sunbeam-the-man

[sunbeam-the-man]

Happy pride month to my dad. When I came out as bi to him, this man googled what it ment, look at me and said "ohh. Yeah. You get that from me. You'd have far more siblings of I only shaged women." And went right back to his work emails.

[sunbeam-the-man]

🎉 Kenfetti Week 2025 Prompts 🎉

Day 1 - With a Twist

Take a tale, a genre, a popular trope, then twist it. Is a mafia boss the one getting kidnapped? A dream come true fairytale turning out to be a horror? Soulenemies instead of soulmates? Whatever you decide, write it with a twist!

Day 2 - Machinations

Today is a day of intrigue and machinations. Is it galactic politics, or courtroom drama? Spies and subterfuge, going undercover? Or will the intrigue be more personal, with manipulation, cults, or fake relationships? What are these two plotting? It’s up to you to decide.

Day 3 - Matched Souls

And they were soulmates! Red string of fate, first words, sharing dreams, sharing pain, soulmarks, countdown timers, the possibilities are endless. Do they know right away, or are they astounded to find out the truth months after meeting? Is this the best thing that ever happened or a cosmic tragedy? All that’s certain is one way or another they were made for each other.

Day 4 - Universes Combined

Put Jango and Obi-Wan into your favorite other worlds, will they be dragon riders? On an episode of game changer? Will they be DC superheros and villains, will Obi-Wan be a tinker fairy in Pixie Hollow? Or will they still explore space but now with Time Lords and Daleks? The only limit is your imagination!

Day 5 - Magic, Monsters, and Myths

What if Jedi actually were sorcerers? What if a Mandalorian’s armor was actually their scales as a dragon? Today it’s time for werewolves and vampires, mermaids and cryptids, gods and legends and things of myth. Anything you make for this day is sure to be fantastical!

Day 6 - Spinning Clocks

Adjust your clocks and get ready to fall back or spring forward! Whether they travel through time, get reincarnated, or just belong to a different era today is the day to mess with time. Obi-Wan could be a Jedi of the High Republic, or Jango could take Din’s place in The Mandalorian. Or perhaps they’re in our world navigating Edwardian high society. Whatever you choose set those clocks spinning!

Day 7 - Marriages Arranged and Otherwise

We are gathered here today to witness the union of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Jango Fett. Are they pleased to be getting married? Scared witless? Is the arrangement just how things are done? For personal gain? To stop a war? No matter why they’re saying ridurrok they’re doing it today.

We hope you all are as excited to create for these prompts as we are!

As a reminder all works for Kenfetti Week 2025 are due by the end of August 10th! Any works submitted after August 10th will be accepted or rejected at the discretion of the mods.

You can submit works to the collection by going to the collection page and either clicking the "Post to Collection" button on the upper right hand of the page or by opening a new work and typing kenfetti_week_2025 into the "Post to Collections" field under the Associations box. Please remember to tag submissions with the relevant day you're submitting for and the year separated by a hyphen like "Day 3- 2025" or "Day 5- 2025" so that we can reveal them on the proper days!

You can also join us on discord to gush about the prompts and all your ideas for stories and art! We’d be so glad to have you!

[sunbeam-the-man]

I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

[sunbeam-the-man]

On reflection, it makes no sense that the Mando'a word for "red" is derived from the word for "blood".

[sunbeam-the-man]

Also Commander Meouch called us all fuckfreaks and like. tbh. It is San Francisco. And it's Pride month. Sir. 👀

TWRP CONTINUES TO BE AMAZING!!

NSP were also there, and they're cool too!

I couldn't see shit, the venue was packed, but the music was excellent.

[sunbeam-the-man]

TWRP CONTINUES TO BE AMAZING!!

NSP were also there, and they're cool too!

I couldn't see shit, the venue was packed, but the music was excellent.

[sunbeam-the-man]

There is a forbidden type of magic out there. It isn’t forbidden because it’s inherently evil, or forces you to lose your humanity, or requires human sacrifices - it’s just forbidden because it’s annoying as heck to fight against.

