lunaeverywhere

[lunaeverywhere]

Everyone should be nice to me forever, I'm not supposed to be on the mortal plane, I cant always control what I do or think or say, I change in ways I dont want, cant do things I do want, the ways of this existance to not come to me as naturally, so please just dont hold it against me

please its not my fault im trying so hard all the time i know it doesnt look like it but this really is me giving it my all im trying to be better and this is the best i can do

[lunaeverywhere]

The problem is I always want to dm my mutuals some shit like "I consider you an ally to my cause"

[lunaeverywhere]

A divinity who's stuck in the mortal plane for too long will begin to rot. The rot is invisible, and usually not noticeable by the divinity until it is too late. But nonetheless, it starts from the inside and consumes them. Often, they are the last to know Others can sense it. The rot of the divine is the worst possible stench that the nose cannot actively discern. But mortals will know something is wrong, whether or not they recognize the actual divinity as divine. And it is not the sort of wrongness that evokes concern. Rather, it evokes disgust. It evokes rejection. The divine will often suspect that something is wrong by the way they are treated, even if they cannot identify why. They may react with despair, or anger, or just confusion. But that only accelerates the rot. By the time they know they are rotting, they have been thoroughly rejected, and the physical symptoms are far too much for them to handle by themselves. A divinity in rot is of no use to anyone. No use to followers. No use to themselves. So what is left for them, but to rot away?

[lunaeverywhere]

shoutout to the woman from my high school martial arts class who liked to get me in joint locks and then joke about how I was easy to catch. you cannot comprehend how psychosexually formative that was for me

[lunaeverywhere]

If a deity requires human sacrifice, ask why. Not what ends they plan on using that sacrifice for. Usually the answer is simple: manifest. Ask why the divinity needs a sacrifice so great to exist. Ask what in this world is so inimical to them that they need to drain a human life of all that it is just to have form. What is stopping them from achieving their full visiage? That is what must truly be sacrificed.

[lunaeverywhere]

Shoutout to angels who aren't entirely pure.

Shoutout to angels who are loud and talkative.

Shoutout to angels who are hypersexual.

Shoutout to angels who aren't religious but simply are an angel.

Shoutout to angels who want to devote themselves, shoutout to angels who dont.

Shoutout to angels who find it hard to love.

Shoutout to angels who exist.

[lunaeverywhere]

this kind of shit--"parent's rights" to abuse and control their children--is why youth liberation and trans liberation are and must be intertwined movements [x]

[lunaeverywhere]

Anyway ultimately justifications based on "well that's how it is in the setting" about stuff in any media will ring hollow if the criticism is approaching it not from the point of view of interrogating it through in-setting logic but from the point of view of an actual human being making a conscious decision to make it like that.

Like yeah we can sit and jerk off all day about how killing cultists is justified through in-game logic because they're literally trying to make Hell real, but when viewed with even a modicum of media criticism you can maybe start to wonder why cultists are such a common villain in medieval fantasy gaming.

Similarly, yeah, sure, in-universe orcs may have been created by an evil god and that's why they're predisposed to evil, but given the already racialized portrayal of orcs in the source material they come from plus the game further adding the reading that they're actually tribal savages, it suddenly puts into context some of the Fucked Up stuff that the author of the game said later in his life.

Anyway, none of this is to say that if you're not constantly thinking about this or flagellating yourself while engaging with the game you're somehow a bad human being, but like the stuff in fiction didn't just emerge out of The Void but came to as a result of someone's decision to dedicate it into the writing. Some people just enjoy thinking about this stuff in our free time, like I certainly do, and speaking for myself interrogating media like this rarely affects my ability to enjoy or engage with said media.

[lunaeverywhere]

People absolutely drew the wrong conclusions from FATAL. The lesson from FATAL should have been "the TTRPG hobby fosters a lot of misogyny and racism" and FATAL should have been seen as the most naked display of that. Instead what people took away from it was "if a TTRPG even mentions sexual subject matter the only reason for it is that the author is a sex pervert." Which is actually an extremely shallow way to look at TTRPGs as a medium and actually does a huge disservice to people who aren't afraid of touching on sexual subject matters.

But even if the point of the sexual subject matter in a game was simply there to titillate it would still be markedly different from the way FATAL touched on it. You can, in fact, be critical of the way FATAL was largely just concerned with sex as an extension of violence without becoming a prude about it.

Also, even if the whole point was for the author to be a sex pervert about it, who cares.

[lunaeverywhere]

okay

[lunaeverywhere]

the idea that jerking off every day makes you a depraved sex addict is so nuts the current obsession with declaring anything a sex/porn addiction is so fucking stupid why am i seeing other queer people and people on the left capitulating to this regressive shamey bullshit. experiencing pleasure is not sinful or overindulgent. we cannot be going around telling people they're not allowed to be horny and not allowed to have whatever amount of sex they want to have.

[lunaeverywhere]

on the tumblr doing numblrs

[lunaeverywhere]

The Fulfilled Goddess

No one actually goes there, but there's a temple hidden on a mountain near this town. It had a different name, once long ago, but now they call it the Temple of the Fulfilled Goddess. No one worships her, anymore, and that's exactly what she wanted.

