you can download current and past hi-res versions of these over at my ko-fi (ok to print for personal use): https://ko-fi.com/mxmorgan/shop/freedownloads
you can also snag shirts here which go to various orgs: https://mxmorgan.threadless.com/collections/pride
these get reposted a whole lot from here to reddit to twitter to tiktok and on and on, and i don't personally care whether or not i'm credited. i made these for everyone to use, enjoy, and find meaning in them. i appreciate folks who do credit me, but if able, please at least link to the threadless shop in the previous post - folks can get an official shirt where 90% of earnings go to trans led orgs focused on mental health (which is an important matter in general, but very personal to me) and not from a scam bot site selling AI-churned maga garbage where you probably won't get one anyway. i also suggest downloading the files from my ko-fi - they are free/PWYW and you can use them to make your own shirt, patch, embroidery project, whatever. tips are always nice, cuz i do like a pizza now and then, but never required for download.
final thought - breaking the pride tradition and more than likely won't make a new piece. the top one from TDOV is all i'm making this year. i have my focus on other projects currently and i don't want to force a poster design. these came from a specific head space and my current head space is Very Tired lmao so i wanna work on other things. đ
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real talk, i saw this other vid 7 years ago where a trainer like this lady gave some of the most important physical health advice I ever heard that changed my life:
#1. You should be able to lay down on the floor (face down or back) and be able to get up without your hands. If you can't? Spend a little bit every day just doing that, laying on the floor and getting up again no hands style, then laying down again (you'd be surprised how fast it wears you out after a few times)
#2. You should be able to get up out of a chair without using your hands or grabbing on to anything. Can't? Fucking start training mother fucker! Just a few uppies every day could save your damn life when you get older!
#3. You should be able to turn your neck to the side without twisting your upper body in the same direction, you should be able to turn your head freely without moving your shoulders, chest or torso! Start looking up loosy goosy neck exercises! It makes such a HUGE difference!
#4. You should be able to motherfucking stand on one foot and keep your balance for longer then 15 seconds. Haha sounds easy right? Thats what I thought when I tried after watching that vid, i was horrified to find how hard it was! I started doing "one leggy style" standing any chance I got, when I'm in line somewhere, when I'm watching a video... just do a few rounds of 10 seconds on each leg for like 5 min every day!
You get older and you think you still have all the same limberness as you did when you were 8, but whens the last fucking time you ran around and played like an 8 year old? You loose that flexibility so subtlety and then one day when you need it? BAM ITS GONE
Start getting into these habits now, i don't care if you're 18/25/30/45/50 OR WHATEVER JUST START YOU WON'T REGRET IT!
Photographer here! I saw some people in the tags expressing concern about hostile architecture. If you zoom in to the right, you can see some standard benches (and there are several more in the area). We're not free of hostile architecture in Sweden, but it's far less common than in some other countries/cities
Just out of left frame there's also a bench with another blue lamp post standing next to it, only that this post grew arms and is holding a large umbrella! It gets windy here so it's not super useful, but it's cute and probably helps a little during summer showers. I decided not to photograph it since there was a parent and child sitting there. Here's a photo from a news article:
SamtalsbĂ€nkar och belysning â nytt projekt för att fĂ„ folk och snacka i Upplands VĂ€sby. QR-koder med samtalsĂ€mnen.
lemons/limes (this needs to make up the bulk of the fruit being used, like at least 80%)
whatever other fruits or fruit scraps you want, plus any herbs/other flavorings you want to try. by fruit scraps I mean things like cherry pits, apple peels, pineapple cores, strawberry ends, things like that.
granulated white sugar, the coarser the better, 50% by weight of total citrus rinds + 100% by weight of any additional fruit. you'll measure this after you prep the fruit.
water as needed
equipment:
a few nonmetallic mixing bowls
a mesh strainer
a chinoise, ricer or some cheesecloth
a kitchen scale
a citrus juicer or reamer (manual or electric)
a potato masher
juice the citrus through a strainer - saving all rinds -Â and refrigerate the juice for the time being. dice the rinds and other fruits if any, keeping the rinds separate. make note of weights, and measure your sugar.
 Place sugar in a large nonmetallic bowl. If using non-citrus fruits and/or any other flavorings, mix them in with the sugar and mash with potato masher. add diced citrus rinds, mix thoroughly, and mash again. cover and let stand at room temperature for at least 4 hours. this allows the sugar to draw out flavors that would otherwise get discarded with the rinds, and the rinds' acids should be enough to dissolve the sugar into a syrup.