[sunbeam-the-man]

You know that Ada Limón poem where she’s like “i can’t help it i love the way men love”? my dad recently confessed to me that he became a shoemaker because they buried my grandma shoeless

oh…………………………………

[sunbeam-the-man]

if he was still alive I know in my heart that Terry Pratchett would have done a bit about Igors and Igorinas doing gender confirmation surgery by now. going into a lab full of bubbling vials and picking out a penis from a tank the way you pick a lobster. that one, please. you gotta be careful though because they'll really try to upsell you into getting two or three installed. people going to the clinic as pairs and just having parts swapped out for a discounted rate. maybe you actually just trade brains, that's even easier. Igorth have already been doing that thurgery for thenturieth.

[sunbeam-the-man]

Tangentially: I need my musical heroes to stop getting so old. Leonard Cohen and David Bowie have already passed, and Tom Waits's face finally matches his voice. Devin Townsend is suddenly looking his age.

At least TWRP are still young!

HOLY SHIT NEW DAVID BYRNE SONG

His voice is really solid for his age, you can tell he's been taking care of it.

ALSO HOLY SHIT NEW DAVID BYRNE TOUR

[sunbeam-the-man]

HOLY SHIT NEW DAVID BYRNE SONG

His voice is really solid for his age, you can tell he's been taking care of it.

ALSO HOLY SHIT NEW DAVID BYRNE TOUR

[sunbeam-the-man]

Back on my bullshit

[sunbeam-the-man]

It's very #problematic of me I'm sure but if they must do either I really desperately prefer authors coming up with fancy always-italicized elven words for being gay or trans than having preindustrial warrior aristocrats and barely-socialized monsters have a vocabulary that casually includes 'demisexual' and 'enby'.

This is only slightly a principled stance (queernorm fantasy worlds are very obviously not trying to have any sort of realistic political economy of gender, which I only slightly judge them for), mostly just painful aesthetic mismatch.

[sunbeam-the-man]

I think one of the best and unintentionally funniest worldbuilding aspects in Star Wars is the reasoning of why did Bail and Breha adopt Leia instead of having their own children. Leia is first established as the princess of Alderaan before she is written to be Luke's sister. So now we need to figure out how she got to Alderaan. She was adopted because she needed to be hidden and separated from her brother. Bail was placed there to be one of the only people who knew so there would be a reason why it was them who got her. They specifically wanted a daughter. Why? Because Alderaan is a matriarchal society, so they needed a princess. Why didn't the Queen and her husband have biological children? Because they can't. Why? Because the Queen can't have kids. Why? Because she got injured as a teenager and got her internal organs replaced and her body can't handle a pregnancy. How did she get injured so badly? She fell off of a mountain. How did that happen? She was climbing it. Why was the future Queen climbing a mountain in the first place? Because she needed to go through three challenges in order to inherit the throne and one of them required her to go through something physically impressive. Why? Because before that they just held a Battle Royale for all the heirs and the one left alive got the throne and they at some point figured out that maybe they shouldn't be doing that, actually. Oh, okay.

[sunbeam-the-man]

i know that like if we want the rewards of being loved we must submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known but like what are the rewards of being loved? are they really worth all that? you talk of love and loving often and sometimes im so in your corner but other times it just makes me angry. is it really all that great?

This ask has been in my inbox for a number of days now, and honestly, every time I try and contemplate what it’s asking my mind stalls. “What are the rewards of being loved?” reads like like asking what kind of cheese the moon is made of, or how much dark there is before the dawn. It’s definitely a question! Theoretically it has an answer! But what kind of answer can I give that will make sense, since apparently....the reward of being loved isn’t being loved.

I mean, in the original essay, the one that gave birth to the meme, the trigger for “being known” is not really all that mortifying. Timothy Kreider emailed his friends about a herd of goats he was renting. Someone accidentally replied-all “oof,” which inspired the reflection about the gap between how we imagine people see us (charmingly off-beat renter of goats, perfect) and how we are actually known by the people in our lives (someone who fritters away their income renting a herd of goats for no discernible reason.)  Kreider concludes that this actually isn’t a gap at all---we are all fully capable of loving people profoundly while still seeing their faults, finding things they do annoying, and commiserating with mutual friends about that person’s quirks. 

