doodled a june :3

Cis people think trans people have this:

But honestly we really have:

1. Elliott

2. Scott

3. *Static*

4. Squid

5. Bug

6. Squid

7. *Static but sexy*

I think bad writing is genuinely quite rare. The more you learn about writing, the easier it is to find something to love in even the most rough and amateurish work. New authors often have crackshot skill in at least one arena of their craft, and there is always something to learn from a text like that.

I've read a lot of clumsy writing. But when an author is passionate about their practice, it's hard to truly hate it. I think much of what we consider bad writing is only called "bad" out of convenience and context.

In my mind, Truly Bad Writing has a sort of naive malice to it. The best example in my mind is Ben Shapiro's work. It is cruel, arrogant, a bit pompous, and powerfully, embarrassingly, ineffective.

You don't read academic journals do you

Academic journal writing is the sulphur vent tubeworm of technical writing. It discards every possible shred of readability, all to communicate the necessary elements of a hyper-specialized idea. In this, there is beauty.

academic writing, too is yuri

Robots in temporary bodies. You agree.

Their gorgeous humanoid chasis, packed full of the latest noctua servos and the Samsung sensor package, is sitting on a bench somewhere at the repair shop. The whole damn main bus got completely fried by that EMP they got off the exploding transformer (not the Optimus Prime kind), so it's going to be at least a week before it can get rebuilt.

So now they're in the body of some toy you had gotten for your birthday a couple years ago. They barely come up to your knees and their hands don't have thumbs. They keep complaining that they only have visual and audio sensors, so they feel half-blind (once you have radar you never get over losing it) and they're constantly worried about crushing anything they pick up. You get a phone call at 2am and have to go rescue them from the bathroom. They accidentally closed the door behind them and that's the one door in the apartment you haven't replaced, so it's big and heavy and made of thick wood. Their little hands couldn't reach the doorknob.

You ask why they were in the bathroom with a smile, and they explain they needed to clean off their treads because they spilled coffee creamer on the floor. These damn hands can't grab anything.

Their job offers them a loaner body but they decide to stay on medical leave for now. Body swaps are a big hassle and no fun to go through, so they don't want to do any more than absolutely necessary. Besides, they'd just barely be getting up to speed in the loaner body by the time they were ready to switch back out. Plus they know all the loaners are those budget model combat drones. They don't want to wear a body like that. I'm sure someone wants to look like "draw Arnold Schwarzenegger from memory", but it's sure as fuck not them.

They'd tried on one of those early in their career, and it's not just the dysphoria of looking so completely different from your mental image of yourself, it's also the change in how people treat you. Yeah, if you're a cop, maybe having people flinch when you walk in the room is a good thing, and maybe it's good that most people instinctively don't want to even try attack you. But they're not a cop, and even if they were, they couldn't handle looking like that during downtime. Maybe some people like making everyone in their life scared of them. Everyone from their partner to the guy handing them their coffee... But people who like that aren't the kind of people you want to be or hang out with.

Besides, metal and motors and servos has a distinct strength advantage over muscles anyway. If you want to be able to lift a car over your head with ease, you don't need to look like a bodybuilder to do it. So it's even more obvious that the only reason you would look like that is because you either really like that aesthetic, or you want to intimidate people. And you know they are in neither camp.

They ask to cuddle one night. They don't need to sleep and they don't have the sensors to enjoy it in this body, but they want it anyway. It's not about the sensor experience anyway, it's about the intimacy and the closeness. You put up with getting poked in the chest by their square edges, and if they their current form could cry, they'd be at serious risk of rusting.

You get it. You fortunately don't have to worry about how it'd feel to spend a week without your body, but you can't imagine it'd be fun.

A few days later, you wake up to the smell of maple syrup. You start to get out of bed when they burst in the room, wearing only a cute "fdisk the cook" apron. They've got pancakes and waffles and coffee for you! Breakfast in bed, to celebrate getting their body back.

While you're sitting in bed with them finishing up your breakfast, you ask what happened to the plan for you to drive them to the repair place, since their previous body couldn't exactly work the controls of your old car, even with the wireless link? They took a cab, they say. Their body's repairs finished up at 5am and they didn't want to wait around until you got up, they were just too excited.

You ask about their previous body, the temp one? Oh, there was a minor accident. See, they were still getting used to having all their main body's senses and strength back, so it accidentally fell of the trunk. At 15,000 feet. While doing Mach 1.3 over Arizona Bay.

