Holy Hell Y'all

Hey y'all! So since the beginning of March I've been dealing with a ??? Medical Issue where we don't know what it is or why it's happening. I lost my job because I've become basically bed bound and unable to work. I need money to pay for medical bills, transport to and from my appointments (as of writing this, I have 5 in the next 4 days alone), and groceries (including specific meal plan types of food my nutritionist told me to get because I'm medically considered Severely Malnourished because of not being able to eat much of anything because of the ???), as well as just, y'know, regular bills and payments that need to be made.

the first time I went in there I pointed at one of those extra-skinny baguettes and said “a flute, please” feeling pretty sure of myself, and the baker said “… that’s a ficelle” (you idiot) (was implied) “a flute is twice as large as a baguette.”

That’s insane, first of all, a flute is a skinny instrument. Call your fat baguette a bassoon, lady—I made some timid remark about how it would make more sense for a flute to be a skinny bread and the baker said, “In Paris it is. I thought you were from the South?”

oh, that hurt

I guess I’m from the part of the South that’s so close to Italy the bread’s waist size matters less than whether it’s got olives in it, but I left the bakery having an existential crisis over whether living in Paris had made me forget my roots

the Least Intimidating Bakery just had normal baguettes vs. seedy baguettes vs. horny baguettes (easy mode, some have seeds, some have horns), while the new bakery has breads that are only different on a molecular level—there’s a good old loaf and then another, identical loaf called a bastard? google told me a bastard is “halfway between a baguette and a bread” but denouncing them like “those are not regulation-sized bastards” would get me banned from the bakery for life

on my 2nd visit (while I stood in line discreetly googling baguette terminology) there was an English tourist who asked for a baguette while pointing at what was either a rustique or a sesame and I felt a bit worried for them, but the baker just clarified “this one?” to waive any responsibility if they found out later it wasn’t a classic baguette, then handed them the bread without educating them in a judgmental tone and I felt envious

I know it’s because she thinks the English are beyond saving but still it made me want to come back with a fake moustache and an English accent so I wouldn’t be expected to play bakery on expert mode just because I’m French. I asked for a pastry this time and the baker asked “no bread with that?” which felt cruel, like she wanted me to sprinkle myself with ashes and admit out loud that my level of bread proficiency isn’t as advanced as I once believed it was

The third time I went, I had lost all self-confidence and I hesitantly pointed at a bread and said “I’d like this, uh—what is it called?” and the baker looked at me in disbelief and said “That’s a baguette.”

God.

for the record, if that stupid bread had been flanked by a skinny bread (ficelle) and a fat one (flute) then yeah of course I would have known to call it a baguette, but in the absence of reference points I now felt lost and scared of being called a Parisian again

This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.

As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.

Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:

Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.

There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.

And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”

The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.

This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.

I've met the sweetest, prettiest queens who tell me "Well, I'm a transsexual. Sometimes I call myself a transman because both my trans self and my manhood are me."

New friends tell me about the sexcapades their closed polycule gets up to that they just watch because they're a kinky ace.

There's staunch lesbians who helped the love of their life transition as a transmasc, gay men begging to be topped by trans men with the fattest tits.

Older queers don't hesitate to shout "oh, like Prince!" when I tell them I'm androgyne. Vanilla questioning men will text me day after day before shyly confessing I'm their dream guy. Closeted trans women ask to kiss me because I'm their dream girl. Doms and subs who melt when they realize I'm both and neither, and they didn't know somebody like me existed.

There's vanilla lesbians on Grindr and acearos who have shown me love deeper than I thought possible and guydykes kissing girlfags and MtFtMtX elders and throuples that have so much affection that they just collectively parent babygays who got disowned.

Queerness is not the exclusive domain of the thin, the white, and the ablebodied. If you are any of those things and can only picture queer people like you? You need to ask yourself why.

That's why I'm making this addition. It is on me as a white person to make the room for queer BIPOC that is vehemently, violently denied. And I did not make that room in the original post.

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Please spread this its gotten worse and more dangerous since I had several seizures and bc my sleep quality is horrible it contributes to it a lot.

In brief, it was a traditional JRPG-style game with an atypical levelling-up scheme. Rather than gaining XP or levelling up at milestones, party members would grow in power by finding and absorbing or ingesting these little extradimensional parasites, represented in the dream as small grub- or fetus-like creatures with smiling humanoid faces. These parasites would be found as treasure and enemy drops, and could freely be given to any party member, except for the player character; the player character alone was unable to use them for Plot Reasons, and was entirely reliant on equipment to grow in power instead.

Absorbing a parasite both granted permanent stat boosts and unlocked weird psychic powers. However, they'd also cause progressive personality changes in the party members to which they were assigned, reflected by changes in dialogue and interactions, and eventually in granting or denying access to particular side quests. This function of the parasites was undocumented, and would likely go unnoticed by the player on their initial playthrough, as they'd level up as they went and would never see the unmodified dialogues.

A further wrinkle is that this effect was mediated by the game's expected progression. Farming parasites and "over-levelling" beyond where the game expected you to be would accelerate the personality changes, while going deliberately under-levelled would slow them (i.e., by giving your party members more time to acclimate to having bugs in their brains); like the personality changes themselves, the existence of these hidden modifiers would not be hinted at to the player.

If you spent a long enough stretch of the game sufficiently over-levelled, you'd eventually receive a non-standard game over where your party would betray, kill, and eat the player character. Furthermore, this non-standard ending had a deliberate "eclipse phase" whereby it would wait for a while after you hit the required threshold before pulling the trigger, in particular making sure that you've saved at least once, leaving your save file irrevocably fucked.