professionaldaydreamer

[professionaldaydreamer]

i think people w acid reflux should be able to store it up so they can unleash it all at once in a devastating corrosive spit attack

[professionaldaydreamer]

[professionaldaydreamer]

What if oxygen is poisonous and it just takes 75-100 years to kill us?

[professionaldaydreamer]

[professionaldaydreamer]

shoutout to nonbinary people who default to presenting as their assigned gender bc it’s easier

shoutout to nonbinary people who default to presenting as their assigned gender bc it’s safer

shoutout to nonbinary people who default to presenting as their assigned gender bc they don’t feel like they can pull off anything else

shoutout to nonbinary people who default to presenting as their assigned gender bc presenting as their real gender is impossible

shoutout to nonbinary people who present as their assigned gender bc they want to

shoutout to nonbinary people whose presentation is mistaken for their assigned gender but is in fact how they express their real gender

just because we might “look cis” doesn’t make us any less nonbinary and tbh fuck anyone who says otherwise

[professionaldaydreamer]

K

[professionaldaydreamer]

A girl is caught in a loop of strange dreams - some absurd, some painfully real. Each time she thinks she is awake, she is still dreaming. Desperate to escape, she accepts help from a mysterious faceless guide to unravel the truth: what’s really keeping her inside this world or nightmares? Don't miss InkPangur's superb new comic 'Dream Loop',coming to the fair this October!

This comic will be available digitally from October 1-31st as part of ShortBox Comics Fair, an online-only event that sees the release of over 150+ new, original comics from artists all around the world!

[professionaldaydreamer]

This is the funniest fucking thing, omg.

THE SAPPHIC MERIDIAN

[professionaldaydreamer]

Clenches my teeth really really hard . So. We’re in agreement that we are not going to buy and play this right . No “just because we’re curious”. No “for the funnies” no “its free” dont give them the download

[professionaldaydreamer]

Why isn't "too scary" a good enough reason to never drive a car

[professionaldaydreamer]

No tech CEO or NYT bestselling novelist will ever match the creativity of a humble French postman who decided on a whim to spend thirty-three years building a surreal, majestic palace with the bricks and mortar of his dreams.

[professionaldaydreamer]

The problem with having a child with an attorney that has spoken to the child like an adult since birth is that she's 4 years old and she's negotiating the order in which we're going to complete tasks as a family to best suit her idea of an ideal day.

[professionaldaydreamer]

what we lose when we reject porn

let me paraphrase an exchange that you’ve almost certainly seen play out many times by now:

“We can’t let the platforms we use bow to the pressure to ban porn, because conservatives consider queer existence itself to be inherently pornographic. They’ll use it as an excuse to ban all queer content.”

“That’s true, but don’t forget: porn is art, and art has a right to exist even if it is unwholesome smut.”

i agree completely with both of these points, for the record. they’re not mutually exclusive, and they are both relevant, persuasive reasons to support porn. they’re the only reasons you need, honestly. these points alone suffice for a robust defense of pornography!

i want to talk about something else, though.

i want to tell you what gets me about all this.

every time we create and enforce restrictions on pornography, we reify the idea of “pornography” as a meaningful and obligatory category. we are forced to say, for any given work of art, whether it is or isn’t pornography. if it is, we restrict it: we hide it away, we place odious limitations on where it can be seen and sold, and we never, ever talk about it in polite company.

but what about art that doesn’t fit neatly into one of these two boxes?

well, the answer is that, for the most part... it doesn’t get made! it’s just too risky. the benefits of making art in the public sphere are too huge to risk incorporating content or themes that might get your art labeled pornographic. and if you’ve decided from the get-go that you are making adult content, then there’s less than no incentive to waste your time and energy creating art that doesn’t fit cleanly into the box of “pornography”, because your opportunities to reach people outside of that box are so limited.

this sucks ass!!!

eroticism by and for itself is great. but art can be anything. art can be erotic among other things. imagine if you were only allowed to eat frosting straight out of the packet. imagine if you never got to taste a cake, because there’s massive financial disincentives to combine bread and frosting into one foodstuff!

anyone who’s into romance can tell you exactly how cathartic a real, explicit sex scene can be in a story, even when that story is not necessarily about sex. indeed, romance is just about the only genre that gets away with this forbidden combination at scale. but only to a limited extent, in limited contexts, and not without its own share of heavy policing from sales platforms.

sex and sexuality are unavoidable parts of the human experience. horniness is one of the primary colors in the spectrum of human emotions. to restrict the use of sex as a storytelling tool is to make artists forever paint with a limited palette. sure, there is lots of great, sexless art out there. for that matter, there’s tons of full-on porn that is likewise great art. but there is SUCH a huge space of possibility in between these two extremes.

and we can’t have it!

because pornography exists as a category in all of our minds, and because we are compelled to reify that category at monetary gunpoint by the jesus freaks upstairs, art must only ever at most orbit the pornographic: if it touches the event horizon, there is no going back.

we don’t just need to fight back against the censorship of pornography. we need to fight aggressively to normalize the existence of pornography. we need to make pornography mundane.

finally: it goes without saying, but there are, in fact, people who are making the kind of art i’m talking about. including me! that’s one of the great things about the internet: it democratized art for a lot of people in a lot of ways. for all its faults, the internet has enabled a golden age of horny queer art that’s allowed to be anything it wants. that’s why many of us are so distraught by the recent waves of censorship at steam and itch.io. if you’ve read this far, please take a moment to consider giving the payment processors responsible a phone call to let them know how you feel about it.

