Words Stiched the Wrong Way Up

A burnt out Indo-Caribbean writer from the American South. I write about the dichotomies of horror and romance that all too often straddle queer lives. More often than not, you can find me skulking around TTRPGs or niche and/or retro videogames. Part of the "LGBTQ+ Book Club." We are currently reading The Membranes by Chi Ta-Wei, translated by Ari Larissa Henrich. Avatar by crxwes!

[frankensteinshimbo]

‘Sup, I heard we don't do 'About" pages anymore. My name’s Kumari - although if you call me by my any of the jargon in my URL, I won't complain. I'm a first generation American of IndoCaribbean heritage, a secular Hindu, and a gay guy that grew up in the deep south. As most colonized queers living in a majority white country do, I experienced parental abuse. I moved to where my parents had first settled when they came to this country, New York. While there, I studied anthropology/archaeology at university and poetry under Rob Plath. I currently live in Georgia and work for a not-for-profit as an educator.

I write poetry and short stories about capitalism, reproductive horror, and childhood abuse because I'm a qualified survivor on all three fronts. As far as academics go, I'm one of the stupider ones, and as far as artists go, I’m burnt out and temperamental; I just think deeply.

If you need to contact me both my ask box and DMs are open.

My Stuff | Subway Rats | San Francisco Nights | Analyzing Frankenstein | Project Summaries (mobile friendly version)

[atlantathecity]

Throwing myself into work seems to take the edge off of the sadness. Planning a couple of new ThreadATL/ Drift the Map walks. Got interviewed on TV about transit today. Working on blog posts. Just do whatever you can in your advocacy space & feel good about the work. Keep going.

A couple of strangers laughed at me today as I stood in the middle of Peachtree Street to take this photo, warning me that "Atlanta drivers will run me down." Too late. I've been (minorly) hit by cars multiple times. Still standing. I'll keep standing as long as my body lets me. ❤️

[frankensteinshimbo]

spoiler this, spoiler that; has no one heard of dramatic irony?

[frankensteinshimbo]

it's called i find out a big portion of the plot but am still genuinely interested in seeing how the writers constructed the story to get there and enjoy it for the construction of the story alone.

[frankensteinshimbo]

spoiler this, spoiler that; has no one heard of dramatic irony?

[el-shab-hussein]

If you have voted Harris today,

You have a fundamental moral obligation to donate a sum totaling 10$ to the following 3 fundraisers, all of which belong to people who have lost loved ones and in some cases their entire families due to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' actions.

Hossam Bardaweel -> entire direct family members dead.

Hazem Mohammed Al-Bardaweel -> entire direct family members dead.

Nemr Matar -> infant died.

These are people whose situations you will never understand. Have some basic decency and respect and don't make this about yourself or your guilt or anything about you. Don't even say you donated. This is about the people who will continue to lose everything as long as American empire persists. Any comments will be deleted.

[luwha]

One day you're working on videos on autoplay and another you watch a 50 minutes videos of how a user faked a democracy for discord political roleplay for 3 years and it's impact on the citizens and neighboring nations

Also the author of a book (related, don't ask) got a cease and desist from the united Nations and proceeded to change the name of it on april's fools

[luwha]

What pandora box i opened can someone smarter than me explain what's up with political roleplay

[vaspider]

You can't just say these things and then not link the videos.

[luwha]

Oh my god you're in for a huge one

[vargamornight]

i don’t read or watch reviews of anything until after i've finished it so i may be repeating what others have said but here is my impression of dragon age: the veilguard

overall i like it. it's a fun game with a good story, likable characters who feel interwoven with the narrative in a pleasant way, really good character customization, and a nice style that rides the fence between realistic and cartoonish that i actually really enjoy.

i do feel like they made this game with the intent for it to be picked up and turned into a tv show, a la arcane, if arcane wasn't allowed to have nuance.

every edge has been sanded down. there is almost no mention of the anti-elf racism, anti-mage bigotry, slavery, etc that were HEAVILY important in the first three games. the mage stuff makes a bit more sense since it takes place in tevinter, where mages "rule," but still. (they also only mention slavery when your character has a background in freeing slaves, as though the fact that the nation you currently inhabit has slaves is irrelevant unless the player character decides to care.)

