#How to make money on Substack?

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

The Substack Eminence Book

An Original Book For Ultra-Advanced Writers Who Want to Scale with Clarity, Authority, and Integrity. Written by Dr Mehmet Yildiz, a Community Builder and Substack Bestseller The Substack Eminence Book Is Coming in August 2025 Dear Freelance Writers, Startup Founders, and Journalists, For those who don’t know me, I am the author of the best-selling book, Substack Mastery and Advanced Substack…

[mistninja]

Feeling very "fitz-core" right now (spiraling)

[fireinanhourglass]

god help me, i'm thinking about making a substack

[dashcon-two]

Volunteering, Virtual Dash, and Various Other Happenings!

Hey y’all!

Buckle up, we’ve got a bit of everything in this one.

Volunteer Applications!

We’re excited to say that volunteer applications for DashCon 2 are now open! You can apply to our form here (https://forms.gle/aaBjd9eSGZBsARBE7), or find out more on our website (https://www.dashcontwo.com/volunteering/). Our convention relies on volunteer staff to keep everything running smoothly, and there’s plenty of work to go around. We’re really glad to have received interest from so many of y’all, so applications will be open until we’ve filled all of our positions.

All regular volunteers will be assigned to at least one 4-hour shift between 7 AM and 11:30 PM on July 5th, 2025. Volunteers who complete their shift, or otherwise work 4 or more hours, will get free access to the con for the rest of the day.

Successful applicants will be required to sign a waiver to volunteer for the convention. Applicants who are under 18 years old must have a parent or guardian sign their waiver.

What about Virtual DashCon?

We appreciate all of the feedback we got after our announcement post last week! We’re happy to say that we’re going ahead with our plans for a virtual convention! However, considering how many of you were enthusiastic about the concept of virtual dash, we’d like to address a common question!

Why would a virtual con cost money? Because it costs money to run! We’re partnering with Live Media to ensure that the live-streamed panels, pit, and duel will run smoothly. We want to make our convention as accessible as possible, we’ve received hundreds of messages from people who couldn’t get a ticket, but we just don’t have the resources or expertise to run a virtual event with volunteers alone. Even with a professional live-streaming team, we’ll need to organize moderators for the official server, vet digital panellists, and all the other administrative work that comes with a virtual event. DashCon 2 is going down in history one way or another, but we’ll be damned if we don’t get good footage for the next generation of documentarians.

We’ll also donate 15% of every ticket to the Canadian Cancer Society! That’s 15% of the total price of the tickets, not the profits. You can learn more about our fundraiser here, and donate directly to our campaign on the Canadian Cancer Society’s website.

Drag at DashCon 2!

DashCon 2 is excited to announce that we’ll be featuring a spectacular showcase of talented drag performers! Performers will be lipsyncing, dancing, and generally serving, to the tune of such classics as How Bad Can I Be? We’re happy to say that we have two confirmed drag artists: Heaven/Hellish Lee (@heaven_lee_court.hellish_lee) and Pandora’s Box Muncher (@pandorasboxmuncher), both on Instagram! They are both incredibly talented - please check out their work and give them some love :)

We hope to announce a few additional performers before the day of the con, so stay tuned!

If you’re an interested local performer: please feel free to reach out to us directly at activities@dashcontwo.com with a link to your website/social(s), a few example photos, and what sort of performance you’d like to give. Portfolios may contain 18+ content, but performances at DashCon 2 must be appropriate for ages 13+.

LVLUP Board Game Room

We’re happy to remind you all that DashCon 2 will have a board game room, kindly sponsored by LVLUP Games! A quick FYI: while they will be providing board games of all sorts, they will not be providing TTRPG materials, dice, or DMs, so you’ll have to BYOD (Bring Your Own Dice). There must be at least a few dice goblins in our audience who have collections to show off.

As always, you can find more information on our website or follow us on Substack!

[ekingston]

Hello! So sorry to bother, but have you had any updates on the Word-Stream/Speechify situation?

Just one: like I posted on Xitter and Bluesky last night, as of yesterday afternoon, the links to individual works as they were listed on WordStream are gone from both Google and Bing. Hurray, right? Surely we’re all sick of this whole debacle and there’s far more important things to worry about. If all is well that ends well, surely there’s no need to still be angry.

Well, I am. Here’s why:

When I checked on Wednesday, the links to my own work on WordStream were still listed. So rather than it taking a week after Cliff Weitzman first hid the fanwork from view, it took a little over a week from the moment he first promised privately that they would be deleted. Which, fine. Perhaps Cliff didn’t really know what he was talking about when he gave that timeframe. Or maybe he told a little white lie to create the impression that he always intended to do the right thing. It seems more likely to me, though, that Cliff still believed—even after the backlash he received—that he would get away with honoring only individual takedown requests. Or worse, that he needed just a little bit more time with the stolen material to figure out an alternative way to profit off it—preferably without us noticing, this time.

But who knows? I certainly don’t! All we can do is speculate, because publicly, Cliff Weitzman has remained completely silent on his copyright infringements. All we got was the initial justifications he and his sockpuppet accounts used in comments on the original Reddit and Tumblr posts. After those were so understandably ill-received, Cliff only ever communicated with a few individual authors who contacted him directly and repeatedly, blocking people who addressed the issue on Twitter and quietly distancing himself from WordStream by deleting a blog he’d posted to Speechify.com dated December 20th—where Cliff promoted WordStream’s platform specifically to fanfiction readers. (See my enormous timeline post for details and screenshots of said posts before they were taken down.)

And this is why I’m still angry: As long as Cliff Weitzman faces no real consequences for his actions, he won’t see a need to own up to his mistake; and as long as he’s able to delay taking responsibility, this isn’t over. This didn’t end well.

After all, wasn’t this the next-best scenario for Cliff, second only to him turning WordStream into a (for him) effortless, infinite money-making machine? He took something we provided for free and fed it to AI so he could more easily put it behind a paywall; we found out and protested; Cliff quietly erased all evidence of his crime; and we went—almost equally quietly—away.

I want to make sure you know that I continue to be genuinely amazed and intensely grateful for how quickly the news about WordStream’s copyright infringement was shared—and continues to be shared—throughout fandom, on tumblr in particular. If it hadn’t been for our collective outcry here and on Reddit, WordStream would very likely still be up in its original form, and Weitzman would be reaping the benefits (those subscription prices were steep) today.

But it’s been frustrating to see that, with the exception of mentions in articles on Substack and Fansplaining (the latter of which is a particularly awesome and thorough read on fandom’s decontextualization) and a Fanlore listing, our outrage never really spilled out beyond the safely insulated, out-of-the-way spaces that are tumblr, a handful of subreddits and bluesky. And I believe that—unfortunately—we are collectively responsible for that part, as well.

Most of us seemed content to only spread the word by circulating the same two posts on tumblr. (Have we all given up completely on every other social media platform? Am I the only remaining straggler?) And soon after Cliff Weitzman hid WordStream’s fanfiction category from view, our interest in the issue took a sharp dive even there. Are we genuinely deceived into believing the issue has been fully resolved? Do we truly fail to realize that Weitzman’s refusal to admit that what he did was wrong left the door wide open for the next greed-driven tech bro to wander through? Or is the true naivety in thinking that, as a community, we can keep this kind of attack on fandom from happening again? Has our disillusionment already gotten that bad?

However the situation spins out from here, Cliff’s actions will set a precedent. If we fail to show Cliff and his ilk that attempts to profit off fandom’s unpaid labor have consequences, their tech companies will keep trying until something eventually sticks. They might be a little smarter about it next time; obscure their sources a bit better, maybe leave the titles and the authors’ names off. Or maybe they’ll go a bolder route: maybe next time they cross the line they’ll do it boldly enough for IP holders to take notice and stop tolerating fanwork entirely.

Doesn’t that make you angry, too?

There’s this whole other mess of thoughts I would love to be able to untangle about how commercial influence is contributing to the steady erosion of fandom’s foundations, but I’m tired, and other people have said it all much more eloquently than I ever could. Seriously, go read that article on Fansplaining. Or listen to the podcast version of it. Better yet, as long as you’re wearing your noise-canceling headphones, go listen to a podfic of one of your favorite fandoms’ works, and enjoy the collaborative joy and creativity of the people who Cliff Weitzman refuses to believe exist. (In one of Speechify’s other blogs, Cliff claims there are only 272 podfics on AO3. Would you like to run that ChatGPT prompt again, Cliff?). Honestly, much like Cliff Weitzman’s infuriating denial of the fact that fandom fucking has this covered, thank you very much, there’s so. Many. More. Things for us to talk about. There’s the connotations of WordStream’s dubious ‘upload’ button, for instance, or the fact that the app scraped (and in some cases, allegedly, still lists) copyright-protected original fiction as well, or WordStream’s complete lack of contact information, which is illegal for an internationally operating app. And oh! Has anyone reported more thoroughly on Cliff’s app’s options to ‘simplify’ or ‘modernize’ uploaded works, or—my own very favorite abomination—to translate them into something Cliff calls ‘Gen-Z Language’? Much like his atrocious AI book covers, it would be hilarious, if it didn’t make steam come out of my ears.

Anyway, there it is. I highly recommend you do all of that. And then, if you aren’t familiar with it already, go do some research re: fair use and your rights as the copyright owner of your works. A good number of people commenting on this controversy expressed stunned surprise or fearful hesitation about claiming any sort of ownership of their fanfiction. The more informed we are about our rights, the more willing we will be to defend them.

Please don’t stop writing or sharing your work. If you can’t bring yourself to work on your WIPs today (trust me, I get it), post about this situation instead. Tweets, skeets, whateverthefucks—about WordStream’s theft, about how this reflects on Speechify’s already shady business practices, about how Cliff’s actions and justifications have personally affected you. You’re welcome to share or copy my posts on these platforms, but since Cliff already blocked me, I very much prefer you post your own. If you do, call Cliff Weitzman by his full name and tag or include both WordStream and Speechify to ensure Weitzman will recognize he has both a personal as well as a professional stake in handling the situation with integrity. Leave your concerns in reviews on the Speechify app. (We weren’t provided with a more appropriate place to put them, after all!) Consider calling for a Speechify boycott until Cliff accepts accountability for his actions.

