breathing dreams

Shade, he/them, late 20s | Shadaras @ ao3 | If I know you offline, please let me know who you are when you follow me.

[turquoisemagpie]

“The answer had been all around you this whole time.”

(Tis the month of self-reflection it seems.)

[anistarrose]

[ID: A pen-lined drawing in a notebook, colored in with marker. The drawing depicts a pale figure standing in the road and looking up with their hands down by their sides, looking surprised. Their clothes are the colors of the asexual flag, and the background and road beneath them are the colors of the aromantic flag. End ID]

[fiabex]

Fic In A Box 2024

Schedule

August 9-16: Nominations Pre-Gaming (participants can load tags from last year’s tagset into this tagset)

August 17: Tag Nominations Open

August 24: Tag Nominations Close

August 25-26: Nominations Cleanup

August 27: Signups Open

September 1: Swap requests open

September 7: Signups Close

September 10: Assignments Out By This Date

September 11: Swap requests close

October 20: Assignments Due

October 27: First Extension Due Date

November 3: Final Extension Due Date

November 10: Last Day To Submit Makeup Assignments

November 16: Work Reveals

November 30: Creator Reveals

All times 10pm Eastern

What is Fic In A Box

A gift exchange is an event where participants create fanworks to gift to each other. Fic In A Box is a fanwork exchange with a large minimum gifting requirement and several unique features. Gifts can include fic, art, audio, video— and much much more.

How It Works/The Nitty-Gritty:

All participants in Fic In A Box are requesting 10,000 words of fanfiction by default, but can opt in to other mediums to give their gifter options. Mediums can include writing structure things like "in-world rpf" for your gift, or include creative formats as far away from fic as different types of art, knitting patterns, logic puzzles, and so on. There were 288 mediums to choose from last year, and we add more every year.

For mediums other than the written word, pretty much any medium will be accepted, as long as it can be digitized for delivery and we can agree on a clear and easily checked equivalent to 1k of written fic. Participants who primarily work in non-writing mediums are very welcome and will get specially matched (as long as they give the mods a heads-up) so they'll have an assignment they can complete. If your art form is fannish cross-stitch? We'd love to have you join us.

Participants have the option to split the 10k words (or equivalent in an opted-into medium) that they owe between several separate works (say, one fic of 3k and a another of 7k) to reach 10k total. The minimum word count per work is 1k by default, but lower wordcount works will count if your recipient has opted into receiving them. (Drabble is a medium that can be opted into!) And initial assignments are 10k for one person, but at the start of the exchange the mods run Swaps which will give you the chance to split that 10k into multiple shorter assignments for multiple recipients!

So when it comes time to turn in gifts, you might turn in 3k worth of art, 4k in fic, and 3k in typesetting a fic (10k total), and then you receive 8k of fic and 2k of map design (10k total). Last year 265 people signed up, and we exchanged 993 gifts at the end of the creation period, everything from fic to reddit posts to logic puzzles to museum catalogues to CYOA stories to colouring pages!

If you cannot complete the full 10k (or other medium equivalent) but are still able to post one or more smaller, complete works, you can default on just the remaining wordcount. You will then be guaranteed (via finding a back up gifter-- "pinch hitting"-- if necessary) a gift equivalent to the amount you were able to submit (rounded down to the nearest 1k). There are also options to "earn back" guaranteed minimum amount by taking pinch hits or completing your original assignment.

Questions?

For more information about Medium rulesets, signing up, nominations of fandoms, relationships, or medium forms, swaps, or much more (questions about how pinch hits work? we have documentation about that), check out the dreamwidth blog!

If you have questions, feel free to ask them here, check the dreamwidth blog for much more documentation, email the mods, or join our discord server. The discord server has a lot of experienced participants happy to answer questions, and you are also welcome to join just to hang out!

Note: you must be 18 or older to join FIAB.

Links

Email: [email protected]

Ao3 Collection (sign up here once signups open)

Tag Set

Dreamwidth Blog

Discord (includes question channel)

[gendercensus]

The 2024 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

Image credit: Malachite and rhodochrosite.

