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ai does not belong in creative spaces. period.

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In regards of the Trump government scraping all trans inclusion in its queer information portion of its websites I have made this thing. Spread the word. Don't let them pretend we never existed.

P.S: Don't like! Reblog! <3

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writing advice for characters with a missing eye: dear God does losing an eyes function fuck up your neck. Ever since mine crapped out I've been slowly and unconsciously shifting towards holding my head at an angle to put the good eye closer to the center. and human necks. are not meant to accommodate that sorta thing.

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okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the "personal life" part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you'll either find a major tragedy he didn't recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she's not there anymore.

I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he's done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.

so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn't work in history, or, women aren't auteurs, or, there just aren't as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.

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Hi, this is a big post about my new TTRPG, Defy the Gods, which I’m Kickstarting soon. It’s a queer sword & sorcery adventure-romance set in fantasy ancient Mesopotamia. I was inspired by Conan, Clash of the Titans (1981!) and Princess Mononoke. (I've also got a BlueSky megathread going about it.)

Sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter launches!

Art by Thalie Shelen! @thalieshelen

(Btw hi I'm Chris, a queer, trans game designer in Columbus, Ohio. This will be my second published game. The first was a furry pack of nonsense called Raccoon Sky Pirates.)

Defy the Gods is sword & sorcery as a story game. My favorite PbtA games emulate specific stories and lead you to resonant emotional moments like you find in those stories. Here, I used PbtA to emulate sword & sorcery, with an emphasis on the romantic moments—but also plenty of metal 🤘. You use the flirtation mechanics (taken from Thirsty Sword Lesbians) to tempt, support, or thwart others. But then, you can roll too high (taken from Apocalypse Keys), where you get more than you bargained for. Like Conan running out of the Tower of the Elephant while it crumbles around him.

Also like Conan, you have a glorious destiny, but in this case it ain’t good. Rising to your most powerful self makes you monstrous, heralding your character’s end as a hero and their beginning as an NPC antagonist.

It’s a queer game. You can fall in love with anyone, or make them fall in love with you. But because the game is also about power, the gods and tyrants wait to stomp on you if your enticement falls flat. Like if you flirt with someone in the wrong neighborhood. Every character has their own arc, and one of the things I had the most fun with was making those feel like queer problems as well as ancient-world sword & sorcery problems.

Play a fierce Sword, chaos-loving Sorcerer, fugitive Revenant, mischievous Sailor, immortal-sworn Vessel, or wild-raised Wolfling. (All character portraits by Thalie Shelen @thalieshelen)

The Sword is big-hearted and violent. You have a move that lets you kill any human-sized mortal NPC within arm’s reach, without rolling, if you’re not already in combat. This always causes more problems than it solves.

While most players roll just 2d6 & add their stat, the Sorcerer casts spells by rolling a lot of dice & looking for patterns in them. If you can’t find any patterns, your sorcery runs amok. This chaos is kind of lovely. For instance, you're always changing your body—sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. But always gorgeous.

The Revenant is like Inanna, or if Eurydice made it out. They escaped the land of the dead. They aren’t who they were in their past life, nor who they were as a shade. They're still figuring out who they are now. Demons pursue them to claw them back to the Underworld.

The Sailor can call on a cast of past friends and lovers for help. They always have a plan, and an eye for the exit. One of their moves lets you fill in the map of the otherwise unknown world.

The Vessel is in love with a minor god. They channel their patron’s power by wounding themself, but their patron can also soothe their pain.

The Wolfling was raised by animals in the Wilds and is curious about the humans, but they belong in neither world. They're definitely the part most directly inspired by Princess Mononoke.

The World Forces are the antagonist. You build them at the table, in quick rounds of pick lists. They are:

The Pantheon: gods, goddesses, and demons. They make the rules, but maybe you can break them.

The City: tyrants, the wealthy, and others with the gods' blessing. They push you to the margins, but you can fight to be seen.

The Wilds: gigantic creatures and their trackless wilderness home. It's place of danger and new rules, but you'll probably break them.

