In my head I'm still twenty

“1450 italy? does it look like I have the time to dye you wool? nO. YOU’RE GOING TO THE 1980s”

“Upper middle class?!?!? You told me upper class! FUCK YEAH THERE’S A DIFFERENCE!!!”

“How about kimoNO.”

“Look me in the eyes. I do not care what you want. This is the 1500s. You absolutely cannot wear trousers.”

“Another court gown?? Here’s a novel idea: go as a peasant for once in your life. Why do you do this to me? You’re fucking sadists that’s why.”

“Don’t mind me, I’ll just be up all night hand painting silk.”

a lot of women: so we’re going to write our own romances that are actually hot and appealing as well as useful for exploring— or escaping— the various traumas and kinks we’ve picked up around living in a world that sees us as sexual accessories. relationships based on equality and friendship, or relationships that specifically foreground inequality and exploitation, are really hot and fun to examine in the context of a couple hundred thousand words of hardcore gay smut— 

inevitable dudes: but this makes us uncomfortable! because you’re sexual accessories, your involvement with sex should be as a passive receiver, a subject, not an active agent, let alone a creator or an instigator. we’re going to make fun of you now until you stop. 

Sometimes when I ship a pairing, they’re not canon, and I want them to be. Sometimes they’re not canon and I don’t care. Sometimes, they’re not canon and I absolutely don’t want them to be, I just love fics and fanarts.

Sometimes they’re canon and I’m happy about what we got. Sometimes they’re canon and I want them to be endgame, so much. Sometimes endgame would be the worst for them. Sometimes they’re canon and I regret it, it was so much better in my imagination.

Sometimes I ship them because I want them to be happy. Sometimes I ship them because I want them to suffer - or just one of them. Sometimes I love it better one-sided.  Sometimes their relation is unhealthy and that’s what interests me. Sometimes it is healthy and that’s what interests me. Sometimes - rarely - I would like to have a relationship like this one, but all healthy relationships are not models to me.

Sometimes I just see it as romantic and non-sexual. Sometimes I just see it as sexual and non-romantic. I don’t use shipping for neither romantic neither sexual relationships, but I know some people who do. Queerplatonic relationships are important too.

Sometimes I want to write fics, sometimes I want to read fics, sometimes canon is enough for me, sometimes just fanarts interest me. Sometimes I think about the pairing all the times and love to consume their canon scenes again. Sometimes I won’t think about it for a long time.

Sometimes I multiship, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’m more interested by the characters in any relationships, sometimes I only love the ship about them.

I have a partial control over what I ship. Not everyone does.

Basically, how it worked is that once you were famous and well-established enough that you could get away with calling yourself a master, you’d make arrangements with young, up-and-coming artists whereby they’d come and help you with your art projects, and in return, you’d let them live at your studio and do art full-time.

Some masters had only a handful of students, while others had dozens; Raphael in particular was famous for having had over fifty students working at his studio at one point, many of whom later became masters in their own right.

So… where am I going with this?

For the past several years, I couldn’t help but notice that a notable number of new webcomic creators and indie game developers seem to have some involvement with Homestuck in their past, whether as an artist, or a composer, or just somebody who once designed a t-shirt for What Pumpkin.

That alone would merely have been peculiar, but then this anecdote started going around about how Toby Fox developed Undertale quite literally while living in Andrew Hussie‘s basement to help out with the Hivebent project, and I couldn’t help but think: this pattern seems awfully familiar.

I grew up surrounded by words, quite literally. By the time I was six months old my parents had taped words to every surface in the house, so the walls said “wall” the window said “window” and so on so forth. I still don’t know how they managed to get the cat involved but some things are meant to be wondered at.

But for the next six years the world was covered in words, as first I learned to read, and then my brother. I dare say if you move some furniture in my parents house to this day you will find a faded piece of paper that says “shelf” or “bookcase” on it. It was a sad day when they were taken down, they were like old friends. But by then the magic had already worked. I was able to look at the world and see words, whether they were printed there or not.