Do avoid making exaggerated claims, and don’t call for physical retaliation against Cliff’s person or his property. We don’t want to give him or Speechify even the weakest of grounds to claim defamation or threats of violence. Focus on the facts: they’re incriminating enough by themselves. Show Cliff that we’re determined to keep bringing up his company’s wrongdoings in public spaces until he demonstrates that he understands why taking these freely shared fanworks and monetizing them was wrong, and takes steps to ensure it won’t happen again.

One last thing—and this is really more of a general reminder—please stop suggesting I handle this situation for you. People have come to me asking for action items. The resulting flashbacks to my days as an office assistant were extremely upsetting. In all seriousness, casting me as some sort of coordinator or driving force behind this backlash actively hurts the cause. Not only does it downplay fandom’s collective efforts, it also makes our message extremely vulnerable. It would be all too easy for Cliff to silence one singular source. Wikipedia will not maintain mentions of this controversy as long as it leads only to Easter Kingston’s attempt to summarize what happened as it was happening. You only know my name because I stumbled upon WordStream’s theft and decided to get my friends involved. I am not more knowledgeable, more skilled or more angrily invested in this issue than you are (or can, or should, be). I draw pictures and I write stories and I worry about the shift I’m seeing in fandom after having been on this ride for even a few pre-livejournal rounds.

I’m not going to stop doing any of those things. But I am going to allow myself to step away for a bit, make my wife dinner, and catch up on our shows.

I trust you’ve got it from here.

[dolphin-diaries]

Detrans Women v. Trans Men, Or: The Sanity Of Sex Change

Originally published on the Dolphin Diaries substack.

Be advised: this essay contains misogynistic, transphobic, and ableist language, especially as it pertains to pregnancy, trans men, and mental disability.

Today the court presides over a very special case, poised to answer a question that has plagued the nation since the dreaded sex wars. Several questions, actually. What are transsexuals? Do they deserve to exist? What about women? If a woman could become a man, why wouldn’t she? Do real women like being women? And when all the real women are gone—who, pray tell, will bear our children for us?

The plaintiff is a sight to behold. She is stern and clearly distressed, because she’s not smiling. She’s dressed with a presentable degree of femininity, not like a whore or anything. But there is a certain mannishness about her. Her jaw and her shoulders—must’ve been a surgery. When she speaks, you can hear she’s not really a woman anymore. Well, no, she is, but—you know. You can just tell by looking at her, she is barren inside.

The defendant is… charming. S—I mean, he, of course he looks like a ‘he,’ but of course he’s also short. Kind of too well-dressed. He has small wrists and his cranium is pronouncedly feminine. If the court looks away for a moment, the court will forget his face, but the court will certainly remember the wrists and the height and the cranium. Can you imagine, that thing can get pregnant? That was an aside, don’t record that.

When the plaintiff speaks, it is with great pain. She bears the scars of her transition with tremulous distress and speaks of tragic self-harm in a futile attempt to escape the patriarchy. She’d been hoodwinked by the trans cult and doctors—they sold her an illusion of a cure. Now she has seen there’s no such thing. The woman-ness has awoken within her and cried for the de-mammaried chest and all the babies she will never gestate. Her question is simple: why was she forced to do this; why was she lied to? Why has no one ever stopped her? Why have her doctors and friends entertained her delusion that she could somehow be a man? It is nothing short of a grave injustice that her woman-ness was allowed to be undermined. That it is now broken and impossible to heal.

When the defendant speaks, he too overflows with suffering. He was—in his soul, his mind—a man, but yet his body was not. His distress over this mismatch was profound and incurable; transition alone managed to mercifully relieve it. And he is dearly sorry for the plaintiff’s pain, but—well, it’s hardly his fault she tried to fool the system, isn’t it? Why must the one truly suffering be held accountable for the delusions of liars? Why must he be punished for the deranged ravings of belligerent, hysterical cunts?

Gender Madness

Now that the jury is well and properly annoyed with me for my inflammatory phrasing—we all have our defects; mine is that I’m a rhetorician—I shall transform from a bigoted judge into a two-headed creature, prosecutor and attorney both. A little unorthodox, you might say? But this isn’t really a courtroom. No, this argument only occasionally makes it that far; we stand most often in the court of private and public opinion.

With that in mind, let us go over the details of the case. We shall start from afar, but do stay with me; the context is vital.

Our crime(s) take place in a very particular world, one in which life is earned with labour. A citizen must perform and provide labour up to a somewhat arbitrary standard, for which they are rewarded with normal treatment. Human treatment, not-Other treatment. What exactly that constitutes depends on time, place, circumstance, and other extenuating traits the citizen holds. How that is phrased also depends, but it’s usually something to the tune of an adequate contribution for the good of something greater and more abstract. In a late-capitalist society, for instance, money is a measure of labour and a vehicle for greater social contribution, and it thus reflects the measure of allowed humanity. Even when that money is inherited, and its holder has not worked for a damn penny of it, it must reflect some great labour done in the past, by themself or an ancestor. They must’ve deserved it, because money is a measure of labour, and labour is a measure of deserving.

Capitalist profit-meritocratic logics are only one of many ways earning life with labour manifests. But this is a court case, not a lesson in history or politics or economics, so never mind that.

What happens when one cannot meet the standard of labour? What is someone who cannot contribute enough to be normal? Every human’s capacity is limited, but some limits lie at or above the arbitrary standard of labour—and some below. Failure to meet standard capacity is, quite plainly, disability. I speak specifically—now and henceforth—of the social construct of disability. Just as sex/gender, it encompasses human features which may exist regardless of social order; just as sex/gender, it constructs archetypes and social scripts that serve a purpose.

What is the social purpose of disability? Of the infirm, the crippled, the wretched? Sometimes it is to make a large performance of helping them—only those that truly deserve it, of course; never forget truly deserving, being truly in pain—but much more importantly, across history disability existed to move the disabled to the margins of society, render them vulnerable and reliant on goodwill when they cannot be cured of being insufficient. They cannot adequately contribute, which makes them dead weights on the finite resources earned by other people’s labour. That’s why deserving is so important, you see. Because, you know, all people are constantly trying to shirk their fair share of labour, don’t they? Wouldn’t we all not work if we could choose not-working? If we granted this sort of charity to just anybody; if we kept encouraging this sort of behaviour—think of the finite resources! You and I—real, honest, hard-working people—will be the last Atlas shouldering humanity! Oh, it’s unthinkable. No-no, we have to ensure the disabled demonstrate real, provable pain that renders them utterly and definitely incapable of working as much as we do. Otherwise the world will end.

The function of the social construct of disability is to draw a line as to how much labour must be performed, and how much accommodation a normal citizen requires to do it. Disability then makes it hell to seek more accommodation for less labour—in broad strokes.

But you might say, prosecutor/attorney ma’am, what does this have to do with being trans? Or with women? Or with gender, or sex, or whatever you kids call it these days?

Well, dear jury, I know it is uncouth and uncommon to call it labour, but—by which process do we create new labourers? By what mechanism do we ensure the production of citizens? How do we ascertain that the working bodies are taken care of; that workers’ homes are clean and tended to; that workers are rewarded with something to fuck? Just for now, allow that feminised labour is labour.

Entertain the notion that the organising principle of patriarchy is distribution of feminised labour. Sexing/gendering is then a social mechanism by which labour roles are assigned and maintained—and, within the current and millenia-standing incarnation of the patriarchy, these roles are assigned at birth based on the external appearance of infant genitalia, and therefore expectation of the baby’s future gestational or inseminatory capacity. From there an entire hierarchy blossoms, in which those deemed Men are called to compete for the finite resource of Women—and to split the women among themselves, deciding which women are and are not permissible to possess by which kinds of men—and all those deemed Women are called to negotiate their commodity. If a woman is capable of producing a citizen—because she can bear children, and she is of the right nation and ethnicity and race, and has no defect she can pass down—she may be a wife. A prized personal possession, like a pet that sometimes talks too much. If she cannot produce a citizen, she’s still good for some things. After all, Men are allegedly born lascivious and violent—and also enlightened and important at the same time. So their violent excesses must be tolerated, but if we force the wives to be their drywall and their fuckdoll, it may prove too much for the gentle soul. She may get damaged, and then who’ll bear the children? Naturally, women that cannot adequately contribute to society with their wombs (either because they lack the organ altogether, or for whatever other reason) must provide for men where wives cannot. Their fault, anyway. They’re not sufficiently contributing.

On that note arises a question: what if one fails to meet their birth-destined standard of labour? What if they cannot perform their proper gender adequately? Well, a wife that fails to sufficiently provide for her man is, of course, lazy. And when women utterly refuse to behave as women should, bitches be…

For brevity, let us call that queerness. I will use the word in the broadest of strokes: it is failure or refusal or both to meet the standard of assigned sex; so then, even cishetero women that disobey their husbands are, for the purposes of this courtroom, queer. One way society has tried to grapple with queerness was to seek basis in a physical abnormality, which may then provide justification for the queers’ less-than-human status as well as avenues for cures. Perhaps the foetus was exposed to an excess of the wrong kind of sex hormone in-utero. Perhaps women harbouring lesbian desire hide a secret false penis within. Perhaps it’s the humours. Often though, because queer behaviours do not really have a direct relationship to physical attributes, they are consigned to the realm of mental disability. Of madness.

