the pleasure and the agony's all mine

Max. Queer adult. Disco Elysium, Heated Rivalry and a bunch of random other things. Queue going at all times almost

[punkrastination]

Intro !!

Hello I'm Max (they/he), 31 years old weird librarian, gay and trans in every possible direction, and annoying leftist that's full of love despite it all.

Back on this blog that started in 2011 after a 5 year break! I overdid the activism irl and almost Got Bad. So now I alternate with being normal about The Characters on here.

All original ~contributions~ are under 'i made this'. Frenchrelovution on AO3, where I like to add a single tragic kiss to canon and put characters in the Jamrock library.

Mutuals feel free to ask for discord, blusky, or my home address.

Previously Please-stop-finding-me

peer reviews:

[mossyshadows]

archaeological evidence for the time traveller - tia tashiro

guys… 😭😭😭😭😭 yeah.

[mossyshadows]

the author’s summary: an archaeologist discovers messages her ex might’ve left for her hundreds of years in the past.

time travel paradox… as preemptive bidirectional grief… as a haunting

[havinganormalone]

Fanfiction is insane. You can write porn so good you make friends.

[endreal]

I know that—objectively—this is bullshit, but I have chosen to believe that the reason the US hasn't formally changed to the metric system is for the poets. When the going gets tough you can still claw your way forward inch by inch, but centimeter by centimeter just doesn't quite carry you. You're in love/excited/nervous/scared and your heart is beating a hundred miles per hour, whoa that sounds fast and dangerous! But a hundred kph? I've been passed by people going faster than that coming out of downtown on capital boulevard. The pound of flesh they take from you is raw and bloody and full of pain, the kilogram of flesh is impersonal and excised in laboratory conditions under strict observation. Liters are okay tho, if only because they sound like meter and a meter is used to measure things, so the measure of a man can be siphoned (as a byproduct of the kilogram) into a bottle with a screw cap lid and stored in a dark cool room until he is found wanting. A gallon would be wasteful, a quart too unserious, and a cup not enough to keep him from withering in the desert sands under 100 degree faeghreignheit sun. ...Okay maybe celsius gets a pass too.

[endreal]

hi, op here. you're my new favorite person and i am express airmailing you 10 thousand high fives and this heart emoji: 💜

[spitblossoms]

[mango-season]

did mitski ever find out what to do after you've been big and small and big and small again and still nobody wants you

[fabrickind]

oobh i got plany off bobbin thread

[simena]

Maria Alfie - Marbles

[0v9]

A truthberry might make you tell the truth... But a lieberry? A lieberry will loan you books

[an-ruraiocht]

there's a lot of talk about reading comprehension and one thing i think is the biggest barrier to people on this site getting better at it is simply... rushing. rushing to share something you haven't understood, rushing to have an opinion without taking the time to think about it, rushing to declare that you don't understand something

take these tags, on somebody else's post (condolences pip)

the thing is. this is what i would call an inside thought. nobody would have known you didn't get it if you didn't tell them that. if you recognised that it was important but didn't have the headspace to process it, you can reblog without commentary for others, or to come back to later. or you can save it somewhere and wait until you DO have the capacity to read it over a few more times, ponder it, consider what it might mean, figure out how to understand it, and THEN reblog it

but no. rushing to reblog while it is still opaque. rushing to admit to ignorance rather than spend the time to achieve understanding. perhaps hoping that somebody will break it down for you more simply, though to my mind it was quite simply phrased in the first place. never stopping to take the time first

comprehension is not always instant! sometimes it takes a bit of time for something to percolate after you read it; sometimes you need to read it a few times; sometimes you realise you don't have the context for it and either go and get the context or accept that it's not for you right now

please just simply slow down. you don't always have to respond to everything within a second or two. it is okay if it is not an instantaneous understanding. we all need to get more comfortable with thinking more slowly and more deeply and more carefully, and not letting our instant split second responses drive us all the time, because they are a barrier to genuine reflection

[creekfiend]

ong thank you. I haven't known how to address this but ... tags like this show up a LOT on my posts. and it makes me feel... pretty bad. like, everything you have said here about how not taking time to try and understand something (or excusing yourself from trying to understand it) is detrimental to personal and communal understanding is totally true and extremely important

AND, on a personal level, as someone who is often trying very hard to articulate subjects that our society tends to not have easily accessible pre-existing concepts for: it FEELS BAD for me to read tags like this. it feels like someone staring at me while i work really hard to articulate something really integral to my existence and then when I'm done pausing and saying "anyway," and changing the subject.

I don't want to be like "let me google that for you" levels of flippant. sometimes a search engine seafch of keywords in a post will help illuminate something and sometimes it won't. checking the other notes in a post is often helpful. going back to the OP's blog and seeing if perhaps they have a tag they use for discussing similar subjects can be helpful. asking polite abd direct clarifying questions can be helpful. these will not only expand your understanding but they will make the person you are trying to understand feel engaged with and respected.

if you want to save a post to read later you can save it as a draft! and also frankly there's a lot of stuff that i read that gets me thinking that i need to sit on and rotate for a bit before i can see how it sort of... fits into things. even if you want to reblog something you are still chewing on, tags like "this post is giving me a lot to think about" feel a lot less dismissive to me personally

anyway. 100% agree. its ok to take time. there's stuff i have read that took me literal years to understand fully (and i still have understanding of some of those things that is as yet unearthed, too)

[nikoco11]

:PPPPP

[incomingalbatross]

You know, it's aggravating to read fics where the writers have created Blorbo-Centered Morality - you know, the fics where everyone who's ever been mean to Blorbo are horrible irredeemable people, and Blorbo himself had never done anything bad ever, and we will reinterpret all of canon through this lens and divide the cast into Camp A (who understand Blorbo is perfect) and Camp B (monsters to be utterly condemned)

BUT

Sometimes you find a writer who has done this for, like, a D-list minor character, and suddenly the heroes who saved the world several times are having their worth defined by whether said world-saving involved being nice to this one random dude or being mean to him. Because said random dude has become this writer's Specialest Little Guy. THAT'S very funny actually.

[faemorrigan]

yknow people can kerfuffle all day about the ~nuances~ of ai but until you guys acknowledge that for a lot of us, we can drive 10 minutes to where the data centers in our town are and physically see the temperature indicator tick up by multiple degrees, youre gonna continue making asses of yourselves. i know you guys dont go outside but People Have Lived Experiences Because We Do Go Outside and that will always come before any 50k word article about how like, water cooling systems could work in some nebulous future timeframe. some people actually pay their own electricity bill.

[faemorrigan]

A lot of you will frame this as a "i just think people should be educated on the things they hate on" thing, and while i agree with that in principle, youre functionally doing theorybro dialectics again which is holding you back. people are educated: theyre educated on the fact that these ai companies are literally in real life trying to choke their communities to death. and people care about their communities because again: They Go Outside. stop putting the cart before the horse. Acknowledge The Horse. if your average joe doesnt know what a learning model is he probably at least knows that its too hot to fucking go outside in his own neighborhood when it wasnt that way 3 years ago before all these ugly gray buildings popped up

[shabbytigers]

[julie-beararts]

Harry dreaming ab his gay disco lover 😛

[attendingthetale]

having an iliad summer. doing a ton of brooding. might be blinded by selfishness and/or rage. considering unexpectedly dying to my hubris. hopefully that wont have devastating effects

[veitstanz]

painted one of my favorite Disco Elysium Portraits in gouache to practice!

Acrylics would probably have been better for this but I like how this came out.

[spilledkaleidoscope]

look at me go