#semi autobiographical

[paladibun]

Very stupid ooc trans byler doodles

1st: Transmasc!Byler

2nd: Transfem!Mike + Agender!Will that does drag

3rd: ambiguous nonbinary Byler

[mothiegrey]

🧷💋Right Bathroom 💋🧷

[norrriey]

"i'm stained by someone else's hand / and i try, and try, and try to ignore it / but leave its traces everywhere i go"

aka how i'm feeling lately

twitter instagram

[qalaphyll]

Scenes from “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” (2015) based on the hybrid novel with the same name by Phoebe Gloeckner. directed by Marielle Heller.

[shironezuninja]

So I bought an available Supaidaman CD OST and that Japanese Toy Magazine on the Supaidaman franchise from CD Japan for nothing.😠😡 FFS, give me some service, Disney+!!

[literaryruin]

Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there were no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late in the nineteenth century.

- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, pp. 51

[everythingilearned]

Belfast (2021)

[renee-writer]

Dear Mom

Written for the writers write daily prompt.

Dear Mom,

I am so sorry for being away so long. I needed time to see if I could make it on my own. Get past the past, if that makes any sense. It wasn’t you I was running from. I pray you know that. Not you. Never. Him, or the memory of him, that was the demon I was trying to slay.

It didn’t work. I was good, no drugs and relatively little alcohol. Men where my problem. You know they always have been. Love means sex, unfortunately that is what he taught me.

I know you are wondering why I am writing you now. I need to come home, mom. It isn’t just me anymore. I am pregnant. The father is, well, let’s just say, out of the picture. I need to be home, we need it.

I can’t do this alone mom. Will you let us come home? I swear on the life of my unborn child, not to leave again. There is nothing out there that helps. I need to face this dead in. For myself and the baby.

Please mom. Let us come home.

Your loving daughter

[tookishcombeferre]

unmasked he sees two

tiny feet - bare - as water

washes over pale skin,

unblemished. a hand

reaches slowly with tiny

fingers grasping for his

spindly ones. he takes

warm hands in cold ones,

and looks

big eyes, so wide they nearly

cross, stare up at him.

“yours is the only face

i ever remember.

i won’t lose you …

will i?”

he ruffles this child’s hair -

“never. i promise.”

***

all of them are always the same

boring, dull-eyed, and finally

afraid - and yet - not this time …

reverent

a word he almost despises,

but, not in this context -

for, the reverence is for him -

long black dress and short hair,

perhaps the only act of defiance,

eyes wide with wonder, reaching,

touching, and pulling back -

this one. this is one of them. a lost

member of his ship. home safe and

drying off from the rain.

“they said i should ask you

how to fit in middle spaces

i hate this dress -

all dresses”

he smiles, ruffles soft transylvanian hair,

and wonders, beyond new clothes,

if other things may need replacing.

***

they listen for the child they knew

seeking the soft timid voice

flat tires did not prevent the worst from

happening. yet, some small thread

woven in a sparkling solo of dreams,

wine, and life kindled a fire in a lab

and a lair on a lake. waiting for a

miracle neither believed in. still, a knock,

soft as they both remember, raps on wood.

voice - still soft - is deeper and their child

holds a child.

“i thought you might miss me.

i still have nothing to give you.

i have nothing to offer. but, a child’s

eyes to see beauty where the world

marks only disfigurement and deviance.

teach me. i missed you.”

hands reach for hands, and they ruffle

styled transylvanian hair.

- “going home” by Pip B.

(Based on the prompt “ruffled hair” for October doodling and writing prompts. Expect many monster feelings from my poetry this month.)

[randomrichards]

BARDO: FALSE CHRONICLES OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS

Surreal avatar

For Post-Awards director

Magic realist film

[loki1987]

I’ve never told this to anybody, but it’s real difficult for me to believe, in my heart, that I’m human.

[brownweaselpoetry]

Hungering.

This is a city where the average man is not inclined to dispose of his trash. Having eaten his fill, a bespectacled man in a drab button-down shirt and formless slacks removes himself from the courtyard table before me. He leaves behind his fast food bag with a naturalness that continues to strike me as bizarre. Before standing up, he had folded the bag closed as if he intended to return for it. The courtyard clear of people other than myself once more, I return to reading in silence for another hour or so.

