Lioness Rampant with Lokean Flair

The wolves are coming home.

Although individual wolves have entered the state from time to time and there may be one small (possibly breeding) group living near the state’s northern border, the enactment of this ballot measure will be the first time that a large, self-sustaining population of gray wolves has been present in Colorado since the 1940s.

Snakes are, in general, solitary creatures. They spend the majority of their lives on their own, slithering about their business, eating the locals and sleeping in the sun and, very occasionally, hooking up with the best prospect that wanders their way for a bit. There were exceptions, of course, like the way rattlers or garter snakes denned up, sometimes by the hundreds, to wait out winter. 

Which is why Crowley finds it so surprising when, in a hissy fit, he retires to a remote island - one across the ocean and all the way in another hemisphere - and finds himself surrounded by small, golden bodies.

He had coiled himself up in a clearing big enough to fit him, one which had made a hole in the canopy that will close quickly enough but for now leaves sunlight streaming down. He had expected to take a short nap, maybe a year or two, but as soon as he lays his head upon the spongey undergrowth, he hears a soft hiss and the slide of tiny scales rasping along his own.

There are snakes here. He tunes his senses from human languages to snakes, and he can hear their whispers all around him. He is bigger than any of them, hundreds of times bigger, and they are curious. They are fascinated. He lies very still and they emerge from the foliage and surround him, exploring and tasting the air and asking him questions.

Where has he come from?

How old is he to have grown so large?

Why are his scales black and red instead of golden?

Can we see your fangs?

He answers them patiently for days, and every passing hour only seems to bring new snakes until he is surrounded by thousands of them. Some of them have climbed the fallen tree that made the hole in the sky, so that they may rest atop him, warmed by the sun on his blackened scales.

Anyways. I spent 1 night searching etsy for the queerest stores I could possibly patronize, while also having products with plausible deniability for homophobic relatives bc I don’t want to start a riot on the spot I just want to have a nice innocuous gift that comes from a source that would absolutely make them furious if they knew. My goal was to find someone who donates to a charity like the Trevor Project so I could get An Innocuous Non-Gay Looking Item but cackle inside knowing that the gift money is actually going to The Gays.

Here’s some stores that I was delighted to find but didn’t quite make the cut for the incredible specific things I was looking for. 

JabaCrafts: sells a variety of what looks like very nice soaps, some are Normal and could be used for Homophobic Relative Gifts, a percentage of money (they didn’t say how much..?) from the sale of only the Pride-themed soaps goes to local LGBTQ+ charities. 

TrandleBoutique: Transwoman-owned shop with Pride candles. Also sells plain colored candles that could be used as Homophobic Relative Gifts whilst directly funding a trans artisan.

TBrosSoapCo: LGBT-owned (I”m assuming they’re a trans man based on the prominent T pun in the title, which also includes a hypodermic needle so heads up if you hate those, the soaps look like they come stamped with the design so unfortunately I can’t use these as Homophobic Relative Gifts but I love this store and may one day have to patronize them For Me) and their soaps look very nice 

SpookiiBubbles: Has spooky/Halloween-themed stuff, which I love; also has a bi and a neon rainbrow pride design, donates the profits from the pride-themed soaps to the LGBTQ bail fund. 

WildRaeBoutique: donates 3 dollars from the sale of every rainbow pride soap to the Trevor Project. Also has Innocuous Non-Gay Items For Homophobic Relatives. 

Runner-ups: stores that are just very fun and also have 1 or 2 Pride options so like, casual allies 

JiroSoap: INCREDIBLY CUTE soaps, some are CAT THEMED, have 3 rainbow designs and all are gorgeous

HarnettHeritage: just some very cute molded soaps in a variety of themes (I was sorely tempted by the Halloween potions set) and they have one rainbow pride option 

HoneyBubbleSoaps: has one Pride design and some other very nice items (the rose loofah soap is beautiful and would make a great gift) 

PeppyLittleSoapShop: has some very interesting soap designs/scents, also sells some pride designs and offers to custom-make any pride flags they don’t currently offer. 

