If you like my music, want to support my top-surgery dreams, or are simply feeling generous, you can donate to my ko-fi.
I love stalking my friends' music listening on Last.fm (one of my fave ways to discover new music tbh). Feel free to add me there.
Some other words that describe me: music nerd, language lover, accidental philosopher, avid autodidact, professional translator, writer for love, editor for money, voracious reader, queer, kink-positive, neurodivergent. I’m pretty anachronistic.
My own original posts are tagged #cosmo gyres, and some of my favorite tags I often use can be found attached to this post.
Some other custom tags if you want to get to know me:
#musicblogging (all the posts about music)
#music nerd (obsessing on my main special interest)
#cosmo nerds out (about various topics)
#my writing (fiction, poetry, song lyrics, creative non-fiction etc.)
#cosmologos (my non-creative writing)
#just songwriter things (my thoughts on songwriting)
#journaling (my offline journal)
#tag rant (posts where I went off in the tags)
#a day in the life (my daily life)
#my translations (from various languages)
#sorry for the mess jerome (bitching about bad translations)
EDIT: If Tumblr goes down, you'll be able to find me on Dreamwidth and probably also on Pillowfort. Feel free to add me there pre-emptively any time, just in case.
(also: I'm the leftist-anarchist type. Free Palestine, BLM, ACAB, FCK NZS, FCK AFD, you get the idea. Not a fan of TERFs or Zionists. I have no DNI.)
It’s difficult to fully articulate the hold that Patrick Stewart had on audiences when TNG was airing. Between the hundreds of magazine covers, the talk show circuits, and the paparazzi nonsense, the amount of baldness puns editors were compelled to create was astounding.
It was like the media fixated on this man because he had catastrophic levels of charisma and audiences were losing their minds over him (TNG was regularly beating network shows in ratings), yet he was so far removed from the narrow Hollywood standards of beauty that it vexed and haunted these people for years.
Baldness was a joke in Hollywood. 75% of George Costanza's identity revolved around bald jokes. If you were a bald actor, you were cast as a villain or a buffoon, never the hero. And if you were losing your hair, you had to slap a wig on or risk losing your career. Yul Brynner was somewhat of an exception but he was from a much different generation of Hollywood and even Bruce Willis didn't fully shave his head until 1994 (post TNG success incidentally).
In Patrick Stewart's case, there was often an undercurrent of snide putdowns with many interviewers, drawing focus to his baldness over and over and over again with low hanging jokes. It was like you could see their vanity-based paradigms cracking in real time and it was strange to witness. Imagine how bizarre it would be if talk show hosts today could only ask The Rock, Vin Diesel, or Jason Statham about their bald heads.
But karma swooped in to the rescue. In 1992 Stewart was voted TV Guide's "Sexiest Man on Television" with a whopping 54% of votes. He beat out the likes of Luke Perry, John Corbett, A. Martinez, and even Burt Reynolds (with a total of 20 contenders).
The middle-aged bald guy in the syndicated sci-fi show beat out the hottest of the Hot Guys™️ and it wasn't even remotely close.
^ Bald joke
So yeah, today he's an old, revered thespian who is occasionally Charles Xavier, but not only did Patrick Stewart pave the way for other bald actors to be considered leading men, he discombobulated Hollywood with his unconventional attractiveness and it was amazing.
My mom texted me today that she'd found an old sketchbook of mine from when I was a kid. She took photos of a bunch of the pages and sent them to me – what a fascinating treasure. I had completely forgotten drawing all of these, but as I look at them, the memory stirs faintly and rouses itself. Wow. I was an interesting little child, wasn't I?
Image descriptions below.
IMAGE 1:
Black-and-white drawing. Watched by a confused creature with eyes on stalks, who evidently has no idea what’s going on, a nervous-looking avocado-shaped creature clutches its head while imagining the following scene:
The avocado creature is lying flat on its back in the middle of the road, struggling and grimacing in panic but apparently unable to move, as a car bears down on it at high speed, about to run it over. The car’s headlights are depicted as evil eyes fixed on its victim, and the windows are all tinted black.
The picture is titled “EID*” and at the bottom of the page, the asterisk explains:
*Ever-Impending Doom
§
IMAGE 2:
Color drawing. Against a background of bright yellow, three non-human creatures, all the same size, sit grandly in large chairs. Each of them has its feet resting in a tub of water. The leftmost creature is a red devil with horns and a wistful expression. The middle creature is a giant six-legged bug, with a dark blue thorax, gossamer dragonfly-like wings and moth-like antennae. The rightmost creature is a lavender-gray elephant.
The picture is titled “The Footbaths of Garda”.
§
IMAGE 3:
Black-and-white drawing. The sun shines on a tall wall that stands alone, unattached to anything. Cross-hatched lines represent strong shadows thrown by the wall and by a few curious stick-figure by-standers: a wondering person holding a child’s hand, and another person wearing a hat and leaning on something.
