alien-of-the-gaps

[alien-of-the-gaps]

Favorite Dragon Pokemon

[alien-of-the-gaps]

[alien-of-the-gaps]

I am a trans woman in Irish dancing and I'm doing my part by being not very good

im honestly convinced trans girls have a natural advantage with everything at this point

[alien-of-the-gaps]

think about lesbian sex on. the. clock.

[alien-of-the-gaps]

the notion in video game culture that gameplay and story are separate is one that i think speaks to the juvenile state of the medium - mechanics and experience convey narrative themselves. it's the equivalent to lazy dubbed-over monologues or exposition titlecards in film, in regards to the notion that 'meaning' is something that can be slapped onto a work post-hoc like a sticker, rather than something integral to the entire thing. that's what causes the feeling of dissonance between the two - imagine if film audiences constantly said they dislike 'story' in films, while referring solely to an epidemic of infodumping interstitial cards and blade-runner-style phoned-in explanations of character motivation

[alien-of-the-gaps]

I would argue that Mulan is a force-masc story, not sure if that's what they're looking for though

Good morning! I think this may be a shot in the dark but do you or your followers know of any force masc stories like dorley (or not like dorley, honestly any force masc stories)?

I'll probably read dorley regardless bc you've made it seem so intriguing and as a trans masc I'd love to explore other trans experiences through storytelling. BUT if there's force masc content out there too I'm having real trouble finding it! (Doesn't have to be a book per se..)

Thanks and have a lovely day (:

sure^-^ i dont know of anything myself but does anyone else have anything like this?

[alien-of-the-gaps]

Also it generally bothers me how animals must be human like in order to garner affection from most people, it's such a joke that people believe in ”speciesm" the oppression of animals because they are different from us, yet many of these same people try to paint x or y animal as valuable by comparing it to people or pointing out a trait of it that's similar to humans. Like it's beautiful how loving whale moms are to their calves like humans, yes, but is that why we should care about them? shouldn't we also care about them if they weren't loving moms? aren't they still valuable to the world even if they cannibalized their children? or do you only care about other living creatures if they are like us?

What about parasites? bloodsucking ticks? wasps that lay their eggs in dead spiders they've paralyzed, rat mothers that eat half their newborns? newborn caecillians that eat their mother's delicious skin? the earthworm that has no sense of morality, altruism, or parental love? aren't they worthy too? do they have to be like us to be loved?

[alien-of-the-gaps]

you don’t see many people eating hunks of cheese and bread with meat anymore. perhaps due to woke?

[alien-of-the-gaps]

when I’m feeling down i read halimede tweets and it’s genuinely better than therapy

[alien-of-the-gaps]

Wear a comfier sweater where they'll come your sweater

(this doesn't mean much but is a play on words if said out loud)

[alien-of-the-gaps]

If you'll permit me to get overly caught up in your example for a moment, a story about seeing a weird bird in a grocery store would almost certainly contrast nature with consumption in industrialized human society. If Susan lived in a differently organized society, less cut off from nature, she would see weird birds when gathering food all the time, and perhaps the weird birds would even be the food she is gathering. Contrast that with the grocery store, where everything is as expected, with all of the biological life weirdness (not to mention the human labor) that went into creating that food obscured and never reflected on. There's something in Susan's spirit that rebels against the constraints of a pre-packaged world, that draws her attention to the hole in the tapestry, the thing out of place, the symbol of freedom, the weird bird.

My point being only that finding meaning in things is really fun, even things that you're explicitly trying to make boring!

"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

[alien-of-the-gaps]

[alien-of-the-gaps]

By the way, the way that No Child Left Behind impacts the trade worker shortage in the US is because in about 2002 shop classes, home ec classes, auto classes, etc, had their funding diverted into teaching kids how to pass standardized tests so that the schools could continue to pay teachers and keep the library open.

It's hard to figure out that you might be interested in plumbing as a career when you've spent twelve years learning how to pass multiple choice tests and having ceramics and band as the only available electives.

This is one place where I actually WILL do the generational thing and say that Millennials and Gen Z got completely fucked in a way that older generations didn't.

It's actually really fucking hard to repair a cabinet when you've never had a shop class. It's really goddamned difficult to learn everything about car maintenance on your own through youtube videos instead of in a semester of auto shop. It's really goddamned difficult to figure out you want to be a plumber or an electrician or a welder when you are eighteen years old, have been taught to pass tests and cajoled into applying for college, and you've never handled an air compressor or used a socket wrench.

[alien-of-the-gaps]

I would love to hear from someone who does read ellipses this way! I'm baffled by them, and my parents born in the early 1960s are also baffled by them. It's hard to find a source who actually uses them this way; a lot of accounts of where this comes from feel like speculation to me. Hopefully McCullough has done her due diligence...

I know gen Xers mean something other than what people my age mean when they write ellipses but i have no fucking clue what they do mean. Especially not when they end every sentence with them lmao

to me "lorem ipsum..." indicates hesitation, uncertainty, disapproval and/or passive aggressiveness and frankly the negative connotations just amplify if the whole message is like "lorem ipsum... dolor sit amet... consectetur adipiscing elit..."

my best guess is that its the gen X version of using "lol" to indicate that something is meant casually???