While it is a kind of disability, it is a peculiar one—so, in terms of social construct, what is the nature and purpose of madness? Dear jury, you likely know the answer, intuitively if not in words. It is to regulate the behaviours and thoughts of normal citizens. When those things breach the line of madness, one is made mad, and to be mad is to be rendered unreliable, unpredictable, and incapable of adequate agency. Once one becomes mad, the sane and the normal are relieved of trying to understand one’s thoughts and needs and desires, for those are made inherently incomprehensible. Once one becomes mad, it is assumed one cannot be trusted to make decisions which the sane make all the time, because the mad are considered consummately and totally incapable of perceiving reality or of making choices that do not harm the self or others. In short, they are a danger to all, including themselves.

What is to be done with the mad? First, they must be removed from society, lest they cause harm. Then we must attempt to make them sane—that is, behaving and thinking in ways that are normal. If that is impossible, we must make them seem as sane as possible, so that their madness is confined to their own head and does not spill over. If even that is impossible, they must be removed from society permanently. Otherwise they will disquiet and disturb the sane, or worse, infect them with madness.

Notably, madness was not made to help those that may suffer from, say, psychoses or hallucinations. The history of psychiatry—and yours truly’s personal experience with it as a transsexual forced to self-inter to access transition—makes it quite clear that its primary purpose is the segregation and normalisation of the mad. At times it happens to address the needs of the mad, but generally only insofar as it can bring about their sanity and make them fit for labour production. If one’s need is irrelevant to that, it is usually neglected. At times doctors are genuinely invested in the well-being of their mad patients, and even respect them as humans—but those doctors are merely individuals acting on compassion. The system itself facilitates the opposite.

So then it becomes abundantly obvious why disobedient women, runaway slaves, homosexuals, and transsexuals either were or are psychiatric diagnoses. Indeed, to return to the court case at hand, in a patriarchal world which constructs sex/gender to be an immutable, unchangeable birth-destiny, to think that it can be changed or that you are not what was destined to you—that is madness. It must be. If it is not, then the entire sex-caste order is thrown into total instability. What if everyone decides they’re trans?! What if the men stop competing to assert manhood; what if the women refuse to be commodity?! Who can we then extract sex from? Who will be forced to take care of our homes? Who will work themselves to the bone and who will serve the nation if we cannot promise they will be rewarded with housemaids and offspring and whores? WHO WILL MAKE THE BABIES?!?!

As you can see, dear jury, obviously all of humanity will die and the world will end. Which is why, although I’m sure not everyone enjoys the patriarchy, we must tolerate it. Just like we tolerate our jobs to survive. At least, like, the core idea. We can jiggle some things around to avoid torches and pitchforks, but the sex-castes must stay. You don’t want to be the last Atlas suffering gender-work while all the kids get surgeries and hormones and don’t want to produce gender anymore, do you? We simply can’t encourage this kind of behaviour.

Within the patriarchal resource distribution system, the trans are sex/gender-disabled, and transition is then akin to an accommodation. Just like any disabled accommodation, it is seen as a resource drain that either must be thoroughly justified—for resources are always limited—or else be deemed a frivolous waste. In an attempt to incorporate trans-ness into the resource distribution system and justify the accommodation, trans-pathology emerges. The key to trans-pathology—whether it is called transsexualism or gender dysphoria or gender incongruence; whether it is considered a matter of biology, psychiatry, or soul—is that transition is justified due to a psychological/psychiatric wound. “I deserve to transition because it is the only thing making me hurt less.” Transition, then, is continuous relief to de facto gender-madness.

But I mean, within such a worldview, wouldn’t a cure always be better than just relief?

Anyway, that is why my defendant has had to prove he really deserves transition. He has suffered greatly for his defect, and although he cannot be made completely normal—that isn’t possible; we’ve tried—he is as normal as he can be. My defendant has managed to prove to the systems built within the patriarchy, beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, that he is gender-disabled, gender-mad; that he is wholly incapable of producing sufficient feminised labour due to his condition. He is too pathologically miserable—suicidal, even. But now that he has transitioned, he is happy; he has demonstrated he can participate in the production of the family. Kinda-sorta. Close enough; it looks normal enough. Again: we’ll keep trying, but for now, this is the best we got.

Here’s the problem with my defendant’s case, though. The needs of the sane supersede the needs of the mad. After all, the sane are the ones really working and producing the resources which may then be charitably allotted to take care of the mad. The sane deserve the humanity that the mad can only temporarily, fractionally rent with their pain and the compassion that affords them.

Dear jury, have you ever wondered why it has been so pervasive for trans advocacy to state over and over again the in-born-ness of it, the low numbers of it? Only 1%, no, 5%, no, I don’t know—how are we counting? Who are we counting? Regardless, we must insist it cannot spread; that you the sane will not catch trans cooties. But what if that number rises—why, we must find a justification for why it’s actually not and it’s been counted wrong, or maybe, maybe those people would’ve been trans all along, only now they have the opportunity to pursue their trans-ness, or maybe—

Why is the argument for trans existence so entwined with asserting its rarity?

As we’ve already established, dear jury, if all the world went trans, it would end, and we would all die in a horrible extinction event. We must face the truth of sex/gender austerity. So, if trans people are to be permitted to exist more-or-less normally within a patriarchal society, they must prove beyond the shadow of a doubt: they are not contagious. Relief for the mad may only be entertained if it does not impede the sane from performing their labours.

But here stands my plaintiff. A woman, born rightfully a woman, a healthy woman, that caught the madness. She’d been contaminated by the delusion of the sex change, despite constant assurance that sex cannot be changed, and despite all the ways which we’ve devised to make transsexuals prove they aren’t lying about their stupid, ridiculous disability. And so when presented with proof of the transgender contagion, we must ask ourselves a world-endingly important question:

What If All the Bitches Went Crazy?

I mean, we all don’t want to do what needs to be done. The good of the nation—or our feudal lord, or the communist party, or Amazon Stonks Exchange—asks much of us. Some more than others, but it is what it is. Right?

The place of the woman is not terribly enviable. Sometimes we tell them of the joys of being the hand that rocks the cradle, or how much better it is to be a well-kept pet that has no worries nor responsibilities, or how empowered they are in being actually more capable then the men they must tend to—but at the end of the day, no rational individual would enjoy being treated as less-than-human, as commodity, as property. Luckily for all of us, sex is immutable and natural and we’re all just born this way, pre-destined for certain roles and behaviours. Even if we don’t want to do what needs to be done, there’s not much choice in the matter.

Except, ever-awkwardly, there stands my defendant. Very clearly a man. Very verifiably assigned female at birth.

Um.

Well, no, you see, it’s not like you can really change sex. You can just—approximate it. It’s like a costume. It’s not real, it’s ersatz, and we can always tell.

Except, no we can’t. If you saw my defendant in the streets, would you be able to tell? Would you really? What about the fact that trans men’s health concerns largely mirror those of cis men, such as risks of certain cancers and diseases, so long as those trans men are on HRT? What about the fact that they seem to live as men in society just fine?

Uhhhh.

Any attempt at normalisation of female-to-male transition arrives at two core issues at the heart of the patriarchy. Firstly, the limited resource of Woman: woman who can birth a proper citizen; woman who will clean your room and soothe your tears; woman who can be used and fucked. Secondly: who deserves to be Man? If patriarchal relation is instantiated at birth; if sex is immutable and fundamental to human character, then those born as women must be too categorically different from men to ever even slightly approximate them.

Therefore, in order to be normalised—made less-mad, shifted into the liminal space of not-quite-sane—the trans man must demonstrate and acquiesce to two things. One: he will never be a real man. Indeed, the world will not allow him to be totally interchangeable from cis men; no matter how much he looks and acts the part, at some point something will remind him he is less deserving. He cannot perform all the labour of Man, and he owes society the labour of Woman by dint of birth. To be normalised, he must acquiesce firstly to the caste system itself, and then to his precarious place within it.

But here’s the second thing—for this court case, it is more relevant. He must demonstrate the sorts of women that will become him were never good Woman material anyway. They would not birth a proper citizen anyway. They would not make good housemaids anyway. They would be too ugly to deserve getting fucked anyway. And—crucially—that these reject-women are few and marginal. Because even bad material can be utilised by men who aren’t good enough to deserve the wifely and hot ones, or else used and disposed of by men who just feel like it. Any and all waste of a limited resource must be thoroughly justified.

Unfortunately for the trans man, normalising his existence is incompatible with these dogmas in practice. Normalisation means better access to HRT and masculinising surgeries; it also means being able to exist in public as a man. A lesser man, sure—but many men are lesser men. Such is the nature of an austerity-based resource hierarchy; the place of the beneficiary is competitive.

Scandalously, I myself had a stint in trans manhood, in a place more patriarchal and trans-unaware than most Western countries. Like many trans men, I have found that if you look like a man, talk like a man, act like a man, people can’t help but treat you like a man. Even career transphobes seem to force themselves to misgender trans people at times. Modern medicine enables passing as another sex even for people completely un-androgynous by nature—and historically, even before transition was available, some managed to live as a different sex anyway, discovered only upon burial or autopsy.

And then, when the trans man is normalised, it necessarily entails that female-to-male transition becomes—little by little, however fractionally—less dangerous to access. Less unknown. Which means more people will try to access it.

But listen, my defendant says—look at this graph of left-handed people, at how the number increased once we stopped forcing them to learn writing right-handed! And the patriarchy does not care, because unlike the left-handed, he has stolen a resource owed to its men. It does not matter why the number has increased, only that it did. The trans man’s extreme rarity was part of the deal struck with trans-pathology.

But listen, my defendant says, women don’t want to be men. Women are essentially, fundamentally women. No matter how badly they do or don’t have it, they would never attempt to rid themselves of womanhood—it’s just not their nature. And that means anyone attempting to avail of female-to-male transition was never a woman by dint of trying at all.