The Shadow of Atlantis: long-gone elders. They dared to scorn the gods, and the Pantheon destroyed them for it, but through you they may live again.

Death: a hungry, totalitarian force. Its underground domain is the end for all mortals and the mockery of hope. But maybe you can return.

Art by Shan Bennion! @anonbeadraws

This was an intensely personal project, but it was too big for me to do by myself. Here are all the people who helped make it a reality:

Avery Alder: Design advisor

Basheer Ghouse: @basheerghouse Cultural consultant

Cat Tobin: Mentor https://www.pelgranepress.com

Cris Viana: Graphic designer & layout artist

Ezra Rose: Interior art

Kanesha Bryant: Interior art

Katrin Dirim: Interior art

Jaqueline Florencio: Cover art

Lyla Fujiwara: Developmental editor https://www.jarofeyes.com

Mary Verhoeven: Interior art

Omar Ramadan-Santiago: Cultural consultant

Rae Nedjadi: Developmental editor https://temporalhiccup.itch.io

Rue Dickey: @ilananight Copy editor

Sean D’souza: World-builder & writer https://linktr.ee/seandsouzax

Shan Bennion: Interior art

Thalie Shelen: Interior art

(art by Shan again! @anonbeadraws)

Thanks for reading! You can sign up at https://prelaunch.hecticelectron.com to know when the Kickstarter launches.

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jayce looking at wizard viktor one last time before getting sent back to his timeline can ANYONE HEAR ME

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"Moist groaned. It was the crack of seven and he was allergic to the concept of two seven o'clocks in one day."

~ Raising Steam (from Discworld) by Terry Pratchett

Ahhh, Terry Pratchett understood me on a deep spiritual level

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[very clearly enamored AND elated] He fucking bit me.

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Like every other person on that flight, he was desperate to live, which makes his final act so stunning. For at some moment in the water he must have realized that he would not live if he continued to hand over the rope and ring to others. He had to know it, no matter how gradual the effect of the cold. In his judgment he had no choice. When the helicopter took off with what was to be the last survivor, he watched everything in the world move away from him, and he deliberately let it happen. Yet there was something else about the man that kept our thoughts on him, and which keeps our thoughts on him still. He was there, in the essential, classic circumstance. Man in nature. The man in the water. For its part, nature cared nothing about the five passengers. Our man, on the other hand, cared totally. So the timeless battle commenced in the Potomac. For as long as that man could last, they went at each other, nature and man; the one making no distinctions of good and evil, acting on no principles, offering no lifelines; the other acting wholly on distinctions, principles and, one supposes, on faith. Since it was he who lost the fight, we ought to come again to the conclusion that people are powerless in the world. In reality, we believe the reverse. . . The odd thing is that we do not even really believe that the man in the water lost his fight. “Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature,” said Emerson. Exactly. So the man in the water had his own natural powers. He could not make ice storms, or freeze the water until it froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a power of nature too. The man in the water pitted himself against an implacable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with charity; and he held it to a standoff. He was the best we can do.

Written for Time Magazine in the wake of the crash of Air Florida Flight 90, 13 January, 1982. It eulogises the then-unknown Arland D. Williams, Jr., who sacrificed his life to save the other five survivors of the crash.

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"Among the many evils the 2024 election released into the world was a renewed round of discussions of the woes of young men, and how we’re being failed by liberalism, or feminism, or the Democratic Party. This narrative has been around for some time, but has been slowly gathering momentum. It runs something like:

Young men in America are lonely, struggling to find community and romantic partners. Many are permanently single. Whereas modern society affirms women, boys are looked down on, scolded, treated like dangerous predators post MeToo, their concerns arrogantly dismissed by feminists, a culturally dominant liberalism, and the Democratic Party alike. Liberals fail to provide young men guidance, role models, or a narrative that will give their lives meaning. As a result, men are moving to the right. The right signals that it values them; it wants a world that has a place for them in it. It gives them advice on how to pick up girls, or that they should clean their room. This may not have good consequences, but it is only to be expected given our (liberal/feminist/Democratic) treatment of them.