They promise to buy you a new robot toy. Maybe one a little... More adult? It'd be just as annoying to be stuck inside when their main body is out for repairs, but at least they could have SOME fun with you while on medical leave. You're firm on the "no creepy sex dolls" front, though. FINE! but they want at least opposable thumbs for the next temp body. You make the obvious crude joke at why they need hands that can grip, and their cheeks go gallium-arsenide-red with embarrassment. You ask if they're having cooling problems again, their face feels warm. They push you over onto the bed, laughing and telling you not to tease them.

The maple syrup goes everywhere. Somewhere downstairs your laundrybot wakes up in annoyance, already annoyed at all the extra work they're going to have to do.

in Disco Elysium I was expecting there to be some kind of “addiction mechanic” that would add a long-term downside to taking drugs, and was surprised not only by the absence of any such mechanic but also that the benefits of drugs greatly outweighed the cost. anyways fast forward to the late game and I was downing three bottles of pyrholidon and smoking an entire pack of cigarettes before attempting any check, and it was only then I realized there was in fact an addiction mechanic

Burnscar is just Lapis Lazuli if a more ruthless member of Steven’s posse went   “fuck it” and crushed her head. Is this anything

And, you know, to attach some more serious analysis to a mid-day “hey their outfits are kinda similar” teir shitpost-

Something that’s easy to overlook/forget because of SU’s saccharine branding is that the non-steven Crystal Gems are genuinely kinda ruthless bastards in the face of genuine threats; they live in an entirely different genre from Steven at the start of the series, and they react to Lapis Lazuli with basically the same vitriol and violence that SU’s detractors often ask for. They would have probably “crushed her head” in the heat of battle if she hadn’t so massively outclassed them, and there’s no question they’d pulverize Burnscar with a similar lack of hesitation if she were to attack Beach City. The show is idealistic; the characters aren’t. You could drop the non-Steven Gems into Earth Bet and they’d attune to the two-faced dirty-deeds-done-in-alleys cape culture without missing a beat. 

But! Steven Universe is a fantasy show, and one of the elements of the fantasy is that everyone who suffers and does terrible things as a result gets to have a second chance. To enable that you need secondary fantasy elements, like, say, absolutely nobody dying when a leviathan-level hydroshaker abducts the ocean, or the thousands of people who were killed and experimented on being starfish aliens who can be painstakingly reassembled, reanimated, and given an eternity to heal mentally and physically, and no humans being permanently killed in the (contemporary) crossfire, and all the doomsday weapons deployed with intent to kill are disarmed in time, and so on and so forth. It’s a kids show so casuality is allowed to contort like that. 

But worm, with the Slaughterhouse 9 and honestly with most out-and-out villainous characters, does have a very similar “what a waste of human life” factor going on. Everyone there is coming from some kind of massive pain, most of them are, like, arrested in their emotional development as children or teens- they’re agentic in their evil and their current terrible circumstances- just like Lapis and Jasper!- but the book is clear that they’re not unpitiable figures. Now, Worm also has a much stronger grasp of the kind of bodycounts in play and also the actual willingness of the layman to forgive and forget such things, and so when things finally do line up for a member of the nine to have a redemption arc it’s only after a set of convoluted circumstances, she’s one of the only ones to make it out despite the nine having many equally-pitiable figures, and she’s still hated and feared, and rather than magically flipping the switch from “maladjusted” to “okay” it’s very clear that Bonesaw is good now literally only because it’s the right thing to do, god knows she didn’t make any friends by flipping and she’s not enjoying herself very much.

But I look at the nine, and I see- you know, they’ve got these simplistic trauma-response motivations, they aren’t really materially benefiting from anything they’re doing, being in the 9 is in many ways its own continuous punishment, and god help me. Sand down their on-screen presentation a little and they’d work pretty well as Steven Universe villains. 

