#long arse post

[eeee-lye]

I hate how the push to be more inclusive of marginalised groups, identities and experiences in the creation and consumption of fictional media has become a performative show of diversity.

I understand that there are good aspects to it; I am (as a multiply marginalised person) the beneficiary of this push that characters need to be more than just white cishet abled middle-class men. I never once read a book as a child that honestly described my experiences, and as an adult, I’m still yet to read a book that encapsulates all or many of my experiences as a trans, agender, aro-ace, queer, mentally ill, autistic, physically disabled, working-class person. I hope that this changes and we get more multiply-diverse protagonists with more than one or two marginalised identity labels.

But I do not see people talking enough about the performativity, and since I run into one of these things at least once a day here on Tumblr, let me burden you with a list of all the problematic trends that have arisen as a result of the fashion for showing one’s diversity as a consumer or creator:

People who are not of the group/identity/experience in question composing lists of must-read books about that group/identity/experience without recognising that their evaluation is limited or even worthless.

People who are not of the group/identity/experience in question listing books that contain minor or secondary characters of that group/identity/experience and thereby reinforcing the fact that we’re expected to take non-protagonists as meaningful representation.

People who are not of the group/identity/experience in question reviewing books about that group/identity/experience as though they have any ability to meaningfully analyse and determine its importance as representation.

People who are not of the group/identity/experience in question listing the numbers of books they’ve read that contain characters of that group/identity/experience as though showing off their consuming of diverse media is something to be applauded and isn’t othering.

People who are not of the group/identity/experience in question writing reviews and reports about that group/identity/experience with “disclaimer: not [identity]” instead of stepping back and leaving the discussion to those who are of the group/identity/experience.

People who are not of the group/identity/experience in question writing posts bragging about their characters of the group/identity/experience as though being inclusive is something to be applauded and celebrated and not the minimum requirement and even basic expectation for being a decent creator.

People who are not of the group/identity/experience in question talking up their inclusion of characters of the group/identity/experience and gaining popularity in progressive circles via their appearance of progressiveness based in their use of someone else’s story.

People who are not of the group/identity/experience in question focusing on the creativity of other people who are not of the group/identity/experience and not the actual marginalised creators of the group/identity/experience who struggle to get any kind of attention and following.

I hate the way it has become fashionable to be diverse because it so often others, silences, fetishises and ignores the actual creators who belong to the marginalised group/identity/experience in favour of diversity as a performance.

Can creators not of the group/identity/experience in question please start quietly being inclusive (which is a much-needed and valuable thing) and stop using their inclusivity as a performance designed to score progressiveness points? Please?

Because I would sell my soul to stop seeing cis people talking about how many books they’ve read with trans characters or allosexual people talking about how their aro-ace character is the reason we should read their books.

[eeee-lye]

In my boredom while waiting around for my hand to heal, I’m reading a fantasy series by a well-known Australian spec-fic author.

The main protagonist, after being warned about spiders/snakes/scorpions by her companion, goes traipsing off barefoot and stands on a scorpion with the resulting envenomation. Her companion cuts open the wound and sucks out the venom, which apparently works in this case, and the next day the protag calls her companion a “brute” for saving her life.

He explains that he saved her life; she doesn’t apologise. Or thank him. Or apologise later on when she’s calmed down. Or behave in any way that isn’t that of a selfish, demanding brat. The next five chapters involve everyone, including the companion, talking about how special the protagonist is and why she deserves absolutely everything in the world ... and I don’t understand why her companion didn’t leave her in the desert to die because she has done nothing deserving of these characters’ loyalty.

The telling wildly contrasts against the showing.