...And young men have definitely shifted right: Men under 45 have gone from supporting Biden by 8% in 2020, to supporting Trump by 8% in 2024. From a purely pragmatic point of view, the masculinity narrative’s proponents on the left (there are many) are correct to say we can’t simply eat a 16 point swing in such a big chunk of the electorate, especially if there’s no compensating gain among women. By and large, there wasn't.

But facts—even relatively incontrovertible empirical facts—don’t interpret themselves. We have to interpret facts, and build stories around them. I do not think the masculinity narrative is a good one. I do not think it interprets the above facts well. I do not think the implicit values it draws on are good ones. I do not think it helps us work out what to do going forward. 

What did you say to make him hit you?

At its simplest, the masculinity narrative imagines young men reacting to a failure of liberal feminism to provide certain things for them and, as a result, turning to the right. This means the story frames liberals as having caused men’s rightward lurch. Implicitly then, we bear responsibility for its consequences. The onus is on us to talk them out of it and repair the harm. 

I have an intentionally ugly term I use for this moral sleight of hand: ‘What did you say to make him hit you?’ politics. Our (often implicit/subconscious) ways of thinking about moral responsibility are gendered and this is reflected in, and reinforced by, how we use language. A classic example is ‘Mary is a battered woman.’ Mary is the object of the sentence. Being beaten is presented as a property she has, not something done to her. The agent actually responsible (let’s call him John), is nowhere to be found in that framing. ‘John beats Mary’ invites us to ask why John does this. ‘Mary is a battered woman’ invites us to ask what Mary does that makes her so. And people do: women who are abused are often asked what they said to provoke it. Common advice is to avoid saying things that ‘set him off.’

We likewise perceive political ideologies and political parties in subconsciously gendered ways. In contemporary American discourse, liberalism is female-coded, conservatism male-coded. As a result, rivers of ink are spilled to frame liberals as possessing sole agency, and hence responsibility. There is a palpable aversion to saying voters who loudly proclaim the most extreme racism, sexism, threats of violence, or deranged conspiracy theories are doing anything wrong. They are just reacting. Reacting to alleged liberal disrespect, to alleged liberal cultural dominance, to some kid hundreds of miles away on a college campus using obtuse social justice terminology, to Democratic politicians getting their messaging a bit wrong, not ‘talking their language.’ We shouldn’t even be thinking about what is wrong with them—we should be asking what we did to provoke it. We should be careful, always so careful, not to ‘set them off.’ 

People who treat conservatives as without agency often defend doing so on the grounds that liberals are persuadable; the right isn’t. It makes sense to focus on people they can reach...Assuming the right is unpersuadable creates a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy in which we don’t even try. The masculinity narrative however assumes the right’s followers can be persuaded, if only liberals could find the right words...When you take off the ‘conservatives don’t have agency’ glasses, it becomes obvious the narrative has it exactly backwards: The modern right messaging ecosystem—the Republican Party, but also the manosphere, the anti-woke podcast bros, people who use the word ‘cuck’, meme pages of ‘women’s Ls’, the incels, get rich quick scammers, MGTOW, ‘how to be an alpha’ charlatans, pick up artists, and so on—is not responding to a crisis of masculinity. It is creating a crisis of masculinity. 

The problem

...To be a straight young man today is to stand under a Niagara of messaging telling you that women are promiscuous harlots, that they take glee in rejecting good men, that the problems of the world are a result of it being ‘feminised,’ that it (and women) are against you, that it has no place for you, and that to succeed you must be an alpha—unpleasant, angry, and unconnected. To an extent it was ever thus—we’ve always raised our children in gendered narratives—but the hatred and resentment of women in today's online world is of a totally different intensity and saturation than a generation ago. Most young men of course are not incel school shooters, but many are something adjacent to that. Many, many more have picked new right views up through scrolling or chatting. To some degree they’re not even aware of their influence, but the saturation is so great it's gotten into the back of their minds. 