They roll into town. Jack is very obviously pulling all their strings and egging on their worst impulses. Some of them are visibly afraid of him the second he turns his back to address someone else. They cause a lot of property damage and take a hostage or two but things play out so that nobody actually dies, despite everyone’s best efforts. Gradually Steven and company start serendipitously hitting upon chinks in the emotional armor of outlying members like Hatchet Face and Burnscar, who kinda got pressganged to begin with. Cracks form in the group. Crawler eventually semi-defects on the condition that the gems just systematically lay into him with every piece of esoteric weaponry they have, and eventually someone correctly diagnoses him as seeking power through violence and self-harm so that he’ll never be emotionally vulnerable again. Greg crashes his van into Manton’s and the two of them bond over lost loved ones. Someone (maybe Jasper) gives Shatterbird a dressing down about how she’ll never truly be free until she recognizes that her hopeless devotion to Jack is an exercise in futility, and then Jack himself says or does something boneheaded that puts the final nail in the coffin. Bonesaw gets the Spinel treatment. Mannequin is treated like a corrupted gem, a product of pain and rage that can nonetheless be subdued and healed. Jack sheds allies until he stands alone, pathetic but incorrigable, and he flees town nonetheless claiming the upper hand, bluebird style. Crucially they still killed thousands of people in this hypothetical. Just, you know, not on screen. And not anymore! Also there’s a musical number when the arrive (when shatterbird glassbombs everyone) and then a reprise at the end (everyone sucks air in through their teeth when Shatterbird is about to do her solo but nothing bad happens this time)

Jupiter reaches out to us. She has a hand for every kind of touch; that hand is for hitting, that hand is for petting, that hand is for grabbing, that hand is for holding.

Most of y’all out here posting like you don’t think polyamory exists. This is “Flushed Dreams of Lavender,” my post for FriJade for @jade-week​! RoseMary was already my favorite ship, so I thought I should include my favorite girl in it too!

Vriska’s entire arc up through her death is exceptional.  She is a fascinatingly flawed character, and I think anyone would be hard pressed to do a better job making a character’s actions sympathetic without actually excusing them.  Her abuse of and obsession with Tavros, for example, makes a terrible kind of sense once you’ve read Mindfang’s journal.  Vriska is young, and she has idolized Mindfang since she was very young.  And yet nothing about the journals themselves or Vriska’s desire to emulate their author forced Vriska to treat Tavros the way she did - in the scene where Mindfang takes horrible sexual advantage of her slave, she reads but does not control the Dolorosa’s mind.  Mindfang doesn’t do anything to try to force or speed up her relationship with the Summoner, either; in fact, the last journal entry has Mindfang deciding to let things unfold on their own.

But I think Vriska’s story is widely appreciated already; let’s talk about my favorite two-panel sequence in Homestuck.

This is where Homestuck’s weird genre really shines, because trying to draw a remotely realistic image of Eridan’s death would be a very bad idea.  One of the best things about Murderstuck is the way the tension draws you in.  Even when you really don’t want to know how bad things are going to get, you just keep clicking forward, or you physically walk two characters to their deaths.  Suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing, and the impact of this scene would be much less if the image was one that was drawn in a ‘standard’ style and, inevitably, was unconvicing.  But it would be much worse to have a panel that actually looked like a 13-year-old space kid realistically being chainsawed in half. 

So instead we get this: a ridiculous, implausibly chaotic scribble-mode panel, followed immediately by a stark, implausibly elegant panel.  The first is a riot of color, with motion and sound effects and blood spraying everywhere.  The second is a moment of perfect stillness and silence.  It is completely bloodless, except for a single muted spot at Kanaya’s waist that calls so little attention to itself I didn’t notice it at first. 

Have you ever been in a car accident?  A fight, especially one you didn’t know was coming until the moment you got punched?  Maybe broken a limb?  Memories of sudden, traumatic events can be weird; you might remember the room you were in perfectly but be vague on what happened, or as a sort of mental snapshot missing details or context you know must have been there, or you might only remember the event as chaotic confusion.  That’s why my reaction* to these two panels was to take a deep breath and a moment to accept that as difficult as it was to believe, I really was reading a work of Genius in the form of half a million words’ worth of poorly typed chatlogs and second-person interactive fiction masquerading as narration.

*Okay, my second reaction.  My first reaction was to think ‘Eridan hasn’t got a spine’ and then dissolve into laughter.  What can I say, I like my comedy black.

nuclear family dad

Hiveswap Review

I didn’t actually play this game, but I gave it 1.5 hats out of 5 hats to keep it real.

Rabbit on the left: *is a rabbit*

mystical creature on the right: CHOHOHHOHHOCHOHOHH

me: *is constantly worried im annoying*

me: hey guys

no one:

me in my head: fuCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

people are hanging out on the train tracks that u usually hang out on. Do you ask to join the large group which seems more fun, join the singular person for a more intimate connection, or does your social anxiety force you to just go home