and masters

[utilitycaster]

oh the raven queen has been ominous vax. likely thing for her to be. you made a deal with a death deity not a rainbow puppy sunshine deity. woman forbid gods do anything.

[mutanthairything]

So I've been thinking about Taryon and his mom in the Vox Machina campaign and why their conversation was so impactful for me, and I keep coming back to this exchange.

Up until now, the party has been discussing Howaardt's arranged marriage plot on basis of how it's going to be terrible for Tary and Lydia, that the family doesn't deserve to be helped, and as Percy puts it, "You'll be miserable, and that will make her miserable." And his conversation with his sister, despite them showcasing some care for each other deep down, is still rather antagonistic.

Then comes his mom, who unambiguously loves him and has been working to understand him better by reading his books, who asks for a private conversation to talk about something serious. At this point of the arc, Taryon has spent a year living in a space space, working with friends, and generally growing from the critical inflection point of episode 94. That's when the second layer of his mask, beneath the one labeled "daddy issues", is pulled off, and get finally gets the message that he needs to be himself. So, while we do see his personality change after the timeskip, we don't really have a scene where we sit down as think about it. Mariya walks in and it's a time for Sam the player to really think about what Taryon should do - help the Darringtons? Leave and let the legacy of his family name be one of evil?

It's in this conversation where I believe he decides to take a third route: change things, but as he brings up with Pike and her relatives, see if he can save the family.

Mariya is described as a woman worn down by life with her husband, and the descriptions of the Darrington home as a dreary place with uncomfortable furniture (and it's no wonder Tary spent most of his time in his room), and even it's is a Sam joke, the "playroom" comment adds to the "tyrant of a father" not really caring much about his children's needs over his own image.

There's no need to get into how Howaardt doesn't know his son and how he sees him as a asset instead of his own person. Mariya opens the conversation by complimenting how Taryon has grown, which in turn implies how much...happier and confident he's become after leaving. She's glad one of her children "escaped" this life, as she states:

I have always seen you fight these same circumstances bravely, and I find vicarious joy in your escape from this place this past year. These books are a reminder of that same bravery.

Taryon leaving is the first bit of hope she has for herself and Maryanne, but if these doubts get to him, everything he's learned will be for nothing. The question of marriage is on his mind, and he wonders if his own mother, who was just as much a victim of Howaardt as Tary was, would have been happier never having met him, never became the faithful wife of a rich man. Which out mean he and his sister never would have been born. And if everything would have been better that way.

But it can be salvaged. He can turn this around and make something good out of this terrible situation - and I think back to Kerrek's letter to Keyleth, about hardship transforming into something new. Mariya wants her son to be happy and to not revert to the man he used to me, and having someone externalize the idea of thinking of his own happiness feels just right happening in this point of the story. After this, Tary decides to talk to the Myriad and find a way to do something different with the Darrington resources.

And , of course, they geek out over books. It's adorable until -

"It reminded me of you" can obviously reference Lawrence, but Taryon's favorite novels are adventure, some chivalric and poetic romance nonsense here and there. A tragic love story almost feels out of place until you remember 1) people who love books will reach any genre as long as it's good and 2) Tary didn't have a happy childhood. He would be drawn to something about an unfair but beautiful tale, and I wonder if Mariya was also thinking about her son's wish to be respected while being trapped by the Darrington legacy. It's something I'll have to think about if I want to write some fics about this family.

[themoonandmyman]

I haven’t said anything interesting in a long while. this will continue

[incomingalbatross]

But Tumblr says this will build engagement; and Tumblr is an honorable site.

(feel free to reblog this any way you want, if you want.)

[david-goldrock]

Friends, tumblerinas, feigalach of all kinds, lend me your ears. I come to mourn the reblog chain, not to praise her

The good that features do, is mentioned after them. Their frustrating parts are oft intered with their bones, so let it be, with the reblog chain

The noble tumblr hath told you the reblog chain denied engagement. If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath the reblog chain paid for it

Here, under leave of tumblr and its @staff, for tumblr is an honorable site, so are its @staff, honorable in their help, come I to speak, at the reblog chain's final moments

She was a good feature. Simple, and engaging to me, but tumblr says she denied engagement and tumblr is an honorable site

She had brought many memes to the world, who's sharing did the userbase grow, did this, in the reblog chain, deny engagement?

When that the meme did flop, the reblog chain had not notes! Engagement denial should be made of lesser stuff, yet tumblr says she denied engagement and tumblr is an honorable site

You all did see that in the last 3 years thrice users of other sites flocked to it, and thrice they had not stayed because opening Tumblr for the first time sucks, and absolutely never for the reblog chain, but tumblr says she did deny engagement, and Tumblr, is an honorable site

I speak not to disprove what tumblr spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love her once, not without cause: What cause withholds you then, to mourn for her? O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And @changes have lost their reason. Bear with me; my heart is in the coffin there with the reblog chain, and I must pause till it come back to me.

[vyvilha]

i think i don't really vibe with most other fans of my favorite male characters is because they usually depict them too much of a man, and i am not interested in men, i am interested in The Character. and i am not saying that they should depict them as women, or nonbinary, or should depict them as feminine, no, not at all. but there's like, you know, you can depict a male character as The Character, and you can depict them as The Man. do you get me? like, i go to the fandom looking for art and fics, and it's just, regardless of his actual characterization, it's all just fantasizing about some kind of an abstract dominant patriarch, wearing my favorite character's face. it may be the most totally-wouldnt-have-normal-relationships (and sometimes even would-literally-abuse-you) kind of guy, and you join a dedicated space for his fans, and all they talk about is how they want to marry and start a tradcore 50s style nuclear family with him. it can be a guy who's arrogance and attempts of domination are explicitly shown to be a facade that hide the fact that he's actually kind of a massive pathetic wet loser, and you go to his fics, and they're all depicting him as a caricaturish daddy dom. at this point it's like, do you even like the character at all, or do you just like The Man, and project this man onto whatever character you find visually attractive? and these people kind of, really really poison actual discussion of the character, who is kind of a fucked up evil person (i only like *those* types, so im talking about them) because they see analysis of the actual character as an attack on their fantasized daddy dom husband, who is actually isn't The Character at all, and is simply a face of the day for The Man

[burr-ell]

we have GOT to put more words on the high shelf bc how are both critical role AND fire emblem fans still insisting that divine creation myths are actually about colonizers

[mollyjames]

I do tend to be suspicious of art that really lauds and worships the idea of being an artist. Like yes, art is cool, I think it's valuable, there's a reason I make it. But let's not get overly self congratulatory here

[mollyjames]

I think it's okay to love what you do, and even celebrate that. But there's a line that gets crossed sometimes where the art goes... "unlike all of those stupid people, who just dont get it." And it's like... hey... who are you making this for, exactly?

[tallspookylady]

reminds me of that "artists fuck better because we turn sex into art, mattresses are our canvas" post or however that goes. always makes me laugh

[trans-seraphim]

also relevant

[hotcrossedfangs]

[shounenchild]

my favorite part of this whole thing tbh

[parkchanwoohoo]

Realizing that I am not employing enough of my free will to become a nuisance at work

[raine-of-auroria]

Me watching this:

[cowboybarbaryn]

I’m not letting this rot in the tags