These three people are all staring in interest at what is occurring on the wall: On its vertical side, several people (also depicted as stick figures) are rapidly moving up and down, sticking out sideways. None of them have any shadows.
The picture is titled “marching up and down the wall / leaving no shadows at all / they never fall”.
§
IMAGE 4:
Color drawing. The page is covered with small pink crescent-shaped figures – all the ones on the left side of the page face right, and all those on the right side of the page face left. Each one has a small black dot within its crescent. At the center of the page floats a huge disembodied human eye, with long eyelashes and a purplish eyelid half-covering a turquoise iris.
The picture is untitled.
§
IMAGE 5:
Color drawing. In the center of the page is a green grasshopper, wearing a debonair striped top hat decorated with festive little dots. Surrounding it are four symbols – a blue star, a red pair of lips, a blue crescent moon, and a red heart – all similarly outlined with dots.
The picture is titled “dastardly deeds” and the title is playfully festooned with dots as well.
§
IMAGE 6:
Color drawing. An orange fruit, perhaps an apricot, is shown with a stem, two attached green leaves, and a large rotten spot on one side.
The picture is untitled.
§
IMAGE 7:
Color drawing. A row of black back-slashes cuts across the entire image from one side of the page to the other. Behind it (and somewhat blurred where the slashes cross them) are two faces.
The face on the left is dark blue. Above the slash-line, it looks like a bald blue head with drooping sad eyes and the beginning of a nose (which gets cut off by the slashes). Below the slash-line, there are no more features and it turns into a mess of wiggly lines like the legs of a blue jellyfish.
The face on the right is dark red. Below the slash-line, we see the bottom half of a head, with a large tooth-baring grin surrounded by thick red lips. Above the slash-line, there are only wiggly red lines sprouting upward and a bit out to each side, sort of like the hair of someone who’s just been electrocuted.
In the bottom right of the image there is a dark green four-leafed clover.
The picture is titled “without you i learn to laugh”.
§
IMAGE 8:
Color drawing. The entire page is covered in dark blue dots on a white background, like a color-inverted depiction of a view of outer space filled with innumerable stars. On the left, we see a planet as viewed from space, land forms in golden yellow alternating with dark blue oceans. In the bottom left are two huge stylized stars in pink and purple, side by side, almost nebula-like.
Diagonally across the entire page, with each line written in a different color, is the following text, which can also be taken as the picture’s title:
and it was so otherworldly
this planet of blue and gold
it almost looked like home again
just seen from a different angle
a whole new pair of eyes
in the same old ignoble head
like orion’s belt
with a star missing
see I am extremely pro-sex-scenes in whatever, I think its good and fun and important because its literally just an aspect of life being portrayed, its fine. But my problem is that a lot of the time, characterizations change drastically within sex scenes and I find that jarring. This is especially true of eroge, VNs and such.
Like, I feel like there's a switch that gets flipped that once the sex happens its "porno mode" and the writing is meant to be more hot than work towards any other cause. Which is fine, but some people seem to take it to the point of just sucking the character out of them to make them porno stand-ins. Like, if theres a clumsy character, I want them being clumsy in the bedroom too. If there's a goofy character, I want them cracking dumb jokes while they fuck. If someone isn't particularly forward outside of sex, why would they be initiating within the sexual scenes? Things like that drive me bonkers!!! And I feel like it would probably be ten times as hot if you get to see an actual character who got built up like that in the bedroom, you know???
And on the slip side of this, if a character behaves differently during sex, what's the reason for that? It can be as simple as "they spend all day with this pressure to be calm and polite in their job, so when they have sex they want to let loose and be rude" or "they're usually more shy in public, but when they're with a partner they trust they really open up and show off their confident side"
You still have to actually set that up to feel like it makes sense for the character, of course.
I agree it can be boring and frankly a little cliche for characters to just instantly become porn stars for the sake of their sex scenes. It takes me out of a story, absolutely ruins my immersion. I no longer feel like I am reading about people with unique lives and an interesting relationship. I'm also asexual and maybe that has an influence on my perception of sex scenes lol. I just don't get turned on by the standard erotic tropes so many authors use to signify "this is hot. You should be aroused now". Doesn't do anything for me, it's not what I'm reading for.
And as a writer, too, I am more interested in writing characters whose personalities really come out when they have sex. It's a chance to show how they act when they're free from the public eye and fully exposed to someone they trust. Or to show how they put on an act even in private. What they've been holding back from the public, how they let loose, etc. There should be a big difference between how they have sex in a new relationship vs a long term one that's been going steady for years. Sex in true privacy vs sex in a house where they know other people are trying to get some sleep in nearby bedrooms, or where their own young children are sleeping and may wake up and come looking for their parents because they had a nightmare.
