grocery store mission barely accomplished took massive damage to the hull and all internal systems. shield repair could take days

[TRANSCRIPTION:  “Ok I know I need to stop saying Ma’am and Sir to customers at work, it’s bad to assume other people’s gender, but I can’t help it it’s how I was raised. My mother was Southern and my father was a Bottom. Something about it always confuses the customers anyway, it could be the whole ..everything about me, but every time I say “Here you go ma’am here’s your change.” All I get is “Oh, thank you?” (the “you” trails off and ends in confusion.)

Suddenly our little game of social volleyball has turned into three dimensional gender chess and I’m eating all the pieces. I’ve got her fucking money in my hand so she knows that the only way she’s getting it back is if she solves my queer little fairy riddle and I’m not giving her any fucking clues.

Now all of a sudden this Karen is studying me with the intensity of a crime scene investigator. She’s stuck in her Sherlock Holmes mind palace trying to figure out if These are tits or just mosquito bites. Or if I’m a woman or just one of those femboys her kids keep showing around the Tik-Tok.

In the past sixty seconds my customer has thought more about men, women, and the terrifying pit where I lie in between than she ever has in her entire life beforehand. She is stuck in my transgender genjutsu.

Now the customer is always Wrong, because even if her little game of pronoun roulette happens to land in her favour she still stood there for a fucking minute mouth agape, fully admitting that whatever I’ve got going on beneath my jeans is Far beyond her comprehension.

If I’m going to be stuck in this capitalist nightmare for all eternity then every unsuspecting mother who comes in to buy a Roblox card is going to have to suffer through a gender identity crisis with me. /END ID]

Spooky season is closer than you think.

why is “report hate speech” not one of the default options with “report spam” instead of “report sexually explicit material”. i’m not a cop so i don’t care if people post hole & pole but i would love if i didn’t have to explain every time why it’s bad when there are nazis

For all my fellow oversharers out there.

As a chronic people-pleaser, this is my advice for success.

Offer as little as possible. Be terse. Get rid of all those exclamation marks and tidbits about why you want to take a sick day. State your needs clearly and concisely without reason. Start saying “No, I’m unable.” more often. Say Thank You only when the other party deserves it.

I think that if you want relationships depicted in your fiction – whether primary media or fan-work – to be emotionally compelling, there's really no getting around the fact that one of the most compelling relationship dynamics in fiction is "hey, wouldn't it be fucked up if".

And I don't just mean "one of them is clearly taking advantage of the other" type relationships, either. There's a whole spectrum of upfuckery to explore, including (but not limited to):

THE ONLINE ARTIST HANDBOOK

So I think a lot of us are struggling with being an online artist these days, with the navigation of various socials being increasingly obscure and even perilous at times

It’s why I had an idea: The Online Artist Handbook

What is the Online Artist Handbook ?

It’s a collaborative google doc where all artists all over various social media websites can contribute their knowledge of said socials to help everyone thrive ! This includes becoming more familiar with various customs and ways to post as a part of building your online presence, and things to watch out for.

The document is completely free and open-source: everyone can use it, edit it, cite it, download it, whatever !

How does it work ?

There are two documents: one document is used for submitting notes about various social media platforms, and a second one is a read-only document where all the information is properly written out to ensure clarity and ease of reading.

I’d like to contribute !

That’s so awesome ! Thank you so much ! You can contribute to the document yourself here: [Google doc link]. The clean version of the document can be found here: [Google doc second link]

Remember to add yourself to the contributors section to be credited for your help !

Let’s go Tumblr ! Let’s create a community artist resource !

a lot of people on this website seem to be very upset about the way adults play pretend in their bedrooms while having consensual sex

what if we were ibuprofriends :)

BOW DOWN TO THE ANCIENT ONE

I graduated high school in 99.

There was a student at our school named Wayne.

Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.

Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.

The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.

Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.

He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.

Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.

So... no.

No one in my school talked about being trans.

Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.

Okay first.

Damn.

Second:

We may not have talked about being trans in high school, but everyone I hung out with in college came out as trans within the past three years.

