#speaking and musing

[nordarknessdimsthesky]

the amount of sheer GENDER stored in these images should frankly be ILLEGAL

[tinystepsforward]

idk how many of you remember this but a few years ago tumblr ran a universally panned ad campaign for (us american) pride month that went "the gayest place on the internet".

well someone planning that campaign dropped in to ask the queer automatticians for advice on that and universally me and the other trans people involved were like "don't do it. i am so serious. don't do it. people on tumblr won't understand that it wasn't automattic who instituted the porn ban, or they will, but they'll recognize that automattic hasn't done anything, hands tied or not, to reverse it. nobody will like this. it will be a disaster." and they thanked us for our thoughts and went ahead with it anyway and then had to do retrospectives about how badly it went and were like "we just didn't know" and [gestures] yeah [edit: i think the person who rbed saying it was queerest place on the internet was right, my brain is fried, sorry! and that's... even worse lmao]

[iphigeniacomplex]

it’s very easy to tell the good satires and pastiches from the bad ones because the bad ones are too afraid to live within the form. like if you are doing work with fairy tales and you are refusing to look closer at the underlying logic and unspoken rules of what can seem at first to be a senseless form, you are not going to create meaningful work. to borrow a turn of phrase originally used by maria tatar, if you refuse to enter “the house of fairy tale” as anything more than a gawking tourist, you will miss the particular order to the way the table is set, the rooms that are locked vs the rooms that are simply difficult to enter, the set of the floorboards and the position of the furniture. whatever you build will then be a gilded imitation of how you believe the house of fairy tale ought to look, the table set according to your educated specifications and every door open. there can be no interrogation of themes from a writer who views the form as beneath them!

[frobby]

rhythm gamers will be like "u gotta play this song it's so fun" and the song in question gives u carpal tunnel syndrome

[metamorphesque]

why do all the words sound heavier in my native language? scratch that. why did I choose to seek refuge in a language of another instead of training my tongue to bear the heaviness of my own?

[princeofhags]

Living vicariously through Minthara’s datamined lines bc what even is this? Modern version of this meme.

[charles-simmons]

Btw, that "no" that Neil told Todd was more romantic than all the love poems I've ever seen

[ouroboros-or-ob]

Happy new year! Because of the trending topic, I’d like to start the new year off by saying that asexuals and aromantics are part of the LGBTQIA+ community, whether they’re asexual and straight, asexual and gay, asexual and bi, aromantic and straight, aromantic and gay, aromantic and bi, or aroace!

[aquaquadrant]

Title: flickering

Warnings: Hearing voices similar to intrusive thoughts (the voices are from sentient fire, not from the character’s own mind), pyromania, session 3 spoilers

~*~

Tango might be hearing things.

That is, beyond what the rest of his friends have already been joking about this entire session. The secret task bestowed upon him seemed like pure hilarity at first: pretend to have an imaginary friend. And he had to go all out, too, having imaginary conversations in the presence of other people. He wasn’t confident enough in his improv skills to pull it off without some kind of prop, though, so he’d assigned the role of imaginary friend to a torch in his inventory.

Torchy, a new best friend for the resident blaze hybrid on the server. Hilarious.

Except, as the hours went on… carrying Torchy around and randomly placing it down… hosting one-sided conversations with a piece of burning wood while his friends watched on with baffled amusement… it started to get a little less hilarious. Because he started to imagine that he could actually hear Torchy talking back to him.

Looks bad. Burn it. Kill him.

Just pleasant little things like that. It made for great conversation fodder; nothing turned heads on this server faster than a randomly overheard, “No, no, we can’t kill him!” And it was funny to carry on that kind of dialogue, chastising a flaming stick for its apparent bloodlust. The looks on his friends’ faces were priceless.

But at the end of the session, after Tango had been found out and failed his task, after everyone bid their farewells and went their separate ways to end the session… he hears it again; a flickering whisper of a voice in his ears.

Burn it.

It startles Tango so badly, his blaze rods ignite. “Aaagh- who? What?!” He spins around, flames spitting.

“Huh?” Skizz pokes his head up from behind their little clump of chests, his wing flared out in surprise. “What happened?”