[professionaldaydreamer]

Eustress, or The Feeling of Mastery

When I heard the word "eustress" I didn't care for it, because it felt more meaningful than the word itself could hold. I explored that concept, over the next couple years, kept having experiences that returned me to it. Eustress: moderate or normal psychological stress, interpreted as being beneficial. How silly. There was a something in that word, but the word was an inappropriate enclosure for the something.

I made my own doctor's appointment and went to it. This was the hardest thing I did that year. It was a new kind of hard. I had always thought I would feel the sickening tightness of forcing, the nausea of silencing my body and my feelings to comply with orders from another person. That was the essence of my medical experiences throughout life: coercion, lack of autonomy, shame, being demeaned and belittled. The trauma resisted being treated as an irrational fear to be pushed down and ignored, so I accepted it. I released the werewolf gnawing on my guts and let the wolf-part of me decide how medical professionals would be allowed to speak to me and to touch my body. I wrote down these boundaries, brought them to the appointment, and walked like an apex predator. And it worked. That fall, I got my flu shot for the first time in my adult life. No crash of adrenaline, no trapped, agonizing panic.

A new kind of hard: not the hard of a dog in a cruel experiment being shocked with electricity no matter what it does, more like the hard of a sled dog running as fast as it can, a bloodhound latching onto a scent, a herding dog weaving and dodging to maneuver the sheep into their pen.

That's how I feel when I'm out, somewhere I probably shouldn't be, exploring some woods or a neglected hay field, searching for plants. You can discover anything in the places no one looks: little pockets of biodiversity, rare species, ecosystems thriving under the mercy of being forgotten. I feel...focused. Locked in. Perfectly stimulated by my environment. I'm good at what I'm doing: good at navigating thickets and clambering over rocks, wading through weeds and mud and weaving through brambles, observant, sharp-eyed, and I know what I'm looking at, where almost nobody else does. Swamp milkweed. Smooth carrionflower. Lyre-leaf sage. Alsike clover. Knowing them all by name is like a sixth sense, a power to move through a higher dimension. A world invisible to others becomes known to you.

Sometimes I feel this way when I'm writing, or rereading my own writing. Damn, I'm good. Sometimes I feel this way when cutting kudzu or invasive bamboo in the forest at work, tying them into a bundle and using my strength and stamina to drag them back to the nature center where they can be made useful in crafts and projects. Sometimes I feel this way when walking, covering ground between A to B, cooled by the breeze through my comfy linen pants. I'm a machine, a persistence predator, an animal doing what it evolved to do. Solving a chemistry problem and realizing I understand it. Pulling off a tough platforming section in a video game. That intoxicating feeling of strength and efficacy.

The counterpart of eustress is distress, the usual association of the word "stress." That's why eustress is hard to wrap your head around, because you imagine the feeling of being overwhelmed and powerless and try to come up with a version of that that's good and enriching (you can't). Insight arrived after that doctor's appointment, when I experienced the crucial ingredient of feeling powerful, not powerless. Then I thought of other times when I felt powerful, when I felt challenged but also engaged, stimulated, maybe even exhilarated.

Another word for this feeling might be mastery. It is good for us, I think. Not just to experience mastery, but to be exposed to it. Watching Simone Biles perform gymnastics makes my brain light up with pleasure, recognizing that I am witnessing pure excellence. Music, art, athletics, films, dance. Wow! That's excellent. Wow! Such mastery of the craft! Wow! So much practice and training! It is amazing how many things a human being could potentially become excellent at.

It's the same when watching a creature behave as it evolved to do, showing excellence within its niche. A tree swallow looping and diving, bumble bees pollinating flowers, a deer leaping gracefully. Wow! Millions of years of evolution, a creature thriving and excelling. I felt this when seeing a soft-shell turtle next to the road sprint into the creek and dive beneath the water as I approached. I didn't know a turtle could move that fast. Wow! What a weird-looking creature- but it's excellent at being the thing that it is.

Humans are adaptable, incredibly so. We can choose the thing that we are. We can be a lot of things. And we can be excellent at them. And no matter what it is, whether swimming or rock climbing or singing or dancing or worm charming (it's a real thing, look it up), there can be that glowing hum of pleasure at being good at it. Or watching others be good at it. That feeling can be a form of guidance. Okay, you're good at it...how does it feel to be good at it?

Are you challenging yourself enough? Are you pushing yourself hard enough? Maybe that's not the right question. Maybe instead it's: Does it feel good to be good at it? When you're doing less than your potential and not growing, the activity would probably cease to be stimulating. Eustress has two opposites: distress and boredom.

Of course it's bad for mental health when things are not effortful enough. That's why zoo animals need enrichment, and even pets can benefit from puzzle toys and ways to "earn" their food and treats. If things are effortless, then you don't experience effort leading to results, and that is a lot like being powerless. Whereas if you have the opportunity to expend effort and focus towards a result, getting the result makes you feel empowered.

Maybe this is one of the purposes of play: to psychologically recover from coerced effort, fruitless effort, or lack of opportunity for effort and reward, by rehearsing scenarios where a creature can feel effective and masterful doing something. From that perspective, play is a way of getting your healthy dose of eustress.

I am working on how to apply this knowledge...

[professionaldaydreamer]

couldn't be me

[professionaldaydreamer]

IN FAIR VERONA is now available in my shop 🩸🩸

"Two girls enter the service of the Princess of All Blood. One is there to be loved, the other tormented, but strange circumstances have blurred the lines between the two."

45 pages. for mature readers

pick it up here!