thegempage

[thegempage]

you have to grab fat wrists and arms hard enough to leave bruises and little crescent shaped cuts where your nails dig into the flesh

[thegempage]

i like how at five guys they're like oh you want one burger okay "ONE LITTLE BURGER" and then the guy cooking the burger is like "ONE LITTLE BURGER FOR BABY FAGGOTS THAT CAN ONLY HANDLE ONE PATTY COMING UP" and then if you can't finish it they make you wear a maid costume and handcuff you to the sink in the men's bathroom

[thegempage]

look at one point you will become disabled (temporarily or permanently) and its better to know more about disability so that you can be a kinder person to disabled people you meet and also to yourself when something inevitably happens

[thegempage]

it's kinda wild that it took the mcelroy brothers 13 years and 678 episodes to drop their "our great great uncle was the chief purser on the titanic" lore. if i were them i would never stop talking about that.

[thegempage]

i feel like people forget that sometimes characters in fic are written like that because it's a reflection of real life.

people have sex without setting boundaries. people have unprotected sex without talking about their sexual histories or producing recent sti tests. people play with kink without discussing it ahead of time or establishing a safeword. they have anal without 'enough' prep or lube—they may even prefer it like that.

and none of this is really a fantasy. it's all pretty normal. you can feel that it's inappropriately normalised, and you'd probably be right! but it is normalised: one study found that 58% of female undergraduate students on the campus studied had been choked during sex. 20% of those students said that they'd never been asked if it was ok; another 30% said they'd only sometimes been asked if they consented. fully half! (non-paywalled journal article on choking during sex here, including these numbers.) despite a rise in stis of all sorts, condom use is declining. (pdf link to the full text of this study about declining condom use in the us; aidsmap article about an australian study with similar results.)

even when people do talk about things—sex or anything else—they communicate imperfectly. 'yeah, but don't go too far' is consenting and setting a boundary, and also relying that the person you're talking to has the same metric for 'too far' that you do. for some people, 'the trash needs to go out' is a neutral, factual observation; for others, it's a request that the person they're speaking to take out the trash.

even when people understand each other perfectly, people react unpredictably to things sometimes! we behave irrationally! people laugh uncontrollably at funerals, or get angry at the straw that broke their back rather than the enormous load they were already carrying. they get scared and lash out at people trying to help them. when hurt, most people do not instinctively reach for therapy-approved grounding exercises and 'i feel' statements.

pretty much any bad choice that characters could conceivably make is a choice that people make in real life, on purpose, all the time. people do things that can have catastrophic, life-changing effects because it felt like a good idea at the time, or they're leaning into the vibe, or they just didn't think about it all that much, or an infinite number of other reasons.

fiction isn't intended as a guide on the best, safest, and most responsible ways to live your life, and fanfic isn't any different. it's not a narrative flaw to let characters do things that are messy or harmful or downright stupid—it's a reflection of what people are actually like, and not something that authors should feel they have to apologise for.

[thegempage]

today I used the phrase "breasting boobily" in casual real life conversation and everyone was shocked asking how I came up with that and I had to explain it. ive been at the devil's sacrament so long that I forgot he wasn't god

[thegempage]

that post about how waxwings are always photographed eating photogenic red berries ruined me. it’s all i can think about whenever i see another Waxwing Eating Berries photo. why do they only eat those berries why are they always conveniently in the berry tree in the first place do they never go anywhere else. do they have a sponsorship deal. what is Big Berry hiding from us

[thegempage]

okay but just a thought that popped up in my head while I was on the bus just now:

the fact that Lou took off his clothes. stood there half naked. and Sam made the comment that we, their fans, would appreciate the view.

the fact that two fat men were featured in that episode, both getting compliments about their appearance.

the fact that a naked fat body gets hinted at being desirable, without fetishizing fatness in the process.

like. I'm fat. I'm also more on the butch/masc/however you want to label it side of things. I've only ever been considered attractive or desirable if I performed femininity and sexualized myself, no matter how uncomfortable it made me or how Not Myself it made me.

so seeing Jacob getting compliments while in his Sam Suit, and Lou getting compliments while standing in his underwear and showing off his "future clothes".... idk. it just made me very happy.

I love Dropout.

[thegempage]

Cheetah cubs feasting on an impala Taken in Maasai Mara, Kenya Photographed by Madhur Nangia

[thegempage]

To be continued...

[thegempage]

[thegempage]

really not sure when it happened or why but personally I'm pissed that the queer community at large seems to have given up ground on the "people with penises/vulvas/testes/ovaries" language to sex & gender essentialists in exchange for the much less precise, much more demeaning "AGAB" language.

is it because you're scared of the word vulva? of acknowledging out loud that some people have penises? of recognising that many many people, including but certainly not limited to trans people, have mixed sex characteristics that cannot be accurately summarised by "afab/amab" as shorthand for "female/male"?

"in [GENITAL RELATED] situation AFABs will need to do X and AMABs will need to do Y" there are "afabs" with penises and "amabs" with vulvas. Saying this shit makes you look so unserious & honestly transphobic (given the ongoing erasure of post-op trans people within broader community). Intersex people and GRS have both existed for long enough (fucking forever and, decades, respectively) that we should well past making this basic fucking mistake.

quit referring to people by a vague & often violent event that happened at their birth as though it defines ANYTHING about how they & their body currently operate, and start using precise language so you at least look like you know what you're fucking talking about.

[thegempage]

there's a fine line between being wary of manipulation and becoming completely paranoid because you get very close to the realisation that pretty much all human interaction involves doing things we hope will lead to a result we like

[thegempage]

really enjoying calling chatgpt a 'magic 8ball' because while far from a perfect analogy i feel like it is a very good deflationary weapon against both hype and antihype that helps bring things into perspective by detaching the actual thign from the cultural object it's attached to. "this magic 8ball is going to become sentient" i dont think thats true. "if you talk to a magic 8ball it will kill your soul" that one doesnt sound true also to be honest

[thegempage]

i don't think ENA has "lore", i think it has themes and motifs, i think you're meant to analyze it on a more emotional level than people seem to do. why is it that ENA is always acting wrong according to other characters? why is her more positive demeanor endlessly accommodating even if she never gets a return on that politeness? what kind of experience might this be portraying? how does it make you feel?