All of this is making it harder for men to form friendships (of either gender), to succeed in the world, and—as we are continually informed—to have sex and form relationships with women. Since liberals are allegedly ceding the ground of relationship and dating advice to the right, I’ll offer my own advice to young men: Don’t be a conservative. That’s it. Never mind the morality or philosophy of it, there are far more liberal young women than conservative ones, and they are increasingly unwilling to date across ideological lines. For all the excuses that have been offered for men turning to conservatism because they’re lonely, becoming a conservative is probably the single worst thing you can do for your romantic life. 

This isn’t ‘liberal intolerance,’ but a sensible, practical, and defensible line for women to draw. Modern conservatism of the sort that attracts young men is premised on being bitterly angry at women. It is quite rational for women themselves to conclude that men holding these beliefs will be less capable of stable, loving relationships. Surveys show ‘manosphere beliefs’ specifically are a dating deal breaker for an overwhelming majority of women. Further, most young liberal women have LGBT friends and family. It's perfectly sensible to not want to risk a social interaction between Black, gay, or trans family members and a right-wing partner who's been trained to mock and antagonise them. 

Dating and its discontents

Am I saying there’s no problem with modern dating, apart from how the right is training men? Well, no society anywhere at any time in history has achieved frictionless romance and harmonious relationships for all. We’re in something of a technological transition moment, with dating apps increasingly the main forum... And dating apps aren't the only game in town: A cursory scroll through a ‘What’s on’ in any major town will reveal plenty of singles meetups, speed dating nights, and the like...Again, we find the modern right is deeply hostile to its followers doing this: The entire focus is on ‘manly’ pursuits; on creating a fierce hostility to anything female-coded; on relentlessly defending male-coded hobbies (like video games) against perceived female encroachment. This ethos is objectionable on its own, but it also sabotages its followers' romantic prospects. The thing about a ‘no girls allowed’ treehouse is it doesn’t have any girls in it...

Ultimately, dating isn’t this awful, impossible thing. The main correlation between young men not having sex or relationships is not having asked someone out in the last year. The defining attribute of people who are single for long periods is that they stopped trying—something the right urges them to do, not the left. They want men to feel angry and alienated because that keeps them in their political camp. 

Feminism and its frustrations

The right also impresses on its followers that feminists hate men as a class and have remade the world to disadvantage us. I’ve heard many young men voice some version of the following (sometimes with an eye roll, sometimes jokingly, sometimes with real anger): Feminism means competing for jobs and promotions on equal terms, but men still have to pay for dinner. Conversely, I’ve heard many older women complain that feminism ‘screwed them over’—they had to work a full time career, but still ended up doing all the childcare. [edit from me, sprinkledsalt: feminism addresses that, too, you morons]

In both cases, the ‘trick’ is fairly simple: We live in a society that doesn’t have one coherent set of gender norms but a ‘mixed regime’ of two (it’s a bit more complicated than that, but we can simplify to two): A ‘traditional’ set of norms that ascribes different roles and responsibilities to men and women, and an ‘egalitarian’ one that stresses equality. Sometimes one set of norms is operative, sometimes the other. 

This incoherence is frustrating. If you’re not doing well, it feels like you’re getting the ‘worst of both worlds’: as a man you don’t gain any advantage when it comes to promotions (egalitarian), but you still pay for dates (traditional). Or, as a woman, you’re expected to work as long and hard as a man (egalitarian) and also do most of the childcare (traditional)...The right ascribes all the discontents of this mixed regime to feminism. The right also tells men that the mixed regime privileges women. It doesn’t. While men can get the worst of both worlds under it, the total sum of inequities it imposes on women is still greater. (The total time cost of women doing more childcare is greater than the money cost of us paying for dinner more.) It is this largely fictional view of feminism that young men are voting against.

And that is the most charitable account of anti-feminist anger. At best, it is about men being tricked into thinking the world is against them, that the pendulum has swung too far the other way and now women are unfairly advantaged. Much of the time however the core impulse is anger at losing social inferiors, fury at women for not ‘knowing their place.’ 

Are you sure you didn’t say something to make him hit you?

