Drawings, pictures, thoughts about life...Little tiny bits about me that you can all find in this blog. :) Have nerdy discussions with me about just about anything! I'm welcome to it! Gifs are not mine unless I explicitly say so. My Deviantart My Other...
Looks like I haven't. Okay, well, let's see. I'll just give highlights, but it'll be long, so let's do a readmore.
So, in mid-2022, I dared to age past about 35 and therefore started withering bodily. Of course, this is partly my fault, because I do not get enough exercise, but also (shakes fist at uncaring universe, pulls muscle in fist) Life Hates Me
So, I started getting muscle pain between the shoulder blades. In my case, this is actually one of those annoying to-avoid-one-disability-you-created-another things, because I've had problems with my lower back since I was in my mid-20s thanks to never using proper lumbar support. Therefore, my standard spot to be in my living room became the sofa that stretches away from the TV, because then I could lie on the sofa and prop my head up on the arm to watch, but that means I spent several years as a recreational candy cane and NOW HERE WE ARE. I remember desperately trying to find a massage therapist that could see me that day before I went away to Edinburgh in August that year, and there was nowhere at all available. I had to get one in Edinburgh when I arrived, which was lovely, but also about £20 more expensive, because Edinburgh.
And then! In November! Of 2022!
I must have wished really hard. Because around the corner from my house - so close I could forward roll that distance, if it weren't for, you know (gestures at body, pulls muscle in arm)... a massage parlour opened.
Except. Here's the thing.
It had a name like "Swansea Oriental Massage" or "Thai Lotus Massage" or what have you (real name not given for privacy reasons.) The kind of name that makes you go "Ah. An independent business, likely staffed by workers fresh from abroad, with a name that implies exotic women to a certain type of client. This may be entirely what it claims, but it definitely Fits a Profile."
And to be clear, I have no issues at all with it being a brothel! I truly, genuinely don't. But for obvious reasons, I do want to know if I'm booking a session with a masseuse or a sex worker, because those are very different types of happy endings.
So Steff and I tried looking them up, which became almost a game in itself. We were like "Right. It has a legitimate-looking website that offers three different types of massage: Swedish, Chinese and deep tissue, complete with a disclaimer that deep tissue is not recommended unless you have good pain tolerance. A brothel would probably use more euphemisms, right? Intimate massage, full personal, that sort of thing. But maybe those are euphemisms?"
And then we'd be like "We have found a review. It says 'Very relaxing, beautiful girl.' That could either be a clumsily worded review from a gross orientalist marvelling about the massage, or it could be a subtle nod to them being sex workers."
And we went back and forth for weeks, until in the end I was like, no, enough. I am in pain. There must be someone, in any brothel, who can give a genuine massage - if you hide behind the phrase 'massage parlour', you MUST get people turning up occasionally looking for a back, neck and shoulders. It's the seamstress/needlewoman thing in Pratchett. They must be able to go 'Tracy, this one's for you.' That's who I need. I need Tracy. I need to be able to enter and go "Trace, what it is, it's my neck - no, no, Trace, leave your clothes on. Or, don't, I don't know your process. At this point I don't care. You know what? You do you. Mash my neck, don't worry about the happy ending."
(Well, unless it's reasonably priced as an add-on. I'm bisexual and I love a bargain.)
So one particularly painful day I thought fuck it, and I rang to book.
It did not clear anything up.
"Hello!" I said, when the lovely woman on the phone answered. In the interests of avoiding embarrassment on all sides, I decided to be Very Clear. "I currently have pain in my neck and shoulders, so I'm after a massage."
"Of course!" said the nice lady. "When would you like?"
"Tonight?" I asked. "About seven? If you can fit me -"
"Of course!" she beamed. "We will see you at seven!"
And she hung up. That was it. She did not take my name, or anything further; there was no indication as to how I would make sure I could, you know, actually claim the appointment on arrival. That was it.
"Hmm," I thought.
And then the phone rang. I picked up.
"I forgot to ask!" said the woman. "Do you want a male or a female?"
This, I thought, could still very much go either way.
"Well," I said. "I don't mind. As it's for getting knots out, I suppose -"
"Ah!" she said delightedly. "A male! See you later!"
And she hung up again.
"Hmm," I thought.