Eventually, a second man of about the same age appears in my periphery. I had not taken note of his arrival. Sitting briefly at a bench a short way from the unoccupied table, he looks not to me but at the abandoned fast food bag with a hungering I can recognize but not understand. He approaches the bag with such an easy coolness I half-suspect I had not correctly remembered the first man’s features.

But there could be no mistake. This man was not soft-bodied from a life of plenty. In fact, there was nothing of excess in this second man’s manner. He wears the familiar uniform of gray and faded black I have come to recognize in homeless young men. It is a method of having others’ eyes slide over and past you, their gazes having nothing descript upon which to latch.

He unfolds the paper bag, fat with its contents, and performs a practiced assessment that could not have taken longer than a second. His eyes are fixed upon the paper bag and his head is held motionless. He folds it closed once more, just as gently as the first man but with a more careful economy to his movements. A sort of minimizing of self, every calorie spent with consideration.

The second man retrieves his skateboard from the bench and adjusts his baseball cap against the naked sun. He makes his way to the staircase far from me, completing his circuit by descending just as silently as he must have ascended. The table is clear again after an hour. No words had been exchanged.

Presently the janitorial service begins his rounds with a rubber garbage can plastered with myriad tags and stickers. Seeing nothing in need of his attention, he drifts through the courtyard without pausing. The table bears no physical trace of the exchange between the two men. The memory is already forgotten in this place, a solitary moment lapsing into the next.

[dark-arts-and-crafts-universe]

Greg, Identity, and an Archnemesis

Greg, Identity, and an Archnemesis

Greg’s a crafter. Of some kind. He’s working on it. But growing up with magic doesn’t solve all (or any) of your problems. Being a crafter cannot be your entire identity. Sometimes, you have to face the facts that who you are is complicated, and scary, and not what you expected.

Note: As an Ace person who’s earliest memory of learning about sex was telling my mother ‘you’re lying who would want to ever do that’ at the age of eight, this is based on my experience growing up, looking at my peers, and wondering if I missed a handbook. Also, enjoy the introduction to Greg, the logical crafter in an illogical world.

Word count: 3,087

Content warnings: This is a pretty frank look at untangling internalized ace/arophobia, and includes other specific tropes under that umbrella which could be triggering. If that could be an issue for you, proceed with caution.

Greg’s identity, since he was old enough to remember, was ‘crafter’. For as long as he can remember, he’s known his mother crafts through knitting, and his father crafts through knots. His Uncle Gwydion was the best story teller because his stories came alive, and wrapping himself in his grandmother’s quilts on a hot day was a great way to cool down, and on a cold day a great way to stay warm. His earliest memories were trying to do magic using one of the family methods. And many explosive mistakes. But as he grew up, he knew he needed to hone in on what type of crafter he was. It took a lot longer than expected.

As a middle schooler, Greg was very focused. He had to learn whatever the public education system was trying to teach him, and he had to try to figure out what was the best medium for him to use for magic, preferably before all his younger cousins figured out their magic. Often people discovered it pretty young, or it was something that ran in families. Sometimes it took people awhile to realize that they were using magic, but that was mostly for people whose families weren’t already involved in crafting.

Greg could use magic, that wasn’t ever a question. His parents had plenty of stories of magical accidents he had as a kid, and he was just abnormally bad with the family magics. Like, set yarn on fire when knitting bad. Unable to tie knots that wouldn’t untie at the slightest breeze bad. The one successful knot he made started a fire instead of releasing wind when unknotted. RIP door 35.

But his friend from school, and fellow after school magic learner, Melody, had decided to invite him to go watch a movie with her, to take his mind off his troubles with magic, and his slight jealousy that she had figured out her magic and was managing to get consistent outcomes whereas Greg was only ever consistently inconsistent. It was a good distraction. And they did it again the next week on Friday after their shared lesson on how not to use magic.

And on Monday, another classmate sat next to him at lunch and said ‘so, you’re dating Melody?’

And Greg, who was far more concerned with the fact that his most recent attempt at knitting magic had resulted in an exploding door (37) over the weekend and a stern lecture about knitting without supervision, stared at him.

“What?”

“You went to the movies with her,”

“Isn’t that what you do with friends?”

“Alone?”

“Well, not all of my friends are friends with my other friends, and I’m not friends with all of Melody’s friends.”

“You had dinner together. At a restaurant.”

Greg did not notice the hurt look turning into anger on Melody’s face. “Well, I’m not allowed to eat candy for dinner and movie theater food is worse than restaurant food. We’re friends.”