The same protagonist spends the first book screaming at her love interest, who canonically knows nothing about outdoor survival (shown and told both, so the author can accomplish this) for making mistakes even though she makes no move to teach him how to do things; he’s just supposed to magically know. The narrative is telling me that he is ignorant and she is knowledgeable, and this basic knowledge should be possessed by everyone. The narrative is showing me that she’s also ignorant about areas of survival and bushcraft, but it’s okay for her to make mistakes when she’s out of her comfort zone. It’s difficult not to see this as a case of the narrative refusing to acknowledge her lack of knowledge and accompanying horrendous behaviour--a case of the worst kind of Mary Sue, where everything she does is right and justifiable. I see an author so in love with their character that they don’t see the consequences of her actions and how they might impact their other characters, that the author buys their telling.

The narrative tells me, over and over, through the voices of other characters and even her own declarations of her goodness, how special and wonderful is our protagonist, even though it shows me a character I pray doesn’t make it to the end of the book.

Why should I trust the telling? Why should I trust the narrative? If this telling is wrong, is any of the telling valid? Why should I keep reading, now that I have no trust in the author?

Readers are able to see the difference between the showing and the telling. Unless you’re intentionally writing this contrast as an unreliable narrator (in which case the difference is the point of the narrative; you’re deconstructing the lies we humans tell about ourselves, and the attitudes of other characters as well as your narrative are a tool in showing this, thereby keeping the reader’s trust) you’ve created a situation where the reader cannot and will not trust anything you say about your characters.

I’m not seeing an exploration of truth and lie and identity in this book; I’m seeing a narrative that ignores the protagonist’s hateful actions while pushing the illusion that she’s worth investing in. I’m seeing a Mary Sue in the worst way--not a character who is special, but a character whose hatefulness is justified by her told special status even as it makes no sense for other characters to see her this way. I’m seeing an author who is trapped by their own telling to the degree that nothing they show mars that telling, however much it should. I’m seeing an author warping their own story by their inability to see past their telling.

Thing is, if this character were intentionally a hateful character, she’d be a thousand times more interesting and compelling than the mess we got. Characters who ignore the social rules are fascinating because they can do something many of us can’t; we like reading about this stepping outside of the boundaries. We also like reading about learning, growing and redemption; the narrative of watching a hateful character learn better from those around her is tried and true for a reason. I’d enjoy this book far more if the protagonist were meant to be an arsehole.

The narrative, though, tells me that she isn’t, and that’s a problem.

Heavy telling doesn’t speak anywhere near as loudly as showing, and I think this demonstrates just how much. I’m not listening to the author’s telling, here, as loud as it is; I’m listening to the showing. If I weren’t hit hardest by the showing, I wouldn’t hate the protagonist nearly as much as I do. At this point, no amount of telling can redeem this character for me; all I see is the book showing me just how contemptible she is in how she treats others.

Showing should be the way you convey the majority of your characterisation, because it can reinforce or undermine your telling.

The worst thing you can do, though, is show a character to be one thing while telling the reader through your supporting characters and narrative, in a book where nobody is meant to be unreliable, that the character is another.

You need to question your character’s actions, constantly, and see if those actions live up to what you’re saying about that character. You cannot stop questioning; you cannot sit back and assume that behaviour equals message. You have to keep asking, comparing, evaluating. Is this behaviour appropriate? How would other characters react? How would I react? How should people react in this situation versus how they do react? What history or situation is influencing the behaviour and will others understand that? What history or situation influences their response? What does this action say about my character and their history? Does it match what I’m telling the reader about them? Is it meant to? Am I deliberately being unreliable here? Am I going for a sympathetic portrayal? Am I showing my character’s flaws and intend this to be conveyed by the narrative and my other characters? What does this behaviour in isolation say about my character? What does it say in isolation about my supporting characters in how they respond to it? How does the context of the situation change the action or perception of this behaviour? Am I showing something now only to pull the rug out from under the reader’s feet later? Is this behaviour setting up a reveal or contrast later on? Ask, ask, ask. Never stop asking.

The failure to ask, the failure to understand what you are showing whilst telling something entirely different, is the quickest way to break a reader’s trust in your protagonist, and when you’ve done that, you have nothing.

You, the writer, cannot buy your own telling.

