bao3bei4 - Tumblr blog

bao3bei4 · 1 month ago

Note

I really for a long time wanted to ask how you got your feet wet in critical theory! Would you say you just kept searching, devouring anything on the internet, or maybe it was through reading other zines, or maybe it was from academic work that you got introduced to it? TLDR: Looking for enlightenment and don't know how to start! -C

hi c! :) i’m excited to hear you’re interested in theory! i’ll tell you a little about how i got into reading more of it, and then i’ll see if i have any tips.

the TRUTH is embarrassing. i got into philosophy in high school because i did competitive debate and it was really popular at the time to argue shit like “there’s no point in debating at all as long as we’re engaging in capitalist frameworks. so whoever best deconstructs it in this round wins” and hope that your opponent wasn’t ready for the marx bomb. so i read marx, nietzsche, baudrillard, and so on. this probably scared the hell out of exactly one person who grew up in that same milieu, so whoever you are, sorry.

i read more philosophy in college for classes, but about partway through i came to realize i did not care about the nature of truth or the meaning of goodness or life and other philosophical questions. i just liked making spurious arguments and calling things gay. by this point of course it was too “late” (it’s never too late) to do anything like change my course of study and so instead i just terrorized people by getting really into freud for fun and bringing him up at every possible opportunity. incidentally, why freud? well i read gender trouble and mx dr butler made him sound so seductive and exciting. like [guy who’s extremely depressed and dysphoric voice] what if you get a gender because of melancholic identification. and it has something to do with your mother.

but doing a lot of self directed reading didn’t really come until i had started writing for fun and was continuously bumping up against the limits of my knowledge. for instance, i had written a version of my kpop fanfiction essay early on, but without having read david eng, i was reinventing the wheel. so when i encountered him it was transformative. the thing about theory is that yes i find it beautiful like literature but also. it’s also really a means to an end. a tool for making sense of the world, telling stories, making meaning, whatever you want to call it.

SO. my personal history aside (i’m just sharing it because i find it funny) my number one suggestion is just to write. it doesn’t have to be original at all. you can just summarize things you find interesting. but once you start researching for fun—which can involve reading academic books, zines, blogs from former philosophy students, whatever—it becomes easier and more interesting to read. at this point, several years into my bullshit, i do also reference stuff i’ve already read. but actually, maybe half the time i cite something i got into it specifically to write that essay. imagine it like a cat bringing you a dead rat as a gift. except the rat is something new i’ve learned.

this may seem unhelpful, considering that the one time someone asked me how to get into writing, i suggested reading. like. omfg bitch chicken or egg. PICK ONE!!!!! but reading and writing are like a conversation to me. you can and should listen to the existing conversation, but if you wanna have fun, you also can and should start talking!! the most important tip from THAT post imo is the suggestion to liveblog theory like it’s something with a fandom. screenshot your favorite lines. add reactions. make memes. i have terminal poster’s brain and that’s what helps me personally digest difficult things.

anyway. all this to say. 1) there’s no wrong way (or right way) to get into reading theory. you can do it for nerd slapfights you can do it for blorboposting you can do it for personal betterment you can even do it for a grade. the important part is just that you start. 2) once you start, if you have a purpose [like writing. or posting, which is also writing if you think about it] it’s easier to stay motivated and helps give you ideas for what to read next.

12 notes · View notes

bao3bei4 · 2 months ago

Text

20 questions for fic writers :)

i love a little ask meme. this is exactly what it says on the tin. inspired by oomf.

How many works on AO3?

THIRTY SIX.... wow. it adds up. in my head it's like. ten. there are also a couple fics floating out there on a different secret pseud.

2. Total word count on AO3?

167,219. again, wow... it adds up.... this number is kind of low considering that i have THIRTY SIX fics (<5k each), but i could have written a novel or two in the past five years. but i didn't want to. so i didn't.

3. Top five fics by kudos?

shen yuan and original luo binghe’s epic adventure in the modern world - 3541 kudos

sweet as honey - 3398 kudos

put me in, coach - 2621 kudos

white amaranth, purple eggplant - 2139 kudos

two point perspective - 2086 kudos

well i suppose that tracks. it's kind of funny to me that all my top fics by kudos were in the year i started writing. did i peak with beginner's luck. but realistically these all benefited from being written relatively early on in the fandom. actually i had been convinced that scum villain fandom had PEAKED in 2019 and no one was going to read my shit. oh how the tables turn. now I'M the hag.

