i think he got "shattered" into a fucking Sine Wave and now can move freely through the "song" of the prophecy. If you think of the music notes instead as the code of the game, the very thing its written in....
oh yeah and
OH YEAH
AND
*EDIT*
Gaster might be the one who wrote the prophecy and is now trying to change it with his "Deltarune's" help:
why do i think this?
because he's partially inspired by a sad piano dork from Yume Nikki
white t girl i love you. and also do not forget that you are not the modern martyr for the oppressed voice. that's still black girls. it's always been black girls. stories of black martyrdom simply don't make it into the news cycle until the unrest caused by its reporting can be packaged as a "riot" segment between traffic reports. i know you suffer, but whatever you're experiencing, i beg you, when interacting with your community and building nuanced understandings of each other and the system which binds us, to not forget that a black tgirl has felt it 100 times worse before positioning yourself as an authority on all systems of oppression for having suffered unjustly at all. because you have suffered unjustly, but suffering unjustly as a white person means something so much different.
serenely reblogging this once more after deleting responses from white people saying "talking about this is actually unhelpful because im oppressed too" yeah i know. i wrote that down in the post i made, and i also wrote down why remembering the difference is important. did you read it?
there is no malice in my reminder. no "you need to do better", just a reminder. do not read it as such. i didn't write it as such.
again. i did not say you were not oppressed. this post is literally about how you are oppressed. it is a reminder that you are not the most oppressed person in the world, a way i've seen a lot of white transfems acting lately. maybe not even necessarily in a detrimental way, but in a way that definitely leans towards the "white is default" lane of thinking, which erases black suffering, which erases progress towards black safety. this, to me, is troubling, which is why i made this post. it's important when building solidarity within our community to understand who the most vulnerable of us are, because the safety of the most vulnerable of us will ultimately be the safety of all of us.
please do not be offended when you are reminded that your skin is white. im not calling you evil. im asking you to remain aware of yourself.
Thing is that I’m not the only Black trans woman writing theory on transfeminism, Black transfeminism, or trans intersectionality - I’m just lightskinned and won’t shut up so I’m one of the most visible ones, and crackers STILL get mad at me for saying the most basic-ass concepts like “white people are still white even if they’re otherwise marginalized”
In many cases, intracommunity racial intersectionality fails because given the choice between solidarity with nonwhite trans people and white people (trans or cis), white trans people will almost always side with other whites in the hopes of preserving a degraded position within white supremacy, because they internally see being “lesser” within whites supremacy but still above nonwhites as preferable to solidarity with nonwhites that loses them that positionality.
I wanna toss this link on here because it’s directly related to the whole “lack of intracommunity solidarity when race is involved” thing and has a specific example from my local community.
💬 0 🔁 132 ❤️ 218 · 100% agreed, but I also want to bring up a similar concern specific to Black transfemmes: the intersection of gendered
Its things like this that i fight to unlearn, a lifetime of racist fascistic rhetoric being pumped into my skull growing up made me a walking cockroach infection, it seems for every one i kill i find a dozen more crawling around in my soul like rot i cant clean
I will spend a lifetime unlearning what they made me
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
At root, enshittification can only take place when companies can move value around. Digital tools make it easier than ever to do this, for example, by changing prices on a per-user, per-session basis, using commercial surveillance data to predict the highest price or lowest wage a user will accept:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Digital "twiddling" represents a powerful system of pumps for moving value around, taking it away from users and giving it to business customers, then taking it from businesses and giving it to users, and then, ultimately, harvesting all the value for the company's shareholders and executives.
Twiddling is powerful because it's fine-grained, allowing businesses to extract more from their most vulnerable customers and workers, while reserving more equitable treatment for more empowered stakeholders who might otherwise take their business elsewhere.
But long before digitization made twiddling possible, businesses that found themselves in a position to make things worse for their customers and workers without facing consequences were accustomed to doing so. Think of the airport shop that sells water for $10/bottle: that's a ripoff whether you're in coach-minus or flying first class, and it's made possible by the TSA checkpoint that makes shopping elsewhere a time-consuming impossibility.