Here we arrive at a contradiction. If trans-pathology justifies transition via an incurable ill or an innate quality, then transition cannot be justified by itself. Transition is the action in need of justification; it is not itself proof of anything. Moreover it makes all my defendant’s attempts to argue for either gender-expansiveness or feminism rather laughable. In order to assert that no True Woman would ever attempt to transition to a man, he must either claim that women aren’t really suffering due to their gender all that much, or else that they are too fundamentally different from men to even consider the option. Too incapable of shifting their self-perception of gender, and altogether too committed to having boobs.

Sooner or later in the process of trans-normalisation, no matter how pathologic its framing, it arrives at the simple truth that those born as women can live as men. And the fact women are a patriarchal commodity is hardly news or a secret. Therefore it is possible that someone—arguably—‘gender-sane,’ and thus perfectly suitable for feminised exploitation, would attempt to avail of transition. It only makes rational sense.

And after all, what about my plaintiff? Is she not a woman?

Ah, argues my defendant, but exactly. She’s a woman, and for whatever reason she decided to dabble in real disorders. And now she’s crying about the consequences. Boo-fucking-hoo. She stands here lying she was forced to do it, but he knows better—he knows how difficult transition is to access, how gatekept it is. No one is scouting vulnerable young women to pump them full of testosterone. With that I could only agree—the patriarchy does not simply let go of its resource. My defendant is none too pleased with me, though, perhaps because I have alluded his transition constitutes a kind of ‘escape plan’ for women. But: clearly fucking not. She’s here, isn’t she? Not too escaped, is she? She wasn’t really trans! And anyway, what does that highfalutin stuff matter. She’s brought us all here today because she regrets a choice she made. If she supposedly ‘escaped’ misogyny with transition, why isn’t she still a man? What kind of woman would choose to become a man, only to come crawling back?

A crazy one.

Competitive Sanity

Dear jury, I do confess: my plaintiff is, some might say, full of shit. We all are in this courtroom, but she’s directly lying more than most. Demonstrably, factually, ideologically, there simply isn’t great social incentive to force women to transition to men. On the contrary, there is great incentive to stop them from doing it. In most countries you need permission to legally transition, and that permission is secured with going through a lot of motions to ensure you really really need it. If you’re transitioning outside the legal procedure, it is even harder to argue you were forced to transition or never prevented from doing it. No, there would’ve been a lot of forces hindering the detrans woman’s alleged self-mutilation. This whole story is incredibly easy to poke holes in—and she would know that.

So why is she saying it anyway? What is she trying to get, and why does she think this is how she gets it?

Her plea, as stated, is for cessation of trans accommodation—medical transition firstly, but eventually all of it. Why? Because she bears a psychological wound. She suffers dysphoria from the results of her transition—she’s been rendered sex/gender-disabled by it. So the request is in essence a request for accommodation. Indeed, due to a total lack of detransition procedures and thus state or insurance coverage, the courts are some of the only avenues through which costs of sex-altering detransition procedures may be covered. It is not an unreasonable question: if I received a double mastectomy on insurance/government funding, so why can’t I receive breast reconstruction in the same manner?

And the answer is: because that’s not how trans-pathology works, sweetie. This isn’t a fair exchange sex/gender marketplace. Transition is a barely-granted accommodation—and a crazy thing to do.

Voluntary detransition necessarily arrives at a different issue at the heart of patriarchy: that sex/gender are supposed to be immutable and eternal, and that natural sex is inherently preferable and superior to artificially modified sex. Trans-pathology seeks to frame trans-ness as an essential attribute which causes a psychological wound that must be relieved, thereby violating the immutability dogma as little as possible and assenting to the superiority of natural sex. But to detransition is, truthfully, to transition again at least once; multiple sex changes cannot be justified within this paradigm. And, the nature of transition access ensures that in the overwhelming majority of cases, going through it is a choice made on purpose. Therefore, desiring detransition under the framework of immutable sex/gender means you transitioned by frivolity, delusion—mistake. And not just any mistake; a mistake in which you pilfered a limited-resource accommodation. Willingly destroyed your ability to adequately perform feminised labour. And, according to the naturalistic fallacy, wasted a superior version of your sex for no justifiable reason.

Just like it is insanity to think you can or should change your sex, it is madness to imagine you can just walk back and forth willy-nilly.

So if that’s the case, how does one normalise detransition? What framing is needed? How does my plaintiff place it in the realm of sanity?

Just like the trans man acquiesces to some of the patriarchal claims about him in order to shift others, so does the detrans woman. She agrees that yes, her natural sex is superior and unrecoverable. Yes, it was a mistake. What she can’t acquiesce to is the idea that she transitioned on purpose, willingly. Because if that is so, she violated the caste system in the most grievous of ways, and she stole labour and accommodation. If you know anything about the treatment of the disabled—or the homeless, or any vulnerable category that requires more accommodation than average—you would know that to admit such a thing is to cut yourself off from any further help. If the detrans woman agrees she was a rational agent when she transitioned, she agrees she is a parasite and a resource-eater. Within the patriarchal framework, she cannot argue for the right to change sex again.

If she does not present her transition as an insanity and her detransition as a cure, then that means she is mad and has been the whole time. Mad: meaning, unworthy of autonomy. She must self-denigrate and totally disavow her past self—or else be denied autonomy not only then, but also now.

She makes the claim she was mad. She finds every way in which her agency could’ve been compromised and exaggerates them until her past self appears completely incapable of making choices. All our agencies are always at least somewhat compromised, of course, for we are not totally rational agents and we are not omniscient—but that doesn’t matter, because mad choices will always be simple to present as delusions, and the sane ones will always be assumed perfectly-agented by default. And so, for instance, it may be true that the detrans woman’s doctor had a poor grasp on the mental health of women while knowing how to follow basic transition guidelines. But this is not presented as one of many circumstances which enabled the detrans woman to rethink her gender and consider transition—rather, it becomes a total superimposition of the doctor’s will upon the detrans woman’s, erasing her own decision-making capacity entirely. It becomes brainwashing.

Or let us return to my favourite topic: the patriarchy. While it is absurd to suggest the commodification and dehumanisation inherent to being a woman under patriarchy could never cause anyone to alienate from ‘woman’ altogether, it is likewise absurd to present transition as an ‘escape’ from patriarchy. The only escape there is from an all-encompassing regime is leaving for the woods. Moreover, the sex-essentialism of its caste system ensures trans men’s lives are made especially precarious, their trans status impossible to totally conceal, and any and all reveal of it threatening dehumanisation and womanisation. You can become a man—but only a queer one, and queerness is automatically degendering and unstable.

(Recall our bigoted judge. He is merely a distilled substrate of my own experiences with how trans-ness undoes humanity, disassembles one’s body into parts to be undressed and examined in the town square, and assiduously regendered.)

As is abundantly clear to anyone that’s ever transitioned, transition results in a re-negotiation of one’s status within the patriarchal caste system—with a heavy penalty. It is as silly to say ‘man’ confers no immense advantages over ‘woman’ as it is to say ‘cis’ confers no immense advantages over ‘trans.’ Both claims are brazenly, demonstrably absurd—mad, even.

So why is the trans man stating the former while the detrans woman states the latter? Why are they making absurd claims while poking at the absurdity of the other’s claim?

The fact of the matter is, both transition and detransition are fundamentally incompatible with patriarchal logics. Bioessentialist sex-destiny at birth and the naturalistic fallacy of sex are its foundational building blocks. Ability to perform sex/gender up to an arbitrary labour standard is the measure of one’s place in the hierarchy, and that hierarchy is supposed to have no mobility. Therefore patriarchy is incompatible with providing accommodation for changing sex, at all, ever. Desire for this accommodation is madness, undergoing it is disabling, and both madness and disability are utterly undesirable within resource austerity.

Then it follows that attempting to justify either transition or detransition care within a patriarchal system generates fallacies, omissions, distortions, and outright lies, because true justification—true equity with those that do not change sex/gender—is impossible. Moreover, sex/gender austerity forces accommodation requests of the trans and the detrans to become antagonistic. If the trans deserve accommodation, that makes the detrans lying and crazy resource-eaters. If the detrans deserve accommodation, that makes the trans crazy mutilators of the sane. Therefore the trans and the detrans must compete for the title of least-mad to be granted anything at all. The needs of the more-sane supersede the needs of the less-sane, because the saner you are, the more likely you are to almost-meet the arbitrary standard of labour. You are more worthy of having a finite resource spent on you.

So: poke holes in the inevitable flaws in each other’s reasoning, and whoever pokes best, wins.

And The Winner Is…

In the realm of pure logic, obviously no one. We’re all mad here. But this isn’t pure logic—this is the court of patriarchy, and the logics we’re operating under are patriarchal. Primacy in a hierarchy is won with obedience.

And in that sense, the case was rigged from the start.

You see, dear jury, you were never needed here, and your votes will not be counted. Of our plaintiff and our defendant, there is a self-evident winner in the ‘most obedient to patriarchal logics’ competition. Look how she cries for her lost womb. She’s obviously very sorry for betraying her labour function, and she says she’s been disabled—mutilated!—by those pesky resource-eaters, those burdens. Well, we certainly don’t need to be asked twice to care less! Reduced accommodation approved!

Ah, but what she really wanted was accommodation for her gender and sex. To be a woman again.

Too bad.

It is curious, isn’t it, how rarely you see allegedly pro-detrans conservative pundits advocate for detrans healthcare. No fundraisers for breast reconstruction, no calls to include voice training in subsidised procedures, no requests to incorporate legal detransition into gender marker change pathways. You’d be forgiven for thinking no such thing as ‘detrans healthcare’ even exists. Yes, yes, they’re campaigning for the benevolent extermination of detrans people as a category via extermination of transition—but what of the ones currently living? Even if they’re supposedly irreversibly damaged, don’t they deserve at least relief?

Seems like the only thing detrans women deserve is pity—not accommodation. All their pain buys them is a lack of direct violence. But in order to have that non-violence bought with pain, they must continue to be in pain; they must remain destitute. We can’t keep encouraging this sex-changing behaviour, after all. If detrans women aren’t destitute, who knows what kind of ideas the gender-obedient will get in their as-yet sane heads.

