#I should start implementing this

[whmp]

hey, it's me! i'm still alive, somehow, though just barely. this semester has been pretty tough so far and will probably remain that way until spring. despite this, i managed to add some fun new features. : ) ALSO i promise 100000% that if you sent me an ask i WILL answer it. i will. anyway, look at all those cool things! -> a system for cuts, bruises, tattoos, wounds and other decorations your whumpee's skin is an empty canvas. whether you fill it with scars and wounds or cutesy band aids is up to you!

the way this is set up is kind of like a bunch of stickers. so for example, if you decide to hurt the lil' guy with something sharp, he'll get a "stab wound" sticker in the spot you decided to target. over time, that sticker will change over to a "stab scar" one. it's a very flexible way to do things, but it still needs some work and a couple big changes, since it's very unfriendly to low-end computers. in terms of visuals though, it should look exactly the same as the decal-based "decorations" for your whumpee that you see above!

- a better way of getting that dude on camera the camera system is now a lot more immersive and will fit the story. the awkward developer cam that could clip into walls is no more.

you can drag around the view and zoom in and out by scrolling. as you progress, you'll get access to even more ways to invade your whumpee's privacy. : )

-> new ways to get horny in the last devlog post (around 1000 years ago) i said that you won't see any "horny accessories" in the upcoming updates. that was a complete lie, sorry! here's a preview of some cool new horns you can give to your whumpee.

the neat part is that the horns are customizable - other than just choosing the shape, you can modify their size and color gradient. -> other stuff + story i've made plenty of changes and additions to the back end. most of it is not flashy or super significant - most of the time and energy i could dedicate to the project went right into fueling the violent, bloody conflict between me and custom shader code. i've also made some updates to how time is simulated and fixed a bunch of bugs. there is now a sound system too! i'll look for some copyright-free sfx and music before the next update. oh, and there's some lore too!

i've been experimenting with different ways of delivering the main storyline. heavily stylized cutscene-like sequences were very fun to do! not sure if i'll stick with this style though. either way, i have the general outline of something that resembles a plot. >: ) that's it for now! again, sorry for the irregular update schedule. i've been following the "no progress for a long time, then one night you have all the energy and inspiration in the world and you zone the fuck out for an unhealthy amount of time just working on your thing then until realize that you're going to be asleep within the next 40 seconds" development strategy - hopefully, my brain will kindly allow me to switch to a more comfortable workflow. :' ) taglist below: (let me know if you want to be added OR LET ME KNOW IF I FORGOT TO ADD YOU IM SO SORRY) @whumpinthepot @andithewhumper @pigeonwhumps @monarchthefirst @scp-1296 @whumpedydump @screenys-whump-corner @whumpshaped @bloodsweatandpotato @burning-and-remembering @thealmightyconeoftruth @whimpity-whumpity @catnykit @vietbluecoeur @rainythealias @cardboardarsonist @snakebites-and-ink @lthrboy @woo-lu-woo @wingsofadragonsstuff @wecoffphm @bayvel @pics-and-fanfics @dokidokisadness @generic-whumperz @lambetjenasus @aarika-merrill @hayaneakabane @moons-cozy-corner @brittaunfiltered09 @rule-masochism @reverie1234 @oddsconvert @wh-wh-whumpified @currentlyinthesprial @cupcakes-and-pain @heavenlyden @whumpsday @likeadeadbattery @stay-on-topic1 @cyborg0109 @kawhump @astrowhump

[the---hermit]

2024 reading wrap up

books I read (rereads in green):

Nature Human Nature And Human Difference by Justin Smith

Resurgir curated by Lorenzo Incarbone

Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman

The Pornographer by Restif De La Bretonne

Storie Brutte Sulla Scienza by Barbascura X

Only Dull People Are Brillian At Breakfast by Oscar Wilde

A Day Of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon

The Ballad Of The Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde

Notes On Camp by Susan Sontag

The Prince And The Dressmaker by Jen Wang

Oh! Il Libro Delle Meraviglie by Leo Ortolani

Dubliners by James Joyce

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

Il Grande Ratolik by Leo Ortolani

Emmeline Pankhurst by Mariapaola Pesce and Paola Zanghi

Babel by R.F. Kuang

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

Her Body And Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

The Vampyre by John William Polidori

Passage On The Secret History Of An Irish Countess by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

The Daughtest Of Salem by Thomas Gilbert

Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King

Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

The Mysterious Study Of Doctor Sex by Tamsyn Muir

Apt Pupil by Stepehn King

Harrow The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Miti E Leggende Dei Celti by Mila Fois

A Psalm For The Wild Built by Becky Chambers

The Southern Book Club's Guide To Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Quando Muori Resta A Me by Zerocalcare

Storie Di Merda by Barbascura X

Richard II by William Shakespeare

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Norse Mythology graphic novel volume 1

Norse Mythology graphic novel volume 2

A Prayer For The Crown Shy

short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Something Is Killing The Children volume 7

