Our Lady of Immaculate Depression

And even though money is pretty tight for her, she told me I could name my price if I would help her, because it was so far away.

I told her she was a dummy for thinking i would take her money but that i would accept the traditional helping-a-friend-move price: a meal (i know she would feel wrong about herself if she didn’t do something for me in return, that’s just how she is) Tradition suggests pizza and beer, we opted for enchiladas and a margarita.

we crashed on the floor of the empty place and left back north in the morning - when we got back to the city three more friends met us at her storage place (the place she was moving into wouldn’t be vacant for a couple months) and we started to move all her stuff up to a storage room on the THIRD FLOOR (because large city storage places be like that)

we had just taken the first box out of the truck when the (only) lady working there walked by and told us they closed in an hour and twenty minutes, and she couldn’t stay even a little late because she had to get to her other job.

One hour twenty minutes. To completely un-jenga a large uhaul and re-tetris it back into a similar sized room on the third floor.

We all just, shared a look, took off hoodies, and got the fuck down to business. 

It was actually.. I still cherish look we passed around. The tiny eyebrow quirks and chin nods. The eye glints. The bigger breath we each took as we prepared to kick it up several gears. That moment of wordless connection, when we all just silently agreed that we were damn well going to do the impossible and didn’t even waste the time it would take to say anything, just got to it.

And we did it too. Finished with exactly two full minutes to spare. And then we all went for dinner and drinks to celebrate. And my friend’s friends that came to help? Two of them were acquaintances/friends of mine already. Like I lived with one for a year a decade ago sort of thing. But this experience? Brought us all closer. Made myself a new friend too.

And the friend i helped move? She and I are closer than ever because of it.

When i left our storage success diner to go home, she asked me again if I was sure i wouldn’t take any money.

I said “I ever tell you when I was 22 I went down to Hollywood to try that scene out? Anyway ten months later, when I just couldn’t do it anymore, and needed to come back, I called one of my best friends and said i can’t do this anymore i need to come back. You know what he said? He said: I’ll be there tomorrow. Not how much will you pay me, not what do i get out of it, not will you be able to cover my gas, just: I’ll be there tomorrow. Okay? You’re my friend. If you need help, I’m going to be there”

Olivia Breckenridge (Arden)

Paige Duplass (The Silt Verses)

Anne (Woe.begone)

Trans men characters in podcasts:

Brother Faulkner (The Silt Verses)

Brian Jeeter (The Strange Case of Starship Iris)

Michele (Moonbase Theta, Out)

Quil, iirc (This Planet Needs a Name)

Non-binary characters in podcasts:

Adjudicator Shrue, Vaughn, Gage, and Sibling Rane (The Silt Verses)

R. J. McCabe and Krejjh* (The Strange Case of Starship Iris)

Cal* (Microcosmos)

The Traveller and Óli* (Travelling Light)

Medusa (Khôra)

Ashwini Ray (Moonbase Theta, Out)

Trans women:

Danielle O'Hara (Hello From The Hallowoods)

Kove (Dustwalker)

Maddie Townsend (The Holmwood Foundation)

Hephaestus (Forged Bonds)

Trans men:

Percy Reed (Hello From The Hallowoods)

Arius Rosemund (Dustwalker)

Sydney Sargent (Camp Here & There)

Bellamy Pink (Killjam XXX)

Nonbinary characters:

Diggory Graves (Hello From The Hallowoods)

Olivier Song (Hello From The Hallowoods)

my partner was a TA for an intro-to-subject course in grad school. finals week rolls around and the students are required to submit this big module assignment they've had like a month to do for a decent chunk of their grade. if you've submitted everything, you'll see a summary screen with a star beside each module name showing it's been completed.

an hour before the assignment deadline, he receives an email from a student claiming they completed the assignment, but the system is not allowing them to submit. there's an image attached to the email. partner goes to open what he assumes is a screenshot of that summary page.

instead, he sees that the student has taken a photo of their laptop from about 2 feet away, with that page open. strange, but it wouldn't be the first time a college freshman has lacked the tech literacy to take a screenshot. he almost doesn't look twice at it, but he realizes something about it just feels a little bit...off. so he zooms in.

the student had CUT STARS OUT OF CONSTRUCTION PAPER and TAPED THEM TO THEIR LAPTOP SCREEN BESIDE EACH MODULE NAME. you could see where they actually had completed the first couple of modules, but the stars for all the subsequent ones were like, double the size of the first two and exactly as uneven/irregular as you'd expect if you were freehanding them with scissors.

About a year ago, teaching an online World Lit course in summer session. First writing assignment is a short paper requiring one (1) outside source; half the class turns in papers with “AI-hallucinated” quotations & citations because they’re just savvy enough to fiddle with the text and get past Canvas’s built-in & very-unreliable “AI detector” but not savvy enough to actually double-check what the computer is telling them. I send out emails to the tune of “if you want credit on the assignment you have to prove this source you quoted actually exists.”

One student apparently clicks the link in their bibliography for the first time, and is presumably surprised to find the same thing I found: working URL, but the page it goes to is not the article they cited (which 100% does not exist; I checked). Student goes into Inspect Page Source, changes the title of the page to display as the title of the hallucinated article, then sends me an email saying they can’t give me a URL because something something VPN but here’s a photo of their laptop displaying the article in question with the URL bar conveniently cropped out of frame.

They didn’t change the body text of the website, so it was pretty clear what they’d done. And what I’d actually asked them to send me was a PDF, since they were claiming this was an article from an academic journal, and it was a real journal we had institutional access to, so the involvement of a regular website at all was actually a screw-up on the “AI”’s part anyway. I eventually went back at the end of the course & gave them partial credit on that assignment (just enough to bump their final grade from a C to a B-minus) for being the only student all summer to put actual mental effort into lying to me — everyone else just took the “nuh-uh” approach.

it’s not just kink

it’s not just an aesthetic

it’s not just a party at a bar you show up to once a month

leather is a distinct culture & it’s highly community based

if you aren’t showing in solidarity for our local Onyx chapter or our bootblack guild, learning our history and talking to our elders, talking to the leather folks who are different from you, or showing any interest in engaging in community outside wearing your doc martens & amazon dot com bulldog harness to a bar to play pool (with the friends you came with), sorry babes but that’s not leather!!

don’t show up to our space and be disrespectful to fat butches, trans women, and bipoc leather folks. I can see when you are only talking to other skinny white people.

don’t show up to our space and side eye the leathermen at the leatherdyke event who have been allies to us, even when we weren’t in the room. we personally invited them, you just saw a flyer on the internet.

don’t show up to our space if you don’t want to learn and do the work outside the bar. it’s not cute to be incurious about the community whose event you are entering.

we vet for a reason, we are watching the new folks.