4. What fandoms do you primarily write for?

scum villain! and a couple other random fics for mxtx. but THIRTY ONE out of thirty six. are scum villain. again also there's my disowned lovechild fics that aren't mxtx out there somewhere.

anyway it's funny originally i thought i would just write a couple of sv fics and then move on to like. naruto. or fe3h. or whatever else i was thinking about in 2020. but now the characters are like old friends to me and it's very easy to imagine them in situations. i should really push myself out of my comfort zone. well i'm doing that for my fandom trumps hate gift. so!

5. Do you respond to comments?

i used to! they used to be my only outlet for talking about fandom. now i have fan friends and it's not all repressed. but the main thing is that a lot of my popular fics were written five years ago, so i don't have much to say in response other than. THANK YOU I LOVE YOU MWAH. i respond a bit more right after i post a fic when all my thoughts on it are fresh.

6. Angstiest ending?

the ones that are canon compliant. isn't that funny? every road leads to an end is i miss shen jiu whump lowkey, as told through ning yingying's eyes. the qing jing ghostbusters and the ten great mysteries of cang qiong mountain sect is i miss binghe whump. and the good, the bad, and the terror of the unjust is also "goodbye shen jiu" whump. well this one was supposed to be a comedy but i couldn't figure out how to make shen jiu stop abusing binghe so i just made it canon compliant.

7. Fic with the happiest ending?

my post canon fics! white amaranth, purple eggplant is about being depressed and getting a happy ending anyway. and forever hold your peace is about getting MARRIEDDDDDDD. so i'm very dedicated to sappy bingqius.

8. Do you get hate?

nope! everybody loves me. for now.

9. Do you write smut?

yes! i love physical comedy and what is sex, if not the ultimate act of physical comedy.

10. Do you write crossovers?

does the failed collaborative attempt at a saw fusion count? check it - the saw villain's self-saving trap.

11. Ever had a fic stolen?

not that i'm aware of!

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

yes! Saettore did with Шэнь Юань, оригинальный Ло Бинхэ и их эпическое приключение в современном мире !

13. Have you ever co-written a fic?

the aforementioned saw fusion fic. and also an exquisite corpse style fic with the now defunct cumplane server - con men. i kind of want to write co write something now. damn!

14. All time favorite ship?

i don't.... think i have one.... i love all my ugly children. bingqiu by numbers, but they still only make up 19% of my oeuvre.

15. WiPs you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

get home safe, my wangxian modern au set in the bay area. my wangxian juices aren't activated, and also i wrote that while missing home. then i moved home for a while and all the hazy romantic nostalgia evaporated. i feel like between what IS written and grandmaster ranked in demonic cultivation, i've gotten a lot of the "let's put the mdzs guys in san jose" juice out of me.

16. Writing strengths?

i think i'm funny. i like my dialogue. i like my fast pacing and comedic timing i have. i joke a lot that my fic at its strongest is really just stand up comedy.

17. Writing weaknesses?

everything else :) no seriously, i have a hard time slowing down a scene, building a setting, or even describing anything.

18. Thoughts on mixed language dialogue?

at first i used to translate everything - e.g. Shizun -> "Teacher" but for the past several years, i just do fandom house style where titles are untranslated. especially for modern aus, the bits that you would say untranslated even in an english sentence, those stay.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

scum villain! well i do also have a fe3h fic i was writing about the same time as my earliest scum villains. it was a post black eagles fic, where petra returns to brigid and becomes involved in masses of political intrigue and an arranged marriage. it was going to be a long fic, so naturally i ran out of steam and full pivoted to yaoi instead.

20. Favorite fic you’ve ever written?

atttt the moment. maybe because of recency bias. or because i've been thinking about it for literally five years, the entire time i've been writing fic. possession. she's my baby. this fic anticipated me going to grad school, and is so much fun to think about and theorycraft with friends about.

okay that's it from meeeee. who am i tagging? everyone. if you see this, you need to do it. thanks <3

12 notes · View notes

bao3bei4 · 3 months ago

Text

In my dreams, everything was burning. A voice was calling out for me.

