GLITTERARY

nerd of the books and fandom variety. occasional ficcer. bi, painfully millennial, she/her but they is fine too. Picrew icon by @grgikau

[wowevenmoreloveonearth]

There’s a petition to ban smart glasses in the uk, if you live in the uk please sign!

Petition: Introduce an immediate ban on the sale and promotion of smart glasses

The government should immediately ban the sale and promotion of glasses that contain recording capability. The government should explore usi

[rars]

saying this as a lesbian who loves women's boobs--sexually, even! but i don't think that we as a society should consider breasts inherently female or inherently sexual. a flat chest should not be seen as the "default" for gender neutrality but instead just one way a person can present. boobs should be normal. anyone of any gender can have boobs

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

Feels like a bad idea maybe

[redstonedust]

sticks my finger in the barrel of your gun so it backfires on you looney toons style but the gun moaned and now none of us know what genre we're in.

[glitterary]

Do you have any friends that are 4x your age or more?

Under 30, no

Under 30, yes

Over 30, obviously fucking not

Over 30, yes, and vampires are real by the way

Over 30, no because I’m actually pretty old for a vampire myself

Nuance/vanilla essence/bald vampire

Remaining time: 3 days 16 hours

I’m gonna give this one a tolerance of ten years, so if you’re 20 and have a 72-year-old friend go ahead and vote yes.

[dozydawn]

nimble, a border collie-papillon mix, wins the 12” class in the 2024 masters agility championship. the first time a mixed breed has won at westminster ever.

[ch40s0w1]

context explaining why the announcer is screaming, this is supposed to take a high level competitive agility dog 40 seconds

[sandersstudies]

This video makes me cry every time it’s on my dash and I can’t even iterate why.

Like the dog doesn’t even know it’s a competition and she’s made history. She(?) just is happy and knows she made her owner happy too.

[solely-ashes]

The face of a being with only a wind storm between their ears, moments before unleashing it unto the world

[severeprincesheep]

always a pleasure to see this girl on my dashboard

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[suedescripture]

which ao3 tag are you?

[penny-anna]

Rocky on the trip back to Erid registering that Grace has defaulted to using he/him for him for sexism reasons and that they don't actually have to go by he/him. xe does some research on the human computer and spends several weeks cycling through different pronoun sets. starts switching so frequently Grace becomes convinced sie has started being difficult on purpose. after a while Grace is like omg will you just pick one and stick with it. Rocky is like okay i have decided. rock/rocks. rockself. Grace like well i can't argue with that.

[penny-anna]

#see the hill that I will die on is that if Andy weir was cooler rockey would use either they them or xe xir#you’re telling me cool middle school teacher Ryland grace is unfamiliar with the concept of fun new genders#absolutely not. his students have taught him about singular they them and neopronouns

Grace trying to explain to Rocky that they can be whatever they want to be and presenting a whole list of different pronoun options and Rocky (who has no concept of gender) being like 'why would I care about any of this'

[penny-anna]

Rocky: which pronouns does Grace use question?

Grace: he/him

Rocky: okay. Rocky will use he/him too

Grace: okay but I feel like defaulting to he/him promotes a patriarchal kind of mindset and we should be more thoughtful about it

Rocky: okay so use the other standard pronouns

Grace: she/her?

Rocky: yeah

Grace: okay but that feels weird too

Rocky: why weird question

Grace:

Grace, later, lying awake: I never considered that Rocky might wanna be a she... Am I a bad person?

[penny-anna]

Rocky: Grace mix it up suggestion

Grace: I guess I could

Rocky: Rocky he/she/they/it

Grace: I don't know if you can use it

Rocky: why not question

Grace: it's just considered dehumanising?

Rocky:

Rocky, being a little shit: I choose it/its

[penny-anna]

Rocky: this conversation boring, let's go back to Grace tones

Grace: okay so you won't pick a pronoun but I have to pick a tonal inflection?

Rocky: my thing more important statement

Grace: okay fine can't you just your tones for me?

Rocky: but Grace not qualified engineer

Grace: well is there a schoolteacher tone?