Bonus: items I’ve found that I, personally, am getting, for me

LA Ramen Girl: cute ghost pride pins, donates 10% to the Trevor Project. 

TabKimpton: has a sparkly headstone patch that says CAN’T BURY THIS GAY and I have literally never in my life vibed with something more omg 

And here’s what I ended up deciding to go with.

The Ultra Stealth Gay Christmas Present for Homophobic Relatives

FlambeboyantCandles. 

They have subtle pride-color candles and candles inspired by drag queens. The entire shop is gay as hell and donates a percentage (again idk how much but I believe them) to the Rainbow Railroad, a Canadian organization that helps queer people escape from persecution in other countries. And the candles just look cool and based on the reviews smell quite nice. They are a bit more pricey than some other stuff on this list, about 20 bucks per candle, but I’m willing to pay that price for a once-yearly Gay Rights Stealth Homophobic Relatives Gift. 

But I feel like people often gloss over how… quietly traumatising it is to grow up being told that there is only one way to be happy— and that everybody who doesn't conform to that norm is secretly miserable and just doesn't know it— and then to gradually realise that, for reasons that you cannot help, that is never going to happen for you.

You're not going to find a prince/princess and ride off into the sunset. Or if you do, then it's not going to look exactly the way it does in fairytales. You're not going to get a 'normal' relationship, because you are not 'normal', and everybody and everything around you keeps telling you that that's bad.

You see films where characters are presented as being financially stable, genuinely passionate about their work and surrounded by friends and family, but then spend the rest of the plot realising that the real thing they needed was a (romantic and sexual) partner, to make them 'complete'.

You absorb the idea that any relationships you have with allo people will ultimately be unfulfilling on their side, and that this will be your fault (even if you discussed things with your partner beforehand and they decided that they were a-okay with having those sorts of boundaries in a relationship) unless you deliberately force yourself into situations that you aren't comfortable with, so as to make uo for your 'defects'.

You grow up feeling lowkey gaslighted because all the adults in your life (even in LGBT+ spaces. In fact especially in LGBT+ spaces) are insisting that it's totally normal to not be attracted to anybody at your age, and then you go to school and everybody keeps pressuring you to name somebody you're attracted to because they can't imagine not being attracted to anybody at your age.

And then you get older and realise that one day you're going to be expected to leave home, and that one day all your friends are going to be expected to put aside other relationships and 'settle down' with a primary partner and you don't know what you're going to do after that because you straight up don't have a roadmap for what a 'happy ending' looks like for someone like you.

(And the LGBT+ community is little help, because so many people in there are more than happy to tell you that you're not oppressed at all. That you're like this because you don't want to have sex, and/or you don't want to have any relationships, that your orientation is some sort of choice you made— like not eating bananas— rather than an intrinsic part of you that a lot of us have at some point tried to wish away.)

Even if you're grey or demi, and do experience those feelings, you still have to deal with the fact that you're not experiencing them the 'normal' way and that that's going to effect your relationships and your ability to find one in the first place.

If you're aiming for lifelong singlehood (which is valid af) or looking for a qpp, then you're going to have to spend the rest of your life either letting people make wrong assumptions about your situation (at best that your relationship is of a different nature than it actually is, at worst that the life you've chosen is really just a consolation prize because you 'failed' at finding a romantic/sexual partner) or pulling out a powerpoint and several webpages every time you want to explain it.

This what being aspec looks like for most people, and it is constantly minimised as being unimportant and not worth fighting against— even in aspec spaces— because we've all on some level absorbed the idea that oppression is only worth fighting against if it's big, and dramatic, and immediately obvious. That all the little incidents of suffering that we experience on a daily basis are not enough to be worth bothering about.