That is, in the end, the issue with trying to earn humane treatment with pain against a system that claims you have not contributed enough to deserve humane treatment in the first place. It is a continuously defensive position, with shifting boundaries you do not get to set or control—because you’re defensive. You don’t get to decide how much pain constitutes enough payment, nor how much your pain is worth.

Consider trans-pathology. Whether we call it transsexualism or gender dysphoria or gender incongruence, transition is presented as a form of relief to a psychiatric or psychological ill—that is, it is an accommodation bought with pain. Then remains a thorny question: what if the source of pain could be eliminated? Conversion therapy is deemed in poor taste chiefly because it does not work. But a total cure is always preferable to a relief. Therefore, under this logic, it must be pursued. So long as gender is what it is, and so long as madness is what it is, the search for working conversion therapy cannot cease. You can spend countless hours proving the ‘true cure’ to trans-ness is impossible, but with enough push, some hack will publish something credible-looking and science-seeming that asserts otherwise—and they’ll be more useful to the system than you.

Just look at the Cass Review.

When Abigail Thorn in her Why I Don’t Like The Word ‘Dysphoria’ essay suggested the basis for the right to transition ought to be her will—that the only justification sex-changing and gender-shifting needs is “because I want to”—she received quite some pushback on the idea. It is a common critique, one I received myself over many years, and it comes in two forms. One is an accusation of pain-ignoring. That we do not recognise the suffering of trans people, perhaps even attempt to override their stories. It’s valid that you’re not hurting, but you have to recognise that I do!

And I ask: why should the freedoms permitted to you depend on how much pain you’re in? Does this not entail that, once you’re not hurting anymore, you no longer deserve them—meaning, your destitution must in some way remain eternal?

The second critique is pragmatic: if we push this weird frivolous agency line, we won’t get what we want fast enough. We’ll die on this hill arguing we deserve autonomy while getting no help at all, when we could have at least some benefit now.

But neither Thorn nor I argue against pragmatism. I lied my way through the masturbation quizzes in the psych ward just fine. The argument made in both this essay and hers is not, as the critique fears, for the rapid dissolution of current trans healthcare and for dying on the vanguard of pipe dreams, but rather for a gradual shift of the patriarchal sex-caste construction—for rethinking sex. And there are pragmatic reasons to argue this; we can observe them right now, as fascism builds its momentum around restricting whatever trans freedoms were won with trans-pathology.

Because, I repeat: transition is fundamentally incompatible with patriarchal logics. It cannot be assimilated. Its normalisation jeopardises the basis on which it is allowed a sliver of assimilation. Thus trans-pathology is locked in a cycle whose only variable is the intensity of its eugenic extermination.

It is also a cycle in which I cannot exist with dignity (not that anyone does.) At the height of trans-pathology, I am a crazy resource-thief; at its nadir, I am a mutilated and fallen woman. So I reject this samsara, not just as an ideological dead end, but also a practical one. I reject the austerity of feminised labour; I reject that a hierarchy of resource-consumption is necessary and that no better world can exist. I reject pathetic flailing in front of impassive juries and judges, trying to prove I’m not really crippled or mad—that I don’t deserve to be treated like them. I reject that some people deserve living more than others, or deserve participation in society more than others. I reject being taxed with pain for failing to be a good-enough resource site. I reject the need for performance of justification.

And I hope you do, too.

Recommended Reading

On mad justice: Micha Frazer-Carroll, Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health.

On the treatment of the disabled as an economic and eugenic burden: Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Verkant, Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto.

[hms-no-fun]

you were on cohost? i guess too late now, how was it for you?

cohost had its fair share of problems and i could often find the community there a bit too tumblr-core fingerwaggy if you know what i mean. but the site's dead now so it's kind of a moot point. what i find myself reflecting on most these days are the positives.

first, no numbers. i think their no numbers policy was probably a bit over-aggressive, but it quelled some of the rat race popularity contest aspect of social media that often makes it so tedious. i liked their tag tracking system, their robust content warning options, and the absence of infinite scroll. what i miss most about cohost is that their text editor supported CSS, which led to people programming elaborate text effects and puzzles and games in-site that harkened back to the days of flash animations. there was something in this combination of elements that drew out a rebellious creativity in users.

cohost came at a time when social media was across the board feeling terrible (and it's only gotten worse hahaha), particularly as someone who makes shit that relies on you clicking links that take you away from the website or app. algorithms hate this and punish it. users also just seem kind of lazy and disinterested in using the internet so much as letting the internet happen to them passively. but when a post of mine went viral on cohost, people engaged with it. it wasn't just likes and shares, it was comments and additions. it felt like a place that (at its best) encouraged actual conversation and the development of new ideas among like-minded peers. when my posts did well and i included a donation link, people gave me money. it felt genuinely like a website that COULD support professional blog work in a way that was more customizable even than substack yet still RSS friendly, and the Following tab which let you easily see posts of specific users was a REVELATION, like a mini RSS reader within the website itself.

but the enterprise was unsustainable for various reasons (not all of them outside the dev crew's control) and the haters got what they wanted. now our big social media alternative is bluesky, a website that dares to ask the question "what if there was another twitter?" the answer is that it fucking sucks. i hate microblogs so much dude, why on EARTH are we still acting like these disambiguited 300-character-limit posts are the most preferable means of social communication online??? why would you set out to make a better twitter and then deliberately choose to replicate literally every aspect of the user experience that encouraged low-information high-drama conflict fabrication? WHY WOULD YOU MAKE A VERSION OF TWITTER WHERE YOU CAN EASILY LOOK UP THE ACCOUNT OF EVERYONE WHO HAS YOU BLOCKED AND IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A FEATURE NOT A BUG???????? i just don't get it. i don't even get the optimism of the early adopters. i've seen people decry the post-election decay of the platform like "of course the cishets come in to ruin a community that was defined by trans & queer people" i'm sorry HELLO???????? from literally day zero bluesky was aiming to be a hands-off centrist IPO-friendly tech startup, there was never anything structurally embedded within the platform itself to keep this kind of decay from happening, you just happened to be on there when there were dramatically fewer users most of whom were curious tech enthusiasts. seriously, how have we not learned this lesson yet? you can't define a digital culture by the vibes of random user behavior! unless you have LAWS and GUIDELINES whereby you fucking BAN people for being shitheads, unless you enforce an actual code of conduct and punish bigoted speech and design a system that encourages constructive conversation, you are always always ALWAYS going to wind up at unhinged facebook boomer slop!

the death of cohost and the utterly predictable decay of bluesky are a big part of the reason why i've been posting so much more on tumblr. this is like the last bastion of anything even remotely resembling the old web, with its support of longposts and tagging and how easy it is to find random hobbyists doing cool shit you never knew existed before. like, yeah, you have to search that shit out and tailor your feed to not drive you crazy, but that's what i like about it!!! i am an adult with agency who understands that life is complicated and as such i expect to have to put some work into making my experience with a website positive! but in the hellworld of the iphone everything is walled garden apps for aggregating content where the content and its creators are structurally established as infinitely replaceable and uniquely worthless punching bags to be used and cast aside. everyone's given up on moderation and real jobs don't exist anymore especially if you happen to work in the "creative economy" IE are a writer or critic or artist or hobbyist of literally any kind. we've given up on expecting anything from the rich moneyboys who own and profit immensely off of the platforms whose value we literally create!!! especially now with the rise of "AI" grifters, whose work has ratcheted good old fashioned casual sexism and racism and homophobia up to levels not seen in such mainstream spaces since the early 2000s.

i like tumblr because i don't have to use a third party app to get & answer asks at length, and because it is a visual artist friendly platform where i won't be looked at funny for reblogging furry postmodernism or transgender homestuck OCs. it is a site that utterly lacks respectability and that's what makes it even remotely usuable. unfortunately it also sucks! partly it sucks because this place was ground zero for the rise of puritanical feminist-passing conservatism in leftist spaces, so it's like a hyperbolic time chamber for brain-melting life or death discourse about the most inconsequential bullshit you could ever imagine. but it also sucks because it's owned by a profit-motivated moneyboy who has consistently encouraged a culture of virulent transphobia and frequently bans trans women who call this out. so like, yeah, this place is cool compared to everywhere else, but it is exactly like everywhere else in that is also on a ticking clock to its own inevitable demise. the owners of this website will destroy everything that makes it interesting and will EAGERLY delete the nearly twenty years (!!!!!!) of posts it's accumulated the instant it will profit them to do so. this will be immensely unpopular and everyone will agree it's a tragedy and it won't matter. the culture and content of a social media platform is epiphenomenal to its rote economic valuation. i mean, obviously it isn't, zero of these massive tech companies would be what they are if so many people weren't so eager to give their time and labor away for free (and yes, writing a dumb dick joke on tumblr IS a form of labor in the same way that doing a captcha is labor, just because it's a miniscule contribution in an economy of scale doesn't mean you didn't contribute!), but once a tech company reaches a certain threshold its valuation ceases to be tethered to anything that actually exists in reality.

all of which is why i remember cohost with a heavy heart. yeah, it was imperfect. it was also independently owned, made with the explicit goal of creating a form of social media that actually tries not to give you a lifelong anxiety disorder so it can sell you homeopathic anti-anxiety sawdust suppositories. for the brief window of time when it was extant, i was genuinely hopeful for the future of being a creative on the internet. part of why i spend so much time on godfeels, a fucking homestuck fanfiction with no hope of turning a profit or establishing mainstream legitimacy, is that my readers actually ENGAGE with the material. what brought me back to using this website consistently was precisely the glut of godfeels-related questions i got, and the exciting conversations that resulted from my answers. meanwhile i put so many hours into my videos and even when they do well numerically, i barely see any actual engagement with the material. and that is a deliberate design choice on the part of youtube! that is the platform functioning as intended!! it sucks!!!

