emberfaye

[emberfaye]

Is this QL couple into that kink?

[emberfaye]

If you need a disability aid, use it. They exist to make life easier, to help people. And there’s no set amount of ‘disabled’ you have to be to use it. Even if you don’t need it all the time, you can still use it. Even if you can still manage without it.

I don’t care if your hip pain comes and goes, and you can just grit your teeth and bear it without any complaint. Get yourself a goddamn cane. Sit down when you need to. Make a big fuss and protest with the rest of us when there isn’t proper accommodation.

Nobody should have to just grit their teeth and bear it. Everyone should have an inherent right to live as comfortably as possible and be accommodated.

[emberfaye]

One of the best letters I’ve ever seen just popped up on my Facebook memories. Still makes me laugh.

[emberfaye]

#Repost @mattxiv

may the universe reward their bravery

first image by @soulwork6

[emberfaye]

In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

[emberfaye]

The first of my collabs from the @ofmd-reverse-bang is live! An Ed/Stede AU based on Alfred Noyes' poem The Highwayman, written by IZZYTRANSS~

Go read the beautiful fic 'ribbon of moonlight' here

[emberfaye]

The first of my collabs from the @ofmd-reverse-bang is live! An Ed/Stede AU based on Alfred Noyes' poem The Highwayman, written by IZZYTRANSS~

Go read the beautiful fic 'ribbon of moonlight' here

[emberfaye]

[emberfaye]

[emberfaye]

Heaven help us now, come crashing down

And hear the sound as you’re falling down

[emberfaye]

Me upon waking this morning: why are my legs hurting i didn't do anything yesterday

(Me upon actually having a moment of being awake: oh yeah)

Today I have cleaned both kids rooms, took kid for a hair cut, moved some furniture, cleaned the counters, went to store for cat food , got mom's medicines and delivered them to her, helped child with laundry plus am doing mine, and then cooked supper. Did dishes. Put my clothes away so basket is empty. And played dnd (kinda. I was knocked out for the fight so I was there).

I am tired but I think this was worth it.

[emberfaye]

If someone on the internet gives you unsolicited advice and then hounds you to explain *why* their solution won't work for you, they're signalling that they probably won't leave you alone until you've revealed potentially compromising information. They are functionally indistinct from someone trying to doxx you, and it's okay to treat them as such.

[emberfaye]

It's so important to remember that when it comes to developmental research, almost everything is confounded* with poverty (*hard to distinguish from). Breastfeeding leads to "better" children? Who has the time, energy, and family support to breastfeed? The middle and upper class (especially in the US which has no paid maternity leave, and guess where a lot of research comes from). So is it really breastfeeding or wealth? Self-control on the marshmallow test leads to better life outcomes? Nope, highly correlated with poverty. Less screen time is important for development? Guess who can pay for better daycare and take advantage of maternity leave? Guess who is stuck using a screen as a babysitter so their family can eat? You can't pick these factors apart; is it the sceentime or is it the thousands of small benefits a child picks up when their parent isn't barely keeping their head above water?

And anyone who replies to this, "Well then the poor shouldn't have children" I'll turn you into Soylent Green because, aside from that being eugenics and all the other reasons, guess what else is highly correlated with poverty? Access to birth control and factual sex education. The solution is to help people out of poverty

[emberfaye]

The notes are broken. This is what tumblr is all about apparently.

[emberfaye]

[emberfaye]

I know I'm far from the first person to say this, but one of my favourite things about K-Pop Demon Hunters is how, despite how close Rumi and Jinu grow and his role in Rumi understanding and accepting herself, he never becomes her everything. As much as his betrayal and eventual sacrifice hurt, Rumi never feared losing him.

No, instead, she's terrified of losing Zoey and Mira. To Rumi, they are the most important people in her life. Not "some" boy she just met and she happens to connect with, but her best friends who've been there for her since the very beginning.

It's just so refreshing and cathartic to find a film with romantic elements where friendship doesn't play second fiddle to romance, as it is frustratingly common in media for romantic relationships to eclipse platonic ones, especially when it comes to female friendships.

So the fact that Huntrix, and especially her friends, are portrayed as what matters most to Rumi, with that role never shifting to Jinu, just means the world to me.

We as a society really need to take the "sisters before misters" rule more seriously.

[emberfaye]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.