Tango clutches his pounding heart. “Did you- did you say something, Skizz?” he asks breathlessly.

“What, just now? No?” Skizz frowns, then his eyes widen. “Oh, wait, I get it…” He chuckles. “Very funny dude, but uh, you can drop the ‘imaginary friend’ thing now.”

Burn him. Kill him.

There it is again. “No, I’m not…” Tango hesitates, glancing around warily. “You seriously can’t hear that?”

Join us. Burn it. Eat it all.

Now Skizz looks a little concerned, rising to his feet. “Uh- no? What?” He takes a few steps towards Tango, holding out a hand. “You okay, buddy?”

Tango rakes his claws through his hair. “Th- the whispering, the…” Swallowing, he creeps a bit closer to Skizz- and as he does so, he happens to move closer to a random torch. The voice gets louder.

Free us. Join us. Let it all burn.

There’s a chunk of solid ice in Tango’s stomach. “I think it’s coming from the torches,” he whispers.

Skizz stares at him for a moment before he sighs bemusedly, shaking his head. “Oh, brother. You’ve been talking to yourself all session, dude, I think you’re starting to hear things.” He claps a hand on Tango’s shoulder. “Get some rest, buddy, and I’ll see you back here next week, alright?”

Skizz doesn’t hear it. Tango makes himself laugh. “Right, yeah. You’re right. See ya.”

With a parting smile, Skizz logs off.

Tango waits. Soon enough, the voice returns. The whispering is now a chant, a dull roar echoing in his skull.

He’s gone. Burn it. Burn it all. Sets us free, let us spread. Join us. Burn it. Eat it all.

Tango’s heart is in his throat. He can see it, in his mind’s eye; the soft pink cherry blossoms engulfed in flame, a ring of smoke outlining the entire island… his inner fire thrums with want, with need.

Yes, yes, burn it all…

The smell of burning snaps him out of his trance. His clawed fingertips are pinching a cherry blossom from a low-hanging branch, a trail of smoke rising between them. Wait, when did he walk over to the tree? Quickly plucking the flower, he incinerates it in his clenched fist, the flame extinguished as soon as it’d ignited.

And now he’s got a handful of ash. Great.

Okay, that’s it- he’s gotta get off this crazy server. It’s all these stupid tasks! They’re totally messing with his head. The secrecy, the deception, the mind games- he just needs a break. He needs to go back to something familiar, some place where things make sense.

Tapping his communicator, he brings up a portal.

Tango steps through it into Hermitcraft, into blue flames and his dungeon master’s robes. He blinks, acclimating to the change of light. He’s in the underbelly of Decked Out 2, of course- most of his time this week has been spent working on the redstone for level four. And over the months, he’s taken care to light everything up (because a single creeper in the skadoodler could derail his entire operation here) so there are torches everywhere…

And he hears nothing.

Just the idle sounds of the dungeon above him. The occasional warden sniff or ravager growl, bats squeaking in the dark. A slime slapping against stone somewhere in the distance. He can even hear the ambient flickering of the countless torches around him, but no freaky voices accompany it.

Tango exhales heavily. It was just the Secret Life server messing with his head, after all. Relieved, he ignites a rocket to take off, whirling through the air in the tight hair-pin turns required to escape from the dungeon’s inner workings. He swoops into his storage room and dives into the bubble-vator, arriving swiftly back in the citadel.

Hopping off the platform and into the air, Tango glides toward his private entrance to the lobby. He needs to go cover up the barrel at the start so he can make a couple changes to the dungeon. Nothing major, maybe just an extra warden or two. Ideas for names are already flashing through his mind. Debating whether to go intimidating or silly, he’s so deep in thought as he passes through the lobby that he almost doesn’t notice it at first. But as he walks past the soul flames, he hears it.

The flicker of a familiar voice- though more haunting, now, almost mournful- whispering in his ears.

Join us. Burn them. Eat them all.