I as an individual might like to think I am exempt from this, that I am dazzling and charming and the people who like me don’t even notice my foibles, but the truth is they do, it just doesn’t effect their love for me. 

Hence the “mortifying ordeal”---not only do I have to make myself vulnerable to someone else’s gaze, but I then have to accept that the people who like me do it in full knowledge of who I am. At any given moment, people are walking around fully aware of the fact that I’m a know-it-all and a bad loser, that I am not always emotionally available; my first instinct is to argue and my taste in music is somehow pedestrian and pretentious at once, that I am mostly trying, and a lot of times I fail. All the less-than-perfect things inside me are not secreted out of view; they are very obvious to anyone who has spent enough time with me, who has chosen to be around me for more than a half hour.

And that’s the people who like me!

So if we didn’t want to be known, deep down under all the squirming icky, insecure mess that makes being known such a terrifying prospect, then you’re right. The ordeal isn’t worth it, we should all pack up and go home, because people are always going to fucking see us. The random coworker who watches your face during a meeting knows you; the cousin who listened to your snarky comment knows you. You stumble through the world being known, inevitably, inexorably.

But being seen is necessary to be truly loved---and when it comes down to it, to be loved is to be real. Kreider references The Velveteen Rabbit in his follow-up article, appropriately titled “I Am a Meme Now.” I don’t think he’s wrong to draw on the idea that people observing our secret places, our weird faces, our strange comments and experience of the world makes them ultimate more real. Our experience lives inside us, in our head and impulse and feeling, so we are not objective in this---but we can’t escape all that leak out of us into the sight of others either. We can’t escape being known by someone who isn’t us, and rendered more than just our subjective selves through them. (In some ways, being known by someone else can be even truer than what we know about ourselves.)

The reward of all this---the only one that counts---is that sometimes, someone looks into your bloody beating insides and stays. They see your ugly expressions and listen to your nasty comments and peel back the heavy, wet layers of your intestines to see the guts beneath and still, they love you anyway. 

It is the closest thing to a miracle most of us will experience.

[sunbeam-the-man]

I have been watching Game Changer for seven seasons. You'd think I'd be able to spot the twist coming by now!

(This is specifically about s7e5 "The Drinking Game".)

[sunbeam-the-man]

The above is a video shared by smrchildsadness on Twitter, showing a person participating in a pride parade exchanging a pride flag with a person standing on his (am using his pronoun based on the TikToks/Tweets of what happened) doorway who had a Portuguese flag. There are sounds of cheers and crying and the two people hug each other as they exchange the flags. The man at the doorway then waved kisses to the crowd within the pride parade.

The Tweet says: "NO YOU DONT UNDERSTAND HE WAS WAVING THE PORTUGUESE FLAG BECAUSE HE DIDN'T HAVE A PRIDE FLAG AND THEY TRADED FLAGS AND HE'S SO EMOTIONAL TO GET HIS OWN PRIDE FLAG I'M EMOTIONALLY RUINED"

For context, apparently they were worried that maybe he's a nationalist because he was waving the Portuguese flag and some nationalists opposing the pride march were waving that flag. But upon interacting with him, it turns out he didn't have have a pride flag and he wanted to wave *a* flag in support of the pride march. So they had an exchange and now he has his own pride flag 😭🥹.

The image above is a Tweet by kunwara_ladkaa that says "I'm crying so much right now (Image taken by Manuel Fernando Araújo/Lusa)". The image shows the same man from the pride parade crying as he hugs his new pride flag.

The above image is a Tweet by dudz_zZzz that says "ainda não parei de pensar nele," which according to Google translate from Portuguese to English is "I still haven't stopped thinking about him." The image is a drawing of the person from the pride parade, crying as he hugs his new pride flag.

Posts were made on July 1, 2024.