Rocky: uhh no

Rocky: schoolteacher not

Rocky: schoolteacher not prestige profession statement

Grace:

Grace: WOW.

[penny-anna]

Grace: is there not like a default tone to use when you don't know all this stuff about a person?

Rocky: yes but very rude to use for close friend statement

Grace: wait hold up 🤔 you think of me as a close friend?

Rocky: yes maybe Grace shut up now

[penny-anna]

Grace several years into their voyage, finally getting good enough at understanding Eridian to clock when Rocky has switched back to using the Neutral Tone for him, thereby implying that they are no longer friends: HEY??

[penny-anna]

Grace, in the middle of a big argument: did you just. dead person inflection me?

Rocky: uh-huh

Grace: does that mean what I think it means

Rocky: it means what it means statement

Grace: come ON

[loveridden1999]

i don't support all women's rights & wrongs some of you are terfs

[loveridden1999]

exactly

[narcissene]

affirmations:

- it’s fun to be awake & in an upright position

- consciousness is a gift

- i CAN do this anymore

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[genderkoolaid]

Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.

[cherrispryte]

Some added 101-level context from someone (me) who’s worked in federal grantmaking for 20 years and is literally certified on this document - this is a document that governs all federal grantmaking. It’s been around for over a decade and is a mega-document that combine multiple previous smaller documents that have been around for ages. It is updated every few years and generally the updates are minor - a notable change in the previous update was raising the small procurement threshold from $10,000 to $15,000 for example. Deeply dry boring minutiae that no one outside of federal grantmakers need concern themselves with. It was also federal GUIDELINES, which means there was flexibility.

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

So yes, please comment. You don’t have to read all 400 pages before doing so, it’s dry and dense as fuck, but I thought this information might be helpful. Also, while there is a public comment period, this isn’t voted on by Congress. The OMB just fucking issues it. Pressuring your elected officials into publicly saying “hey what the fuck are you doing here” is good, though.

[mikkeneko]

Please note the comment period is open through JULY 13th, not JUNE 13th. I saw a lot of relogs yesterday saying "last day!" and I just want to say it is very much not too late.

[grison-in-space]

As of today, 7/8/26, we have five days for public commentary on this to go through. I am begging y'all: if you care about independent science in the country that produces the most global science funding in the world, please leave a comment.

[annabelle--cane]

yknow I'm feeling a bit brave so I will venture to say what this blighted essay's pitch actually is: reading project hail mary (novel and film) as a ravishment fantasy. in both main threads of the narrative grace is brought wildly out of his element and pulled into the orbit of a mysterious foreign stranger who is significantly stronger / richer / more powerful than him, forced to accept unsolicited lavish gifts and personal praise despite protests and discomfort, and made to live in isolated locations in extremely close proximity to these people with no say in the matter, all of which are common motifs in ravishment fantasies. on her own, stratt also brings in other common motifs of restraints, drugging, being above the law, multiple kidnappings (I'm doing crazy things with the classical definition of "rape" as in "abduction" and its shared etymology with "rapture" as in "being taken to the heavens"), and the very specific yet still common motif of "otherwise trustworthy partner goes too far and doesn't take 'no' for an answer." rocky on his own brings in the overprotective flavor common to a lot of dark romance novel heroes, i.e. "I make sure you sleep and I like to watch you while you do it, I make sure you eat enough even if you've got baggage about it, I make inhuman displays of strength when you're injured, and as long as I'm around I'll make sure nothing bad ever happens to you ever again."

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

my hopes for writing this are twofold: a) to address the question I sometimes see phm audience members come away with of "if grace likes his life by the end and doesn't seem that mad about all of that, is the message supposed to be 'violation of bodily autonomy is good, actually?'", and b) to lightly resist one of the prevailing notions in the study of forced-sex fantasies, that ravishment fantasies are solely abstracted and fantastical and pleasurable and are completely 100% separate from fearful paranoid imaginings of / flashbacks to realistic sexual violence.

