bathrobe-wizard

[bathrobe-wizard]

original by clairetablizo

[bathrobe-wizard]

Conceptual art furniture by Ai Weiwei at Seattle Art Museum, 2025

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i like to think that my permanent eye bags and general worn-down look give me a certain cuteness

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today someone asked me what my favorite even-toed ungulate is… god, who could decide?

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I really don't fuck with the idea of "cishet men being there is a sign of a healthy queer community" and the way it gets touted as a litmus test like "oh but cishet men being there is a good sign for all the closeted trans women." Like okay if you're trying to convince a bunch of trans women that your queer community is safe for them I really don't think you should, even implicitly, be saying "oh don't worry, our queer community is totally inclusive of trans women! That's why we've got cishet men here! Y'all are pretty much the same, right?"

Like, a closeted trans woman is probably going to feel more comfortable in a queer community if she sees a bunch of other trans women who are safe and comfortable, innit?

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do all dogs drink then come directly to ur face to dribble on u or hav i jst gotten lucky so far

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I JUST FOUND OUT IVE BEEN WALKING AROUND FOR TWO WEEKS WITH A SHARD OF GLASS IN MY FOOT 😭

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That’s a sight that makes a parent’s heart twitch. Nightshade in the cherry tomatoes

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what if instead of having a fake name for internet personal-life purposes we could have a fake name for professional work-life purposes

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In the D&D campaign I'm running with my wife's siblings, one of them learned about how trolls regenerate within minutes of any damage not caused by fire or acid, and then asked why people don't just like. Cage them and eat them, forever. Why there aren't troll meat dungeons in the king's castle as a safeguard against sieges or famines.

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Anyway I'm passing this on because this is my new troll lore and I want it to become canonized in the way that all D&D lore becomes canonized: By having eople read it and go "oh, neat" then start doing that too.

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One of the reasons I'll always stand by the 2013 Carrie remake is how it perfectly understands the psychology of a bully in the way few pieces of media do. The bullies in the original Carrie film adaptation, the one everyone praises, are cartoonish caricatures rather than real people, the all the interiority of Snidely Whiplash.

But in the 2013 movie you get to the scene where Chris Hargensen, the leader of the bullies, is brought into the principal's office and told that she'll not only be suspended, but banned from going to prom for how she and her pals bullied Carrie at the beginning of the movie, and the actress who plays her does this phenomenal job of conveying how, in Chris's mind, she's the victim. There's no cartoonish ranting or villainous monologuing, but rather a genuine outrage at a situation that she truly believes is unjust.

The actress and the movie both understand that in Chris's mind, she is entitled to torment Carrie - that her tormenting Carrie isn't just enjoyable, but a right that she has, a just and good thing for her to do because it the world is structured for her to do so, and that denying her that right is an injustice. The warped logic of the bully isn't "Haha I love being mean and evil," but rather, "When I hurt people, they deserve it and I deserve to enjoy doing it, because that is good and just."

And I think that's important because, like, we all have our Chris Hargensen moments. Every one of us has had a time where we felt entitled to be cruel, and recognizing that is important to being a better person. You can't let yourself fall into the trap of believing that your cruelty is always justified, or else Carrie is going to throw your car into a brick wall with you inside it.

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