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Annoyed medieval peasant, rolling his eyes at you: No, it's just... Look, you're the fourth time traveler this week trying to wow me with energy drink and obnoxious shortform content. It gets old. Now if you would please allow me to get back to working the land...

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Despite everything, a better world remains possible.

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So weird to me how people are basically begging Ryoko Kui to put into writing that Laios is Officially Autistic, as if Laios receiving a diagnosis from his creator would change anything, really, about who he is and whether you can see yourself in him.

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I, for one, think it's awesome that there are Olympic events where athletes have to pass a DC 14 Constitution saving throw every few turns or end up poisoned by a polluted river.

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You feel like your attraction, as a man, to trans women makes you "queer" because societal prejudices made you view them as some kind of exotic thing that's not fully woman. And by publicly labelling said attraction "queer" you help perpetuate those very prejudices. Which is why you shouldn't.

If you care about trans women as people and not just as bodies to have sex with, you really should think twice about what effect you loudly declaring "I'm queer for wanting to have sex with trans women specifically" has, before you scream it from the digital rooftops.

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人　　人人

人人　人失

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Travelling back in time to ask Marsha P Johnson and others at Stonewall for their opinions on really important topics like bisexual girls who bring their cis boyfriends to pride and the lack of corporate pride merch for lesbians, only to have the air knocked out of me by a brick to the stomach.

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I'm at Jeopardy. The clue goes "This creature is the opposite of an underdog." My palms sweaty, my throat tight and my heart racing, I ring in immediately. I know the answer but do I dare to say it? I hesitate for a bit, before I speak with a voice that shakes with fear: "what is updog?"

The presenter smiles at me like a cartoon villain.

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I wrote a tanka referencing the latest Dune movie:

「太陽が黒色ですね」ってジエディ・プライム上の愛の告白

Translation:

"The sun is black, isn't it" - a love confession on Giedi Prime

Context: an often-referenced way of confessing one's love in Japan in an indirect manner is by saying 月が綺麗ですね (the moon is beautiful, isn't?). Renowned novelist Natsume Soseki is said to have once suggested this phrase as a Japanese translation for the English phrase "I love you", but that origin appears to be more of an urban legend than truth.

Anyway, in the second Dune film, we see a black sun from the perspective of the Harkonnen homeplanet Giedi Prime. As far as I am aware, it's left somewhat vague why exactly the sun is black--perhaps the sun itself isn't black and something in the atmosphere modifies its colour--but director Denis Villeneuve has said in an interview he thought it would be interesting "if instead of revealing colors, the sunlight was killing [people on Giedi Prime] and creating a very eerie black and white world".

An interesting decision indeed. It adds to the cold and cruel ambience of Giedi Prime. Underlying this tanka, then, is on the one hand the idea that even on such a planet feelings of love may blossom. But without things that spark beauty and happiness, it is the sun's pitch blackness that serves as a conduit for indirect love confessions.

As an added note: I have seen both ジエディ・プライム and ジェディ・プライム as katakana transliterations for Giedi Prime. I'm not sure if there's an official one, but I went with the former option for the sake of the tanka's moraic 5-7-5-7-7 rhythm.

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"This character can't possibly be a trans woman. My evidence? A scene where other characters vehemently insist that the character isn't a woman."

I know some of you don't touch grass on the regular, but come on. Use those two brain halves of yours for a moment. Please. I beg you. If only for a minute.

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"that's not a haiku!! that's not a haiku!!!!!", I scream into the void as I stare in horror at my phone screen where I see how tumblr user "the-haiku-bot" has falsely labeled as a haiku, a 5-7-6-syllable phrase that doesn't serve haiku energy whatsoever, in a reblog of MY post, my body melting away from underneath me

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"Hahaha people used to be so weird about ankles", laughed the person who thinks that a woman's breasts being visible is tantamount to "sexual harassment."

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Cube-shaped "square watermelons" are a metaphor for raising children. To thrive, a watermelon needs space to grow. Forcing them into narrow boxes may produce surface-level desired results, in terms of the conformity and aesthetics you strive for, but it inevitably harms their development on the inside.

Find me the farmer who can grow a happy cube-shaped watermelon through real nurture and love instead of through violence and subjugation, and who loves that watermelon just the same as all of its siblings in different shapes and different sizes, and I will crown that farmer "parent of the year."

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Two Japanese mother's day poems from a transgender daughter (me). First, a haiku:

母の日や娘になった元息子

And an acrostic tanka:

ありのままリトルな息子が長女に

という化成をうたう母への

For translations and short reflections, see below

and a former son who has

The haiku has 母の日 (Mother's Day) as its season word and translates to something along these lines:

Mother's Day!

become a daughter

True to herself, a little son has become an eldest daughter

Usage of the word "元息子" (former son) is not about the idea of whether the daughter in the poem was once a boy or a man, but about the fact that her mother no longer sees her as her son (but as her daughter instead).

As for the tanka, this one is difficult to translate while maintaining its acrostic nature. If you take the first kana of each of the tanka's five verses, they spell out the word ありがとう (thank you). My intention here is for this 5-morae phrase to act as a little sixth verse. If I were to translate those six Japanese verses into three English lines then, it would become as follows:

To the mother who sings of this metamorphosis,

A "thank you"

Writing an acrostic 5-7-5-7-7 in English based on the tanka, I also ended up with the following poem:

true to herself, once

her mother's first little son,

an eldest daughter

now, her mother hums so

kind, of metamorphosis

Emily Maple Boon

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D&D idea: wizard who constantly casts spells like 'Comprehend Languages' and 'Tongues' to be like those annoying "polyglot" youtubers who SURPRISE native speakers BY SPEAKING THEIR LANGUAGE. He records the episodes by casting 'Arcane Eye' so he can get a third-person perspective, and uses 'Minor Illusion' paired with 'Silent Image' to play the recordings back to others.

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春光や日の目みたいな目の光

Haiku by me. English version:

sparkling spring sunshine

—like the light of day itself,

glimmer in an eye