Summoned forth as the intended sacrifice of a mysterious ritual, a young man finds himself in a new world with the face of his attempted killer, Acacius Duval, as well as a looming death curse if he doesn’t carry out Acacius’ last will. However, while Acacius has left many looming problems, he didn’t leave behind the most important piece: his memories.

That would have been too convenient for navigating a world stitched together from apocalypses.

Fortunately, after only a few life and death trials, Acacius’ unintentional replacement is sent away to the prestigious Nithemoore Academy, where he can learn everything he needs to know about the world and gain the power to grasp his freedom…

At least, if the tracks of history don’t doom him first.

First three chapters out now! 130k words pre-written, and updates every Saturday. Hope to see you there!

read on github books | read on neocities

#i read it and it’s good #i like webnovels

259 notes · View notes

bao3bei4 · 3 months ago

Text

help buy solar panels for the gaza refugee camp!

hello everybody! thanks to your hard work, we were recently able to meet our goals for two previous campaigns: one for ahmed, and one for shimaa (proof of donation post coming soon!). after the ceasefire was declared, the people of gaza are in a state of uncertainty - and the people of ahmed's local refugee camp are no exception. while some still had houses that remained standing (though with significant damage) and were able to return, many now are forced to live in continued displacement as their homes were completely demolished.

due to the seriously damaged state of gaza's infrastructure, the refugee camp that we work with has extremely restricted access to electricity. many people have to walk a long ways to charge their devices, and each charge costs a fee of around $3 each. many people in the refugee camp use their devices to continue working remotely to support their families (like shimaa), contact their family if they are spread out across the gaza strip or abroad, and to document their lives through the genocide. ahmed himself depends on electricity to stay in contact with us and with the people of the refugee camp in order to respond to any urgent situations that arise at all hours of the day.

as such, ahmed believes it would be beneficial for the people of the refugee camp to set up their own solar panels, both to reduce the expenses that the people of the camp have to pay and to give them more independence.

we are setting a goal of $1600 for this project.

the easiest way to donate is through our link, which will redirect you to our paypal page:

(alternatively, you can use paypal.me/qquwq to donate or send money via simk’s P/P email: [email protected]. you do not need a paypal account to donate to this campaign.)

how it works:

per ahmed’s request, simk and i are collecting money on his behalf. the money that is collected in the paypal account will be sent via wire transfer to ahmed as soon as we meet the fundraising goal. it generally takes 3-5 days to transfer and for ahmed to get notification that he can withdraw the money. ahmed texts us as soon as the money is transferred and put to use.

ahmed will take videos and photos to document the process of buying and setting up the solar panels for the camp. i will share selected videos and photos on my blog so that you all can see what we can do with our collective efforts!

a small note here: to preserve the privacy and dignity of the displaced, and to avoid issues with the tumblr staff, i will be careful with what i choose to show publicly. ahmed will also refrain from publishing his own photos on social media for this same reason. if you have any other specific requests you would like to see as proof of your donation going to good use, please DM me.

please help us complete this campaign! things are still extremely difficult for the people in gaza. i can't even truthfully say that they are no longer under active threat as the israeli army continuously ignores the ceasefire deal. this will be a small, but crucial step in helping the people of the refugee camp persevere after the genocide has taken so much from them.

1K notes · View notes

bao3bei4 · 4 months ago

Text

I DID IT AGAIN….. longposter.neocities.org/yaoizine5.pdf

YAOI ZINE 5 IS FINALLY HERE! THE THEMELESS ISSUE, WHERE PEOPLE WROTE WHATEVER THEY WANTED.

362 notes · View notes

bao3bei4 · 4 months ago

Text

YAOI ZINE 5 IS FINALLY HERE! THE THEMELESS ISSUE, WHERE PEOPLE WROTE WHATEVER THEY WANTED.

362 notes · View notes

bao3bei4 · 4 months ago

Note

will yaoi zine 5 be available online in the future? btw very excited for american* fujo* :D!

yes! i'll upload it right now; thanks for reminding me!