“I can’t believe you!” Melody yelled at him, and the next thing anybody knew was that there was flying food, Melody was strumming away at air and having it make noise, and Greg had pulled out a piece of rope while hiding under a table.

“Are we not friends?” Greg asked, still very confused as he tried to make a knot to stop the food from flying. “And you aren’t supposed to play air guitar at school!”

“I asked you to see a movie with me! We went twice! I was wearing nice clothes! I kissed your cheek!”

Luckily the music teacher was supervising lunch, so he managed to stop the food fight, deal with the table that now had a lovely hole burned through it courtesy Greg’s failed knotwork, make sure there was a reasonable explanation for those who weren’t aware of magic for everything, and separate the two children from each other.

When his mom was driving him home, and asked him why he destroyed a table fighting with Melody, Greg explained that it wasn’t his fault, Melody had gone insane and decided they weren’t friends so therefore must have been archenemies and he had been trying to stop her from making the food fly, not destroy anything.

“Does this have anything to do with the two of you going to the movies?”

“Apparently that’s how Melody decides to declare archenemyship,” Greg shrugged. “Am I banned from unsupervised knot work too?”

When he got home, he had to sit through a lecture on not fighting in school, using magic or otherwise even if someone else starts it. And for some reason his parents decided to tell him about bodies.

“What’s your take away from this?” His father asked him after explaining some changes his body would go through soon.

“That air guitar magic shouldn’t exist. How can she even make it make noise? There’s nothing there!” Greg said, because really, that was the important thing. Melody’s magic was stupid and she was stupid and he had an archnemesis before any of his cousins.

“Well, that’s not how magic works…” his dad started.

“Well, it should. I’m going to figure out how magic works, and find my craft, and become the best crafter ever, and everyone will agree that air guitars are stupid,” Greg stomped his way upstairs, already trying to come up with another art to try.

“…Well, hopefully he processed some of what I said,” his dad said, looking at his mom. His mom sighed.

“We’ll just keep an eye on him, and when it seems like he realizes what happened, or seems interested in dating, we’ll sit him down to talk about it again.”

“Well, having a kid not interested in this right now isn’t too bad,” Greg’s dad looked on the bright side, before they both winced at the sound of an explosion from Greg’s room.

“Well, hopefully our next child’s magic doesn’t tend towards explosions,” Greg’s mom said before going up the stairs to deal with it. Greg’s dad nodded until he parsed her words.

“What do you mean our next child?”

Middle school continued, mostly unchanged for Greg. Melody had become his Archnemesis, and besides the two getting into supervised magical duels every few months, Greg was still focusing on magic and school work. And helping to fix the room in the Arts Center that he and Melody had accidentally damaged in their first and only unsupervised after school magic fight. Oh, and his mother had his little sister. High School was a little different.

In high school, Greg spent a lot of time singed. And watched in chemistry. And in any of his art classes. He may have been responsible for a few fire alarms, although everyone had to agree that they were clearly never intentional, just accidental. High school is when you should really understand and explore your magic, but Greg was still trying to discover what medium worked best for him, since he had a long list of things that didn’t work. He didn’t have an explanation for the fires in chemistry. So he could be excused for being far more focused on magic than interacting with people his age. When prom came around, or dances, or anything where high school culture generally expected people to attend with a partner, Greg was oblivious. Oh, he heard the talks, everyone saying ‘so and so would be cute together’ and ‘such and such just had a breakup because such was cheating on such with someone else’ and ‘did you hear? Person asked dude to the prom but everyone thought person was going to ask guy’, but he discarded this talk as unimportant.

Who cared who was dating who? Or who was going with who? It was information that was just useless, especially when it seemed to change daily. People kept trying to pair him up with his Melody, but she routinely informed everyone that it was never happening, ever. At all. Well, honestly, Greg didn’t even notice those attempts, but he did notice when Melody got snappy. Mostly he noticed because she would sit down next to him at lunch and complain about people and their unwanted meddling. Greg would shrug and proceed to inform her why her air guitar magic made no sense whatsoever. There was nothing to vibrate and cause sound.

Greg was the only person who never laughed in health class. Most everyone else would give a nervous laugh, or turn red when the reproductive system was discussed. But it was just...knowledge. Knowledge he didn’t need right now. That was for later in life. When he was old enough to be an adult. When he had this magic stuff down.