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[shadaras]

@tavina-writes tagged me in a "share a snippet of a current WIP" game, and I went "...what is a WIP I currently have that is for public consumption." (Exchange fic and zine fic are most of what I've got WIP-drafts of right now.)

However! I can share a bit from the next part of Ash, Snow, Clouds, the story I'm slowly writing for @glyphsinateacup. (Canon divergence: LWJ dies to save WWX.)

Later, when he could stand and walk without tiring, Xiao Xingchen sent Wei Wuxian to the market. “Your complaints about my cooking are noted,” he said with a smile. “Pick something nice.” Wei Wuxian clutched the coins tightly enough that the edges bit into his palm. Xiao Xingchen had casually handed him more money than he’d grown used to spending for a week’s scant supplies in Yiling. “How are you with spice?” he asked, instead of screaming about how much Xiao-daxia’s skills were worth to the public compared to the Yiling Laozu’s. Xiao Xingchen waved a hand. “I’m sure I can handle it.” The market was overwhelming. Wei Wuxian wouldn’t have agreed to go there if Xiao Xingchen hadn’t stood him in front of a mirror and told him to take a good look at himself, since the change Xiao Xingchen felt in his energy meant that his face was likely changed as well. He was right. Wei Wuxian barely recognised himself. His hair had streaks of silver running through it, aging him decades, and the hollows of his cheeks did nothing to make it look premature. It did not make it any less annoying when the fish-selling auntie called him “Uncle.” Wei Wuxian forced a smile onto his face and paid more than he wanted to for fish that wasn’t nearly as plump as he’d like.

Gonna tag @lynne-monstr, @iamwestiec, @nemainofthewater, and whoever else sees this and wants to play! :D

[duckprintspress]

Urgent: Help Us Not Get Screwed

Anyone who follows us has seen us screaming from the hill-tops about our current crowdfunding campaign for Aether Beyond the Binary (17 aetherpunk stories! Outside the gender binary main characters!). We've only got 50 hours left...and we just got screwed.

Our Anthology Kickstarter is being scammed.

About two hours ago, with us still roughly $1,500 from our goal, we got a junk pledge for almost $2,000. This pushed us into being marked as "funded" but there is zero chance it's a real pledge, it's from a shell account marked as being in Turkey. This kind of money doesn't just fall like a miracle into the laps of small business like ours.

The timing on this attack is devastating. The final 48 hours of a campaign are absolutely critical, especially for one as close to meeting our goal as we are. We were very likely to hit our target, but doing so was going to require appeals to y'all that started with "hey, we're so close, please help spread the word." Further, the campaign has hundreds of followers who will get a notification at the 48 hour mark, and many who might have backed to help get us to the finish line will now think "oh, they're there, they don't need me," and not back. Meanwhile, one of two things will happen with the spam pledge: either it will get removed by Kickstarter, which could take hours or a day+, totally nuking us during this crucial window, or it won't get removed until the payment bounces post-campaign, at which point we won't actually have enough money to do fulfillment.

Either way, we are fucked.

Please, please don't let these dipshits ruin the love and passion that 30+ people have poured into this project for over a year.

Our campaign IS NOT FUNDED, and it won't be without help. I'm begging, help spread the word about how we're getting screwed, and help spread the word about Aether Beyond the Binary (visit the link for so much info!) so that we can get enough real pledges to fund this project we've poured our hearts and souls into.

SUPPORT THE QUEER ANTHOLOGY KICKSTARTER FOR AETHER BEYOND THE BINARY (with your pledges or with signal boosts!)

[whizpurr]

[jellogram]

Cannot deal with the concept of lesbian/sapphic love being somehow pure and innocent. When I see a hot woman I want to fuck her. I am a woman and sometimes I want to fuck other women. This is normal and fine. Deal with it I guess.

[valtsv]

i do enjoy "living weapon" characters but specifically living weapons who did in fact do absolutely horrific things which at least a part of them enjoyed and thought was good and right at the time, and that no amount of not knowing any better or guilt they feel in hindsight will ever make up for. i love living weapons who are "irredeemable", and no it's not their fault that they were made that way or pointed in the directions they were by the hand that wielded them, and yes they are victims, but so were their victims. living weapons who some people will never be able to forgive, but who still wake up every day and try to do better than what's expected of them. a sword that uses its blade to cut wheat to make bread for the people who once lived in fear of its arc falling on their heads.