The right is targeting young men and boys with a propaganda campaign the scope and scale of which feels like one of the more intentionally exaggerated passages from Orwell. And yet, people who know all this still can’t seem to let go of the instinct that we—Democrats, liberals, feminists, the left—must have done something to drive them to it...

Feminists get portrayed as ideologically inflexible, as dismissive of contrary opinions. ‘Feminism is a religion’ was a common refrain in the old days of the male-dominated New Atheist movement...Feminism as an ideology has been unusually willing to grapple with its own history with regards to racism and trans inclusion, as well as to reconsider and discuss key commitments, like its position on sex work and pornography. 

That the Democratic Party is saying something bad enough to provoke sweet young men into fascistic hatred is an even stranger claim. The party's messaging is almost defined by its inoffensiveness. It can be a bit bland—vacuous even—but when has any Democratic leader ever said anything as offensive about men as what Trump and Vance regularly say about women?  We’re told we need to offer young men meaning. I’ll be the first to say I think modern liberalism and socialism alike have failed to provide an inspiring vision of the future, but that’s not the same thing. If Harris had better articulated her vision for the country, that wouldn’t make your existence complete. Ideologies can’t do that...

Telling people their lives are meaningless unless they join your group is a cult recruitment tactic (which makes sense, fascism has many similarities to a cult)…We’re told we need to offer young men more role models, people who are both credibly masculine and embody our values. But wasn’t that Tim Walz? He was selected overtly for that purpose. The response from the poor, lonely young men we liberals have apparently been failing? Pure, visceral anger. 'Tampon Tim' was arguably subject to more gender-based attacks than even Harris precisely because he didn’t validate their misogyny. The problem isn’t the left’s role models, it's the right’s. Men have been reached first by the influencers and politicians they hold up as the masculine ideal: people who, almost to a man, have been credibly accused of rape or assault, who have failed to maintain their long-term relationships, who, in the final resort, are clearly not happy, or even capable of happiness. In the internet age, they are aggressively importing the beliefs that so damaged their own lives directly into the minds of young boys who ordinarily might be kept safe, or at least distanced, from them.

We’re told we need to offer dating advice or assistance. Sure, that seems like a bit of a gap in the market. Apparently, there have been efforts to fill it in the form of socialist singles nights and speed dating. The result? Not enough straight men showed up. And this failure was mocked by the poor, lonely young men we’re told we’re failing. They weren't any more willing to accept non-misogynistic dating help than they were non-misogynistic role models. I strongly suspect the same will be true of non-misogynistic life advice.

Men aren’t moving away from the left because of something we said. They’re moving away because they’re getting taken in by the right’s propaganda. This is the thing that people who push any ‘what did you say to make him hit you?’ narrative just don't get: People aren’t listening to the messaging of individual liberal politicians anymore. If they think Democrats said X, it's not because they said X, it’s because the media they consume told them they said X. There are no ‘magic words’ that will reach the white working class, or men. We can say everything the appeasers want us to say—a lot of the time we already have—and it wont make the slightest bit of difference. 

What is to be done?

...My main concern with the masculinity narrative is it urges a mindset that is actively harmful: We’re asked to respect young men, to empathise with them, to see if from their point of view. Throughout the entire Trump era we’ve had this omnipresent theory that Trump voters could be swayed from voting Trump if liberals learnt more about them and it's never made the slightest bit of sense. The demand is that I put my values, my facts, to one side. I don’t know how to say this more basically: validating men’s false feelings of persecution will not reduce the power of ideologies who feed on those feelings. It will make them stronger. 

This feels like one more shakedown. When it became clear that liberal democracy would be on the ballot in a series of disturbingly close elections, multiple groups rushed, not to support those of us who wanted to save it, but to see what they could leverage from our fear. ‘If you want Democrats to win in 2016 you’d better make Bernie the nominee or we’ll sit it out,’ ‘I don’t like they/them pronouns, knock that off or I’ll elect people who will kill you all,’ ‘Democrats should stop talking about race altogether if they want my vote.’ 

