Just a Dork

James | He/Him | 25 | I've been here over a decade let me out

[grimalditeuthis]

what they don't tell you about hadestown is that orpheus and eurydice are not the main characters. neither are persephone and hades. or hermes. or the fates. the main character is whoever in the band is playing the trombone because holy fuck

[dark-magician-girl-meets-world]

The Eiffel Tower gets slightly bigger every year. That's because it's alive and slowly absorbing the girders and I-beams from the other buildings in the city. The French government didn't want to alarm its citizens, so they made up a story about it being built by an architect, but that's not what happened at all. In fact, despite its name, the Eiffel Tower isn't really a tower at all.

[dark-magician-girl-meets-world]

It's a Paris sight

[flame-shadow]

hey did you know??? that if you stop stretching and maintaining mobility in your body then it goes away?? things get tight and you can't move the way that you used to??? and when you decide to try getting a stretch routine going that the first week fucking sucks because you keep going 'damn i used to be able to do this no problem' and then you have to switch gears and be kind to yourself and just focus on getting better from here instead of berating yourself for dropping the good habits in the first place??? and your body never stops aging so you gotta keep taking care of it and sometimes you gotta take care of it extra in certain areas because of things that happened when you were younger and it's boring and sometimes hurts but it's so necessary???

i am yelling this at myself right now i am going through An Experience (trying to get into a routine of body maintenance again for my physical and mental health)

[fucking-relax]

oh, Sisyphus! i got you

[depsidase]

[mreullogy]

[whisperingsoup]

it exists to divide the working class. All labour is skilled labour. Yes including that one. Yes, including that one too.

Do you know what's unskilled labour? Owning capital. There's no labour involved, thus requires no skill. And you can tell because people can be born into owning capital.

[heatherwitch]

Art is by BreadPanes: instagram

[adiabat]

i’m not aromantic but i believe in their beliefs

[adiabat]

for me being bi has contributed a huge amount to noticing all the ways in which romance and friendship run together and i think in general people would benefit from recognizing that romance and friendship are socially constructed categories used to describe a vast, nebulous, and often overlapping range of feelings

[asteroidtroglodyte]

My way of parsing it:

Every Relationship is actually a specific, unique thing. We invented Shorthands, such as Friend or Husband, to help describe recurring motifs in Relationships. But. The labels are simplifications. They will always fail to adequately contain the entirety of the Relationship.

[taylor-titmouse]

i wrote this post over on bluesky today and, after receiving a few of the predictable "but what if i Want to write badly" responses you get to any opinion that can be taken as prescriptivist writing advice, i thought i'd talk more about what i'm getting at.

basically, it's an issue of suspension of disbelief. there are a lot of things in fantasy and historical writing that we're willing to look past. dragons, potatoes, the divine right of kings. we are able to suspend our disbelief that a monarch could be anything but a despicable tyrant if the story we're being told is convincing enough, or plays to our comforting worldviews about nobility and Great Man theory. we can also suspend it if we straight up didn't know that europe didn't have potatoes pre-columbian exchange. basically--it means it doesn't bother you that these elements aren't perfectly realistic. fiction is not required to be realistic. clue's in the name.

but there are some things we just can't ignore. some things hit us as out of place for the setting we've been presented, or the world as we understand it. it pulls us out of the story by reminding us, in that moment, that we are reading a constructed narrative made of a series of choices by an author. and for whatever reason, they made a Wrong choice, like plucking the wrong guitar string.

bdsm safety protocols are the classic example, since a majority of people that encounter this sort of thing often enough to identify it online are reading fanfic and romance. things like a red light/green light system appearing in a chinese fantasy world where cars have not been invented, or cowboys intuiting the concept of a safeword while having spit-lubed anal sex in the desert. absurdisms that break suspension of disbelief, because who is teaching these cowboys the principles of consent. nobody.

now, we've beaten the dead horse of 'don't write like you're afraid of a callout post' a million times when it comes to including bdsm best practices in writing. you are allowed to write whatever you want forever, and if what you want to write is perfectly safe, negotiated sex between two adults who would have never received sexual education and probably thought a woman's uterus wandered in the body depending on the temperature, you are free to do that. i'll think your writing is bad, but you don't have to care what i think. you don't have to care about the people who'd get upset at cowboys doing unnegotiated "lasso tricks" either.