And so it was that I went to the massage parlour that evening, still none the wiser, waved off by my husband telling me to take the happy ending if it's offered, because he didn't mind at all and didn't want me to feel unsatisfied. This was very kind, but also qualifies for a "He's a little confused but he's got the spirit" meme, because I cannot tell you how little I was thinking about sex and how much I was thinking about the Gordian situation in my trapezoids and the way it was making me move like a T-rex.
Anyway. I was met by a lovely man who took me to a private room, gave me a towel, and told me to call him in once I was undressed and settled on the bed. This I duly did.
And then, what followed ended up being an hour and a quarter of the best massage I have ever had in my entire fucking LIFE.
I paid for an hour, to be clear. But this guy put his hands on my shoulders, frowned, said "Hmm," and then proceeded to work me over like I was meat for a tenderiser. It wasn't sexual. I just ceased being a person in his eyes. I was just muscles to him. Flesh to sculpt. I became a personal challenge. I watched as he passed into a state of intensive hyperfocus, time slipping away from us. He was like a fucking truffle pig after those knots, Tumblrs. He found every one. I could literally hear them clicking as he pressed them.
It was also, and I cannot stress this enough, the closest I have ever come to achieving enlightenment. There were points where I thought I was no longer in residence. I think I purred.
Eventually, he remembered the time, and left so I could get dressed. Then he sat me down in a chair and spent a final bonus ten minutes on my neck and shoulders, during which we chatted. His UK name is Chris (it's not, but both his real UK and Chinese names are here redacted for obvious privacy reasons), and he told me all about how he wanted to be an architect, and how his parents were hoping he would go back to China but he likes Wales and wants to stay, and which is the best Cantonese restaurant in Swansea. It was great. Transcendent experience. I walked out pain-free for the first time in months. He told me to drink water because it would remove the toxins the massage might have unleashed, and I thought that is not true, Chris, but I will do it for you.
I got home. "It's not a brothel!" I told my waiting husband and friends. "It's a legitimate massage parlour!"
"Hurrah!" they all said. "Perhaps we should get massages too."
And so, I went weekly. One time he had to reschedule, and so I received a message saying "Hello, this is Chris the massage boy", which is the most endearing sentence anyone has ever said to me, just absolutely delightful. Such a nice guy.
And then, one day, Steff thought maybe he'd go and get a massage.
And; well.
It turns out, Tumblrs, I had drawn a conclusion from too few datapoints; it turns out, Tumblrs, if you are male, in addition to the Swedish/Chinese/deep tissue options, you also get to order off the Forbidden Menu.
I had been ushered into a room where I was given a towel, and Chris would leave and only return once I was under the towel on the bed, so that he never saw a thing. But the first major difference we discovered was that, when Steff arrived, he was taken to a room and the woman who took him in then watched him expectantly until he stripped naked in front of her.
He did so, and got on the bed. She said, "Do you want two hands? Four hands? I can bring someone in."
"Oh," said Steff. "Um. Just a massage, please."
She stared at him.
"But," she said. "You don't want...?"
She mimed, very graphically, the act of wanking him off.
"No thanks," said Steff, voice getting higher.
"No??" she said, dumbstruck.
"Just a massage, please!" squeaked Steff.
They stared at each other.
"Okay," she said after a moment. "Okay."
She gave him the massage. It was very good. He's been back a few times. He's offered the menu every time. Every time, they are baffled by his refusal.
And then tragedy struck after almost a year - Chris the massage boy became Chris the no-longer-massage boy and moved away to Cardiff. Devastating. Horrifying. I was inconsolable for months. Why do bad things happen to good people.
Which meant I started seeing the other workers there. I don't think I've ever seen the same one twice, so immediately, there's an issue of never getting to a point with anyone where they know how much pressure I like/can take or anything like that; but also, every damn one of them has been a waif of a girl I could bench press with one hand with no ability to do a proper deep tissue massage.
Mostly, this has not been a problem. They do very nice massages regardless, though it turns out they really do just wait for you to get naked in front of them, and Chris was very much an outlier in that regard. But a few months back I did get one who checked the file they apparently had on me, and got out her language translation app on her phone, and spoke into it. In English it read, "You want me to go hard? Deep?"
"Well," I said. "Just on my back, if possible?"
Her phone translated what I said into Chinese, for her to read. She nodded, and said something back, and held up the phone.
"My me is very small," it read. "But I will try."
And then what she did, Tumblrs, was channel every ounce of rage and hatred and inter-generational trauma for the British that she possessed in her heart straight into into her hands and, by extension, my me. Have you ever seen someone, like, scrub at a bloodstain that won't come out, and is going to send them to prison? Ever seen someone scrub so hard and so fast and so desperately that they start grating off their own fingertips, and yet they just keep scrubbing? Ever seen someone scrub like their life might literally be depending on it?