5 notes · View notes

bao3bei4 · 4 months ago

Text

the AMERICAN* FUJO* Kickstarter is now live!

introducing a new literary journal about the intersections of gender & sexuality, power, and virtual space in fandom. By the editors who brought you works like yaoi zine, yuri zine, and butchverse 1 & 2.

(cover illustration by the incredible shalida)

AMERICAN* FUJO* is Alexis theswordwizard (thats meeeee :D) & tshirt3000's forthcoming anthology on fandom culture, trans identity, and general overanalysis. Our project tries to asterisk and complicate its categories of both “American” and “Fujo” as much as possible, interrogating gender and sexuality, power of all kinds, and the virtual communities we call fandom.

We asked our contributors questions along those lines: How has being a fan affected your gender or sexuality? How has our gender or sexuality affected how we engage in fandom? Who is a fujoshi, who wants to be one, and who doesn’t get the choice? In America-centric fan spaces, what is necessarily suppressed? How can we trouble the category and dominance of “American” from within and without? Finally, what does it mean to be in a community that’s overwhelmingly virtual, as reliant on digital social platforms as it is on fictional media, both owned by another party? And what affects or acts are uniquely enabled by these virtualized desires and sexuality?

Our contributors range from actual self-identified American fujos to writers who are emphatically neither. They answer these questions through illustration, comics, essays, and autotheory, developing creative ways to capture fandom and its discontents. The anthology surveys a wide range of topics, from transgender fujoshism (in any direction) to race and belonging within theoretically progressive fandom. We want to make the full vibrancy of fandom as accessible as possible, and theorize both its possibilities and its limits through this anthology. We hope you’re as excited to read AMERICAN* FUJO* as we are to make it!

Support or follow our campaign on Kickstarter!

#my latest project is here!#x

446 notes · View notes

bao3bei4 · 5 months ago

Text

a girl is a witch: on umineko ep 4

as promised, i wrote a zine on any topic the winner of my raffle wanted. and um. bee wanted umineko. after a long time rereading it, i realized that i only really wanted to talk about one episode. here it is:

As Kathryn Bond Stockton, to whom this zine owes a great debt, writes in The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, “The child is precisely who we are not and, in fact, never were. It is the act of adults looking back.” (5) This is not to say that there are not people who are young, but rather that the figure of the child and the idea of childhood are culturally constructed, and have been so relatively recently. What “the child” is, is a question of retrospect, determined by adults. Ange, most precisely, and her retrospective POV on both her own childhood and the events of Rokkenjima Island in 1986 introduce this framing. The act of looking back and constructing a narrative around that past —including one of innocence and not-knowing—is central to Umineko’s overall story. It is not an overstatement then, to say that the novel is in many ways about childhood and our construction of it. This zine, therefore, is an investigation of what uncomfortable truths about childhood Umineko reveals. Or at least, some of what it says on the topic in Episode 4, “Alliance of the Golden Witch.”

We read Episode 4 with a focus on Maria, being as she is the ultimate child of Umineko, the most “childish” child against which all the other children are contrasted. In the fashion of Stockton, moreover, we read her as a queer child in three respects: the child who is delayed, the child who is haunted, and the child who kills.

Maria is cast as a delayed child. Let’s rewind just a little bit before we dive into her portrayal in Episode 4. In Episode 2, Eva mockingly asks Rosa, “By the way, Rosa, how old did Maria-chan turn this year?” after Maria explains witch lore. Kyrie attempts to write it off as a product of Maria’s age. But Rosa responds, “Maria has already graduated from that age.” Rosa, at various points in the story, punishes Maria for her attachment to her toys, her verbal tics, and her fantastic beliefs, all of which Rosa believes Maria should have outgrown and no longer need. And compared to other children, Maria is similarly portrayed as delayed:

Compared to the other kids in her class, Maria onee-chan's tempo was always a little slow. Her sensibilities and ways of viewing things were a little peculiar... and a little too idiosyncratic for her to blend in.

Maria is not alone in this delay. As the narrator comments with regard to Beatrice, “Did she show absolutely no signs of lacking sleep because she was young, or because she had the mind of a little kid?” In the very same conversation, Battler is painted with the same brush. Ronove comments, "Hmm, well, that's right. That man's a bit too trusting for his age, isn't he?" He finally casts Battler in even more hyperbolic terms that highlight his simultaneous youth and sexuality: “You violated the purity of one never deceived since the time of his birth, as well as his rosebud-like innocence, all to your heart's content.” So Maria, Beatrice, and Battler are all young for their age, whatever that might mean.