anyway, i'm getting off track. the actual point of the post above was that i see this same kind of thing with modern terminology for queer concepts in completely incongruous settings, and it pulls me out just as bad as any cowboy therapyspeak. i simply do not believe the local dirt farmer who binds his chest and changed his name from helen to troy would call himself "trans". i do not believe the wizard who has no time or interest in sex would call himself "asexual". and 1800s english dandies would not be calling themselves "gay" unless they were in a holiday mood.

that doesn't mean they couldn't understand those concepts, but it's not the language they would use to express them, because they would not have it. you see this with discussion of actual literal history--we technically cannot call historical figures "gay" or "transgender" with 100% confidence, even when their behavior lined up very closely with our modern idea of those concepts, because those people did not have our modern idea of those concepts. would they have identified that way, if a time traveler taught it to them? possibly! but we can't know that. they might like "transsexual" better, even if it's no longer in vogue.

and much like nobody is teaching cowboys the concept of aftercare, nobody is teaching our dirt farmer troy the word "trans", which is itself a shortening of several words that have come in and out of fashion as recently as the last century. troy would be calling himself something else, if he even has a word for what he is.

and that's where you, the author, have a Choice. there's plenty of reasons to default to the modern term--you're writing for a modern audience, you want to be clear about your representation, you're afraid of getting yelled at for getting something wrong--but i think it's the wrong move in any serious writing. because what you're losing by doing that is an opportunity to get creative and actually say something with the character, rather than tick a box.

troy might describe himself as a man trapped in a woman's body, because that is how he experiences it, and that experience informs his character. or he might think of himself as a man who just has breasts, because he's always been a man and has been treated as a man, and he's never had to examine it. or he might call himself a "rock", because he lives with dwarves and that's the dwarven word for masculine-presenting.

or he can just say he's "trans", and you don't explore what it means to the character in the world he lives in, while also implying somebody sat this boy down on a stump in the dirt fields and said the word "transgender" to him, and then said it often enough he shortened it to "trans". while living on his dirt farm. where he would never have seen a pineapple.

i am more interested in a troy who doesn't have a perfectly modern understanding of what he is and what he wants, because that's where a story lives. i don't read to see my understanding of things perfectly mirrored back to me, i read to experience something different. i want to read about the guy who calls himself a slur because it's the only language for himself he has, and what that means to him. i want to read about the guy who never calls himself a man, but understands implicitly that he's something different. i want to read about messy, complicated people who don't know shit from fuck. it'll absorb me a hell of a lot more.

anyway.

this is all opinion and i am just one guy so you're allowed to disagree with me. i just won't be interested in your work if you do. and that's only a loss if you make it one.

[razzmothazz]

still caring about internet friends you lost touch with years ago is so embarrassing. yeah i had a deam we met up irl recently. the last time we spoke was maybe 7-8 years ago. i still wear the laces we randomly decided was a sign of our friendship. i dont know what any of your socials are or if youre even active on any. sometimes i see someones art resemble yours and i wonder for hours. do you still go by that name you chose? whenever i see it i wonder if its you. we couldve passed each other in this vastness a thousand times and not have a clue.

[razzmothazz]

we were lonely kids having fun together. do you remember?

[edgebug]

it means so much to me that rocky's lead puppeteer james ortiz got to voice him and got like. full billing right next to ryan gosling in the opening credits. and he's gotten to do interviews and red carpet appearances and talk about puppetry and it's all being taken so seriously just like he's any other type of actor. gonna make me cry fr. like they could have gotten some famous person to be rocky's voice to try and pull more star power but. they went with the guy who acted him. and like of course they did. like there he is. how could they do anything else. he's right there and he's perfect

[lemonscribs]

Pride sharks! Happy pride month :D more super cute pride flags themed sharks coming soon 👀

[madmonksandmaenads]

I wish I could make white people(and not just white Americans) understand how diverse the pre-columbian Americas were. The history, religion, culture, politics was at least as complex as Europe's. There was the full gamut of religions, from monotheists to animists to ancestral religions. There were city building empires, village farmers, nomadic traders, and so many other ways to live. This is all just based on what we know, the fragments left behind and the stories of survivors of an apocalyptic plague. All this before the most extended campaign of genocide in history was waged in an attempt to wipe out those survivors.