what the memory of cohost has instilled in me is a neverending distaste for the lazy unambitious also-rans that define the modern internet. i remember the possibility space of the early web and long for the expressiveness that even the most minor of utilities offered. we sacrificed that freedom for a convenience which was always the pretense for eventually charging us rent. i am thinking a lot these days about what a publicly funded government administrated social media utility would look like. what federal open source standards could look in an environment where the kinds of activities a digital ecosystem can encourage are strictly regulated against exploitation, bigotry, scams, and literal gambling. what if there was a unionized federal workforce devoted to the administration of internet moderation, which every website above a certain user threshold must legally take advantage of? i like to imagine a world where youtube isn't just nationalized but balkanized, where you have nested networks of youtubes administrated for different purposes by different agencies and organizations that operate on different paradigms of privacy and algorithmic interaction. imagine that your state, county, and/or city has its own branch of youtube meant to specifically highlight local work, while also remaining connected to a broader national network (oops i just reinvented federation lmao). imagine a world where server capacity is a publicly owned utility apportioned according to need and developed in collaboration with the communities of their construction rather than as a deliberate exploitation of them. our horizons for these kinds of things are just so, so small, our ability to imagine completely captured by capitalist realism, our willingness to demand services from our government simply obliterated by decades of cynical pro-austerity propaganda. i imagine proposing some of this stuff and people reacting like "well that's unrealistic" "that'll never happen" "they'd just use it for evil" and i am just SO! FUCKING! TIRED!!!!

like wow you're soooooo cool for being effectively two steps left of reagan, i bet you think prison abolition and free public housing are an impossible pipedream too huh? and exactly what has that attitude gotten you? what've you gained by being such a down to earth realist whose demands are limited by the scope of what seems immediately possible? has anything gotten better? have any of the things you thought were good stayed good? is your career more stable, your political position more safe, your desire to live and thrive greatly expanded? or do you spend every day in a cascading panopticon of stress and collapse, overwhelmed to the point of paralysis by the sheer magnitude of what it's cost us to abandon the future? you HAVE to dream. you HAVE to make unrealistic demands. the fucking conservatives have been making unrealistic demands forever and look, they're getting everything they want even though EVERYONE hates them for it! please i'm begging you to see and understand that what's feasible, what's reasonable, what's realistic, are literally irrelevant. these things only feel impossible because we choose to believe The Adults (and if you're younger than like 45, trust me, to the ruling class you are a child) whose bank accounts reflect just how profitable it is to convince us that they're impossible. all those billions of dollars these fuckers have didn't come from nowhere, it was stolen from all of us. there is no reason that money can't and shouldn't be seized and recirculated back into the economy, no reason it can't be used to fund a society that is actually social, where technological development is driven not by what's most likely to drive up profits next quarter but by what people need from technology in their daily lives.

uh so yeah basically that's my opinion of cohost lmao

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Canadian Newspaper Globe And Mail: Conservative Leader wants harsher jail sentences for repeat offender auto thieves.

Nora Loreto, self-described Socialist: Stealing cars is a victimless crime!

Loreto: Also, most people in our jails are innocent!

Loreto: As long as you use the extremely technical definition of “jail” that means “a place where people are usually held before trial and are therefore legally innocent”, which is not how it is generally used.

Loreto: I say this while ignoring how car theft means there is a victim, by definition.

Me:

Some idiot also claimed the real issue was car manufacturers making a ‘defective product’, and the “logical step” should be the government going after them for obvious collusion with insurance companies.

The intellectual titan agreed.

Even though about five seconds thought would go “wait, wouldn’t having an insecure car reduce sales? And don’t insurance companies try to avoid paying out money? And isn’t car insurance mandatory anyway?”

She has a substack post about it, and it’s, uh, special. As in Ed. (archive)

>For me, I understand a victim to be someone whose life is irrevocably impacted, negatively, by forces they cannot control.

>You’re not a victim if things can be made well through consumption.

If someone spills my drink in a bar, I'm still a victim even if they or I buy me a new drink. It doesn't un-spill the drink.

Even if I get a new car, that’s a lot of trouble to go through.

>You’re a victim if you’ve experienced something that means that you’ll never again be the person you were before.

Because no one's ever been permanently traumatized by someone using force to take their stuff. Even leaving aside the times where the thief assaulted and seriously injured the car owner.

>My immediate, half-serious reaction, that jailing people for a victimless crime is ridiculous, caught a lot of heat.

Ah, yes, the classic "I wasn't serious (except when I was)" dodge.

>Thousands of men told me how much they love their cars, how their cars hold them at night and make love to them. My emails and direct messages filled up with lots of “if you steal my car I will kill you”s and “where do you live so I can steal your cars”es. The people were mad that I could assert such a thing.

Along with the classic "let's make this a gender issue, for some reason" and "talking about the harassment so I look more like a victim while ignoring the actual criticism".

>It’s the formulation that this object is so premordial that anything that may befall a car, whether a jacking or an overpacked highway, is a personal attack on the car’s owner. It’s silly.

And naturally, a red just starts making up entirely new arguments for and assumptions about the critics from thin air instead of addressing the actual criticism.

A carjacking is a violent theft of an occupied car.

Which means the operator must a) be removed, by force and/or threat of force, or b) become a hostage of the 'jacker. Sometimes both.

It's amazing that this intellectual titan can even type while she's staring so hard at her navel. Or...another body part. From the inside.

[astroismypassion]

✨PART OF FORTUNE IN SIGNS AND HOUSES SERIES: 4TH HOUSE✨

Credit goes to astrology blog @astroismypassion

ARIES PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Aries and Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via starting your own small business from home or take a leadership role, especially in the kitchen, family matters, children, education, history and geography. You may be an excellent tour guide of your local town. You may also find wealth through becoming a coach, personal trainer or someone who suggest meal plan for a specific sport, for example meal plan for runners.

TAURUS PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Taurus and Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via real estate, gardening, landscaping, art and craftsmanship. You can sell handmade items, such as pottery, jewelry or home decor. You may also offer gardening services, sell plants or draw plants and sell your drawings online. You could start a home-based catering service, bakery or sell homemade goods at a local market. You might be able to create financial plans for families since you have a knack for helping others to manage their finances.

GEMINI PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Gemini and Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via writing articles, blogs, even e-books from home. Especially on platforms like Medium, Substack or starting your own blog from the comfort of your home. You may also offer tutoring services o reven create online courses in subjects you are passionate about (Udemy, Coursera, VIPKid).

CANCER PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via a home-based business, such as home bakery, daycare or arts and crafts. You could find abundance in life by becoming a life coach, counselor or therapist. You may earn money from a home-cooked meal delivery. You can also each yourself interior design.

LEO PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Leo and Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via music, singing, performing from home, tutoring someone in music and teaching them how to play an instrument. You may also post tutorials (for example guitar tutorials) online from the comfort of your home.

VIRGO PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Virgo and Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via selling your homemade jams, pies or granola mix. You may also offer healthy student snacks or offer tips on how to make those at home with cheap and easy ingredients. Again, you could feel abundant when starting a podcast or your own local book club or even themed book club.

LIBRA PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Libra and Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via designing and selling your own T-shirts, designing logos for other people. You could be good at doing make up for weddings or birthday parties. You have a knack to be an excellent host at your own home. You feel the most abundant when you have balanced family relations and friendships, partnership.

SCORPIO PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Scorpio and Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via teaching people how to overcome tough situations in life and helping them find their purpose, hosting a leadership course online or from home. You may also enjoy talking about mental health and psychology.

SAGITTARIUS PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Sagittarius and Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via showing tourists your hometown, hosting a culinary course in a foreign language on the local cuisine. You could also find abundance by becoming a local tour guide, even offering virtual tours of your local town.

CAPRICORN PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Capricorn and Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via working with your parents, helping other families finding structure and order in the home, organising someone's closet.

AQUARIUS PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Aquarius and Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via video gaming from home and streaming. You could also start a home-based business. You feel the wealthiest when you are being progressive, unique and standing out from the community. You may attract wealth by starting a podcast with your close friends, building websites from home or launching your own social media channel, platform.

PISCES PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 4TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Pisces and Cancer Sun people in your life. You could make money via taking photos of families or pregnant women. You may also do videos for someone's wedding, anniversary or birthday. You may host themed parties at home for your friends or poetry nights.

Credit goes to astrology blog @astroismypassion

[louiseolivier]

Fic Idea

Post 8x05

Bobby's acting strangely—not overtly, but just enough that everyone is side-eyeing each other. Buck decides to hang back after his shift one morning and catches Bobby still in his office. He asks him what's up, and Bobby admits that even though Gerrard is gone, that doesn't mean the budget cuts also went away. The good news is that with union pushback, instead of firing someone, they've agreed to rotating month-long furloughs, effective Nov 1st.

Buck immediately volunteers for A shift. He'll do Nov and Dec. Bobby says he can't let Buck sacrifice that much of his paycheck. Buck tells him he's got enough stocked away for a couple of months and that he wants to do this. It might even be good for him.

The first month is really good. Tommy works 48/96, so they get four full days off together and it's amazing. They had a mini vacation in Palm Springs where they went stargazing, hung out by the pool, and spent a day in Joshua Tree.

Buck gets in a lot of reading and knocks down his sizable tbr. He fills in as a sitter for Jee-Yun and enjoys the hell out of spending time with his niece (never mind her deep disappoint on the days Tommy isn't there too). He also gives himself a full day of doing nothing but scrolling his phone. He jumps from one Wikipedia article to another and explores exceedingly niche substacks.

And he still gets 118 time. At least once a week he goes in and cooks a filling lunch for them. He does it at the 217 too, where they sing his praises. He even spent two days being a firefighter when Chim came down with a cold. All in all his month off was pretty amazing, and he figures December would be a piece of cake. He's so sure that he tells Bobby he'll take January too.