The airport shop is the only game in town – a "monopolist" in economics jargon. When a business has something you really want (or even better, something you need) and it's hard (or impossible) for you to get it elsewhere, they can take value away from you and harvest it for themselves.
The most obvious forms of monopoly extraction are high prices and low wages. Dollar stores are notorious for this, using their market power to procure extremely small packages of common goods in "cheater sizes" that have high per-unit costs (e.g. the cost per ounce for soap), while still having a low price tag (the cost per (small) bottle of soap). These stores are situated in food deserts, which they create by boxing in community grocers and heavily discounting their wares until the real grocers go out of business. They're also situated in work deserts, because driving regular grocers out of business destroys the competition for labor, too. That means they can pay low wages and charge high prices and make a hell of a lot of money, which is why there are so many fucking dollar stores:
That's the most obvious form of value harvesting, but it's not the only one. There are other costs that businesses can impose on their customers and workers. Think of CVS, the pharmacy monopolist that uses its vertical integration with bizarre, poorly understood middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" to drive independent pharmacies out of business:
If you've been to a CVS store recently, you have doubtless experienced a powerful form of value-shifting: understaffing. CVS (and the other massive chains in the cartel, like Walgreens) have giant stores with just one or two employees on the floor, often just a cashier and a pharmacist.
This makes them easy pickings for shoplifters, so all their merchandise is locked up in cabinets and when you want to buy something, you have to find the lone employee and get them to unlock the case for you. This is CVS trading your time for their wage-bill.
Then, you're expected to check out your own purchases – shifting labor from workers on CVS's payroll to you – with badly maintained machines that often misfire and require you to wait again for that lone employee to come and override them.
Meanwhile, that employee is absorbing a gigantic amount of frustration and abuse from customers who are paying high prices and enduring long waits – another cost that CVS shifts from their shareholders to someone else (workers, in this case).
Finally, CVS demands that publicly funded police respond to the inevitable shoplifting and other security problems created by running a big-box store with a skeleton crew, shifting costs from the business to everyone in the local tax-base.
In "Not Enough Workers For the Job," The American Prospect's Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein looks at the systemic trend towards understaffing that has swept across every sector of the US economy over the past five years:
Kaiser-Schatzlein lays the blame for many of life's frustrations at the feet of this business trend: "long lines, messy grocery aisles, organized theft, high hotel costs, frequent flight cancellations, deadly medication errors at pharmacies, increased use of medical restraints in nursing homes, and, more generally, a palpable and rising dissatisfaction with work."
As you can see from that list, understaffing affects everyone, from people with the wherewithal to buy a plane ticket to vulnerable elderly people who are literally tied to their beds or drugged into stupors for the last years of their lives.
There's academic work to support the idea that understaffing is on the rise, like a 2024 Kennedy School survey of 14,000 workers where a majority said that their workplaces are "always" or "often" understaffed. A 2023 study in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found that public health institutions need to hire 80% more workers to be adequately staffed. New York's Mt Sinai hospitals paid a $2m fine in 2024 for understaffing its ERs, as well as oncology and labor units. Another study blames understaffing for the rise of use of antipsychotic "chemical handcuffs" in nursing homes:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35926573/
The hits keep coming: the DoT Inspector General says that 77% of air traffic control is understaffed, with NYC ATC staffed at 54% of the correct level. In Texas, county jails have had to reduce their capacity due to understaffing (they have enough beds, but not enough turnkeys). Understaffing is behind much of the unprecedented union surge, with workers at Starbucks, railroads and elsewhere becoming labor militants due to understaffing. 83% of white-collar millennials say they're doing extra work to make up for vacant positions in their organizations. As Starbucks union organizers can attest, workers need unions if they want to have a hope of forcing their bosses to adequately staff their jobsites, so it's not surprising that understaffing has emerged at a time when union density is at rock bottom.
Kaiser-Schatzlein quotes the Kennedy School's Daniel Schneider, who identifies understaffing as a deliberate business strategy. Businesses don't hire enough workers because that makes them more profitable. It's not because "no one wants to work anymore" (though doubtless repeating that fairy tale helps shift the blame for long lines and poor service from real, greedy bosses to imaginary, greedy workers).