[eeee-lye]

At everyone who complains about Apple not using a standard micro USB cable for their iPhones and iPads and how this is horrible:

The Apple cable on my 2017 iPad is the only cable I have that my autistic, dyspraxic arse can plug into my device on the first attempt.

It is the only cable I have that I find easy to use.

This is because it does not matter which way I insert the cable, saving me from picking the wrong side and then having to turn the cable. (I struggle to process things like left and right or right side and wrong side, to the point that my riding instructor used to yell “Your other left!” several times a session because I cannot pick the correct one.) While I acknowledge that this isn’t a problem for most people, it is absolutely a hassle for me. Charging my devices is a daily moment of awkwardness, and I didn’t know how not awkward it could be until I got my iPad.

Additionally, because the pins are flat, it’s so much easier to slide in, too. I don’t have to have it carefully aligned with the slot/port. Roughly-aligned is good enough. I can connect my iPad to the charging cable after having taken my mirtazapine and am in that groggy drunk-esque state of having zero fine motor control ... something I cannot do with my Windows Phone, Sony Reader or anything else that has a standard micro USB cable.

Yes, Apple everything costs way too much. This is indefensible. I’ve also got a long list of things I despise about Apple (alongside the lists of things I despise about Microsoft and Adobe and Google) that only begins with the fact that they’ve removed the ability to easily sync books through iTunes. I’m not writing this post to make the claim that they’re a flawless provider of accessibility, not when one of their most recent updates took away from their overall accessibility!

I am, though, writing this post from intense frustration at constantly seeing people regard Apple’s refusal to use a standard micro USB cable, something that is for me an accessibility feature, as unnecessary. That reversible cable, where I can plug it in any which way I like without discovering that I have always picked the wrong side, is a blessing. It does make my life that much easier to not have to think so hard just to plug in my device to recharge.

Apple’s refusal to use a standard cable, when their cable is far more accessible for disabled users, is not the problem. Apple’s pricing of replacement cables and their entire product line is.

(Additionally, if you want to talk about how Apple products are so easy to use, since I often see this, too--yeah, they are, and this is also a feature that disabled people might actually seek out. I have far fewer hand movements operating my iPad than I do using Mum’s Android tablet. A thumbprint scanner instead of typing my passcode over and over? Perfection. So if you make any sort of comment stating that only people who want an easy device use Apple products with an implication that intelligent people use something else, you are being fantastically ableist. Yes, I know that there’s a long and shitty history of Apple products being held up as intellectual--I run Adobe CS on a Windows PC and learnt how to use it on a Mac, so I know how my industry regards Apple, including the idea that CS is magically better when installed on a Mac, which is bullshit--but taking that same snobbishness and judgement and reversing it is hardly thoughtful activism, and all it does is harm disabled Apple users. How did it become okay to judge people for wanting an easy-to-use device?)

What I want to know is this: if Apple can make an easy-to-use cable, why can’t everybody else? Why haven’t they bothered? Why are they still using a cable that needs to be orientated in the right way and then guided correctly into the slot, requiring concentration and fine motor control, and why is this a benefit? Why do people routinely forget that for some of us, a micro USB cable is a difficult thing to use? Why are we only thinking about accessibility in terms of price and availability and not accessibility in terms of usability?

There’s a world wrong with the idea that Apple is keeping their accessibility only for those who can afford (or borrow or beg) far-too-highly-priced Apple products.

There’s also a world wrong with the idea of patting Microsoft, Sony, Google et al on the back for continuing to not develop an easier-to-use cable.

[eeee-lye]

The media you like isn’t pure.

I really, really hate this tendency to refer to things we like as “pure” and “perfect”.

My creativity is neither. The things I like are neither. Nothing I make or consume, no matter how good it is, is either of those things, because media is made by humans and all humans are hampered by some form of privilege or ignorance, no matter how much we try. We’re humans. We fuck up.