Except it stops being a piece of cake. Two days in and he's already restless. It doesn't help when Tommy, Chim, and Eddie show up and tell him how they worked together for a rooftop rescue at Nakatomi Tower. Buck doesn't know the building and asks where it's located. The guys are dumbfounded. "Like, Die Hard, man," Eddie tells him. "Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs?" Tommy says hopefully. "Die Hard...Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker?" Chimney prods. "Oh, yeah," Buck says, having it all click together.

After that his aimlessness really takes hold. He keeps himself busy by feeding the 217 breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the days Tommy works. On his second day, one of Tommy's crew tells him, "You know, you should start taking orders. Make some money since they won't let you fight fires.

Buck's surprised at how fast the idea takes hold. He spends all four of his days with Tommy talking about it. He feels like he's vibrating out of his skin, and he falls just a little more in love with Tommy when he tells Buck that his idea is not only good, but that he knows a guy who can help make it happen.

Buck next goes to his team and explains his idea. He's going to open a sandwich service. Nearby fire stations will send in orders the day before, the sandwiches will be made the next morning, and delivered throughout the afternoon. Tommy has a friend who will rent out commercial kitchen space to him, and the employees will be fellow furloughed firefighters. They wouldn't be making the same pay, but they would be making something instead of draining out their savings like Buck. Eddie's all in, but Hen and Chim are a little more hesitant. Whether they come around or not, that's okay. Buck plans on starting small and thinks he can do it with three or four people, and he has multiple firehouses to pull from. But he knows his biggest hurdle is coming up with the start-up cash.

He toys with the idea of asking his parents for a loan. They were willing to fork over money for Chim and Maddie's down payment, and they swear up and down they want to make amends, so if Buck needs to use guilt to get a cut, he will. Before he can work up the nerve to ask, Tommy hands him a card and calls it an early Christmas present. Inside is a check for 10k. Buck's floored and misty eyed. He asks how and why and are you sure? Tommy pulls him in and tells Buck that he's sure. That he believes in Buck and wants to do whatever he can to help him succeed. Including making sandwiches.

And that's it. That's all I've got. Purged from the system.

[olderthannetfic]

celestemdavis substack letter "Why Boys Don't Go to College" has been on my dash. I'm reading the sources, and as I do, I keep thinking about what you said before about fannish spaces and the relative difference in how boys and girls are taught to value unpaid labor. The "male dominated" fields have direct financial rewards, but all of the "male flight" fields are ones that I was encouraged into for, like, betterment of the human race. Money alone makes me squeamish. I wonder how common that is?

--

[darkmaga-returns]

…as well as the history of the Polio bioweapon “vaccines” which were used to assassinate an incarcerated Jack Ruby with the very same SV40 promotor sequences that children and babies, in lesser concentrations so as to make it less obvious, are still being injected with today…

"They're giving COVID vaccines to 6-month-old children now...[but] we know that it ruins stem cells in pregnant women...[plus] Kevin McKernan [et al. found that] there's SV40 in it. There was [also] a staphylococcal endotoxin gene...[and] two snake genes in there." Suzanne Humphries (@DrSuzanneH7), a physician and the co-author of Dissolving Illusions, describes for Joe Rogan (@joerogan ) how the CDC still has three COVID injections on its "vaccination" schedule for six-month-old infants. Humphries notes "how bad [this] is" by highlighting the fact that the injections "ruin stem cells in pregnant women." The physician also highlights the fact that scientist and former R&D lead of the Human Genome Project at MIT Kevin McKernan found SV40 in the injections (which is linked to the development of cancer). Furthermore, Humphries says that there's also a staphylococcal endotoxin gene and "two snake genes" present in the genetical material in the COVID injections. Regarding why hospitals are willing to administer such dangerous injections to infants, Humphries says that "[it's] all a money game. That's really the bottom line of it."

[ofmdrecaps]

11/15-16/2024 Daily OFMD Recap

TLDR; David Jenkins; Rhys Darby; Taika Waititi; Con O'Neill; Samba Schutte; Adam Stein; Dominic Burgess; Fan Spotlight: Fluffvember Reminder; OFMD Advent Calendar; Love Notes; Daily Darby / Today's Taika;

= David Jenkins =

Chaos Dad was sharing some sweet fan videos this past weekend on twitter-- but it wont let me link the video in tumblr, so here it is on Instagram by the same person!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by magda (@astralvcid)

Source: Astralvcid's Instagram

== Rhys Darby ==

Rhys out and about in LA and running into fans!

Source: Ops35mm's Instagram

Rhys will be joining the San Francisco Comedy Festival that's going on between January 16-Feb 2, 2025! Thank you to @adoptourcrew for shouting this out!

Source: Adopt Our Crew's Tumblr

= Darby Daily Doodles! =

I'm so behind on sharing the Darby Daily Doodles! Here's a pile for you since there's image room today!

Source: Rhys Darby's Free Substack

= Darby Family Kittens =

The Darby's are still looking to adopt out these kittens! If you are in the area and looking for some adorably sweet and energetic (if not chaotic) kittens, please hit up https://www.instagram.com/kittenrescuela/ and help Rhys and Rosie reduce the cat size of their house!

Source: Rosie's Instagram

= Taika Waititi =

More of Taika out at the Interior Chinatown premiere, this time with Tzi Ma!

Source: Tzima8's Instagram

Taika and Jimmy O were on Good Morning America talking about Interior Chinatown!

Source: Youtube

And a tragedy/comedy in 5 parts.

Source: TV Insider's Instagram

An article about the Boy and the Octopus <3

Source: Belfast Telegraph UK

= Con O'Neill =

New trailer for Con's new role in SAS Rogue Heroes!

= Samba Schutte =

Samba sent out another thank you everyone who attended his Momentus event!

"Thank you again to all 250+ of you who joined my Death by Cheese baking class🙏🏾 We are able to serve over 4000 meals to hungry kids, elders and families thanks to your generosity via @lafoodbank❤️ Thank you thank you thank you, and so happy you love my mac and cheese recipe🫶🧀"

Source: Samba's Instagram

= Adam Stein =

Our fab writer/executive producer/extra Adam Stein has been active with Waiting for Godot, and also getting to meet one of his idols!

Source: Geffen Playhouse Instagram

= Dominic Burgess =

Dominic was out at the Paramount backlot!

Source: Dominic's Bsky

== Fan Spotlight ==

= Fluffvember Reminder =

Fluffvember is still going on! You can check out what's been posted or interact with them on bsky! ofmdfluffvember.bsky.social there's also some fluffvember going on over here on tumblr! Check it out!

Source: ofmdfluffvember.bsky.social

As a taste-- Our darling crewmate @blueberreads' is back with more pixel art! This time of our Boyfriends!

Source: Bluberreads Bsky

= OFMD Advent Calendar =

Sounds like things are ramping up for an OFMD Advent Calendar this year! All the collaborators have been found so if you'd like to keep an eye out for the advent calendar starting Dec 1, you can follow them on Bsky!

Source: OFMD Advent Calendar 2024 Bsky

== Love Notes ==

Hey there lovelies. I hope the weekend has been treating you well and you've gotten some good rest. We've got some holidays coming up soon-- do you get to take any time off?

I hope you know that you are loveable no matter where you are in life. I hope you know that you are worthy of that love no matter where you are, no matter what you've done, and now matter how little or how much you've accomplished. A lot of people in this world want you to believe you are only worth something if you are making money, or gaining status, but you are worth so much just being your goofy, wonderful self. Please take care of yourselves this week lovelies. Rest well <3

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by bailey (@anxiety.positive)

Source: Anxiety Positive Instagram

== Daily Darby / Today's Taika ==

Heyyyy been a while since I was able to get one of these in here! There's been so much going on! I know I've used the Taika one before, but it's too good not to apply with Rhys working out. Today's gifs courtesy of the fabulous @daxxlovesrhys and @meluli!

[lesmisletters-daily]

Sums Deposited With Laffitte

Les Mis Letters reading club explores one chapter of Les Misérables every day. Join us on Discord, Substack - or share your thoughts right here on tumblr - today's tag is #lm 1.5.3

On the other hand, he remained as simple as on the first day. He had gray hair, a serious eye, the sunburned complexion of a laborer, the thoughtful visage of a philosopher. He habitually wore a hat with a wide brim, and a long coat of coarse cloth, buttoned to the chin. He fulfilled his duties as mayor; but, with that exception, he lived in solitude. He spoke to but few people. He avoided polite attentions; he escaped quickly; he smiled to relieve himself of the necessity of talking; he gave, in order to get rid of the necessity for smiling. The women said of him, “What a good-natured bear!” His pleasure consisted in strolling in the fields.

He always took his meals alone, with an open book before him, which he read. He had a well-selected little library. He loved books; books are cold but safe friends. In proportion as leisure came to him with fortune, he seemed to take advantage of it to cultivate his mind. It had been observed that, ever since his arrival at M. sur M., his language had grown more polished, more choice, and more gentle with every passing year. He liked to carry a gun with him on his strolls, but he rarely made use of it. When he did happen to do so, his shooting was something so infallible as to inspire terror. He never killed an inoffensive animal. He never shot at a little bird.

Although he was no longer young, it was thought that he was still prodigiously strong. He offered his assistance to any one who was in need of it, lifted a horse, released a wheel clogged in the mud, or stopped a runaway bull by the horns. He always had his pockets full of money when he went out; but they were empty on his return. When he passed through a village, the ragged brats ran joyously after him, and surrounded him like a swarm of gnats.

It was thought that he must, in the past, have lived a country life, since he knew all sorts of useful secrets, which he taught to the peasants. He taught them how to destroy scurf on wheat, by sprinkling it and the granary and inundating the cracks in the floor with a solution of common salt; and how to chase away weevils by hanging up orviot in bloom everywhere, on the walls and the ceilings, among the grass and in the houses.

