Rambles and Fandoms

like. imagine you are grace. you have a life you enjoy where you get to teach kids you’re fond of about a subject you love. you’ve been hanging out with your friend marissa weekly for years (!) and you have a lot of peers on project hail mary who you respect and even have fun with. but! you’re also like 40, and you know how the world works - at the end of the day, at the end of the project, all of those people will go back to their parents and families and partners. the people whose names are on their emergency contact forms and birth certificates and marriage licenses and apartment leases. no matter how much you care about them, and no matter how much they care about you, there is always someone else in their life who is Above you, and Before you, because That’s How The World Works.

so like… yeah. lmao. aroace grace not opening himself up all the way because he anticipates pain and wants to avoid that is a kind of protective hedging that i find very likely for him to engage in? even if he opens himself up to the people around him, the fact is that most of those people will only reciprocate to whatever degree they/society deem acceptable for friendship, even if they like him a lot.

and then. My partner started it. And the SAME THING happened to him.

me: yeah, i posted on tumblr

publisher: .........tumblr?

me: that's where the gays are.

publisher: And what is your marketing strategy on... tumblr?

me: idk, i shitpost at 2am?

publisher: .....and it works?

me: depends on what the gays find funny at that point in time.

publisher: Could I have a link to your tumblr?

me: .......absolutely not.

Like, the overwhelming majority of the mechanics of that genre would lend themselves absolutely perfectly to that. The tank controls early in the genre? character handling and turning their chair. The oft-joked part of you can't climb over knee-high obstacles? Well, yeah, even if the protagonist has enough mobility to stand and climb over, unless they can get their chair through with them they're out of luck. The often semi-cumbersome relationship with melee weaponry and use of firearms? A wheelchair user is someone who would have even more reasons to not want a demon from hell practically on top of them- both their body and their primary means of mobility is at risk.

Heck, Silent Hill even loves scattering wheelchairs around and using them as imagery anyway, just put the playable character in one.

Even the way these sort of games often herd and control the player character's movement through the setting, and how they have to solve puzzles to progress- that would have perfect intertextuality with someone who's not just lost in the middle of nowhere but also has to figure out how to, say, get up to a second floor of a space that doesn't have an elevator and they can't climb the stairs.

I know the game Endoparasitic has a protagonist with only one working limb as its central conceit but as-said it baffles me how few games feature mobility-limited protagonists when so many genres but especially survival horror feel like they'd lend themselves perfectly to that sort of thing.

Almost every survival horror concerns itself at least partially with navigating an environment that seems set against you and often having to specifically solve problems to get place to place in crumbling environs.

i got the first dose and almost immediately fainted. they had to call in a whole medical team and it was a huge fucking deal

i was kicked out of the study and got a phone call later where they were supposed to tell me what the drug was, so i could avoid it in the future. they told me it was saline water. a placebo. i fainted from the placebo effect.

anyway, it's been a few months and i just got an email from the same department asking me to be a research participant in a new study: testing the effects of open-label placebo.

open label placebo is when the subjects and the researchers all know it's a placebo. they're testing the power of my mind. my power to imagine anything.

I just bought one and it's got like 400 family photos on it.

Personally, all my family photos from like 2003-2014 are locked on some inaccessible hard drive that's probably been lost or thrown away, so if anyone had my family photos from 2006, I'd like to at least see them before they're deleted. If this is your vacation to Yosemite, your dog, your 2-year-old's birthday party, your trip to the park, please contact me [you can send this blog a tumblr ask even if you don't have an account at 20dollarlolita.tumblr.com/ask or you can email me at pink @ pinkandthekeytarcat.com (I'm pink and my cat is the keytar cat)].

These pictures are all separately named so please tell me the names of people in the photos to verify that it's you. Photos from a 1gb wii SD card aren't going to take up too much space on my computer so I'm going to just hold onto these. If they're yours, or you can contact anyone in the pictures, please let me know. I'd like to reuinte them with their owner.

If you are getting gender affirming surgery, especially if it’s your first major surgery, PLEASE be aware that you can become SEVERELY depressed afterwards ESPECIALLY if you have a history of depression or suicidal ideation.

Post op depression is a natural reaction to the crazy mix of hormones your body goes through after major surgery as well as the stress and anxiety of recovery. Think of it like an adrenaline crash, but dragged out longer.

For me it kicked in about 6 weeks after top surgery and the worst of it lasted until about 10 weeks post op. EVERYTHING felt IMPOSSIBLE. None of the skills I’d been practicing worked. I thought everything was going to be bad forever. I didn’t attempt, but I was in the hospital. If it wasn’t for my support system I probably would have attempted.

This is not regret, but it can feel like it. I remain happy about my results to this day (going on six years later).

This is not you failing to maintain your mental health, but it can make you feel like a failure.

Things are not hopeless, but through the haze of this depression they can feel hopeless.

It can be terrifyingly sudden or it can sneak up on you. I didn’t even realize what was going on until after the depression finally passed and my mental health went back to normal.

I am writing this post because nobody told me about this before my top surgery. I was caught completely off guard. For my subsequent surgeries being aware has made all the difference. Being able to treat those symptoms as an expected and normal part of the healing journey has made them far easier to deal with. Because even when my emotions go to dark places I *know* they will pass. I have been able to tell the bad thoughts to take a bad seat and focus on healing.

OK

final one

for all the marbles,

this one doesn't have an illustration bc i think it was just a kids novel but i haven't been able to find ANYTHING about it on my occasional internet queries:

kids is staying with his (grandmother?) in the woods and she warns him not to look a fox in the eyes bc they're tricksy and will swap places with you. obviously that's the first thing the little boy does and gets body snatched by a fox who uhhhh proceeds to pig out with his new little boy human hands and the boy has to trick the fox into looking him in the eyes again to switch back...