I was four when I sat down to consciously write my first story. I remember it vividly because I had my bright yellow Cadburys Caramel mug, that had the purple flowing font on the side with the bunny rabbit lady on it. It was filled with “baby tea”— mostly hot milk with a splash of tea from the pot to give it color— and I was holding it in both hands, sitting at the little “art” table dad had built for me in the corner so I had a place to sit and scribble that wasn’t the walls. Contemplating my next masterpiece I looked around the room for inspiration. Would it be an exploration of color through pinky finger painting only? Or would it be the greatest macaroni interpenetration of a dog we’d ever seen? Sadly we’ll never know how this might have worked out, as at that very moment, mum came in holding a crystal mobile and hung it up on the window sill. This in turn had the effect of creating a living, dancing rainbow in the living room, and something in my brain short fused.

That was the day I learned the word “iridescent”. It was like learning the language of angels.

After that I was always scribbling something. My school books were a mess of words, crammed into margins and on back pages. I was always in trouble for letting my mind “wander into whimsy.” Once I got a report card that said “fantastical leanings towards flights of fancy.” It was meant as criticism, but dad still has it framed in the office.

Then there came the time a few years later when I was reading the Hobbit with dad, and I turned to him quite seriously and asked “where are all the girl hobbits?” and dad hemmed and hawed before eventually telling me “they’re in another book, darling…having their own adventure…” and I accepted this and settled back down to let him finish the chapter. He probably thought I forgot about it until that weekend I marched up to the Librarian and asked for “the girl hobbit book please”, which was met with much confusion and my dad rushing over to tell me they probably wouldn’t have it yet because it was very rare. A few weeks later, dad handed me something. It was sheaves of paper bound together by string. It was, he told me, a very exclusive copy of the girl hobbit book.

I still have it somewhere, back home. Probably on a shelf somewhere that still says “shelf”.

And sweet, naive thing that I was, I believed him. It wasn’t until later on and someone else popped my bubble, that I realized dad, not Tolkien, had written it. And oh I was furious, furious because the story had been so good and because dad had lied about not writing it himself. But that small bubbling anger was nothing compared to the heat inside my brain when my dad confessed he’d tried without much success to find books I might like with girls in them. All the heroes were boys, you see. It made me quite tearful actually, that no one had ever thought that someone like me could go off on an adventure and save the world, when I knew it to be a blatant lie. Old Mrs McDougall across the street had been a land girl and saved a man shot down from his spitfire. Mrs Mitchell had been the emergency coordinator and saved people from burning buildings when the Nazis bombed the shipyards, and her skin was all bubbled and tightly pulled across the left side of her face because of it and her hands didn’t quite work because she’d gripped burning metal to try and free the men inside. Those, were heroes. But we never learned about them at school. We only learned about kings and tyrants and the kind of heavily filtered history that lead you to believe that women were in there somewhere, but only in the same sense that a wall has paint on it.

And now my books, my lovely wonderful books, where you could travel through space and time or climb up volcanoes to throw rings inside and save the world…those wonderful colorful worlds that spoke the language of angels, were just the same.

I was ready to cry and be defeated about it until dad, raising his eyebrows at me and offering me a notebook, said, “well, maybe someone ought to write one.”

And you likely know the rest by now. But in short I write because there are stories to be told. I write because it’s the closest I’ll ever be to how the word iridescent feels. I look at the world and I see words, dancing like rainbows, singing like angels.

I remember him as a gangling man with a wiry beard that made him look older than he probably was, and he carried a leather bag filled with paper. He had a pen too that was shaped like a carrot, and he used it to scribble down notes between answering our (frankly disinterested) questions. We had no idea who he was you see, no one had made an effort to introduce us to his books. We were simply told one morning, ‘class 1b, there is an author here to talk to you about writing’, and this you see was our introduction to creative writing. We’d surpassed finger painting and macaroni collages. It was time to attempt Words That Were Untrue.

