the whole world is a very narrow bridge

What if I...got you into my hyperfixation....ahaha just kidding.....unless?

Having your own personal blog is honestly quite a nice change of pace compared to Reddit. I could put a funny GIF of George Bush getting hit by a shoe on here and the worse case scenario is that no one even notices.

You put that on a big subreddit and you get your eyes gouged out and a heap of political discourse underneath your post.

YOU HEAR THAT EVERYONE??? I’M A LIL GECKO BOY

The Redditors really are adapting well to the ecosystem here.

Sky puppies

i do im celebrating my dogs birthday

shes turning 2

I’m also celebrating your dogs birthday

celebrating tumblr user heartseeker’s dog’s birthday on the fourth everyone

you dont want character ai you want to roleplay with someone

you will be far happier if you roleplay with someone instead. i prommy

i can't roleplay with someone if the character is my own oc

wait

dun dun

- T.J. Scott in 'What You Didn’t Know About Xena’

i wish i could telepathically communicate to all the young gays that watching Xena is worth it even with our much higher standards today for lgbt characters in media. the cast crew writers and showrunners never panicked when they discovered that their characters were driven by romantic love and were pulled back only by the network to prevent it from becoming textual. by season 4 they established them as souls in love reincarnated together forever and never tried in earnest to pair them with men. by the end of season 5 they stopped that altogether. by season 6, it is as explicit as they were able to make it given the restraints at the time, and they did so much to signal to queer audiences that Xena and Gabrielle were one of us. like Xena presenting Gabrielle, a lover of written word, with a poem by Sappho as a gift (and becoming adorably shy and blushing as she reads it).

there is so much joy in seeing just how effectively they were able to convey the romantic nature of their love and companionship despite the opposition. physical attraction is clear in the s6 episodes “Who’s Gurkhan” and “When Fates Collide”. “When Fates Collide” and “Return of the Valkyrie” are so dizzyingly and overtly romantic that i still can’t believe they pulled it off. when viewed in its full context it is really an epic and beautiful love story. :)

#i’d even go a step further and say that xwp is unique BECAUSE of the censorship#it forced them to rely on literally anything other than words to convey their love for one another#which made it so much more impactful#we believed their love because of the way they looked at each other the way they fought for each other and it was so CLEAR#but modern media is no longer pressured to tell a story this way and while that’s great for representation#i also feel like something got lost in translation#idk how to express my thoughts exactly but. in newer media I’ve watched wlw relationships don’t ever reach the same depth xwp did#i have my beloved blorbos don’t get me wrong it’s just that#xwp was epic. xwp was one love for a thousand lifetimes. xwp was romance at its absolute most egregious#xwp wasn’t the story that ends when the will they/won’t they couple finally get together and live happily ever after#it was a story devoted to everything after that#and I’m gonna sit in my corner and blow kisses at the heavens for placing it in such a precarious cultural climate#that ultimately nourished a tale of such overt devotion#one that is extremely hard to replicate today#xwp (via @shiryawashere )

Hello!

I guess I am now on tumblr.

I'm TJ and I am the author of several queer romance novels. Chef's Kiss and its follow-up Chef's Choice are out now. If you've ever wanted to see nonbinary or trans people in a romcom while also dealing with cooking and baking, those books are for you. My third novel, Second Chances in New Port Stephen, is out later this year. It's a second chance holiday elder millennial Floridian romcom about a trans man falling back in love with his high school ex-boyfriend who is now a hot dad. You can get all the info on those at my website.

I'll be honest, I'm back on tumblr for the first time in years because it's become increasingly sucky to be on certain other social media sites as a trans nonbinary person, especially when you're trying to be a professional. Being an author is my job, and talking to readers and booksellers is a big part of that job, and I can't do that while clinging to my last shred of mental health. Not sure if returning to this site is the answer but let's find out!

Mr president we have reason to suspect their is a masquito in the oval office

Reading guide

Behind the scenes

This post was inspired by the Mosquito Bite that appeared at or around 1:30 AM on my right elbow. As of 1:39 AM, the culprit remains at large. Some say a faint buzzing can still be heard

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL TRANSGENDERS

the x files is funny because at the time it was “progressive” or whatever to have the ultra-rational, levelheaded character be a woman

but it’s also a show where all the fucked up alien shit actually is real, so she’s just constantly wrong about everything

What’s funny is how often they’re both wrong. Mulder will be like “the victims all had their livers scooped clean out this is obviously the aliens escalating from cattle mutilation” and Scully will be like “don’t be silly Mulder this is clearly just a serial killer who’s really good with surgical tools” and then it turns out the actual killer is an immortal sewer man who comes out ever quarterly century to feast on human liver.

I cannot stress enough that this is literally the plot of an actual episode

Federal troops were called against 13,000 miners.Three battles that led to the biggest armed insurrection since the Civil War. 

 Ask yourself why you were never taught this in school. 

Although there were planes used against the miners in the Battle of Blair Mountain, it is not true that this was the first time planes were used to drop bombs on American soil against Americans. 

The Battle of Blair Mountain took place in August and September of 1921. Just a few months prior to that, on May 31 and June 1, planes were also used to help destroy the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous black neighborhood nicknamed The Black Wall Street. At least 39 people died during the event, which is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Hundreds were wounded, and 6,000 black people lost their homes. 

Both of these events were hugely important moments in American history. 

Ask yourself why neither was taught to you in school. Also ask your local school board. 

It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment. I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”

On my campus there tends to be a problem where even I you have the doctors note professors will still take points off of your final grade regardless of how sick you are. I’ve seen people show up to class with the stomach flu, pneumonia, respiratory infections and all sorts of other contagious ailments.

Here’s a fun story:

The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.

So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”

So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.

A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.

So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.

The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.

This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.

And on top of it all, misinformation campaigns are encouraging people not to get vaccinations! It’s 2019 and we’re flirting with the plague! Next thing you know some blogger is gonna be like “actually we should all be fucking rats and eating our meat raw, death to all science and god bless america”

Many kids at my school will show up really sick because we only get like three days of excused absences without a doctor’s note.

this is what those in literary academia call “foreshadowing”

(note the dates)

this post aged like an ice cube in an oven

My cartoon for the latest issue of New Scientist.

Our world.

baristas deserve 100 dollars per hour

there's a whole culture of mostly white women whose entire personality is "Don't talk to me before I've had my coffee or ill kill you" and a barista's job is to deal with those people before they've had their coffee

she took the ladders in the divorce

can someone help me get down

ah the world is so beuatiful and wonderfull peace on earth forever and foreevr