He had “recipes” for exterminating from a field, blight, tares, foxtail, and all parasitic growths which destroy the wheat. He defended a rabbit warren against rats, simply by the odor of a guinea-pig which he placed in it.

One day he saw some country people busily engaged in pulling up nettles; he examined the plants, which were uprooted and already dried, and said: “They are dead. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing to know how to make use of them. When the nettle is young, the leaf makes an excellent vegetable; when it is older, it has filaments and fibres like hemp and flax. Nettle cloth is as good as linen cloth. Chopped up, nettles are good for poultry; pounded, they are good for horned cattle. The seed of the nettle, mixed with fodder, gives gloss to the hair of animals; the root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow coloring-matter. Moreover, it is an excellent hay, which can be cut twice. And what is required for the nettle? A little soil, no care, no culture. Only the seed falls as it is ripe, and it is difficult to collect it. That is all. With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How many men resemble the nettle!” He added, after a pause: “Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.”

The children loved him because he knew how to make charming little trifles of straw and cocoanuts.

When he saw the door of a church hung in black, he entered: he sought out funerals as other men seek christenings. Widowhood and the grief of others attracted him, because of his great gentleness; he mingled with the friends clad in mourning, with families dressed in black, with the priests groaning around a coffin. He seemed to like to give to his thoughts for text these funereal psalmodies filled with the vision of the other world. With his eyes fixed on heaven, he listened with a sort of aspiration towards all the mysteries of the infinite, those sad voices which sing on the verge of the obscure abyss of death.

He performed a multitude of good actions, concealing his agency in them as a man conceals himself because of evil actions. He penetrated houses privately, at night; he ascended staircases furtively. A poor wretch on returning to his attic would find that his door had been opened, sometimes even forced, during his absence. The poor man made a clamor over it: some malefactor had been there! He entered, and the first thing he beheld was a piece of gold lying forgotten on some piece of furniture. The “malefactor” who had been there was Father Madeleine.

He was affable and sad. The people said: “There is a rich man who has not a haughty air. There is a happy man who has not a contented air.”

Some people maintained that he was a mysterious person, and that no one ever entered his chamber, which was a regular anchorite’s cell, furnished with winged hour-glasses and enlivened by cross-bones and skulls of dead men! This was much talked of, so that one of the elegant and malicious young women of M. sur M. came to him one day, and asked: “Monsieur le Maire, pray show us your chamber. It is said to be a grotto.” He smiled, and introduced them instantly into this “grotto.” They were well punished for their curiosity. The room was very simply furnished in mahogany, which was rather ugly, like all furniture of that sort, and hung with paper worth twelve sous. They could see nothing remarkable about it, except two candlesticks of antique pattern which stood on the chimney-piece and appeared to be silver, “for they were hall-marked,” an observation full of the type of wit of petty towns.

Nevertheless, people continued to say that no one ever got into the room, and that it was a hermit’s cave, a mysterious retreat, a hole, a tomb.

It was also whispered about that he had “immense” sums deposited with Laffitte, with this peculiar feature, that they were always at his immediate disposal, so that, it was added, M. Madeleine could make his appearance at Laffitte’s any morning, sign a receipt, and carry off his two or three millions in ten minutes. In reality, “these two or three millions” were reducible, as we have said, to six hundred and thirty or forty thousand francs.

[aimmyarrowshigh]

"Right now, many authors are understandably pissed off. Can you believe Meta has decided to steal authors' books to train AI? I’ve gone from anger to rage to… laughing about it?

"The author Emily Henry told her 531,000 Instagram followers that she’s pretty miffed:

“Meta has stolen our books to train its AI. To me, the inevitable end result of this is that someday billionaires will be able to remove writers from the equation and make even more money off other people’s labour than they already do. I’m not sure how much longer I can justify using this app so if you want to stay up to date, make sure you’re subscribed to my Substack.”

"I did the same—tagging Meta on Instagram, as if they were a naughty school kid. But they don’t care! A few authors leaving Instagram won’t make the tiniest difference to them.

"It’s never been more important to think about ownership of your art. Authors spend so much time working on their projects. I recently read about Martha Beck’s writing process—she takes six-mile walks, listens to audiobooks at 2x speed, writes on Post-its notes for a year, and then lies on the floor with huge sheets of paper to bring it all together, and then types it all up before sending a draft to her editor. The manual work authors do with their juicy little brains is intense. I’m sure AI can help with some stuff, but honestly, the reason you enjoyed the book you just read is because someone, a human, spent years churning it over inside their heart and mind, and stuck with it throughout so many ups and downs, just hoping it might change someone’s day.

"I don’t know why I’m surprised by this daylight robbery from tech dudes with no morals. I don’t know what rights actually anyone has. Authors aren’t exactly the type to put on suits and file lawsuits. We sit at home with our animals and soft jogging bottoms and slippers most of the time.

"An author friend of mine, who used to be a lawyer, said that if she worked it out, she got paid the equivalent of 2p an hour for the amount of time it took her to write her book and get it published. Many authors get a pretty low advance, and many also have to pay for legal reads, sensitivity reads, and photography themselves—on top of paying agents and various taxes. It’s becoming increasingly rare to live off solely writing books. So if you feel underpaid for all the manual labour and doing something mainly out of love, it’s pretty galling when someone then comes along and steals it too…"

-- Emma Gannon

[b0rtney]

you want homosexuals in every conceivable scenario?

Boy oh boy do i have the substack for u: mine!

NO PLEASE LEMME TELL U THE STORIES BEFORE U LEAVE--

Current is Cinnamon Muffins. TLDR: Six queer boys in a homophobic tiny town in Iowa are trying to survive winter break dodging awful parents, social stigma, and mental health crises.

Next up is How to Get Away with Marriage. TLDR: Guy with awful, religious parents marries guy who is living paycheck to paycheck so they can both get all their younger sisters out of their shitty situations (but they fall in love ofc).

Longer desc of these plus the stories coming in the next months are below the cut! (Genres include fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, mystery/thriller, coming-of-age)

Cinnamon Muffins centers on Taylor Macready, a homeless senior in high school holed up in a sleeping bag under a bridge after his parents kicked him out. He's fully ready to just accept death when it starts snowing on him while he's stargazing, but social outcast Wes Post is taking his nightly walk in a new direction and stumbles (literally) on his longtime crush, Taylor. Dragging Taylor home, Wes's parents prove themselves the only reasonable parents in this book by setting Taylor up on their pullout couch and nursing him back to health. Then Wes, whose closest school relationships include the kids who bully him for his anxiety-related speech impediment, has to get in touch with Taylor's friends to let them know the situation. Meanwhile, the mean girls of Swisher High School are starting a campaign to get homosexuality banned at school. Administratively, it gets nowhere, but it inspires several small-minded shitwads to take matters into their own hands. While Taylor is used to getting into fights, Wes isn't, but he'll have to sink or swim, because the teachers are not paid enough to care what happens in the hallways during lunchtime.

How to Get Away with Marriage opens with Luke Providence, son of a devoutly Baptist family in Nebraska, proposing to Patrick Demden, son of a recently-deceased alcoholic mechanic. The wealthy Providence parents have a longstanding agreement that once their children get married, they will receive a trust of $100,000 to use on the down-payment of a house and to start a life with their spouse. Patrick's younger sister tutors Luke's younger sister, but Patrick's sister is 16. This age gap doesn't matter much to the Providence parents, but it matters a lot to Luke, so he strikes a deal with Patrick: tell the parents he'll marry the sister, legally marry the brother, everyone gets to move to Colorado and escape abusive religious parents and crushing poverty. He needn't have done something so elaborate, Patrick would have married him for any reason at all. But the secret doesn't stay secret forever, and the Providence parents eventually come knocking, trying to recollect their children and their money.

Future stories I'll keep shorter, but feel free to ask about them either in the replies or my askbox and I'll elaborate!

Assassin x Demon King will be getting books 2 and 3! ADK is about an assassin and the king he was supposed to kill, both of whom have quit their jobs and started trying to save as many people as the assassin killed before he dies of a slow-acting poison in twelve months. Books 2 and 3 will have things getting awfully tragic and somewhat more horny than before! (No smut will make it into the print versions of these, that will remain on my substack alone)

How to Find Your Friends After the End of the World is a fantasy inspired by the isekai anime genre. Five friends in their 20s are on earth as it is wracked by a violent battle between the Heroine of the Gods and her Nemesis, and then, suddenly, they aren't. Earth has been destroyed and they are now on a new planet, in new (non-human) bodies, strewn across continents! On their new wrists, they have tattoos with each others' names, plus one (or two) new ones: their soulmates. Court politics and wastelands of monsters await them as they try desperately to reach each other, and their soulmates try desperately to reach them.

HtFYF will also have a prequel, focusing on the events that led to earth's destruction, and the battle between the Heroine of the Gods, a young woman, and her Nemesis, who seems to know more about the gods than she says. Why do the gods keep choosing such young heroes? What has the Nemesis done to put the world in such peril? Will the Heroine get to graduate on time despite the sleep she's been missing!?

The following do not yet have titles, but are fully fleshed out works ready to be thrown onto Substack:

A trilogy of eleven teens assisting in the fight against an agency that traffics, tortures, and then sells children with preternatural powers and abilities, and an exploration of the trauma those kids emerge with.

A murder mystery where a woman's sister dies, the police rule it suicide, and the woman enlists the help of a rumored contract killer to help her solve the murder-- but why does this rumored murderer-for-hire seem to know so much about her sister's death? And who was truly responsible?

A campy novel about a woman who graduates college, goes back to her hometown, and finds her highschool crush is still there, still single, and has since come out as gay. Of course, the only solution is to co-adopt an at-risk child from a neighbor.

This post will remain pinned on my profile, but for the next few days I'm having a sale on my substack tiers-- 20% off! That makes the cost to you just $8 per month to get a chapter every other day. 15 chapters for $8; that's a steal!