#(discussions of)

[boundlessentity]

Need to put my thoughts and feelings into the universe rn and what is the internet if not a backup therapist, amirite?

I’m reading an excellent fic at the moment where the cast all have disabilities and the author is showing the audience a piece of disability culture. It’s great, but it’s got me feeling things about my own life that I don’t love to think about.

I have epilepsy, like one of the characters from the fic, but I can’t help looking at him and myself in comparison and people diagnosed with epilepsy in general and feel confused and kind of icky. Epilepsy is generally considered an invisible disability, to the best of my knowledge, but I feel like a dirty liar for even thinking that maybe I’m a person with a disability. I felt terrible about myself the one time I said I had a disability to my friends, when there was literally a person with hearing aids and an actual disability in the car, like I was trying to say what we go through is even remotely similar.

I haven’t had any of the characteristic experiences of the disabled community, only had great doctors and access to whatever I needed quickly, my seizures are only when I’m sleeping so it’s not something I think about during the day, and my seizures are medicated and controlled.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to be approaching four years seizure-free, but even before that my seizures were months apart. Yes, I wear a monitor to bed so my emergency contacts will be notified if I have a seizure, and yes I still live in my hometown and can’t travel by myself because something might happen, but I’m not really disabled by my epilepsy. It doesn’t really affect my daily life, and I somehow feel guilty about that?

I feel like a liar when I say I have epilepsy, because it’s not really epilepsy, is it? I’m fine. I really don’t have it that bad. I feel guilty for inconveniencing my family like this, and I feel like I’m being a fucking drama queen about it all. I feel like if someone says they have epilepsy too, we’re talking about different things.

Maybe it’s some kind of fucked up imposter syndrome, I don’t know. Maybe it’s me looking for diversity points in a culture that values that sort of thing, which is worse.

At the end of the day, I have no clue. I don’t think I have an invisible disability? I’m not epileptic enough to count, but I’m too epileptic to be normal. I hate thinking about this, because I can never land on a conclusion and having a disability, not having a disability, and not knowing are all shit options. End of words.

[last-capy-hupping]

Chapter 32 of AWY, featuring the first of many tough conversations.

[probablyscreamingintothevoid]

It wasn't even 10:30 when I read the message from my friend: "What you lack in your childhood is what you seek in your adulthood" with an upside down smiley face at the end.

I replied, "Eddie Munson???" immediately and as a joke because I can't stand a serious thought for more than a moment. But it felt disingenuous and dismissive, I could tell my friend had more to add to their thought so I followed up with, "On a serious note, this is so fucking true."

My friend either didn't catch my joke or is a saint and chose to overlook it, continuing the conversation with, "think of what Wayne is to Eddie" with another upside down smile. "Hopper to Eleven🙃" And to my serious note they said, "So you realized that already👀"

Of course I did, I wanted to respond. But I waited, giving myself a moment to process all of these things. I finally sent back, "Give me a broken father figure who works on bettering himself for his kid even if he thinks it's going to kill him." Barely thirty seconds pass but I start to worry. "This is something I crave. It's why I try to be so solid for my niece."

"And you actively write wholesome, fatherly acts in your fics whether you intentionally do so or not."

And shit if that didn't get me thinking just how telling writing can be. Of course I write about Wayne Munson and Jim Hopper. I know it is my inner child still begging my late father to look at his children with as much love as Hopper has for El. My childhood lacked a father who could over come his own personal demons and be present for his children, it almost lacked any father at all. How could I possibly not love Wayne Munson for how he defended his nephew up until the bitter end?

What you lack in your childhood is what you seek in your adulthood.

How very true this is. It is why I have given my original characters sound family units, a father or father figure always there to save the day. It is why, even in the brief amount of time I worked with the thought of Kirishima's father being a villain i made him a desperate man, not a bad one that would hate his child for wanting to become a hero. It is why I have spent weeks writing thousands of words about how steady a presence Wayne is for Eddie, how he and Hopper collectively ensure that none of those children ever feel alone again. It is why Otabek has grown up in my story believing that his step father is his dad and why that doesn't change even once he is told the truth, because that man is his dad.

While I'm here sharing my truth I should add that it is the reason I write so much relapse and recovery. I gave Kirishima an older sibling who uses drugs until it tears him apart. but after years of struggling he begins to recover, finally able to be a good big brother, both of them happier than they ever imagine possible. It is what my younger self never got and what my current self still longs for.

What you lack in your childhood is what you seek in your adulthood.

How true this is. My God how it shapes you and all you give to the world.

[ratsbypaulzindel]

when they got "character who made an undeniably terrible decision but man i dont know what i would have done either" at the function

CHARACTERS THIS POST WAS ABOUT

GO HERE NOW.

[rivetgoth]

It's honestly crazy that discussion around testosterone HRT skews so much towards the beginning stages of it (to the point that you have dozens of guys thinking their transition is "failed" if they don't pass by like a year in lol) and what the initial changes of the first couple of months to years look like, like the classic laundry list of those early basic changes like bottom growth, voice drop, etc, when IMO literally none of that compares remotely to the depth and intensity of the long term total masculinization you start to experience like 3-5+ years in.