[jmfenner91]

[weirdmageddon]

the way my jaw dropped at this bit

[changelingsrule]

Toby: So I wrote a bunch of music for the computer to play. Its going to be epic since the computer can handle so many crazy parts. Orcistra: We’re going to play this. Toby: Ummm…

[mrevaunit42]

Every band member ever: Music that was clearly composed by someone who doesn’t know how human fingers work? yeah alright, let me warm up. 

[stars-for-thought]

I need this

Like the full concert or a copy of the audio I can download

[stars-for-thought]

Oh look, I found it!

https://youtu.be/2vHERvHx26A

[official-lucifers-child]

new favourite thing to listen to: literally exactly what i’ve been looking for my entire life

[cerothenull]

Music Producer Alex Moukala did a whole video on just why this is so impressive

[exeunt-pursued-by-a-bear]

same energy as the people who made Fifth Element being like “the diva’s song is done using editing because it’s meant to be impossible for normal human vocal cords, no human could change between these notes so quickly” and opera singers immediately taking that as a challenge

[rainbowangel110]

@existencebringsonlypain

[existencebringsonlypain]

yea have you not seen this? they even have a toby they put in the middle, it’s great. and I’m pretty sure they foreshadowed deltarune at the end if I remember right

[rainbowangel110]

I knew there was an orchestra version but I didn’t know it was like THIS

[duckprintspress]

Our Favorite Reads of 2023

Inspired by this post from the Queer Liberation Library, we asked our awesome rec-list contributors to name their one favorite read of 2023, and the result is a list wonderful in its diversity of formats, genres, characters, stories, and authors. Check um out!

@adrianharley Favorite: Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed

@dei2dei Favorite: Consort of Fire by Kit Rocha

@shadaras Favorite: The Spear Cust Through Water by Simon Jimenez

@terrapwaters Favorite: Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

@unforth Favorite: Mo Du by Priest

hullosweetpea’s Favorite: Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H

Shea Sullivan‘s Favorite: Death by Silver by Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold

@thechaoscryptid Favorite: The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K. S. Villoso

@hairasuntouchedaspartoftheamazon Favorite: Gideon the Ninth by Tasmyn Muir

@fpwoper Favorite: November by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

@captainhaterade Favorite: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

@tryslora Favorite: To Drive the Hundred Miles by Alec J. Marsh

@ramblingandpie Favorite: Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

@nursinggeek Favorite: The Heartbreak Bakery by A. R. Capetta

@boneturtle Favorite: Many Drops Make a Stream by Adrian Harley

An anonymous Favorite: Heaven Official’s Blessing by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

@diroxy Favorite: Add Magic to Taste

@maggiepageauthor Favorite: A Power Unbound by Freya Marske

Lyonel Loy’s Favorite: The Last Sun by K. D. Edwards

@crowbraiin Favorite: Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

@not-gwaenchanha Favorite: Open Throat by Henry Hoke

What was YOUR favorite read of 2023? Dare ya to try to pick only one!

[apocryphics]

lydia davis

[snakesonacartesianplane]

In the same vein:

"The simultaneous borrowing of French and Latin words led to a highly distinctive feature of modern English vocabulary: sets of three items, all expressing the same fundamental notion but differing slightly in meaning or style, e.g., kingly, royal, regal; rise, mount, ascend; ask, question, interrogate; fast, firm, secure; holy, sacred, consecrated. The Old English word (the first in each triplet) is the most colloquial, the French (the second) is more literary, and the Latin word (the last) more learned." (Howard Jackson and Etienne Zé Amvela, "Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology." Continuum, 2000)

via ThoughtCo

Though I like how John McWhorter phrases it better:

But language tends not to do what we want it to. The die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin – note how one imagines posture improving with each level: kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.

from "English is not normal"

[balaclava-trismegistus]

Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."