[annabelle--cane]

oh also: the most common interpretation of why people have ravishment fantasies is that it allows the fantasist to disavow a desire they feel ashamed of because, in the fiction of the forcing, they don't *want* it at all, they're being made to do whatever it is and can't be considered at fault. as I allude to in my final paragraph of the original post, I think it's a tad more nuanced, but there's definitely a lot of truth to that. grace can tell stratt that he's not smart or important or capable or brave or selfless enough to do what she wants, but she'll ignore it, make him do it anyway, and kit him out with skilled staff members and expensive lab equipment and coffee just the way he likes it. it's a fantasy of being respected and heroic and good whether he likes it or not.

with rocky, the fantasy is of being forced to be loved and protected. rocky decides to initiate contact, he decides that he's moving into the hail mary, he decides that he's always going to watch grace sleep even if grace says he doesn't need it, he decides to gift grace the fuel to get home even when grace pretends he doesn't want it, and he decides he's not going to let grace die to save him even when grace says he's made his choice. the two scenarios allow grace to experience the rewards of being selfless without needing to be so gauche as to ever say he thinks he's that good of a person AND to experience the rewards of being selfish without saying he thinks he deserves to be cared for.

[everina-maxwell-updates]

Cover is UP! The stunning art is by @eliotbaum.

Call Me Traitor is the story of a living weapon fighting her way towards personhood and the awful lesbian she's doing it with. I keep calling it 'the sapphic Winter Soldier wizards' book despite being told we can't put that in the blurb.

STORY:

En is a weapon. Battle spells are carved into her skin, she’s trained to work through pain, and she’s magically compelled with loyalty to the archmagi. When she's sent on a mission to retrieve a group of infamous traitors from exile in a land of unpredictable and deadly magic, she's forced to team up with a common soldier to have any chance of success, or survival.

Tamol is a disaster. En isn’t fooled by the soldier’s silver tongue and good looks. Tamol is flighty, cowardly and the worst soldier En has ever met. But she’s also brilliant at magic and kinder than En has any right to expect. When she saves En’s life, it takes everything En has not to start falling for her. That is, until En discovers Tamol is one of the very traitors she seeks.

The empire never forgets. Years ago, the exiled traitors were just normal students with a vision for a better kingdom. They put their lives on the line fighting for it and lost. So they were exiled to the Far Peninsula to die. But now, the empire discovers the traitors may yet live, and they’ve unearthed something in the wilderness that the archmagi will pay any price to get.

But the might of an unforgiving empire isn’t the greatest force in all the land. Something monstrous is living in the Far Peninsula that does not discriminate between soldiers, traitors, and kings.

Out October! Preorders (every one of them highly treasured for obscure publishing industry reasons) are up here!

[avoliot]

UK PEOPLE - I said I would update when UK preorders are available and they have finally gone up! Here it is at uk.bookshop.org, or should be up at your UK bookshop or website of choice! (Smaller indies may not have it automatically but can probably order it on request).

[konoko]

[tossawary]

I think that if a story ever pulls a line like "You could have destroyed your magic with a stunt like that!" or "Pushing ahead with your magic too quickly can have dangerous consequences!" then the story should be obligated at some point to show me these magically disabled people.

All stories should have more disabled people, honestly, because disability is a basic part of being alive! What am I supposed to think of any given fictional community if I never see any elderly people, any retired people, any injured people, or any disabled people?

But seriously, a lot more fantasy stories specifically could really stand to show people who have been burned by magic to various degrees and are now living with the consequences. I'm too used to the protagonists fainting and sleeping extreme recklessness off without issue.

[captain-acab]

One of the (many) cool things about Wizard of Earthsea is in like the first act of book 1, the MC shows off to his peers by doing super advanced ~dark magic~, it horrendously wounds him on a physical, spiritual, and magical level, and the rest of the book (and sequels tbh) revolve around living with the consequences of that event.

[doriangraysrockcollection]

i must say, i am a huge fan of when a book is in the middle of a very exciting plot containing many interesting problems when out of nowhere for a few pages it's like, "hey by the way, real quick, here's a detailed explanation of the city's water filtration system! i'm telling you this for a reason and you should worry about it. anyway! haha okay back to the plot" and you just get to be Scared for a while

[doriangraysrockcollection]

i am kissing you on the mouth right now

you are the only person who understands me. you and the person who tagged a series of unfortunate events