[orchidvioletindigo]

The state of Georgia did what with voter registrations?!

[inkskinned]

how do i contact apple bc actually i am currently going through an internet story but i don't have twitter.

which is to say that 3 weeks ago i was on vacation to the Azores with my family. due to girl pockets (iykyk) my phone fucking jumped into the ocean literally only because i lifted my leg above a 30 degree angle to avoid a wave. the phone was black. the sand was black. it was night. i had waded in about 2 feet deep. i think my guardian angel just closed his eyes.

i immediately reached a state of peace about it. maybe it was a sign from god or the universe. don't we all need to unplug. let's live in the moment or whatever. also, let's give the crabs technology, i just think it would be funny.

i come home. i haven't backed up my phone in a while (lol since 2022) and the shitty replacement i got is literally useless. i lost pictures of newborn babies. i lost contacts. i have to wrangle things together that need 2-factor authentication with a phone that's in the fucking ocean.

and then today i got this notification.

What in the everfuck. are you kidding me. this thing was IN THE OCEAN. like the ACTUAL OCEAN. like originally "find my phone" was reporting it as ABSENT.

and then i get this email:

she found it while she was SNORKLING. at the bottom of the actual ocean. it's been there for 3 weeks.

IT STILL WORKS.

which is to say. like how do i get her anything she wants, forever. i don't have any money but i would buy her a fucking boat of iphones to thank her. how do we get apple to give me a commercial. if nothing else i just want people to know that someone found my phone at the bottom of the ocean because how fucking fake of a story does this even sound.

what's going on. hello????????

[veramitar]

Young overlords ready to paint the neighborhood red.

Minimaniacs Artboard 1 | 2

[dogboyboyshorts]

"ummm you know the writer only included that because they have a FETISH right?" is always so funny to me as a disparaging comment, because imagine if people spoke that way about nonsexual interests. "the lord of the rings? didnt the author only write that because he was interested in linguistics? thanks, i'll pass" "yeah, i used to love spongebob as a kid, but i can never see it the same after finding out stephen hillenburg is a marine biologist :/"

[apollos-boyfriend]

we have GOT to kill tiktok/twitter self-censorship i just witnessed a grown adult say the word “smex” out loud to our professor

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[fubblers]

To younger broke adults getting into sex work here’s some common scams:

“I’ll pay you $ every week for feet/genital/fetish pics” they start a long conversation about this. Then they convince you to send some sample pics. They will try to get you to enact their fetishes with promise of later payment. Then they cut and run. They will be kind, promise large things, but become aggressive when you refuse. Lesson: never give things for free unless you’re specifically doing it for marketing. Personalized fetish content should require payment upfront.

“I want to be your sugar mommy/daddy” These are insanely common and will use a variety of tactics. They prey on vulnerable broke people who are desperate for stable cash. They may try to use a BDSM dynamic to make you feel sexy and submissive. They’ll start a long flirty conversation that makes you feel good and desired and confident. Then they might send a link…. Don’t click it! Or they might ask you to “prove your loyalty” as their sub/babygirl/whatever. Proving your loyalty will probably involve sending them money in some way. The most common way is to buy a gift card and tell them the code. If a stranger ever asks you to buy them a gift card that’s pretty much always an instant block.

The same thing goes for “pay pigs”. There are very few people out there actually into financial domination. Chances are people promising you access to their bank accounts are liars trying to get dommed by a stranger, or scammers trying to get money from you.

There’s essentially two main categories of scams in sex work: 1. Traditional scams (trying to get money, personal info, account access) and 2. Freebie scams (trying to get your SW content for free)

Freebie scams can involve someone trying to piss you off so you curse them out and they can go jerk it to being rejected by someone hot. You can just block people being weird.

As a new or established SWer you literally don’t owe anyone anything unless they’ve specifically paid for a service you offer.

[aethiriarts]

Remembering that one embarrassing thing you did 50 years ago.

[cursedgamerchild]

"internet historian's alt-right anyways" "great day to have never liked james somerton" "never even heard of illuminaughtii before this lol"

that's great buddy but don't go around thinking you're immune to this. if you're not looking for plagiarism, you likely won't notice it unless its egregiously obvious. hell, you've probably consumed plagiarized content without even realizing it. even hbomb pointed out that these people disguised what they presented pretty well as long as you didn't try and dig deeper. don't come away just thinking of this as a callout piece, take this as an important lesson about vetting your sources. if googling scripts in quotes was enough to expose the original, we should all start doing that shit!!

edit: it got a little too doomer-y a little too fast so one quick addition

this is hbomb's curated playlist of queer creators, many of whom were victims of plagiarism

this is producer kat on reddit calling for any more plagiarism discoveries and for queer content creators to be uplifted

please take some time to uplift these creators and recommend any you know! if you can help uncover more of the original creators whose work was lifted that would be great too :)

UPDATE- From Hbomb's twitter: "We're in the process of cataloguing everyone James Somerton plagiarised and finding their contact information. Which is quite a task, so to help us out: If you see this and happen to be one of the people Somerton stole from, please email us at contact@hbomb.zone"

edit 2:

[thottybrucewayne]

I don't think people realize that critiquing the media you enjoy is fun too.