I’ve seen desperately cissexist TV shows described as “pure”. On the other side of the coin, I’ve seen shows that succeed in many kinds of representation but fail in a few areas dismissed as media inappropriate to consume - impure - because of their failures. It isn’t pure, so therefore it isn’t worthwhile, and wanting to consume it is seen as a slight on those not included by it, even though other groups are finding good representation for the first time.

Neither is the right way to evaluate media. Neither results in what it is we want - conversations educating and resulting in media made with more awareness, compassion, representation and insight. Neither results in people thinking, considering, growing, learning.

Is anyone discussing the problem of using a word like “pure”, anyway? What the hell are we doing, deciding that “pure” and “perfect” work as a merit ranking system? “Purity” has been used as a means to exclude and justify hate for many kinds of minorities, so why are we using it as an indicator of merit? What possible worth does the notion of “purity” in evaluating anything give us that we’re happy to overlook the history of this concept wielded against vulnerable groups? It’s a word and concept that has been used to harm us, yet now we use it to evaluate media that supposedly doesn’t? How does that even work?

(And don’t get me started on the ableism behind “perfect”, honestly.)

Again: creators and consumers are human. We are all working from positions of privilege and ignorance. We are all going to make mistakes based on our possession of these, no matter how hard we try. We are all going to be less inclusive than we should be. If nothing can be pure, on what basis are we determining a work’s purity? What microaggressions and erasures are being overlooked by the person evaluating a creation as “pure”?

Isn’t, in fact, the ability to determine something pure an act of privilege? And if we acknowledge that this is so, why is this a remotely useful determination?

Can we, please, have conversations that talk about media’s flaws and failures along with its strengths and successes? Conversations that understand why someone doesn’t watch it (on the basis of the harm it causes) but also doesn’t judge someone for watching it (on the basis of inclusion and acceptance)? Conversations that go beyond the incredibly limiting and unhelpful narrative of pure or not pure? Conversations that don’t slam minorities for engaging in less-than-pure media because that’s the only representation they can find?

As a multiply minority person, I have to wade through a lot of media that is horrible in other ways just to get a few bright spots of inclusion. Should I not talk about that? Should I hold out for the correct, mythological “pure” media (that doesn’t exist at all) that gives me representation without harming anyone, knowing that will never happen? I have privilege and ignorance, meaning I will not recognise a great many hurts perfection-by-my-evaluation causes others, so how can I hold out for something I deem “pure” when it won’t and can’t be? Or should I lie and brand the flawed media I consume as “pure”, even though that’s a slap to the face to those many people who are hurt by its absences, by the author’s ignorance, by poor handling? Which is also a worthless evaluation?

We shouldn’t have to pretend something is pure just to justify our enjoyment of something that is, like all of us, human and flawed.

When I see someone describe a work that is ableist or cissexist or hurtfully amatonormative as “pure”, I feel sick. It tells me that my pain doesn’t matter; this “pure” work can stomp all over me because I don’t need to be included.

When I see someone describe a work that is ableist or cissexist or hurtfully amatonormative as “ableist and cissexist and hurtfully amatonormative but I read it for X reasons that appealed to me”, I feel included, acknowledged, understood. It tells me that they know the work has problems and they’re not ignoring those problems in any discussion about it.

Or even when they just say “I liked it for X reasons”, I feel like there’s space to discuss my problems with it. Space that doesn’t involve me slamming up against the realisation that another reader thinks an author that disregarded me has created a “pure” work. “Pure” shuts down discussion. It says something is socially acceptable and silences other viewpoints.

Please, tell me: what possible benefit is there in labelling a creative work as “pure”?

Why has this become the norm in evaluating media? Why has it become the metric on which we base whether or not works are socially acceptable to consume?

Why are we using a word with such a damaging and judgemental history?

[eeee-lye]

I don’t know how to write this, how to begin it, how to make this tenuous idea make any kind of sense. I don’t suppose it matters, as I’m not writing this for anyone but myself.