Why yes!

In elementary school, there was K, who only played with the boys, and only wore shorts or athletic pants, and who I found weeping in the bathroom in 4th grade because it was picture day and her mother insisted she wear this very girly outfit and she was bawling that it was all wrong because she "was a tomboy not a girl". It was 1992 that was the closest word the kid knew.

And in high school, I knew a kid who shared at lunch one day that they knew they weren't a boy but they didn't think they were a girl either and it was confusing and distressing. And all of us at the lunch table just sort of patted their shoulder or knee awkwardly and a couple people quietly said it was okay to not know, or that they would figure it out. And then we changed the subject. It was 1998, I think. We were very quiet about the whole thing cuz that kind of talk could get your ass kicked.

And my boyfriend at about the same time would not come out as gender fluid for many years, but he was already wearing dresses when his band performed and getting his ass kicked by his dad for wearing nail polish, and asking me odd very vulnerable questions about being a girl.

Just because we didn't have language for it in that time and place and at those ages doesn't mean kids weren't talking about it, or weren't having those experiences.

I graduated in 1996.

I didn't learn the word transgender until I was in my 20's.

But every moment of telling my parents when I was barely old enough to remember it how parts of me felt like they didn't belong; the girlfriends that dumped me because "it feels like I'm dating another girl" and how it stung so hard I made my first subconscious attempt towards suicide; every fucking stupid intrusive thought involving a pair of scissors. All of that suddenly fucking CLICKED. They kept it from us. lies of omission, a world not connected enough for us to learn it on our own, and ALL the everything telling you to hide it to survive. It still took me the better part of two decades to break down the indoctrination, denial, internalized shame, and everything else to finally come out. And I look at how few trans people there are from my generation- I go back through my yearbooks and wonder how many others there were, only I'm having to guess at how many went stealth and disappeared, how many might still be locked up in denial, and how many simply didn't survive long enough to get it. Gen X was hopefully the last generation to have this be this widespread. I look at all the trans kids younger than me coming out and realizing who they are, and I am so fucking glad they were able to learn and get to it sooner than I did.

Any setting where the elves have weaker booze than the dwarves isn't committing to the bit

I mean, we're talking about people whose lifespan is Yes.

"Oh, the weak wine? That is for children. I am two thousand years old, and I daresay one sip from this highball would knock you on your ass for a week."

Look, there's this weird thing people do with high fantasy where they want elves to be immortal/extremely long-lived snooty aristocrats and also somehow incapacitated by imagining the taste of salt too hard. "Orcs and dwarves have the hardest booze" no they don't, they have work in the morning! In any of these settings, elves would pregame harder than hobbits party and everyone else has shit to do tomorrow.

The average high elf builds up the drug tolerance of a mid-70s Hollywood producer and then spends three centuries studying alchemy. While humans seek immortality, the Immortals seek the elusive "philosopher's cocaine."

Reasons why I still insist Melnibone's a better depiction of an elven society than 2/3rds of modern fantasy.

Drow probably have shrooms that would kill a dragon with one hit.

Queer music is impossible to define because we are not a monolith and we all have our own tastes and styles but it sure is not harry styles and taylor swift

Ok, new post time. Eight days to go until my combined Gender Confirmation and Facial Feminization surgery consult. By this time next week, I'll be hitting the road.

Except i have zero funds for fuel, and don't even have the money in to cover the hotel I had to book for me and my partner for the night. Much less things like eating. So, yeah, I'm asking for help if you can.

If you can, please, donate here: http://paypal.me/tormentedartifacts

(I appreciate the fuck out of it, and it's way less stress because it's not adding orders to an already backed up queue)

Or if you want to get something awesome in return for helping out, like these:

Go right here and grab stuff: http://tormentedartifacts.com

Or even just help by reblooping or sharing this post around. All of it helps. And thanks in advance.

Obligatory rebloop, etc, etc.

Officially down to one week until my consult. Holy crap.

this always gets me very warm in the face >/////<