She was one popularly worshiped, with dozens of followers attending to her. But she was never meant to be here. For some reason, one even she was unable to articulate, the divine realms were closed to her. So, while most divinities would visit the earth and retreat to their demesne to recover, she had to stay among mortals.

This took a toll on her. It was manageable, at first. Her worshipers were able to tend to her, and through that care she could perform miracles. She reached such heights, even in her state. But over time, the mortal realm took more and more from her. She grew lethargic and distant. Her care needs grew and her ability to reciprocate withered.

With no miracles, worship dried up. Some stayed by her side longer than others. But all left eventually. In her empty temple, with no one to care for her, she faded away. Those of us who remember when her halls were full hope that she went back to her true realm, but her final fate is unknown.

This sounds like a sad story. But in her final days, she left a note. It started with her gratitude for all who served, for all the care they gave, and for making her stay in the realm that ate away at her as comfortable as they could. It cast no blame on them for leaving. In fact, it said, she was happy now. It meant she wasn't leaving anything undone as she left. She was Fulfilled.

[lunaeverywhere]

I have had a dream about this post and while it didn't add anything useful the cards were the size of those Lindt chocolate bars, like these guys:

had a fascinating dream last night where there was a new, virally popular trading card game - it was called MOUNTAIN (stylised in all caps) and the whole gimmick was that you couldn’t buy boosters or anything - you had to find them?

nowhere sold MOUNTAIN - I mean, I expect players did, once cards were in their hands.

but acquiring cards meant noticing a box lying around, and just….nabbing it? they’d be in weird places - in a skip, wedged high up in a fence, nestled in the branches of a tree? nobody ever saw who left them there, and there was a lot of debate about how MOUNTAIN boxes were sometimes hard to acquire without risking one’s physical safety - but then, that was also bragging rights. especially as harder-to-reach boxes seemed to contain more elusive and sought after cards…

no, I don’t remember anything about the actual gameplay, we never played any MOUNTAIN. alas. I know there were “frame cards” that were literally transparent but for a fancy metallic or holographic border, which I guess upgraded the card they were applied to? frames were super rare, my coworker literally ran up to me in the pub purely to show off the frame he’d just found

dream brain gimme the deets on MOUNTAIN’s actual mechanics, I’m invested in this controversial unpurchasable scavenger hunt game

[lunaeverywhere]

it/its pronouns are the coolest thing ever btw and you should give anybody who uses them $1,700 immediately

[lunaeverywhere]

More importantly, "water is wet" studies give us ways to explain impacts of things in quantifiable terms. Yes, this is common knowledge among trans people, but this tells us how heavily it helps, and gives us something official to point to when challenged. Also, places with standards of evidence can now use this for their stances and information.

Two years after being tasked with commissioning a review of medical evidence surrounding gender-affirming care for trans youth, Utah’s own state health department has concluded that trans healthcare bans “cannot be justified.” The Republicans who commissioned the study aren’t too happy about it.

Back in 2023, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a bill that placed an indefinite “moratorium” on doctors prescribing gender-affirming care like hormone therapy and puberty blockers to trans youth. That bill ordered the Utah Department of Health and Human Services to compile their report in order to produce recommendations for the state government on whether or not to lift the moratorium.

This week, the department delivered their long-awaited, over 1,000-page report — which is dated August 6, 2024 — to Utah lawmakers. The report’s authors found that “the consensus of the evidence supports that the treatments are effective in terms of mental health, psychosocial outcomes, and the induction of body changes consistent with the affirmed gender in pediatric GD [gender dysphoria] patients.”

The authors added that “the evidence also supports that the treatments are safe in terms of changes to bone density, cardiovascular risk factors, metabolic changes, and cancer.” Trans youth who had received gender-affirming care were within the bounds of normal, non-pathological ranges for these conditions.

y’all this is huge. please don’t “water is wet” all over it! I understand that we all already know this… The point is that the world doesn’t know or care or believe and so these studies really fucking matter!

[lunaeverywhere]

Let's not forget that it isn't an equal dynamic, either. Teachers can asign less homework or focus on methods of teaching which arent so easily cheated with AI. Meanwhile, a child has no control over what sorts of tests or tasks they recieve, and all the classes do so largely independent of each other. Your math class assigning 30-60 minutes worth of work doesn't care that your english class asked for two chapters, or that your history class gave you a five page questionaire. And in high school, you can't even take a smaller courseload, you have X slots and maybe you can make one of them a study hall but otherwise you have to fill all those slots.

A couple of years ago we were all terribly concerned about the fact that a lot of American high schools are assigning such crushing homework loads that some kids literally don't have enough time to eat or sleep (and all this in spite of the fact that there's no good evidence that assigning homework actually improves academic outcomes at the pre-university level), but now we're hearing stories about those same schools struggling to stop kids from using ChatGPT to write their essays and suddenly It's The Children Who Are Wrong. Like, do you think maybe there's a certain level of cause and effect in play here?