mtreebeardiles

[mtreebeardiles]

DAVRIN 💪 Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024)

[mtreebeardiles]

blowjob? more like nojob! #unemployed

[mtreebeardiles]

[mtreebeardiles]

i saw a post recently telling people they shouldnt lie to their trans friends about whether they 'pass' because it could endanger them, and while i get the concept i think the problem is that passing is... so highly subjective? different people are gonna intepret your gender presentation differently.

like i've personally had strangers adjust their gendered language with me mid conversation and had no clue what changed their mind. i had a lunch break where one coworker had clearly assumed i was a man while the other had clearly assumed i was a woman and both kept side eyeing eachother in confusion. which is fine by me, that's the kind of reaction i've intentionally cultivated, but it does suck if you're aiming for a stealth lifestyle because there really isnt a line where you wake up one day 100% passing.

maybe just... try not to resent people if they say you pass when it turns out others may not agree with them. there's a good chance they weren't intentionally trying to give you false hope, it's just that gender is in the eye of the beholder, and if you're mid transition different people are gonna behold you differently.

[mtreebeardiles]

[mtreebeardiles]

Biiiitch OUR TIME IS HERE

[mtreebeardiles]

I still have a few more Alters to sit with and learn about but the Refiner is my favorite

A playthrough without my boy?! Unheard of 😭

[mtreebeardiles]

[mtreebeardiles]

[mtreebeardiles]

[mtreebeardiles]

[mtreebeardiles]

Shout out to that guy from Florida talking to my coworker about wanting to take his sail boat through Lake Superior in November. He was planning on a little trip and my coworker was like hey man I don't know how to tell you this but you will Actually Die

*Lake Superior, in the far distance*: yes yes yes yes yes do it yes yes

[mtreebeardiles]

Drawing porn is hard but I'm harder

[mtreebeardiles]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[mtreebeardiles]

Cis people be like im not transphobic but my partner just told me shes trans and i feel betrayed and gross and manipulated, like obviously shes a woman but why wouldn't she disclose her entire medical history i mean shes biologically male so it was basically rape

Fuck that reddit post so much holy shit

[mtreebeardiles]

maybe you should look your gift horse in the mouth. could be greek soldiers in there