The written word is my weapon. It’s the only weapon I have. In a world where I am treated as less than human for multiple reasons, where to say what I think and feel is to take up battle for the right to say it at all, it is a weapon. To fight with it makes me vulnerable, just like any soldier: a sword isn’t dangerous if it lies rusting under a pile of hay in a crumbling barn, but it is dangerous when it is taken to war. Dangerous, not only to the people around me, but also to myself. To pick it up and wield it, I am vulnerable to those who attack me. To leave it, buried in the hay, I am less than myself. Safe, but less. So much less. I know it, and I despise myself for it.

It is a hard thing to be armed and vulnerable all at once. You have a weapon, and you can swing, but you duck back each pass, hide in the barn a little while, come out again. You bounce between aggression and terror. You’re all fury, fury backed up by the blade in your hands and the anger at how much you’ve been hurt, and you swing in wild fury because your life depends on it, because you are in battle or hiding from it, because you’re bleeding from a lifetime of cuts, because you are so done with the fight and the pain. But then you’re all terror, terror backed up by the blood steaming down your skin, too afraid to swing for the flurry of blades flung at you in return. Sometimes, you hide; sometimes you stand there and let them hurt you, because that was what you learnt in the days before you took up words as your blade.

You hate yourself for the aggression and you hate yourself for the terror, but you’re always one or the other, swinging back and forth so wildly it makes you dizzy.

It’s bad writing to shift into second person here, but if I have to do that to get the words out, better that than not saying them at all. I know what psychologists would say at the shift; I mark it. And I move on because it’s better to tell the story than to stand around poking into the wound. I can come back; I’ve got a lifetime in which to do so. Or I don’t, because I’d rather write fiction and paint a Tangle Jr in PVA glue. It probably doesn’t even matter. If I need to go back, the Universe will arrange it.

I don’t know how to be anything else.

Nobody ever taught me to be anything else.

Nobody tells you, really tells you, how hard it is to be a person with a weapon when you know the need for the weapon but have no training, not in the use of said weapon, but in living with said weapon.

But then ... through luck or fate or the Universe just throwing up Its hands in grave despair, I’m somewhere else. Somewhere I can’t be crouching in terror, because people are relying on me to help them. Somewhere I can’t be aggression, because I can’t and shouldn’t alienate those people who have come, trembling and apologetic, in search of my sword. (Why are they apologising? Why?) They’re mine. They don’t know I’m broken. They don’t know how hard I’m trying to hold back the aggression or how often I duck behind the side of the barn to hide, for a moment ... and how much longer I stand there, trembling, in search of the courage to re-emerge. They don’t know this. They can’t know.

I’m trying to be something else. Sometimes more than other times. Sometimes I’m something else there, aggression here and shaking in my bed. It’s a mess. I’m a mess. I can’t not be.

But I think I found it, today. That something else. That something else that bears arms, that takes up sword, that fights without apology but without aggression. I don’t know that anyone else will see what I did; I don’t care if you do or don’t. I found it. That balance. Something that was right to say, something that matters, something that wasn’t the rage of a broken person clinging to the only weapon left to them. I still might be wildly wrong in my beliefs and it was still the right thing to say - and that’s okay. Come at me. I’m not going to scream at you if you want to fight me.

I’m not gripping my weapon. I’m just holding it.

Tomorrow I’ll probably drop it again and go barrelling behind the barn. Or take it up and run screaming at the enemy. It never works like in stories, where that one moment of realisation changes everything then and there. Never.

But those people have given me the knowledge of that one moment - that I can just hold my weapon and wield it, because I can, because it’s my job and duty and reason, because I have something to say and every right to say it, because I don’t have to say it in anger and desperation.

When you’re hiding from the enemy or when you’re running and screaming at them, you’re not breathing.

Right now, I think I’m breathing.

[eeee-lye]

I am not queer because I am non-binary and pan.

I am queer because I am non-binary, pan, ace and aro.