Private equity firms lead the charge here, "rolling up" multiple, competing businesses in a sector and then cutting staffing across all of them. Putting all the businesses in a given sector and region under common ownership means that when these businesses hack away at staffing levels, workers and customers have nowhere else to go. This is especially pernicious at nursing homes, where PE companies drastically reduce headcount, putting staff and patients alike at risk:
Private equity has just about declared victory in its decades-long war on community pharmacies, consolidating pharmacy ownership nationwide into just a few chains that are the poster-children for understaffing. These ghost-ships aren't just frustrating places to shop – they're a danger to their communities. As Kaiser-Schatzlein reports, Ohio fined CVS in 2021 for boarding up the walk-up pharmacies in its stores and forcing customers to use the drive-through, because there was only a single pharmacist on duty.
Without help, the lone pharmacist was unable to process deliveries, so CVS pharmacies' floors were littered with unopened parcels. Patients had to wait over a month to get their prescriptions filled. CVS refused to hire additional staff to process the backlog, and the on-duty staff worked under declining conditions, as the undermaintained air conditioning quit and indoor temperatures soared. Unsurprisingly, these stores had massive staff turnover, which also hampered their efficiency.
Understaffing in pharmacies leads to serious medication errors, which are proliferating across the US, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. The errors are incredible, like the woman who died after getting chemotherapy drugs instead of antidepressants:
Pharmacists at chain stores like CVS are at elevated risk for kidney stones because they don't have time for bathroom breaks, so they adopt a practice of not drinking water during their shifts. One CVS pharmacist told Texas regulators, "I am a danger to the public working for CVS."
As ever, covid provides the ideal excuse for shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Today's high prices never came down after the "greedflation" that bosses boasted about to shareholders, even as they told customers that it was because of "supply chain shocks":
Likewise, staffing levels never came back from the covid skeleton crews that we all learned to deal with in the days of widespread acute illness and social distancing. Kaiser-Schatzlein spoke to hotel workers like Jianci Liang, a housekeeper at Boston's Hilton Park Plaza, who described a post-pandemic jobsite with 20 fewer housekeepers: "I sleep with pain, I wake up with pain, I go to work with pain." The Bureau of Labor says that hotel staffing levels are down 16% nationwide.
Prices (and profits) are up, though. Hotels are posting record profits and paying record executive salaries, wrung from facilities where the pools are closed and room cleanings happen on alternate days.
Workers absorb the cost of understaffing in their bodies and their psyches. It's not just physical exhaustion, it's also the abuse that is directly correlated with lower staffing levels. Frustrated customers vent their anger at grocery workers, flight attendants and other front-line workers.
I can't help but see a connection here to the AI bubble, which is fueled by the fantasy of a world without people:
The billionaire solipsists who have directed hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investment like to rhapsodize about a future where a boss's ideas are turned into products and services without having to be funneled through workers:
That's why AI has taken over customer service – the multi-hour waits for a customer service rep were always a way of shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Businesses could increase staffing at their call centers. Businesses could offer better products and services and reduce the number of people who need customer service. By refusing to do either, they make you wait on the line until you are suffused with murderous rage, and then expect their workers to deal with your anger. Turning the whole thing over to AI makes perfect sense – your problems won't be solved, and they don't have to pay the chatbot at all when you get angry at it:
"We don't care if this is done well" could well be the motto of the understaffing craze. The technical insights that sparked today's AI investment bubble could have happened at any time, but the ensuing investment tsunami is a product of a world dominated by large firms that are "too big to care" about the quality of their products – or their jobs.
Playing Operation Eventide served as a gateway drug that pushed me into the intoxicating embrace of the independent Yuri VN scene. A space that formed itself around Itch.io and self-organized game jam contests. Thousands of hours of reading material, unconventional stories, the antithesis of mainstream genre conventions, right at the tip of my keyboard pressing fingers. Naturally, I had to write about these games. Consider this article naught but an appetizer for the massive (and very specific) meal that's to come in the future.