...What is to be done? You already know what we can do. We can be still more rigorous about what our boys are exposed to online, we can teach them online literacy, and teach them early...Many on the left pushing the masculinity narrative frame it as being about other men, but clearly buy into misogyny themselves on some level. (Socialist discomfort with anti-Trump liberalism—the derision of ‘wine-moms,’ ‘girlbosses,’ liberals ‘at brunch,’ etc—is clearly misogynistic.) 

We liberals can more aggressively contest the new digital media landscape...Finally, when we see men around us drifting into this worldview, we do need to try and talk them out of it. In times like these, there is a duty to persuade. Not by silencing ourselves to validate false and pernicious grievances, but by directly and respectfully telling people they are wrong...

We are where we are because we’ve been pretending we’re somewhere else. Pretending that fascists aren’t serious about what they’re telling us they plan to do. Pretending that people don’t really buy into their ideas, that it's actually about something else. Pretending, most perniciously of all, that liberals said something to provoke them, that we can stay safe by staying quiet, by not setting them off. At this point it may be too late. I don’t know. But let’s at least stop pretending. I promise you; you’ll feel better for facing the world as it really is." 

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there's probably a better way of wording the last part but like come on it doesn't matter if we're all the same to fascists

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A recommendation to all the audio drama creators out there:

Always listen to your show in the way your audience is listening to your show.

We tend to edit using nice gear. Good over-the-ear headphones. Quiet rooms. But most of your audience will not listen to your show this way. A recent poll indicated that almost 20% of AD listeners listen with a *single* earbud in. Almost 10% listen on their phone speaker. That's a significant part of your audience that is listening in a mono environment or with tiny speakers (or both). You also likely have listeners with hearing loss in one of their ears*, and you want your show to be accessible to them. Before you release your show, make sure to listen to it at least once on a single earbud in a noisy environment. Is your show still legible this way? Can a listener still enjoy it like this, and understand all the plot beats and character moments? If not, it's a good idea to spend some more time on your edit so that they can. (And it's still definitely OK to make your show sound *great* for those who have a great audio setup! Just make sure the show still works for those who don't.) *You likely also have audience members with hearing loss in *both* ears. Transcripts are important. I'm behind in getting them posted for Metropolis, I need to get on that. (Episode 3 of Metropolis is live, BTW. Just waiting for Spotify to pick up the RSS feed before the big announcement. 😅)

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Right now, the world of trans and nonbinary folks feels small—too small to push back against a system designed to isolate and conquer. The far-right’s divide-and-conquer strategy has long splintered marginalized groups, pulling friends and allies apart to weaken us. But this moment demands a reframing of the fight: this battle is not men versus women, or even male versus female. That war is last century’s story. The real gender binary today draws different battle lines—and opens the door to powerful resistance. The real gender binary pits “real manly men”—cisgender, heterosexual, white, Christian nationalist men—against everyone else. These men hoard power, demand deference, and gatekeep leadership while ensuring those outside their ranks fight over scraps. They dictate who gets to succeed, who gets to speak, and who gets to exist safely. Their patriarchy isn’t just about controlling women; it’s a more generalized sexism. It’s about controlling anyone who doesn’t conform to, or bow down to their idealized masculinity. They build walls, expel interlopers, and mock challengers from a pedestal of entitlement and fear. If this is the real gender binary—real manly men versus everyone else—then suddenly, trans and nonbinary people aren’t so small. We’re part of a massive coalition of “everyone else.” And within that realization lies the seed of resistance.

— The Real Gender Binary And the Path to Resistance by Kate Bornstein on substack

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i wrote about how every subsequent Hunger Games book feels like Suzanne Collins grabbing a certain section of readers by the scruff of the neck and shaking them to finally get the fucking point 

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🧬 heart of the machine 🧬

patreon | bluesky | instagram

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had a dream last night that sappho 16 became a meme. everyone on the internet was posting images that contained the text "some say cavalry, some say infantry, some say ships are the most beautiful thing, but I say it's" and then just like, the worst stock photo image the poster could find of whatever they loved (the ocean, a loaf of bread, etc.)