When you tell my cis ace and aro siblings that they are not queer, you are attacking, questioning and invalidating my queerness. You are attacking, questioning and invalidating everything that made me not belong in straight society, everything that made me not conform to amatonormative relationships. You’re attacking the aro teen who went to dances with boys hating every moment of it because that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re attacking the aro teen who had to field off questions about when they’re getting a partner while never knowing why they didn’t want one. You’re attacking the aro-ace adult who had no language for their differences and spent a decade in queer spaces not talking about it. You’re attacking the aro-ace trans adult who bought genre books about trans characters only to discover most of them revolve around romance and (romantic) love and don’t speak to my experience of transness at all. You’re attacking the aro-ace trans adult who feels ignored and excluded once again.

When you tell me I am welcome because I am non-binary and pan, you make me less by stripping away the parts of me you don’t wish to see. You make me less by ignoring how much my asexuality and aromanticism shape my transness, genderlessness and my pansexuality. You make me less because you cannot see how these are merely faces of the same shape.

In truth, you show me just how much you don’t care about differences you don’t share. The thing that hurts me most, though?

Queer folk are supposed to be better than the allo cishets.

That’s the promise I was given. Here, in queer spaces, I have siblings, kin, a home. We together have suffered isolation and exclusion and hurt. We know what it feels to be hated for a facet of our being. We know what it feels to not know what we are save that it isn’t what society tells us we should be. We know what is to be different and strange - doesn’t queer encapsulate that? Isn’t it a rallying cry? It’s us, in our differences from an oppressive culture, spitting in the eye of tired, restrictive, limited illusions of normality? Unifying, with all our differences in sexuality, gender, relationships, expression, race, history, ability and experience, under one bright banner to defy the oppression of the constricted way of being handed to us by Western society?

But that flag is trampled underfoot, the colours obscured by mud. Now it’s “SGA and trans”, unmindful of the cruelty of that initialism. Now it’s a locked gate; entry only acceptable if you’re the right way of being queer. (You probably shouldn’t use that word, by the way, because the right to self-identification and pride in that identification, too, lie buried in the mud.)

I am queer. MOGAI. LGBT+. I prefer queer but I belong in those categories. I am part of the group those words refer to. So are my ace and aro siblings, if they also feel that sense of belonging and connection. All of them.

I’m not here for someone else to pat me on the head and condescendingly allow that I might belong for only the correct decided-by-someone-else reasons.

I am here to tell you that I belong, as I am, all that I am, and that it was never your place to decide for me.

I am here to hold you to the promise I was given, all those years ago.

I am here to extend that promise of self-declaration and community to others.

Especially my ace and aro kin.

[eeee-lye]

You know, I’ve got a problem with emphasising the period of research with autistic self diagnosis. Like self-dx’ing is only appropriate if you’ve spent weeks/months/years doing it. If you can point to all the questionnaires and the research - if you have something with which to back you up and a lot of time with which to consider and evaluate. Like then, and only then, it’s valid.

I’ve got a problem, because that degree of research just isn’t applied to all professional diagnoses - and most of the time those people providing said diagnoses aren’t autistic themselves and, therefore, are already less informed than society thinks they are. Half the time we’re teaching them, not the other way around!

I’m autistic, pretty much, based on a single questionnaire by a professional followed by a discussion and every professional thereafter going you know, you actually are pretty autistic. I’m sure other autistic folk have also less formal professional diagnoses, but that doesn’t make me less autistic save in the eyes of allistic ableists. In fact, talking to other autistic folk and reading the autistic-written diagnostic criteria has only confirmed my agreement with this: the words of other autistics have made me identify with this label, not the words of the professional who gave it to me.

If someone spends a week looking through autie Tumblr and going hey, fuck, that’s me? They have that profound moment of relating to so many of our experiences? They have that moment of realising there is a word that encapsulates their differences and a community ready and willing to accept them? That’s more informed than my professional diagnosis (and in fact, my professional diagnoses for any neurodiversity-related label full stop). We shouldn’t ask months or years of research and self-evaluation to validate something that should be valid on its own, not when we recognise the best authority in recognising autism is autistic people.