I mean, who gives a shit if you feel broken, inherently toxic as a partner, and like you're going to be denied happiness because of your orientation? Shouldn't we all just shut up and thank our lucky stars we don't have to deal with all the stuff some of the other letters in the acronym have to put up with (leaving aside the fact that there are many aspec people who identify with more than one letter)?

So you know what? If you're aspec and you relate to anything I've said above (or can think of other things relating your your aspec-ness that I haven't mentioned) then this is me telling you now that it's enough. Even if we got rid of all the big stuff (which we're unlikely to do any time soon because— Shock! Horror!— the big stuff is actually connected to all the small stuff) we would still be unable to consider our fight 'over' because what you are experiencing is not 'basically okay' and something we should just be expected to 'put up with'.

And now that all the ten intended Dragon Age makeup tests have been done, here is a set of all of them.

“Yes good”

“AND EAT THE BAD ONES”

“Wait no”

“EAT THEM”

You better watch out

You better watch out

The disappointment Trump supporters feel today is NOT the same as the fear that women, BIPOC, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and people with an iota of empathy felt in 2016.

And the joy and relief felt by many today is not the same as the schadenfreude seen in 2016.

Yes, it is important to work towards unity, but the path to get there is not through compromising with fascism and intolerance. It is not about sympathizing with those who voted for cruelty and violence and might be a little sad today that they didn’t get their way.

I am perfectly happy working 8 hrs a day because I don’t have to:

grow my own food

find my own clean water

heat my house

- I'm not sure if I want to put my NSFW work on the same account as my regular work. Would it be a smart move to segregate them? I'm mostly concerned with practicality and making sure my account is/accounts are comfortable and convenient for reader access. If I do segregate them, would it be best to include them together in series/on longer not-NSFW-centric works/name them similarly as a signal that they're both me or keep them entirely separate? I'm somewhat nervous/embarrassed about writing NSFW but I genuinely do want to and probably wouldn't post any until I felt good about my skill level and my friends seeing/knowing about it.

- Also, how should I tag longer fics that include NSFW but it's not necessarily important to the story/the main focus? I'm considering just tagging in chapter beginning notes and rating appropriately (with tags for Sex/Skippable Smut/similar) because I don't necessarily want people to either come specifically for or be driven away by the (possibly fairly odd) NSFW scenes, but I don't know if that's appropriate.

Any advice here would be really helpful, I know my questions are fairly nitpicky/minor but I feel like input is always helpful to me.

Okay, so from the sounds of this, you want to write three different types of stories:

stories without explicit sexual content

stories with explicit sexual content as the primary topic of the fic

stories with explicit sexual content, with that content being a secondary or minor part of the fic

Your first  question seems to be whether you should post the explicit stories on the same account as the non-explicit ones. I understand that you’re concerned about your readers being comfortable with your full profile. I’d say you have a few options:

Keep the stories all on the same account. 

Keep the stories all on the same account, but create a pseud that you use when you’re writing explicit content.

Create separate accounts

In each case, you should tag them and rate them and write summaries that let people know what kind of story they are. That’s true for anything you post on the Archive. If you do that, whether you use one account or two, whether you use a pseud or you don’t won’t matter. People will be able to see what they’re getting into and if they’re uncomfortable with explicit content, then they can just... not click. 

Since your concern is just about your readers finding what they’re looking for, I don’t really see why you would go to the trouble of creating a second account. If your concern was around maintaining a distance between your public fic writingn persona and the fact that you’re writing smut, then I could see a second account being more useful.

When it comes to creating a series, you could do that, but again I don’t really see a reason why. 

As for tagging, tag what’s in the story. Remember that tags are there for people to find what they want to find and to avoid what they want to avoid. You don’t need to tag every single sex act that occurs in the fic. I’ll sometimes just use the tag “smut” and leave it at that to cover that aspect of the story. The rest of the additional tags that I use as well as the summary that I write will be a broader indicator of what to expect.