Except that people in his classes seemed to...actually be interested in it? It seemed like dating and relationships and sex were almost always being discussed. Even when he wasn’t trying to listen, he could still over hear things. And people would make references to him wanting to date or sleep with people and he would just make a face and shrug. He didn’t understand why people cared so much. He also didn’t understand why anyone would ever want to have sex with anyone. It just...didn’t seem fun. Or to make sense. He hadn’t believed his parents when they talked to him about it before high school, because who would ever want to do that? It just...ick.

So he pushed it back, said to himself that it was just a phase and he’d understand when he was older.

But...older never really came. College was better, in the sense Greg had found a stable magic to use, was taking fun classes, and Kitty was fun. Well, as fun as a sister under ten could be. But it was also more awkward.

Greg found that people were a lot more open about sex things. Maybe he just had the kind of face that people didn’t notice, or he was just giving off some kind of vibe of being unthreatening. Or maybe Kitty switched his hat with an invisibility hat. But he could sit at the student center, and people would just talk about various things in front of him that he would have thought were private conversations. (Most everyone else would call it gossip). It was...disconcerting.

If everyone, including cousins, and his few friends, and his parents, and the random people he overheard, were interested and talking about this, did it mean there was something wrong with him? He decided to reread about the reproductive system, wondering if this time the magic switch that seemed to have flipped in everyone else would have flipped for him. It hadn’t.

Melody had found him at the local craft store, looking at stickers and trying to figure out what he needed to fix himself. She took one look at some of the stickers in his hands, and dragged him out of the store. She pushed him to Tea and Charmalade to grab some nice warm drinks and pulled him out again so they could go sit down by the port and watch the ships. Greg didn’t even say anything when she strummed her air guitar to set up some kind of privacy ward.

“You were not seriously going to try and do some kind of sketchy permanent mind alterations on yourself, right?” Melody asked, sipping her drink while Greg just stared at his.

“I’m broken. I’ve been broken since high school. I need to be fixed,” Greg shrugged.

“You may have been annoying, very good at setting things on fire accidentally, and obnoxious, but you aren’t broken,” she said. “A killjoy and a wet blanket sometimes, but not broken.”

“Yes I am. Everyone else seems to understand this...this thing that I don’t understand at all. And they understood in high school. And I thought it would happen later, but it hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t know when later is going to be, and if everyone understands it, shouldn’t I?” Greg asked.

“Just because you aren’t normal, doesn’t mean you’re broken. You aren’t broken because you can do magic, right? Not everyone can do that,” Melody pointed out, leaning back against the bench and looking out at the ships.

“That’s not the same thing, this is...about reproduction. It’s...a biological need, desire, right? I mean, it’s an imperative, right? Keeps the species going. Shouldn’t I feel that?” Greg took a sip of his drink, also staring out at the ocean.

“Why do I always end up with the hard conversations?” Melody looked to the sky, before looking back at Greg. “I’m only doing this so you can go back to your obnoxiously annoying know-it-all self with your structured imagination that crushes my soul. My parents sat me down during the Incident back in middle school. At the time, they told me that people mature at different ages, that all the signals I gave you that were in my opinion obvious weren’t something you were looking for yet. And then they signed me up for a health class outside of school because ‘if I was old enough to attempt to date, I was old enough to learn about my body more’.”

“If this is the ‘if I feel like I’m in the wrong body’ talk, I’ve had that. I mean, my body is mostly functional, and aside from my hair, it’s not too bad to be stuck in,” Greg said, giving Melody an annoyed glance.

“Are people who feel like that broken?”

“No, of course not,” Greg said, glaring at her.

“And you aren’t broken. You’ve clearly gotten the ‘gender is not binary’ talk. Sexuality,” Melody paused as Greg winced. “Is also not binary.”

“I know, people can like men, women, and men and women. People can like to be with multiple people, or in committed relationships, or committed relationships with multiple people. But…” Greg interrupted before Melody did a little twirl on her air guitar, causing Greg to be muted.

“Or they can not be interested. They could be asexual. As in not interested in sex. People who for various reasons do not feel any desire to have sex. Some of them are sex-repulsed, refuse to have sex because the idea of it is something they just can’t understand. And none of those people are broken,” Melody waited a bit, seeming to want a response from Greg, before remembering that she had muted him.

“You can’t prove a negative,” Greg began as soon as Melody unmuted him.

“I swear to god if you decide to approach this using the scientific method,” Melody began, and when Greg made a face at the experiment he would have to run she pointed at it. “See, right there. That. That is how you feel. You don’t want to. You have never wanted to. And you aren’t broken.”