[elidyce]

My personal favourite is his lengthy lecture on the subject of Supplies Being Very Important I Cannot Stress Enough The Importance Of Protecting Your Supply Lines But Also Supply Lines Are Expensive As Shit So Steal The Enemy’s Supplies At Every Opportunity. 

[biohammer]

via- @elidyce

[crazy-pages]

One of the more important things to consider about any historical work is the audience it was published for. The Art Of War was aimed at fancy nobles high on philosophy with little practical military experience who were nonetheless leading armies.

[limpurtikles]

Sun Tzu, after desperatly trying to explain extremely basic logic to a bunch of upper-class twits, basically sat down and wrote the most elaborate "As per my last email" ever

[roach-works]

the art of war is tedious and irritating when you read it as like, immortal prose by the most brilliant man ever to kick ass. but it’s incredibly fucking funny when you realize that sun tzu had to write every single one of those entries because someone somewhere did not know this ahead of time and made a really, really expensive oopsie doodles.

[vaspider]

What's really funny to me in context are all of these tech bros and wannabe tech guru bros who talk about The Art Of War as if they, personally, were not the same exact kind of dude that Sun Tzu was talking to 2k+ years ago.

Like, no, really, sir. If Sun Tzu met your 'disruptive' ass he would absolutely hate you, personally.

[lycandrophile]

Songs sung in T voices? You mean just regular male voices because trans men are men

imagine being so miserable that you see a post about trans joy and pride in transmasculinity and the first thing you think is “i’m going to find a way to see this as transphobia instead”.

i have a t voice. my voice is distinctly different from most cis men’s voices in a way that a lot of other trans people’s voices are distinctly different after being on t. a lot of us have voices with a unique quality to them. the claim that me, a trans man with a t voice, talking about voices like mine somehow implies that my own gender isn’t real…is just fucking wild, honestly.

i think t voices are BEAUTIFUL. i love them so much, having my own voice sound like that was genuinely one of the things i was the most excited about when i started t because to me, that voice is the kind i heard when i watched videos made by other trans guys that taught me about what was possible for me and met other trans guys irl for the first time and got advice on transitioning or just life from them. it’s such a comforting sound and so important to me.

nothing about recognizing that distinctive quality implies that trans men aren’t real men. i have a t voice just like i have a deep voice, a quiet voice, a tonally expressive voice — it’s just a descriptor for one of many things that can make a voice unique. my voice is a “male voice” and it’s also a t voice because i’m a man whose voice has been affected by going on t in a distinctive way. the two aren’t in any way at odds with each other.

if i described my chest as a post-op chest, would you come into my inbox saying “you mean just a regular male chest?” i have a feeling you probably wouldn’t because on some level, even you get that talking about unique parts of living in a trans body doesn’t invalidate who we are. it’s fine if you personally wouldn’t want to describe your voice that way because it makes you dysphoric or isn’t applicable to your voice or isn’t as meaningful to you, but that doesn’t mean it’s morally incorrect for me to do so.

trans bodies are wonderful. visible (or in this case, audible) transness is wonderful. it’s not a bad thing to have features that are distinctively trans, and having those features doesn’t make you less of a man. we don’t have to reject our transness or be exactly like cis men to be real men because cis manhood isn’t the gold standard, it’s just one of many ways to be a man.

(also, not everyone who goes on t is a trans man, so not every t voice is a male voice. it’s funny how the people who get mad at me for being proud of my t voice are always the same ones who have really gender essentialist and binaristic views on transitioning.)

so no, i don’t mean “regular male voices”, i mean fucking t voices because that was a post about unashamed in-your-face proud transmasculinity, not transmasculinity that tries to make itself indistinguishable from cis manhood. please keep your assimilationist bullshit away from my trans joy, thank you very much.

[evilwizard]

okay, skeletons have xylophones, demons have fiddles, ghosts have theremins and vampires have pipe organs. but what of the humble werewolf? what instrument does she get for her very own?

[chimera-posting]

Werewolves are vocalists. What instrument could rival her beautiful howl?

[cam-pteryx]

They’re in a band together

[terezbian]

i think it’s important to get deeply emotionally unironically involved in a bad piece of media whilst fully aware that it objectively sucks ass. like for your health or whatever

[twelvemonkeyswere]