You don't need to be a licensed toxicologist to handle these unhealthy dishes... but it might help!
di/aphragm para/digHm by Azalinworks
Hey, you. Yes, you! You like Toxic Yuri, don't you? Don't lie to me. You like it when the girls are PrObLeMaTiC and not good for each other. You enjoy a bit of Degradation Play, right? One-sided abuse? One girl being deeply traumatized, the other a murderer? Then check this one out. It's a short visual novel with a "fun" conceit, an abundance of allusions, repressed memories forcefully brought to the surface through S&M dynamics dressed up as "exposure therapy", voyeuristic objectification and a whole bunch of relatively obvious Wonderful Everyday references.
I think it's interesting, definitely worth the price of admission - which is nothing. The art direction has that rough, sketchy presentation reminiscent of an underground comic book scene from 30 years ago by way of "How to Draw Manga", which creates a distinct aesthetic.
You will probably have a miserable time with it... Go on and have fun, you crazy kids!
Id & I by Throwpup
Id & I is a harrowing experience, one I was not emotionally ready to behold. It left me shaken, crestfallen, perturbed as it hit dangerously close to my mental abode. That is probably the second best way to sell you on it. Here's the first: it's Psychological Horror Selfcest Yuri. Technically.
Id & I unfolds in claustrophobic darkness, softly lit by computer monitors, enveloped in alien purple hues as squiggly, floating thoughts mercilessly intrude themselves upon the world. It's an aesthetic that grabs you by the chest, throttling you by the collar bone. The writing is subsumed within said aesthetic, fused with it, creating this suffocating atmosphere. It captures a feeling of profound, crippling loneliness, drenched in depression, self-loathing, guilt and a desperate yearning. Interactions with the environment are limited yet significant. There's an optional clicker game titled HEARTBREAKER, browser search "gameplay", and a piss bottle emptying sequence... On that high note, I must refrain myself from saying anything more.
This is a short visual novel. It can be completed in less than two hours. It was created by Throwpup, with character designs by Kolulu (Operation Eventide), and music by Lolratz. It honestly looks and sounds great. Still, heed the warnings and approach it at your own discretion.
PASSENGER X PRINCESS: NO HOPE // MUST DIE by Lunaticker
This novel hits you in the lower abdomen with an oppressive feeling of manic melancholy; red-tinged backgrounds and surreal visages juxtaposed to dire mental states, a third-person narration akin to a purposefully dissociated inner monologue hating itself.
In preparation for this, I read GIRLS' SYMBIOSIS by the same author, made for the Toxic Yuri Jam 2025. It certainly laid some of the groundwork for the game. Namely, the dynamic between a domineering cis woman and the deeply traumatized trans girl she treats as her property. Also, the colour of violence red.
PASSENGER is about an abduction, a suicide pact, a road trip towards an inevitable destination with a looming oblivion hanging above the world itself, as if to emphasize the depressing finality of it all... There is more to it, lurking in the subtext.
The two main characters, Clover and Lotus, appear as twisted, "gendered" mirrors of each other. The latter projects her self-loathing unto the former's trans body, the former is willing to cede agency to her abusive, transphobic yet weirdly validating affections.
A certain interpretation emerges from reading between the lines. One that re-contextualizes the entire diegesis in an allegorical key, from the writing format to the particular texture of the entwined characterizations, to the existentially terrifying backdrop.
The ending all but confirms said reading, but I won't spoil what it was actually about. You shall have to discover it for yourselves. PASSENGER X PRINCESS is well-written, well-illustrated, well-composed, generally well-made. Play it while in a good head space.
Hey, does anybody want to grab a snack at WOMAN's?
LONER_DOG//:Snuff Puppy Carnage Society by Snek RK
This novel is as interesting as it is un-sanitized. A colour-bleeding maw of unsavoury, unmarketable, viscerally authentic queer art. Aesthetically pungent, its backgrounds akin to viewing the world from the inside of a cataract smeared in the abrasive lights of LSD-induced acid trips. Its UI is a Dark Web's chatroom with low-quality popup windows. The characters who inhabit it are monochromatic sketches on an alien canvas.