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

Life Isn't Binary by John-Meg Barker and Alex Iantaffi

Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman

My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

L'Idea di Medioevo by Giuseppe Sergi

Due Racconti di Vampiri - shoet stories by Frederick Cowles

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

What Moves The Dead by T. Kingfisher

The Fall Of The House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

The White People by Arthur Machen

The Road - the graphic novel adaptation by Manu Larcenet

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

What Fiests At Night by T. Kingfisher

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

Interworld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves

L'Importanza di Chiamarsi Oscar Wilde by Licia Cascione and Tommaso Vitiello

Questioni di un Certo Genere by il Post

The Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Storia Degli Stati Sabaudi by Andrea Merlotti and Paola Bianchi

I Belli Hanno Rotto Il Cazzo by Barbascura X

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This Is How You Lose The Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar

Re:Dracula

The Adventures of Amina Al Sirafi by Shannon Chkraborty

Genderqueer by Maia Kobabe

The Forbidden Harbor by Stefano Turconi and Teresa Radice

Sacred Bodies by Ver

Seghe Mentali Cosmiche by Barbascura X

Costituzione by Maurizio Floravanti

Bi by Julia Shaw

Governo by Paolo Colombo

Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio

A Babbo Morto by Zerocalcare

Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman

A Dog's Heart by Mikhail Bulgakov

the books I have dnf-ed:

The Last Man by Mary Shelly

Venerdì 12 by Leo Ortolani

The Dreamchatcher by Stephen King

Night Man by Leo Ortolani

La Donna Senz'Ombra by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

[macabrebat-art]

doods of tim and jason hehe

[applepixls]

hope iskall's doing well where ever he is with whatever he's doing (i heard he's working on vault hunters?) but i definitely miss him on hermitcraft. i hope he's hearing how much hermits are all enjoying his mission possibles cause i know skizz at least is absolutely addicted

[sysig]

Coding woes (Patreon)

[st4rryyynight]

★me when urh. me when g/t in non-g/t horror games. me whe—★

cw: scopophobia, hands, mild blood

[waywardsalt]

anyways. my very first attempt at malenia

[dropthedemiurge]

Tumblr, I actually enjoy your For You page but I have pressed >30 times "I'm not interested in this blog" and you keep pushing more and same posts of this user in my recommendations only because we're in the same fandom... 🫠 Meanwhile this algorithm can't bring me one (1) post with link to the new KBL to watch even if I scroll for half an hour looking for it again.

Is this fourth circle of hell?

[skrunksthatwunk]

just finished s2 of kaiji and it was good i really liked it but i hope i never see that fuckass pachinko machine again!!!

[lastonthebrakes]

as if we haven’t had enough changes already in motogp this season let’s now also start penalizing tyre pressure infringements mid-season!

[cute-chamomile]

The amount of fire putting off and defense of my code i did today. I even, kinda, lead a meeting. I should be given all the praise I think

[sonknuxadow]

i assumed that the frontiers dlc would just be adding to the existing plot, like maybe showing certain events from other characters perspective or adding more story content to areas that were lacking but now that theyre actually giving more information on it it seems like theyre going for an alternate route sort of thing? but if thats the case then which version of the story is gonna be considered the canon one? and if its the version from the dlc why would they add the true ending of the story as dlc. to be fair its FREE dlc but still. would kinda be a weird thing to do

[leavemetoplaythesims]

gonna see if i can make a cowboy florence/felix edit tomorrow!!

[ekingston]

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman��s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much!

[lizardho]

Before I knew I was bisexual I was just insanely dramatic and weird around guys I liked. I had a crush on this guy in my ward - he was older than me, he played bagpipes and had a cheerful dog and an old Volkswagen bus that he worked on all the time. He also had nice scruff and unnaturally attractive hands and a good sense of humor, so I was like FULLY smitten.

I talked about him a lot and about how he was just so dang COOL, dang it, because he was so frickin’ cool. And I really liked him. I thought he was funny and smart and interesting and cool and fascinating and a bunch of other weird feelings I barely had the attention span to think about (I think my ADHD may have prevented me from coming out for a while tbh).

One day, I’m like 14-15, his dad is called to be my Sunday School teacher. His dad is this ex-military hardass with a chip on his shoulder for absolutely no reason and unattainable standards for his children. He spent most of Sunday School talking shit about his eldest boy and how he was rebellious and didn’t listen to him and how that was going to make him a bad adult and a bad son forever. How his son was too lazy and unmotivated to be successful because he didn’t listen to his advice on how to read the scriptures. He complained about how our generation was too weak to do things right and that our generation would surely be the one that brought the world’s downfall because of our laziness and sin.

And like, first of all, that guy can already go fuck himself for that. To clarify, that’s already stupid. BUT. He was talking about the man I had uncomfortable dreams about at least once a month. I couldn’t stand it. I’d get so mad I’d go home shaking sometimes because how fucking DARE he insult his hardworking stunning son by calling him lazy? For not reading the Bible the way his dad wants? When he’s already spending his time learning bagpipes? And fixing cars? And being cool? And cute? Who the fuck even cares if he uses the footnotes in the Book of Mormon? Who gives a rotten rat’s ass if he doesn’t use the scripture study manual his dad uses? He’s so cool he doesn’t even need it? So fuck off?