How I still have skin baffles me. I'm astonished she didn't buff off every mole on my back. She fucking pummelled me. And the worst part was, she didn't let up once she moved away from my back and down my legs, and I couldn't communicate that she was now going far too hard, because she didn't speak English and her magic phone app was put away, and also I'm a wimp who never tells tradespeople when I'm unhappy. It was an endurance session. I paid her £30 for it, and thanked her once she was done.
Anyway. All this brings me to today.
So I managed to jar my back by falling off a Ninja Warrior cheese-shaped board just before New Year, which, naturally, jarred right between my shoulder blades. Super painful, now passed, but the stiffness has remained and seems reluctant to leave; so, I thought, it's massage time.
And
Well
I think that was the worst massage I've ever had from that brothel.
Not bad as in painful! It was not bad as in "This is actively painful." But it has never been clearer that this girl was a sex worker cosplaying as a massage therapist, and was sort of guessing at what to do.
Like, she started on my back, and normally that's the focus of a massage. I would say you normally get about two thirds of the session on your back. Not so today. Today, in a half hour session, she spent maybe five minutes, if that, just loosely running her hands up and down my back. Just loosely. Sort of skimming her hands over the skin, if you will. A sort of extended stroke, like I was a flighty Thoroughbred.
Then she moved on, whereupon she she spent, conservatively, about TEN FULL MINUTES on the backs of my legs. Some of that was doing a sort of pressing pinch, where she was squeezing big handfuls of flesh. Some of it was a massage stroke. And the rest of it - quite a lot of it, actually - was her attempting that thing where massage therapists do the smacking with the sides of their hands, but she hadn't understood it, so it was actually about ten minutes of being softly but rigorously karate chopped on the thighs and calves.
(No overlapping strokes, mind. I appreciated the transferrable skills on display.)
Next, she told me to turn over, so I did. At this point, she attempted to put a towel over me. I'm unsure why, since I was bollock naked and had been the whole time; perhaps she wanted me to stay warm? I don't think it can have been for modesty, though, at least not entirely, because I KNOW the kitty cat was not wholly covered. I think there was a good centimetre or two of labia poking out the base, two happy little hills, peeping out at the room as the session progressed.
And progress it did, but with one change - she used absolutely zero oil to do my front. From this point onwards, this encounter was was done dry. That is probably making some of you wince, but honestly, it actually wasn't that bad, for reasons of there was very little massaging that actually required it from here on out.
She sort of pulled on my fingers first of all. Really very firmly too, one of them clicked. She started with my left arm, and pulled every finger in turn; then she raised my hand up above my elbow, pressed her thumbs into the centre, and then quite literally punched my palm. Then she laid the arm back down, held my shoulder down with one hand, and then used her other hand to grab my arm at different points to sort of half squish it, half grind it into the bed. And then she yanked on my shoulder, karate chopped a bit more on my forearm, and then that was it for Arm 1. Arm 2 was much of the same, except she added in a fun lil move where she sort of waved it about a bit from the shoulder a couple of times.
Then she went back to my legs. No more oil, so she sort of half-heartedly prodded and karate chopped my shins a bit, but to be honest I don't think her heart was in it by then.
But THEN she had a brainwave, so the last five to ten minutes were an attempt at a face massage.
Except when I say a face massage, I mean:
Well; she started well?
She did the fingertips on the temples, thumbs on the forehead, rotate gently thing, which lasted maybe 15 to 20 seconds. But then she got bored, I suspect, so she smooshed my cheeks a bit and rotated them vigorously like a cartoon character. And then she decided that I carry my stress in my forehead, so she started gently pinching my eyebrows and spider walking her fingertips left and right across them. And then she massaged my forehead for a moment
and then
she went back to karate chopping. On my forehead. Where my skull is. Repeatedly.
And like, don't get me wrong - it didn't hurt. But there's only so pleasurable and relaxing you can find "softly yet rapidly struck on the head in a rain of blows for two minutes straight."
Also, and I probably should have led with this, but she had her tits out the whole time.
Anyway it's my favourite place to go for a massage. I mean I now have to go somewhere else tonight to get my back sorted, admittedly, because I in fact carry my stress in the shoulders and not the eyebrows and they were the least attended part of me. But absolutely 10 out of 10 experience, no regrets.