You could tell from the look on Mrs M’s face she thought it was a waste of time. I remember her sitting off to one side marking papers while this tall man sat down on our ridiculously short chairs, and tried to talk to us about what it meant to tell a story. She wasn’t big on telling stories, Mrs M. She was also one of the teachers who used to take my books away from me because they were “too complicated” for me, despite the fact that I was reading them with both interest and ease. When dad found out he hit the roof. It’s the one and only time he ever showed up to the school when it wasn’t parents night or the school play. After that she just left me alone, but she made it clear to my parents that she resented the fact that a ten year old used words like ‘ubiquitous’ in their essays. Presumably because she had to look it up.

Anyway, Mr Scott, was doing his best to talk to us while Mrs M made scoffing noises from her corner every so often, and you could just tell he was deflating faster than a bouncy castle at a knife sharpening party, so when he asked if any of us had any further questions and no one put their hand up I felt awful. I knew this was not only insulting but also humiliating, even if we were only little children. So I did the only thing I could think of, put my hand up and said “Why do you write?”

I’d always read about characters blinking owlishly, but I’d never actually seen it before. But that’s what he did, peering down at me from behind his wire rim spectacles and dragging tired fingers through his curly beard. I don’t think he expected anyone to ask why he wrote stories. What he wrote about, and where he got his ideas from maybe, and certainly why he wrote about ghosts and other creepy things, but probably not why do you write. And I think he thought perhaps he could have got away with “because it’s fun, and learning is fun, right kids?!”, but part of me will always remember the way the world shifted ever so slightly as it does when something important is about to happen, and this tall streak of a man looked down at me, narrowed his eyes in an assessing manner and said, “Because people told me not to, and words are important.”

I nodded, very seriously in the way children do, and knew this to be a truth. In my limited experience at that point, I knew certain people (with a sidelong glance to Mrs M who was in turn looking at me as though she’d just known it’d be me that type of question) didn’t like fiction. At least certain types of fiction. I knew for instance that Mrs M liked to read Pride and Prejudice on her lunch break but only because it was sensible fiction, about people that could conceivably be real. The idea that one could not relate to a character simply because they had pointy ears or a jet pack had never occurred to me, and the fact that it’s now twenty years later and people are still arguing about the validity of genre fiction is beyond me, but right there in that little moment, I knew something important had just transpired, with my teacher glaring at me, and this man who told stories to live beginning to smile. After that the audience turned into a two person conversation, with gradually more and more of my classmates joining in because suddenly it was fun. Mrs M was pissed and this bedraggled looking man who might have been Santa after some serious dieting, was starting to enjoy himself. As it turned out we had all of his books in our tiny corner library, and in the words of my friend Andrew “hey there’s a giant spider fighting a ghost on this cover! neat!” and the presentation devolved into chaos as we all began reading different books at once and asking questions about each one. “Does she live?”— “What about the talking trees” —“is the ghost evil?” —“can I go to the bathroom, Miss?” —“Wow neat, more spiders!”

After that we were supposed to sit down, quietly (glare glare) and write a short story to show what we had learned from listening to Mr Scott. I wont pretend I wrote anything remotely good, I was ten and all I could come up with was a story about a magic carrot that made you see words in the dark, but Mr Scott seemed to like it. In fact he seemed to like all of them, probably because they were done with such vibrant enthusiasm in defiance of the people who didn’t want us to.

The following year, when I’d moved into Mrs H’s class—the kind of woman that didn’t take away books from children who loved to read and let them write nonsense in the back of their journals provided they got all their work done—a letter arrived to the school, carefully wedged between several copies of a book which was unheard of at the time, by a new author known as J.K. Rowling. Mrs H remarked that it was strange that an author would send copies of books that weren’t even his to a school, but I knew why he’d done it. I knew before Mrs H even read the letter.

Because words are important. Words are magical. They’re powerful. And that power ought to be shared. There’s no petty rivalry between story tellers, although there’s plenty who try to insinuate it. There’s plenty who try to say some words are more valuable than others, that somehow their meaning is more important because of when it was written and by whom. Those are the same people who laud Shakespeare from the heavens but refuse to acknowledge that the quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them“ is a dick joke.

After the first full genome sequences of octopuses, biologists have determined that the creatures are totally unlike any other animal on Earth, their genome shows a striking level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes identified, more than in a human. I knew there was something up with those smart blobby creatures.