You shouldn’t have to claim six months of research time to belong when plenty of professional diagnoses aren’t held up to that same criteria. And if you’re wrong in that self-dx? Well, let’s point to all the medical professionals who’ve made a wrong diagnosis...

It strikes me as kind of ableist to support self diagnosis but hold it up to higher standards than professional diagnosis when the standards for professional diagnosis vary from six months of evaluations to a questionnaire and an hour of talking. Because if self-dx’ers who diagnose after a week of reading autie Tumblr don’t belong in the community ... I, with my professional assessment/diagnosis, also don’t belong here.

I love that self-diagnosed people are welcome here, but I’m increasingly super uncomfortable with putting any kind of stipulation on how people self diagnose or to after which point of time a self-diagnosis is acceptable.

If you say you’re autistic, you’re autistic.

I’m not interested in the story of how you came to own the label.

[eeee-lye]

[image description: two roller bead lanyards/bag charms. The top is made from yellow elastic and threaded with matte and pearly pony beads in pan pride colours and finished with a clear star bead embedded with gold glitter. The bottom his made from white elastic and threaded with pearly pony beads in trans pride colours interspersed with blue star beads embedded with silver glitter. Another blue star bead finishes the lanyard/charm.]

Between all the things I found today shopping and all the things @ambiguouspieces gave me yesterday, I had too many things to photograph and not enough time in the best light to do it all or well.

But Julia is getting into beading (info and tutorials can be found in my beads tag) and made me these.

The pan pride lanyard is on my bag. (It’s a rainbow-striped satchel/shoulder bag from a Nepalese crafts stall at the Queen Victoria Market. I am really obviously queer between my bag and pride necklaces and the rainbow lanyard I made for myself and now this pan lanyard. My bag is starting to fall apart and I’ll just repair it again because I can’t not have a queer-as-fuck bag.) The glittery stars on the trans lanyard are so pretty, though, that I’m afraid to put it on my bag in case I catch it on something or lose it. I have to attach it to something that stays inside, but I don’t know what, yet.

(I lost my Abzan House pin from Fate Reforged pre-release by having it fall off my bag somewhere between my house and the train station two kilometres away, and I’m still a little cut up about it. If it bothers me that I can’t show off my clan badge from Magic the Gathering, as someone who is heavily Abzan colours in my deck preferences and reluctantly retired Anafenza to One Of The 99* only because Atraxa is by far the superior commander, you’d better believe it’d bother me, intensely, to lose something important and not trivial like a pan pride lanyard a friend made me!)

One of the odd things about being crafty is that ... I make things for other people. People don’t make things for me. As odd as it sounds, I’m fine with this. It’s never once occurred to me to feel bitter about this; I like making things for people. I don’t expect or even desire it to be returned. Hell, my somewhat-professional life is all about Making Things For Other People. I’m a creative. I create. Because of this, I don’t even really know how to respond when someone makes something for me. It disrupts how I’m used to being in the world. I don’t say this to be ungrateful; the opposite, in fact. I think it’s sweet and kind and amazing. I just don’t know how to respond to the idea that someone does something for me when, in truth, most of my life as a professional, casual, amateur and up-and-coming creative is about making for and serving others. I really struggle with it. I don’t know what to do with it. I still don’t. It’s confusing and I don’t do well with emotion I can’t analyse and rationalise.

Thank you, said in that upwards inflection that doesn’t really carry across in writing? Thank you.

* Actually, Anafenza doesn’t even play that well with my Atraxa build, since I’m really just trying to get out Ghave, Master Biomancer and Rishkar along with a couple of hydras and the counter Lords; I don’t attack with anyone but Atraxa or massive hydras until the board’s set for lethal, meaning she’s only good for shutting down graveyard shenanigans. I’m working on a casual Frontier deck that still has Anafenza front and centre, though. I love her character and philosophy. Well, and there’s that playset of Seige Rhinos I own... *twiddles thumbs*