Childhood, as Stockton sees it, is a legally enforced delay, a stage in which the trappings of a normative heterosexual adult life are deliberately held off-limits. So to be a delayed child is to reject the specter of that life entirely, to borrow Stockton’s concept, to grow sideways rather than grow “up.”

And Maria’s delay makes her haunted. Battler explains at the beginning of Episode 1:

...I hear that everyone can feel the supernatural, but that it weakens with age. In that case, Maria, being the most juvenile of us all, still possesses that perception of something that we lost because we got older... I wonder if that something is giving her a warning.

This reinforces Maria as the most childish, but also makes childishness a source of ghostly power. The most obvious manifestation of a haunting within Umineko is Beatrice, the sinister figure that the family finds themselves tormented by. But there are others—another ghost in the novel: the 19th person, who may or may not be Beatrice as well. A ghost is the repetition of the past in the present. Might we not say the same thing about a child? The child functions as our imagination of our own pasts, made living flesh embodied by your own continuous presence as well as the living young people who exist today. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the next stranger in the family is Maria herself, who becomes a ghostly apparition too, as she haunts Ange via the diary.

Ange begins to enter Maria’s world, learning both the story of her everyday life as well as being inducted into the alliance of witches. Maria, as a ghost child, is doubly past made present. Umineko, therefore, suggests that the past is crying out. There has been a great injustice done, and the family has suppressed it. In this view, Maria becomes an avenger. Thus she also becomes the final queer child, the child who has adult desires—to kill.

Let’s take a brief detour into the theories of Donald Winnicott. The two that are most relevant to us are, first, the concept of the “good-enough mother” and, second, the “false self.” The good-enough mother’s task is to be good-enough, as you might guess. She must provide for the infant and mirror the infant’s face back to them, but she must also disillusion the infant so their initial impression of omnipotence is broken. That is, the infant must learn that by crying they summon the breast, which they come to perceive as part of themself, but they must also eventually be prepared to be disappointed by its absence and learn that it is part of the mother, separate from them. A good mother, a good-enough mother, must disappoint her children.

But consider the case of a not-good-enough mother. What happens when the child must learn to manage the connection with their parents, rather than the other way around? Winnicott argues that the false self develops, as protection against the mother and the world. But “In situations in which what is expected is a whole person the False Self has some essential lacking,” he writes. The false self is not a real person. It is what you learn to become to fit what your mother gives you, rather than what you want.

"I wasn't acknowledged by Mama either, was I...? So the broken Maria won't be fixed either..."

Why might a mother be not-good-enough? In Selma Fraiberg, Edna Adelson, and Vivian Shapiro’s “Ghosts in the Nursery,” they ask why a mother cannot hear her baby’s cries.

The answer to the clinical question is already suggested in the mother's story. This is a mother whose own cries have not been heard. There were, we thought, two crying children in the living room. The mother's distant voice, her remoteness and remove we saw as defenses against grief and intolerable pain…

Episode 2’s Tea Party excavates some of Rosa’s intolerable pain. Beatrice asks her, “How far back must I trace the deep wounds in your heart in order to heal them?” She answers her own question upon tracing Rosa’s past:

...This is... deep... quite deep indeed. Sometimes, wounds close up while a fragment of foreign matter remains inside. Even when such wounds appear to have healed, they continue to throb for all eternity. Sometimes, you have to open the wound once more in order to heal it completely."

Rosa describes how she was punished by her siblings for arbitrary or nonexistent infractions, both by hitting and by breaking her toys. She comments that she never understood why she was being punished. These became the same punishments she enacted upon Maria, most obviously the destruction of Sakutarou. But there is a difference between the two of them. Rosa’s abuse was at her older siblings’ hands, and Maria’s was at her mother’s. As a result, Rosa actually characterizes her own abuse as simple lateral violence:

It's common for unfair things to happen between kids. And you mustn't hold onto grudges for such things forever. With time, those memories get buried away, and forgetting them bit by bit is supposed to be part of growing up and becoming an adult. So becoming an adult is the same as separating yourself from all those memories.

