btbluetangerine

[btbluetangerine]

Decided to do a painting study and thought to myself hey why dont I draw Alfie too! I rendered and rendered, decided to add jewelry and then things got a bit out of hand… I imagine Neige dressed him up.

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Not Quite Dead is a podcast

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Firefox Extensions I like

UBlock Origin - Adblocking

Chameleon - IP and random agent spoofing

TrackMeNot - Floods web search engines with false queries at a settable interval

Location Guard - Obfuscates precise location

Privacy Possum - Blocks and falsifies information collected by tracking

ClearURLs - Removes tracking elements from URLs

LocalCDN - Prevents third party requests

CanvassBlocker - Prevents fingerprinting

UnPaywall - Circumvents paywalls for research papers

Sci-Hub - Adds a Sci-Hub link to academic papers

ChromeMask - Disguises Firefox as Chrome for Chrome-only websites

FlagFox - Adds a flag next to the URL indicating its origin

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That one time Anne Rice dressed them like gay sailors for Halloween in QOTD was really cute...I'm not sure what it did for the plot but I enjoyed it

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[btbluetangerine]

in case it was a legit question bc I think it's fun!! he's blonde for the same reason that Lestat and Alucard are blonde, which is the same reason that Dorian Gray is blonde, which has a lot to do with classical depictions of cherubs which have a lot to do with why Lucifer is often also blonde, and also a lot to do with this painting (The Evening Angel by Cabanel)

[btbluetangerine]

Not Quite Dead is a podcast

[btbluetangerine]

Leonid Pasternak  (Ukrainian, 1862–1945) - The Torments of Creative Work

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My new favorite tag:

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BATTLE STATIONS! BATTLE STATIONS! The trash truck is here! We are on high alert!

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Not Quite Dead is so close to being able to have 14 episodes for its fourth and final season!!! It has less than 20 hours left. I would like to bribe you to listen and support the show with a little art. Its an amazing show about lovable characters making questionable choices but still caring a lot about eachother and other things. Pls consider checking it out so we can have more gay vampires going thru stuff

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Sketching sketching

[btbluetangerine]

Btw much as I love to make fun of twitter and reddit's business decisions, I have 0% trust in tumblr's management to not go a similar route so this is your gentle reminder that you should regularly go to your blog settings to export your blog. That's a fancy way of saying you can download a backup of your blog so if everything goes down you'll still have a backup of your posts & convos.

[btbluetangerine]

Malevolent Big Bang 2025!

[ID: A banner with the words "Malevolent Big Bang 2025" in the middle in a black and yellow serif font. Surrounding the words are orange and yellow tentacles with spiral patterns atop a black background with spiral patterns. /End ID]

Hello all! The mod team would like to formally announce that we will be hosting the Malevolent Big Bang again this year, 2025! We're excited to see what everyone creates this year, both new faces and old 💜

Here are the dates you should mark down if you are interested in participating in this event as a writer, beta, artist, or pinch hitter!

Writer signups open on May 1

Beta signups open on May 1

Artist signups open on July 14

Pinch hitter signups open on July 14

Keep an eye on this space as we get closer to those dates for more information, and make sure to check our FAQ and rules to see if this event would work for you! Note for returning members that there have been a few changes to our rules this year, including minimum word count for writers and clarifying expectations for artists, so please make sure to read them over.

If you have any questions, feel free to send us an ask and we'll be happy to answer them!

[btbluetangerine]

It's Trans Day of Visibility!

Today I want to talk about being overlooked, which feels like an odd thing to discuss on TDOV, but there we are.

I used to talk a lot about gender things, and I don't anymore. One reason is that it's just not as present a discomfort in my life, now: I went on T and I got top surgery and these things meant that I didn't feel that grating dissimilitude between who I am and what I appeared to be to other people the way I used to.

But it's not that I don't feel it at all. It's that the way it shows up is different. A disconnect between myself as I am and how I'm addressed by the world. Sure, some people misgender me still, but it's usually relatives wilfully resisting respecting my identity. By and large, strangers assume he/him pronouns for me, even if sometimes look at me with question marks in their eyes for a moment.