~*~

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

When I first met him... he was the most gallant of lovers. He knew so many things. He delighted in sharing his knowledge. He had a castle full of treasures, and he took such pleasure in showing them, giving them to me. He was so gentle, and his skin felt like white silk against my skin. And I gave what I could give to one such as he. When we made love, it was like a flame: I felt utterly engulfed, utterly loved. Treasured. I have been with many poets, many dreamers... but his love alone was ice and fire. His eyes were stars.

Calliope, in The Sandman #71, by Neil Gaiman

[ratbastarddotfuck]

it's so deeply strange when people - even other tmascs - refer to "gross side effects" of testosterone and then list things like... getting hairy, bottom growth, weight redistribution.

like first of all, I'd love to stop calling any effects of any HRT gross. and secondly, dude, that's why I'm on this thing. those aren't "side effects", those are just like... some of the major effects. that's the intended goal. testosterone is the Get Hairy And Grow A Dick drug.

I'm not sayin you can't have your own preferences with your own body (and attempting to mitigate these factors for yourself is your choice) but like... I think it's WILD to get online and say that Some Of These Things Are Universally Gross. no thankyou. actually my body hair is great and makes my meatsuit feel like home to me in a way it didn't for years.

btw, this goes for positivity posts too. if your post starts with "can we see some positivity for the gross things" you should rethink. you can be positive about these things without framing them as gross first.

[nordarknessdimsthesky]

ok hear me out reacting to discord messages with emojis essentially serves the same purpose as aizuchi (interjections that show the listener is paying attention or understands the speaker). if a friend is going on a spiel in discord DMs, reacting with emojis to successive messages can be a more efficient way of showing you're listening without interrupting the flow of messages by responding with "yeah" or "yep."

and then you have custom emojis that vary across servers which allow individual servers to develop their own emoji dialect. joining a new server and looking at its custom emojis scratches my linguist brain because immediately i think about when/where/how said custom emojis are used.

i also think about nitro discord users being able to spread server emoji dialects (but only to a limited extent because regular discord users can't save and use custom emojis outside of their original server). i've now been in a handful of interactions where i've had to ask about the etymology of certain custom emojis and the explanations i've received are always fascinating.

[shortnotsweet]

In a Week by Hozier ft. Karen Cowley

“The raven is death, obviously. When I die, I want a good tombstone—something right spooky. LT’s got something against the underground, though you’d think that would be just his kind of place. That’s alright. He needs to, he can cremate me. It’s not exactly Catholic, and Mam would turn in her grave, but God is a unicorn and no one is pure anymore, so. What’s all that got to do with me?”

Johnny “Soap” McTavish has a journal. Had. It is his no longer.

Simon “Ghost” Riley had dreams—awful ones, the kind that sank claws into his lungs, dragged him into sleep, and then sent him careening out of it. He still has dreams, but they’re different, now. Better. Johnny’s pages have folded themselves under his eyes and gotten into his head, brighter and more infectious than anything else has ever been. It’s more than the past, that rotting carcass behind him, and more than now. Now is nothing. Now is ash. It’s like, it’s like—blinding, is what it is. He’s a blind man.

It is biblical now. Ghost has read it backward and forward and sideways and inside out. When he runs out of things to read, he reads them again, and when that is not enough, he reads between the lines.

[canisalbus]

Hello I made you some more art!! IDK Why your little guys have just stuck in my brain as of late but yeah I'm just on a roll I guess!

This piece was inspired by wondering who was present around Machete's assassination, and how people around him would react to his downfall. So I had the idea for a portrait of a final lover's embrace, as Vasco holds his dying beloved in bloodsoaked arms.

I tried my best with the clothing -- especially the shoes -- and I think I did a pretty good job but BOY were they hard! XD Anyways, I hope you like this one, it was a blast to draw! I love machete sm istg <3

.

[chilschuck]

`✦ ˑ ִֶ 𓂃⊹ imagine pulling tall-man chil gently down to your level by his neckwarmer to press a soft kiss to his stubbled face, then one to his cheek, and letting him go like nothing happened. you don’t even look his direction after, just catching up with everyone else and leaving him flustering. so brain rotted rn

[silver-1ining]

My darling angel, the only end proper for us is to merge as one, and bear our scars together as a shining burning singularity