But it inhibited her development all the same: “And because of that. No matter how much time passed, Rosa couldn't become an adult.” So perhaps, at least in Rosa’s eyes, the violence she commits against her daughter is simple unfairness at worst and justified at best, the way her siblings’ might have been against her.

Rosa’s complex relationship to adulthood comes to a head shortly after. She squirms at the cannibalistic revenge Beatrice sets up for her. But she only reaches her breaking point when Maria is next to be prepared as food. So she is ultimately adult in the sense that she is both a perpetrator of abuse, and someone who also finally chose not to continue it at the Tea Party.

Maria also tries to break the cycle of abuse from the powerful to powerless by turning the violence back onto her mother. She becomes Freud’s child, the one with murderous desires towards their parent. At first, it seems like this might finally heal her, or at least distract her.

Then would the repeated murder of her mother purify her soul...? Would even this wasteful murder save her soul, at least a little bit...? This endless torture... might have become a slight diversion from her sad, unrewarded life. After all, it seemed that she'd finally been able to regain her smile.

As Maria herself says, “Since it's gotten so fun, I'm somehow starting to feel that I could forgive you...! Hey, Beato, this is a veeery strange feeling...! Why? Why am I starting to feel like I can forgive Mama?!" Catharsis, in this view, could be achieved by reenacting the trauma from the perpetrator’s side. Maria simply needed to become her mother. By identifying with the aggressor, she is able to repress the negative affect that she herself experienced. So Maria comes to identify with Rosa, and Rosa’s strange in-between state.

This is not the only reason that it is not so simple, incidentally, in Umineko as “children are good and adults are bad.” Both Ange and Maria are bullied by other children. Ange characterizes childhood by cruelness of character, actually, when she comments that her bullies are “as innocent and cruel as you'd expect from kids of that age.” Maria, as you might expect, takes an optimistic view of this bullying, telling a story about a scenario in which everyone can bully one child, who takes all the suffering that might otherwise be distributed among their peers. Even magic, associated with childhood, is not even uncomplicatedly good. Rosa is cast as a “black witch,” capable of immense harm.

Anyway, this is a longwinded way of saying that we are skeptical that you can break the cycle of violence with more violence, that growing up or not growing up can deal with the problem of childhood as violent. And we must believe that that problem can be addressed. As “Ghosts” puts it, “Then we must reflect that if history predicted with fidelity, the human family itself would have long ago been drowned in its own oppressive past. The race improves.” Now the argument can be made that the Ushiromiyas are indeed drowning in their own oppressive past. But we also know something more hopeful. It doesn’t have to be that way:

Truth is unfixed and changes its form every time it's witnessed. By the way it's perceived... in other words, depending on the person who perceives it, a single truth becomes different truths. And truths of the past are painted over by truths of the future…

The act of interpretation can be an act of love. My identification with Maria as a queer child experiencing a queer childhood can be meaningful in itself. Queer children are children that “should not exist.” As Max Fox writes, children ostensibly have “fixed gender but no sexuality,” so they can be cis but not gay. So if I claim Maria as a queer child anyway, if I speak her into existence, if even I want her to exist at all, something very powerful can happen. We can see childhood as life in microcosm—or even just life—rather than something that is a rupture with adulthood.

What I want to argue here is that the end of the Question arc already answers the great "mystery" of the series by showing that there is an existential and inherent battle in the family between love and violence. Now, love, like “the child” is not an unvarnishedly positive thing. Love is also cast as immaturity, underdevelopment, and childishness. To borrow Sophie Lewis’ quotation of Madeline Lane-McKinley, “‘innocent’ is code for powerless – a way to fetishize the child as both dependent and sub-human”. Love is not an easy choice. Umineko vests a lot in “the child” and “love” without necessarily idealizing either. The story, to me, is about the myriad ways you can choose to cope with the intrinsic horror of the family.