I'm a writer and I write queer stories. Those stories often have trans and nonbinary people in them because they are a part of the world, and so of course they're there. I also have the privilege of being surrounded by mostly queer people, so when I'm imagining any given group of friends or colleagues I assume they're about. 70% queer people? I think my data is skewed. Oh well!

The thing is, I'm not particularly interested in writing coming out stories or stories about the process of transition, at least not explicitly. Whilst arguably both Not Quite Dead and Spirit Box Radio handle these things thematically, neither is interested in the explicit process as literally experienced. Part of that is that I think queerness, transness, LGBTQness, it's simultaneously highly individualised and extremely broadly relateable. Whilst most people don't experience an extra puberty in their twenties or thirties, that feeling of learning who you are and being brave enough to become it is something that I think most people can find something powerful to relate to in. Especially when stories lean on the consequences of that decision of radical self-acceptance, which often leads to losing people and muddling up other things in your life, and is rarely as straightforward and affirming as it might seem.

Sometimes it feels like my transness swallows up other parts of my identity. Sometimes that happens on a personal level, where I feel like I can't do things or be a certain way simply by virtue of being trans. I felt this for a long time about dressing and moving in feminine ways. I felt they were not allowed for me in the way they are allowed for cis men. But more often its others' perception of me which is most impacted by transness' distorting lens. People make assumptions about the kinds of work I make, the kinds of characters I will write, because of my transness. They overlook my queerness and my stated attractions because of it, switching the labels I might use for myself into ones they deem more appropriate on the basis of my identity. They'll assume that because I have had access to gender affirming care, I come from a background of middle class privilege and stability, and respond with surprise when I explain I grew up mostly on a council estate in a bedroom with a mould problem so bad the back of my wardrobe was physically damp to the touch.

In my private experience of my transness, it's something which is mostly about other people and the barriers between what they see and assume about me, and who I am. It's often a positive thing; for example, it's part of the reason I am able to connect with and articulate my emotions the way some of my cis peers who are men struggle to without huge amounts of hard work.

To other people, though, it seems like it can get in the way of them understanding other things about who I am, parts of me which from my perspective are far more important and far more integral for understanding and grasping my identity and experience of the world. It means there are expectations on me that don't exist for my cis peers. At it's worst, it can lead people to want to distance themselves from me, whether out of conscious or unconscious bigotry or a fear of being seen as 'too political'. I've been passed over for jobs; awards; opportunities.

Most of these discriminations are subtle. They're usually not conscious. This doesn't make them better than out-and-out, mask-off bigotry, but it can make things more difficult to deal with and express to others who are not used to experiencing these kinds of things. It can be harder to criticise the people themselves for their behaviour, too. They're not doing it on purpose and it's not their intent so the response can often be vicious, defensive, and sometimes even violent, in response to a disconnect between how they perceive their actions and what you're telling them the consequences of their behaviour can be.

It is an extraordinarily difficult thing to suspect that your work might be able to reach more people, that your career might've progressed more smoothly, that you could be in a more safe and stable position, were it not for this one, unchangeable part of who you are. I am fiercely proud of who I am, but that doesn't change that it's made my life more difficult. These kinds of prejudices stack, too. My working class accent; my Jewish heritage; all of these things swirl into a pot of reasons that other people use to overlook me and my work. This things would be massively amplified if I were not from an English-speaking country; if I had not had access to higher education; and especially if I were not white.

It is extraordinarily important for Trans Day of Visibility to exist, because we are so often overlooked to the point of invisibility. It's not just about normalising the idea for cis people; it's not just about pointing out there are trans people everywhere. Those things are hugely important too! It's also about us. It's about the impact that lack of knowledge has on us, those in the closet and out, those stealth and those public about their identities, passing or not. All of us. This impacts *all of us*.

[btbluetangerine]

starting a collection