It's uninviting for all outsiders but it's familiar to those who live in it, those who would not function within "acceptable society." This is a small community of non-conforming, drug-addicted, trans queers who only have each other - and their inpawssible fetishes.
The writing reflects the frantic, intoxicating pace of their lives, often fragmenting its structure to check on what everyone is doing at any point in time, always discarding a more traditional format in favour of this... carefully crafted mess. As messy as these people are.
LONER_DOG is not gentle. It exists in the foreground of a truly horrific, bleak landscape, wherein trans "puppygirls" are used, abused and abandoned, collected by state-funded shelters, killed off and mutilated. Their corpses lay half-buried in a massive ditch filled with the gore of their entrails, a monument to violence.
It's a slaughter that's been tacitly normalized, easily ignored by society at large, the disposal of undesirables atop which the Status Quo is maintaned. Simply existing is an act of resistance, and the occasional puppygirl rescue is the most anyone can do when they themselves are at the bottom. And yet, in spite of the horror, life must continue: Argo works its night shift at the gas station. Argo and Nessa cut each other romantically. Maya and Haley have relationship problems. HarshNoise and Roaches broke the toilet. Audrey shot her dick off. It's a flawed community, but a community nonetheless. It's all they have.
So, yes, this is an emotionally raw journey, bordering on the psychotic, the repulsive, the downright unpleasant. Its destination isn't a hopeful future but, rather, a present where you're (hopefully) still kicking, surviving past your episodes, desperately clinging to what gets you going. I shall say, it did not occur to me it was thematically and narratively possible to earnestly reframe necrophilia as a means to process grief while still being fundamentally rooted in ultra-complex psychosexual feelings. These characters are capital F Freaks and not in a cute way.
In case I didn't make it abundantly clear, you should not read this novel if you're too "normal." You should behold its brutal atmosphere as a window to the souls of deeply unwell queer people surviving at the barest minimum, stuck together in the depths of a fascist dystopia. The vital necessity of togetherness supersedes the inevitable toxicity that percolates in their circle. This is not a story about things working out fine thanks to the power of companionship, it's a reminder of how much worse it would all be without your only (bad) friends around you. You have to firmly, desperately love each other because no one else will, outside of your group. You have to keep on living for the same reason. This is both, somehow, bittersweet and bleak beyond anything I'll ever experience in my cisgender life.
...
Well, I feel like shit now so I'll call it a review.
Great game! Thumbs up! The final sequence is Cinema! Support your community-run puppygirl centres! Trans rights and death to fascism, forever!
---
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Soul Entity Lore ✦ Chara's Nightmare ✦ Hello Noelle! ✦ Sus ✦ Learn to Play Piano ✦ Super Secret Door ✦ What if it was VR ✦ A Name... ✦ It's Laughing ✦ Moss! ✦ Sal & Pep meet Lancer (Pt 2) ✦ Possession PSA
College Buddies: Glow-in-the-Dark! ❖ College Classes ❖ Magic Food? ❖ In Every Universe
Chara Bio! ✖︎ Azzy Concept ✖︎ Human World Building ✖︎ Silly World Building ✖︎ Early Weird Route Concept ✖︎ Town skits ✖︎ College Az and Chara ✖︎ Frisk Concept(1) (pt 2) ✖︎ Frisk Darkworld ✖︎ Darkworld Concept ✖︎. BellHop(1) (pt 2) ✖︎ Darkworld Sketches ✖︎ Original Chara ScaryFace ✖︎ McOven Secret Boss
**You can find these through #deltarunecharatimeine on my main, but these links are organized and have pictures
The comic pages in this blog are not linked properly. Your best experience with this comic would be using the links above, rather than the blog itself.
I haven't drawn in like. an entire week. but it's also been a really long time since I actually made a real rendered drawing instead of just sketch pages and doing so finally ended my art block !! wonderful. it's so relieving to draw something I particularily like after a long line of drawings I'm just "okay with". also yeah he doesn't bleed I'm being edgy on purpose for effect fight me