And eventually I got fucking Sick Of It and decided to mutiny. And by mutiny, I mean skip class. I’d just not go. And after a bit, adults started noticing and bugging me about it. At first, this was put off by small talk and excuses, but as my absence from Sunday School became more well-known, my excuses began to be rejected.

“Oh, Lizard, why aren’t you in class?” Uhm idk because my Sunday School teacher is mean to his kid and that makes me so mad wtf do you want from me? 🫠🤔

“Where’s your class, I’ll go with you!” Oh no ty I’d rather peel my own eyes than have my taste in men critiqued tyty 🩷

“Lizard, you should go to class, I’m sure they miss you!” And I miss the innocent days where my stomach didn’t hurt when a cool boy I knew was being belittled but unfortunately for us both those days are LONG gone and all that’s left is a budding psychosexual clusterfuck that will render me almost fully incapable of functioning for the better part of a decade so Bye Bye, sister Smith 🙂‍↕️

It had gotten to the point that ward leadership was involved. I was being approached by members of the Young Men’s presidency and the Bishopric to try and make me to back to class. They were telling me God had told them to find me and instruct me on my rebelliousness. This is where I implemented my secret weapon - women. Mormons are weird as hell about a lot of things, but especially about women. And I was GREAT with women. So to combat the leadership’s attention, I started helping women.

Our ward had a lot of new moms with babies who were, as babies tend to be, fussy. But for Mormon women the church is often their only social outlet, so they try to power through as long as they can even if it means enduring the exhausting ordeal of taking care of a fussy baby at church.

For what it’s worth, I have a lot of sway with babies. I got baby street cred. Me and babies have a rapport. I have always known this. I have always loved this. And in this crucial gay time in my faggot life my baby mind powers came in clutch - Every time I saw a member of the bishopric getting close, or a young men’s leader giving me side-eye, I’d start walking slowly towards class, passing by relief society. I’d wait until a mom’s baby had gotten too fussy and needed to leave the room, and I’d swoop in like a knight. “Oh, don’t you worry sister, I’ll bounce him a bit. You go back and hang out with your friends in class. You deserve a break.”

If it was a diaper change or something they’d tell me no. But if it was just some good old-fashioned baby fusses, I mean, they’d be moved almost to tears. They just got their social time back AND a free babysitter who is renowned as the Baby Whisperer. And because I was holding a baby as a favor for someone else, I of course could not reasonably be bothered to return to class.

So just like that, I was out of everyone’s sights. This went on for about a month before the straw that broke the camel’s back, which was that without my class participation the classes were quiet and awkward. I’d often take the brunt of Sunday school lectures by answering questions impulsively and over explaining myself enough that the clock could run out without anyone needing to do or say much. My absence meant everyone else was getting hit with the full unpleasantness of this guy’s bullshit. And so slowly, one-by-one, I had a group of about 8 kids on baby-holding duty. These new moms were so overjoyed, they and their husbands were both so actively in our corner that now chastising us was untenable. Now we had bargaining power. So the Bishopric approached us, confused beyond confused and uncomfortable beyond uncomfortable, and said,

“What’s it gonna take to get you back to class?”

The POWER I possessed in that moment was addictive. By being kind to the women of the ward and ignoring the Mormon de facto Rule of Law of following rules en-masse so the rule breakers feel left out, there were now so many people breaking ranks that we had effectively enacted a church boy labor strike. And they crumbled so fast it was almost like we had swayed God himself to our cause.

“I want brother assholedad gone. He sucks at teaching.”

I didn’t even have to say it. One of my rebels said it for me. I just nodded sagely and said “Yes, his class is not edifying. It’s better to not go and hold babies.”

And just like that, with a snap of my limp-wristed, Christ-wounding, bottom-brained fingers my faggot will was enacted. God’s revelation that brother shitdad was his chosen Sunday school teacher flipped on a dime. Suddenly brother shitdad was asked to be an usher and the fun dad of another one of my crushes was called in to teach us. I still stayed to hold babies a lot, but the rest of the class returned and all was well again.

Although I didn’t recognize it then, I think that was a formative moment for me in a lot of ways. I learned that being really persistently annoying will get me what I want from authority eventually. I learned that God’s will can be swayed by going in strike. I learned that ignoring men’s made up authority forces them to level with you as a person. I learned that caring for women, especially vulnerable women, can make a whole world happier. I learned that letting women rest can help them feel more love for the things that matter in their life. I learned that social bonds make everyone stronger and happier. And I learned that loving others in a gay way can change the world.

Be gayer. Read Terry Pratchett. I love y’all 💕

[softdaysahead]

One day I will remember that I must drink warm tea in the morning before eating anything otherwise my stomach gets all crampy for no reason