“How do you know? What if later on the switch flips? How am I supposed to know what something’s supposed to feel like if I’ve never felt it before? What if I have felt it but ignored it?” Greg asked.

Melody sighed, running her hand through her hair. “Sometimes, I really hate you. You’re being deliberately obtuse. Look, Greg, archnemesis of mine, I don’t know what you feel. I don’t know what you think, I wouldn’t want to know how you think since you have no imagination and this insane desire to logic magic, when everyone knows magic can’t really be logicked. You can only really decide things based on how you are feeling. Or aren’t feeling. And I can’t exactly tell you what all those feelings are like. It’s really subjective. I felt butterflies in my stomach thinking about a crush, but a different friend describes it as floaty, and a third like getting surprise math tests. We’re still not sure if he meant that in a positive or negative way,” Melody got a little distracted before shaking her head and refocusing on Greg. ”Regardless! You are allowed to not have those feelings. You still aren’t broken. You don’t have to make a decision and be forced to live with it until you die. If your feelings change, your labels can. I mean, don’t you have a friend who’s gender fluid? You never have a problem with their pronouns,” she pointed out.

“This seemed...different,” Greg scratched the back of his head, sheepish.

“Because it was you and not someone else? You aren’t broken, Greg. Your attempts to apply logic to magic is obnoxious, your imagination is lacking, you are a walking fire safety hazard, but you are not broken. If the topic doesn’t interest you, or repulses you like I’m pretty sure we’ve demonstrated, what does it matter what anyone else says you should feel? You have never cared before, so starting now seems like it would be bad timing. Now, you good?”

Greg sighed and shrugged. “I won’t go and do dubious magic to fix something about me that you think isn’t broken.”

“Great. In that case, there’s a suspicious cloud forming in the general vicinity of your sister’s after school location and it’s been a week since her last incident,” Melody pointed to the very suspicious cloud of pink, orange, and purple beginning to form where Kitty spent her afternoon doing after school arts.

Greg gave the cloud an apprehensive stare. “Kitty probably wouldn’t actually make it rain cotton candy and hail candy apples, right? Especially after I explained why that would be a really bad idea? I mean, maybe it’s just a weird cloud that’ll do absolutely nothing but look pretty?”

“Your sister’s imagination is both inspiring and terrifying. Remind me to get a steel reinforced umbrella,” Melody said, making no move to get any closer to the cloud.

Greg sighed, and stood up. “Just because you had a good point this time, doesn’t mean that your air guitar magic makes sense.”

“That’s the Greg I love to annoy. Go stop Kitty from unleashing her imagination on the unsuspecting city.”

Greg was a sticker mage. He had a bad habit of exploding his door, causing unexpected fires and starting fights with an air guitar mage over whether or not her magic obeyed the laws of physics and the arbitrary laws of magic he tried to develop. He loved his little sister most of the time when she wasn’t accidentally sending him to Paris with no passport or causing a magical accident. He was uninterested in dating, and asexual.

He wasn’t broken.

He was, however, swearing off cotton candy and candy apples forever.

[pikslasrce]

highlights from androgyny (2005) an indie doc on placebo (paraphrased bc i have shit memory)

"when you look at brian you dont think 'oh hes a student oh his mum is going to give him a sweater for christmas' you look at him and you think hes so short but he is rockstar material" - their old producer or something

brian wearing frilly victorian blouses with a leather coat in pre-placebo london days

brian writing directing and performing in an autobiographical play in uni where he was (if his professors recall correctly) a transgender man brian molko transmasc icon Confirmed

in that same play he strips naked (being the only one to actually do so despite many students threatening to do the same)

a gay magazine journalist calling brett anderson and david bowie fake bisexuals but saying that brian seemed like the real deal because he was interesting

a LOT of bowie slander (primarily from the gay mag journalist)

steves former bandmate seeing him at the set of velvet goldmine and thinking hes a prostitute before realizing it was him 😭

the weirdest least placebo looking title card youve ever seen with the worst music over it. #graphicdesignismypassion

their biographer saying that theyll only get the respect from the uk media they deserve if they break up or if one of them dies (BOOO)

[shironezuninja]

Short lived daydream, at the very least.

[iphigeniacomplex]

eleven year old girl at a sleepover excitedly describing her celebrity crush but as she continues to be pressed for details by the other girls it slowly becomes clear that she is talking about the ibm 7094, popularly known as the first computer to sing