in the first three games, the bad guys were guys. just some dudes. every villain, with the exception of the archdemon, was a person. it was an elf selling elves into slavery, a human turning his back on the grey wardens, a man insisting the mages be slaughtered just in case one of them was an abomination. in da2, it was your friend's brother who tried to kill you, the fantasy sheriff who tries to kill everyone, your friend and/or lover who blows up a building. in inquisition, it's your friend's old mentor who tries to erase you from time, your friend and/or lover who was lying the entire time, and a DIFFERENT friend and/or lover who was ALSO lying the entire time. who the villains even were is occasionally debatable, but every villain was familiar. you knew them, you cared about them and their story, so it added weight to your decisions about how to deal with them. this is present in all three games.

in veilguard, the bad guys are grotesque, ancient mages akin to gods, so far removed from anything familiar that you cannot possibly mistake them for anything other than the villains. all nuance is gone. the biggest decision in the entire first third of the game just hardens one character. compared to any big decision you could make in origins or inquisition, where your choices literally shaped the future of multiple nations, it seems very... meh. and the decisions you made in the previous three games have no bearing whatsoever on the world in veilguard! i knew i wouldn't like that when they announced there would only be three decisions included, and i was fucking right.

basically veilguard feels like it was written for people who have never played a dragon age game, with the express purpose of netflix adapting it to a pg13 original series, so it has absolutely no teeth.

comparing veilguard to origins feels like going from the shawshank redemption to toy story. toy story is still an amazing movie, but how the hell did we end up here?

[schmookens]

[warcrimesimulator]

[kusali]

That's not even.. what's going on (re the last tweet). People with ocd aren't contemplating sexually abusing kids, they're afraid they might sexually harm a child by mistake, or be a pedophile without realising, or any number of similar anxieties, but the point is that it becomes an anxious fixation because the person finds it so repellant. It's such an incredibly common ocd symptom, but most people are understandably terrified to talk about it

I remember reading a study where a therapist was helping people with similar anxieties - though not involving children - work through them. One client said she was afraid she was going to murder the therapist, not that she wanted to but that she'd somehow lose control of herself or an accident would happen. The solution? The therapist brought a kitchen knife to an appointment (with the patients consent), handed it to her and basically said "okay, what now?" Turns out nothing now, nothing happened, and it helped the client deal with the phobia

Obviously that approach isn't workable with something like pedophilia/csa anxiety but I think it highlights the true nature of what the anxiety actually is. It's irrational anxiety that comes from a deep fear and disgust of csa, not a desire to perpetrate it

[transhuman-priestess]

OCD-haver: “I have ridiculous irrational fear disease, it causes me to have ridiculous irrational fears”

Enlightened normal-brainer: “that is ridiculous and irrational, clearly you’re worried because it’s secretly true”

OCD-Haver: [tired stare at camera]

[frankensteinshimbo]

This is something that strongly affects victims of childhood sexual abuse as well. Being fixated on your own abuse causes people to associate having to process any scenario with a child (themselves) being sexualized to have genuine fear that they themselves might be dangerous.

I'm in a CSA support group where people report being judged by outsiders and having these anxieties worsen because of trying to reach out for help. Attitudes like this only hurt vulnerable people around you.

[littlestpersimmon]

The fire god’s boon

[eelhound]

"The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:

If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.

'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."

- Kurt Schiller, from "Omelas, Je T'aime." Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.

[hannahgoodall]

‘DEMONICA: A Bloody Beauty Story’ by Jan Philipzen, with makeup by Jenneke Croubels

[orsanedraws]

i missed MMs 3 year anniversary...........

here's the spontaneous illustration i did in a couple of sittings cause i wanted to paint a spooky thing with a background lol

[sleepyowlwrites]

there's an easiness in breathing as the moon begins to bleed

as the daylight turns to dusk

as the crows begin to flee

as the embers die in the light

as the song fades into mist

as the whales are on their back

Voting ended onOct 25, 2024

@revenantlore @abalonetea @klywrites @winterandwords @jaxwrites @jadefyre @writeblrfantasy @avrablake @squarebracket-trickster @moondust-bard @colombette @harmonictornadosiren

[koty-witha-k]

Wild Species of salmon from Alaska, with their Tlingit (Lingit) name above and their English equivalent below.

Artist Unknown.

[frankensteinshimbo]

Maybe I'll read some pathologic fan fic. As a treat.

[frankensteinshimbo]

I am still writing. Don't worry.

My home life is still garbage (domestically abusive.) I've been focusing a lot on work.

But yeah. Not much finished stuff to report on between the 0 time I have. I'll probably write some update later on.

[frankensteinshimbo]

Maybe I'll read some pathologic fan fic. As a treat.