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

Do you understand how much poorer our whole species is because of it? Can you imagine where art, religion, and science would be if we still had these vast bodies of knowledge? The stain of the colonial project will never be fully washed clean. We owe more than just the land to those we stole from. We owe them a whole future, a future that could have been brighter for all of us. If only greed and fear weren't allowed to rule this land.

[rabbitscreams]

we need to invent a way to explain how deep running and pervasive and subliminal racism and antiblackness is without immediately sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist

[rabbitscreams]

female characters are always lighter than male characters. strong characters are almost always dark. aggressive characters are almost always dark. peaceful and intelligent characters are almost always light. even amongst darker characters the lightest one is usually either the leader or the girls. dark is evil and light is good.

[rabbitscreams]

if you try to explain this to a white person they look at you like youre insane

[gay-milton-quotes]

briefly pursuing a career in animation radicalized me on this. So many stories from the industry about how you have to start with your character design as dark as possible, because INEVITABLY you'll get "notes" from higher-ups asking you to make them lighter.

In a class about making a pitch bible my teacher once role-played as a shitty executive with a classmate, pressing them in intentionally abrasive ways about why they made their characters diverse. He emphasized that we had to learn to defend these things, because the racism in the industry is extremely deliberate.

[vforvalensa]

Ronald Wimberly's comic essay, Lighten Up, stays evergreen

[quasi-normalcy]

Why do so many Japanese urban legends seem to involve a dialogue tree that you need to follow very carefully?

[quasi-normalcy]

It's just the interactive element that seems characteristic. Like I hear a claim that, at some point, "everyone dreams of a village littered with blue corpses, and if they trip and fall then they will die in their sleep and become one of them" and ai just immediately know before I even check that, yes, this urban legend originated in Japan.

[lizardsfromspace]

[quasi-normalcy]

"Am I pretty?"

"I don't know, you're wearing a mask."

"How about now?"

"...I'd say you're a definite four--" (*remembers that four is bad luck in East Asia because it sounds like death*) "FIVE! I meant five! Definitely meant five!"

[sistersorrow]

According to Wikipedia, that could actually work according to some versions of the legend

"You're kinda mid, tbh" or "I don't have time for questions" are both valid responses

Maybe chuck some Werther's Originals at her for safe measure

[thefloatingstone]

[knowing]

[imatmywormrightnow]

I seem to be living a very expensive lifestyle called eating food regularly

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Okay but imagine being the team of Eridian scientists tasked with keeping Erid's Only Human alive for as long as possible while the whole planet's environment is literally trying to kill him. And then Rocky shows up and is like:

“Grace says he would like half of dome to be water.”

“Oh, is necessary for humans to have large amounts of water question?”

Small Eridian equivalent of a sigh. “No. Not needed for life. In fact Grace will die if he falls in water and does not get out.”

“Tell him we give him water in containers that won't kill him. Lots lots lots of water on Erid for Grace to drink.”

“No. Grace say he want water on ground. Also want it with excess sodium chloride compound so it will be unhealthy for drink.”

“WHY QUESTION???”

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

To celebrate Erid getting their sun back on track, Grace asks for some alcohol. There's a small amount left from the Hail Mary and Rocky offers to take it to the science Eridians to see if they can synthesise more.

“Grace want this liquid for celebration.”

“Of course.” They scan it. “You have wrong liquid. This contain compounds which are poisonous for humans.”

“Yes yes yes. Grace say humans like feeling of being slightly poisoned.”

“WHY QUESTION?????”

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Grace is like one of those extremely finicky tropical fish who instantly die if not kept in extremely specific conditions.

Only here the fish can talk and keeps asking you to make it vodka.

[soundoftheirwings]

Gotta tell you guys something wild in the Chinese fan sphere

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

And that is how this charity received over 1 million in donations in three days lol. Oh btw the “freedom of expression” side won by a landslide (960k to 40k)

[altonin-deactivated20180325]

if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right

[funereal-disease]

This post is the distilled essence of everything I believe in.