So on that note, let’s conclude by talking about Beatrice. Like Maria, Beatrice is delayed. She haunts the island. And she most certainly kills. Unlike Maria, however, she is not nine years old. But for most intents and purposes, we can say that judgments about Maria can also apply to Beatrice. Beatrice being a figure of love as well as a queer child is something that can seem counterintuitive at first. But from Maria, we know that children can do anything. Children can even break the cycle—but of course, so too can adults. As Ange speculates:

So I'm sure... If Maria onee-chan had had children in the future... She probably wouldn't have pushed the pain that had been forced on her onto her children. That chain of pain and sadness that stretched back for who knows how long, which she couldn't understand and which she had inherited, which had been forced onto her... Maria onee-chan cut it with her magic.

What is Beatrice cutting with her magic?

In the end, magic is more complex than love alone. To quote Ange at the close of the chapter, “Magic is made of love and sadness and anger. No matter how cruel a witch Beatrice might have been, the source of her magic is exactly the same.” To be a queer child, to be a witch, whatever you want to call it, is constituted by love in the face of suffering, love in the face of family, pain in the face of love. No matter how fantastic the events of Umineko, magic therefore exists in the world we live in.

----------

okay also footnote just because i have anxiety: i’m NOT saying that killing people makes you gay. i would love if that was true though it seems so fun to kiss girls.

13 notes · View notes

bao3bei4 · 5 months ago

Text

help ahmed stay connected to us!

hello everyone! as you may know, we have been working to replace ahmed's phone, which was damaged irreparably by some water. 😢

as he is our current point of contact for assessing the needs of the refugee camp, it's essential that we replace his phone as soon as we can. currently, he is using @itsshimaa200's phone, which isn't sustainable as shaima also needs to stay connected to us.

to get ahmed a new phone, we will need $725, and we are already 20% of the way there!

we only need $573 to complete this campaign.

if you can, please spare some cash to help us meet our goals. even $5 helps us get closer to completing this campaign. it would mean a lot to us to get this completed by january 12th (ahmed's birthday)!

here is the link to donate, which you should COPY TO YOUR BROWSER: https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=P4XV4Z9GHKV22

as of late, tumblr has been having trouble with redirecting. if you have trouble accessing this link, please copy the full campaign link to your browser!

(alternatively, you can use paypal.me/qquwq or via simk’s P/P email: [email protected]. you do not need a paypal account to donate to the link above!)

thank you all for your support thus far. we have all worked together to provide truly lifesaving aid to this refugee camp in gaza, along with shaima and ahmed's respective families. it may not feel like much, but please see the #update tag to see how much you have had an impact on us.

$152 / $725 | 20% | $573 REMAINING!

118 notes · View notes

bao3bei4 · 6 months ago

Text

zine finance and fulfillment... TWO!

this is a follow up post to my original “zine finance and fulfillment” post that i made oh gosh a year and a half and a few big zine projects ago. i come to you now with some more thoughts on my process. so here are some things that you can consider before embarking on your beautiful journey**

WHAT MY LAST POST COVERED: what goes into my pricing, which websites i use for fulfillment, the epic highs and lows of flat rate shipping.

WHAT THIS ONE COVERS: some warnings, estimates for perfect bound books, detailed numbers for diy zines, explanation of my fulfillment timeline

**note: this is aimed at the rotten people of the united states of america. some tips may be generally applicable, but my numbers are in USD and my estimates are tailored to US prices as of december 2024. anyway!

NUMBER ONE: YOU NEED TO HAVE EXTRA MONEY LYING AROUND

zines are beautifully diy. you can make them for free if you steal shit or use something you have lying around. however. the second you start selling them online, you need to have a little extra money as a cushion.

NUMBER TWO: YOU NEED TO BE OKAY LOSING THAT MONEY.

especially if you operate with as thin margins as i do OR you are doing a p4p model. you will lose money. something will happen to you. sorry. i can’t believe i priced my very first zine at $8 shipped worldwide for a pro printed booklet. what the hell. the hubris of youth.