There are so many ways to make sex scenes unique and interesting and actually tie into the rest of the story!
i can understand that, but there's also something i've seen in a fair bit of media that bothers me (maybe its cause of the media i watch, which is mostly live action tv from the early 2010s and late 2000s but idk)
why is sex treated as necessary for the relationship to be "real"? it seems weird that that's a "thing", and as someone who dislikes reading/writing sex scenes and has no plans to include any in their own work, it confuses and bothers me
shows like Psych, Monk, Grimm, Bones, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Sherlock (BBC), Unforgotten (which is a newer show, so that's especially weird to me), they all kinda treat romantic relationships as less real or as though they aren't worth as much when the people in the relationship aren't sleeping together.
it must just be a "me thing" though. i've never liked reading, watching, or writing about sex, and i've never really understood the whole "i think this person's attractive so i want to sleep with them even though we've never even spoken to one another before this!"
i think it can be interesting from a narrative standpoint, but the show writers slash authors just never seem to do anything with the potential narrative
When Tess Morgan's son came home with a tattoo, she was griefstricken. She knew her reaction was OTT (he's 21) but it signalled a change in their relationship
This is gold this, absolute gold, the most over the top melodramatic hysterical ridiculous thing I’ve ever read
This is actually so interesting to read- it’s from 2012 but its full of the same anxieties, even some of the same phrasing that many of the guardian’s later pieces on transness use. really hammers home how much of the terfism that emerged in the late 10s was middle class mothers angry at a loss of control over their adult children- whether that be their bodies or their friends or their opinions- and making that everyone’s problem because they have the power to do so
I look at him, sitting there, my 21-year-old son. I feel I’m being interviewed for a job I don’t even want. I say, “But you’re not. You’re different. I will never look at you in the same way again. It’s a visceral feeling. Maybe because I’m your mother. All those years of looking after your body – taking you to the dentist and making you drink milk and worrying about green leafy vegetables and sunscreen and cancer from mobile phones. And then you let some stranger inject ink under your skin. To me, it seems like self-mutilation. If you’d lost your arm in a car accident, I would have understood. I would have done everything to make you feel better. But this – this is desecration. And I hate it.”
This is literally what people are talking about when they say AI will be used to mainstream widely held bigotry. LLMs are trained on frequency and probability -> straight relationships are more well represented in the dataset -> straight pronouns and terms become the "correct" normal.
This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).
Combine this with the mass of people inclined to believe (and being encouraged to believe) that if AI says and does something it must be correct
I worked briefly in regulating AI back when the US actually believed in that and this was exactly the shit that I, the single queer enby in the office, spent trying to beat into the heads of all the white straight men around me.
It is worth noting that as one of its first actions, the Trump administration pulled federal funding and halted federal work on preventing bias in AI (and then proceeded to rip up all the guardrails I and my fellow ethicists had installed).
There is a reason the AI shitsunami has hit over the last two years and it's that someone went and erased all the regulations.
So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”
Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”
So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it.
That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender.
When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.
And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.
But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.
But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”
Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”
When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?
And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.
“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.
Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.
(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)
That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..
So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.
And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”
ive been saying for years that around 10 years ago on tumblr, it was only radfems who were pushing the queer as slur rhetoric, and everyone who was trans or bi or allies to them would push back - radfems openly admitted that the reason they disliked the term “queer” was because it lumped them in with trans people and bi women. over the years, the queer is a slur rhetoric spread in large part due to that influence, but radfems were more covert about their reasons - and now it’s a much more prevalent belief on tumblr - more so than on any queer space i’ve been in online or offline - memory online is very short-term unfortunately bc now i see a lot of ppl, some of them bi or trans themselves, who make this argument and vehemently deny this history but…yep
Or asexuality, which has been a concept in discussions on sexuality since 1869. Initially grouped slightly to the left, as in the categories were ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘monosexual’ (which is used differently now, but then described what we would call asexuality). Later was quite happily folded in as a category of queerness by Magnus Hirschfeld and Emma Trosse in the 1890s, as an orientation that was not heterosexuality and thus part of the community.
Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.
Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against ‘queer’ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled ‘Queer’. It was just… there, and so were we!
So it blows my mind when there are these fifteen-year-olds earnestly telling me - someone who’s called themself queer longer than they’ve been alive - that “que*r is a slur.” Unfortunately, I have got reactive/defensive for the same reasons OP has mentioned. I will absolutely work on biting down my initial defensiveness and trying to explain - in good faith - the history of the word, and how it’s been misappropriated and tarnished by exclusionists.
Narrator: “Water. Unlike other cats, long-haired Persians need regular baths to keep their luxurious coats healthy and fluffy. Reginald doesn’t care if he has a prize-winning coat. He just wants the ordeal to be over.”
Reginald: *meows in distress*
Narrator: Unfortunately for Reggie, there’s one last step. He’s about to learn that getting wet is nothing – compared to getting dry.”