Replay of Shadowbringers - finished 5.3 the other night and, as I have the previous two times I played it, ugly cried through the entire sequence after defeating Elidibus, and again when Beq Lugg is relaying Exarch G'raha's goodbye to the Scions.
But this time I wasn't crying about G'raha Going Through It (or, mostly that's not what I was crying about). I was crying about the fact that after everything he's been through - waking up in the The Darkest Timeline, giving up his humanity for A HUNDRED YEARS, and a million other Fucked Up Things to boot - Exarch G'raha...
still. has. hope.
I mean. Look at this man. He knew exactly how fucked he was from the moment Elidibus started using the Tower to summon souls willy nilly. It's so bad that he doesn't even try to hide it from the WoL - when putting a brave face on Not Being Fucking Okay is G'raha's whole deal.
"If I were to tell you that this isn't the end - that we will meet again - would you believe me?"
And.
He doesn't know. He wasn't around for everything that happened between the Crystal Tower and Shadowbringers, never met the companions who gave their lives for the WoL. Moenbryda. Minfillia. Heurchefant. Ysale. Papalymo.
Beq Legg has been warning us this whole time about the many and sundry things that could go wrong with transferring Exarch G'raha's soul - all of which G'raha is fully aware of, since he had to help make the damn things. And despite a fucking century of getting fucking nothing that he wanted in life, he chooses to have hope. To believe that this isn't the end. And to believe that everything he's been through will give hope to others.
To the point that instead of pouring his heart to the WoL - who he fucking adores - in what very well may be his last moments, he uses his last words to leave a message to the community he's shepherded for so long.
So yeah. That whole fucking scene had me ugly crying about G'raha being someone who always chooses hope. And then in the Crystarium, Beg Lugg's recounting of Exarch G'raha's final message had me crying just as hard.
"No matter how deeply buried they may be, our hopes never truly disappear. No, they are always with us. Guiding us. Driving us.
We struggle because we have hope."
And then. And then andthenandthenandthen.
EVERYONE IS OKAY AND G'RAHA FINALLY GETS WHAT HE WANTED. HE GETS TO LIVE HIS FUCKING DREAM AND GO ADVENTURING WITH THE WARRIOR OF LIGHT.
And. Like. Fuck. Shit. Fuck.
"We struggle because we have hope" is something I fucking needed to hear right now.
So yeah. I will never be normal about how Shadowbringers is legit one of the best-written video games of all time. Every time I replay it, I find something new and meaningful that helps me have hope about the very real-world apocalypse we're all living through right now.
If this fucking adorable dumbass who self-harms by helping others can Go Through It and come out the other side, then maybe I can too.
1. Radioactive - Imagine Dragons // 2. Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums - A Perfect Circle // 3. I Predict A Riot - Kaiser Chiefs // 4. Wretches and Kings - Linkin Park // 5. Uprising - Muse // 6. Vox Populi (A Call To Arms) - 30 Seconds to Mars // 7. S.I.N.G. - My Chemical Romance // 8. Ce N’Est Pas Bon - Amadou And Mariam // 9. Seven Nation Army (The Glitch Mob Remix) - The White Stripes // 10. Unnatural Selection - Muse // 11. Revolution - Nevada Tan // 12. The Fallen - Franz Ferdinand // 13. This Is Why We Fight – The Decemberists // 14. Supremacy - Muse // 15. Empire - Kasabian // 16. The W.A.N.D. - The Flaming Lips // 17. Kill Your Heroes - AWOLNATION // 18. Viva La Vida - Coldplay
Ohh, so I was looking at my storage and found these! I originally shared them on twitter before yeeting the platform. Anyway, feel free to use! Art memes for your oc :D
you meet real interesting people in early morning/late night dungeon roulette. today i am going to talk about the “your boy eggnog” healer.
i queue in as a tank and i get the aery, and right away the first thing the healer says is that he doesn’t feel like healing, so i might die. already we’re off to a good start. the first few pulls aren’t anything truly noteworthy – he seems a bit slow to keep me up, but no close calls, nothing especially worth noticing until he shouts in all caps in party chat:
“MR POSTMAN"
and then before anyone can respond:
“who do youy think yoiu are?@!”
being that i’m the only one with the postman title equipped, i answer, “the postman”
“you aint never gonna get my love!“ he tells me.
“mr. the white,” i say in reference to his own equipped title, “we have a purely professional relationship.”
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