NUMBER THREE: WHILE WE’RE TALKING MONEY, LET ME HELP YOU ESTIMATE COSTS

i love transparency and oversharing. you can hear the specifics of my financials. assuming that you are selling black and white perfect bound books between 100-200 pages that you are buying online, and you are working in quantities somewhere from 50-150 books…

i assume that to get those books to my house, it will cost roughly $6.50 plus or minus a dollar depending on the length of the book. i tend to budget 50 cents per book for shipping materials. stripe fees are stripe fees; i just let my spreadsheet take care of that.

shipping cost. the beast that consistently costs more than i budget for. well. if you’re normal, and charge people the actual cost of shipping.... within the US, it’ll cost maybe $2.50 to ship a lightweight zine (<100 pages) and closer to $4.50 if it’s heavier or you want tracking [you can use media mail]. shipping to canada is consistently around $4 for lightweight zines, and $6-7 for perfect bound books using lettermail [possibly illegal]. everywhere else in the world is around $7 for lightweight zines and around $15 for heavier zines. whew. estimate your specific costs using the usps links i linked in the last post, but TO GET A BALLPARK you can use my numbers.

so anyway you will never see me pricing a perfect bound book less than $10 anymore, because $15 shipped would be my "i am planning to make no profits and give out no contributor copies" price, where i'd be reasonably certain i would not lose money.

NUMBER THREE AND A HALF: DIDN'T YOU JUST SELL A $5 ZINE. WHAT IF I DIY

okay, imagine for a second you’re not a clout-chasing sellout like me who makes perfect bound books. let’s say your zine is handmade. how does that shake out. great question. i will show you a picture of the exact breakdown of yaoi zine 5 costs.

i’m not done yet, so i’m not sure how much money i’m going to lose on shipping. but i have no doubt that it will cut into the profits. but anyway, yeah. spreadsheets are your friend :)

NUMBER FOUR: SO HOW LONG WILL THIS TAKE ANYWAY?

alright. great question. i do a preorder model for all my zines. this is so i don’t have to worry about inventory or buying too many or whateva. this does mean, however, that my dear dear zine buyers have to wait longer. how long does my average zine fulfillment take, from posting the store link, to shipping the final zine?

i will use yaoi zine 4 as my example. it was a pro printed zine that sold around 100 copies, which is what i usually estimate i will sell in a two week preorder period.

i posted the store link august 27th.

i closed the store september 10th.

i ordered the zines september 11th.

the zines shipped september 17th.

they arrived at my house september 20th.

my first shipment went out september 24th [packing orders was more complicated because i was doing a large giveaway, and also selling shirts]

my final shipment went out september 27th.

so exactly one month! it took anywhere from a couple days (localish buyers) to a couple weeks (people who live outside the us) to get their zine.

NUMBER FIVE: HEY, YOU SKIPPED OVER THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE TIMELINE.

yeah those four days of packing and shipping zines were um. grueling. luckily i was extremely underemployed at the time. unluckily i don’t have that much willpower so i only worked on shipping for a few hours at most each day.

here’s what you need to consider budgeting time for:

making zines (optional). i hand sew mine because i have poor judgment. for my 72 page zine, from first hitting print to tying off the thread, it takes around um. 10 minutes. damn i’m slow. you may be faster. this is the most time consuming part of the process, which is why i often skip it [also because 100+ pages is too thick to saddle stitch]

packing zines. most people will buy one zine and one zine only and make your life easy. pack all of these first, then do your “odd” orders separately. this part is pretty self explanatory. just stuff an envelope. you can do this in a hour or two.

addressing zines. i handwrote all the yaoi zine 5 addresses, in another lapse of judgment. you can print them on labels to make it easier. or, if you’re shipping media mail, you can buy addressed postage through pirateship. this is the most variable time sink.

buying postage. be prepared to spend an hour at the post office at a time using the pitney bowes machine. do not bother the stalwart workers of the usps with your dozens of packages lmfao. especially because half the time they’ll tell you that they don’t think letter mail will work out for you (it always has for me). also don’t try to ship them all in one day i get soooo sweaty and tired shipping like 20-30 at a time.

well. that’s everything i can think of. hopefully i said something non obvious. or at the very least satisfied your curiosity as to how much money i make.

EDIT THIRTY SECONDS AFTER I POSTED THIS: my dear oomf julian asked how i pick a printing company.

well normally i choose based on price. bookmobile has consistently had the best prices for the small runs i do of simple books.

i use mixam if the run is veryyyy small or i'm just making a one off.

if price is no object and i want to pick the best paper irl etc etc, i go to my local guy.

17 notes · View notes