Afterward, mash one last time, then collect the syrup by pressing the macerated mixture through a strainer/chinoise or ricer, or squeeze it through cheesecloth. if you want, this can be saved as a standalone syrup at this point, for use in cocktails or desserts. if not, slowly pour the reserved juice through the solids to to help get the remaining syrup out, and squeeze/press again. do the same thing one more time with warm water (roughly the same amount of water as juice). discard solids (or try making sangria with them!).
taste the mixture and add more water if necessary. a stronger mix is totally fine if you anticipate serving over ice on a hot day, or adding booze, or if there was a lot of non-sour fruit. keep in mind that it will taste a bit less sweet once it's chilled. pour into a pitcher and refrigerate.
citrus oils will float to the top, so stir/shake before serving. love you. enjoy.
some tried and true flavor combos:
straight lemon or lime, or any combination of the two, is of course an untouchable classic
lemon & strawberries (that's pussy babe!)
lemon & orange with a hint of vanilla (creamsiclemonade...?)
lemon & apples or apple peels with cinnamon/ginger/allspice (for late summer)
some cocktail type combos, booze optional:
lemon or lime & berries with basil + gin
lime & mint + white rum
lime & ginger + dark rum
lime & cucumber + gin
lime & orange (berries optional) + tequila
lemon, orange & cherry + brandy, bourbon, or rye whiskey
friend is trying to sell her car bc shes moving to a state with vehicle inspections and her prius lives in defiance of god. anyway so shes cleaning it out at my apartment complex bc we have dumpsters and her roommate forgot to pay the trash bill. i will be liveblogging my experience watching her do this and you will understand why i refuse to help her
guys theres a pile of chicken bones down there from wingstop im so scared
AND i hear "hey dude can i use ur washing machine real quick" and she pulls out a pair of pants from, i shit you not, 1940 and theyre moldified into a SOLID. those pants survived a war and couldnt last a year in her fucking shitbox istfg
i swear to god im not exaggerating here. anyway heres an incomplete list of everything we found inside:
-axe (stolen)
-earrings made out of dentures
-flavored condoms
-a quilt
-hello kitty sweater (stolen from a DIFFERENT ex-friend with a felony charge)
-deer spine
-baseball sized wad of human hair
-""sex apron""
-uranium glass plate
-pile of non-uranium non-car glass
-rollerblades
-complete phantom of the opera cd set
-magic the gathering cards mold-ified into a brick
-lego millennium falcon
-a CUTLASS??? (for "self defense")
-the back bumper of the car
-an entire fucking ant colony
and finally, perhaps the most disturbing,
-a pack of vanilla wax melts, inexplicably unmelted and intact despite sitting inside this terrarium-with-a-prius-wrapped-around-it in 100 degree heat for god knows how long
i must stress: before today she DID NOT KNOW about the ant colony in there . she thought ants just really liked to climb inside anytime the car was parked.
bringing this post back bc i found a video of her offering me the phantom cd set and i said no because the box was coated in a syrupy mat of human hair and she was confused because "we know whos hair it is" ???? as if the origin of the hair was the only fucking holdup
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After sending my first letter to the gender clinic in October 2021 I finally received my diagnosis this week and will most likely get top surgery sometime in spring 2027. There are a lot of thoughts and feelings to process. Thank you for the comic <3
If any part of your plan involves the words "nobody could be that stupid", please be prepared to be proven wrong at any minute at a moment's notice. Pay in mind that the person determined to prove you wrong may already be aware of this assumption, and is already approaching your current location at an alarming speed.
In 2011 I attended an event called Bmore Fail, in which entrepreneurs in Baltimore talked about their failures and what they learned from them.
What I learned is that there is an inflexible rule about how people interact with systems. If your system would work perfectly if people Just Would, and yet they Don't, then your system is bad and you should feel bad. Systems must be built with an eye toward "will people actually do this"?
Recycling was a thing when I was a child. (The 70's.) In my home in New York State, you could carry recyclables to a recycling center. Nobody did. Now in 2024 Baltimore there is a trash truck that comes every week to pick up my recyclables, and I and my neighbors fill our cans with objects that can be recycled, because a system was developed that was easy for busy people to do, and there's a lot of social pressure to do it -- but the social pressure wouldn't exist if it wasn't easy to do. Only the most crunchy granola people bitched at you if you didn't recycle in 1979, when it required a lot of effort. Now it is considered kind of on par with spitting in the street or leaving a dirty diaper on the diaper changing table in the bathroom instead of throwing it out, if you don't recycle.
Your job as the system creator is to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing, and as hard as possible to do the wrong thing. This is why web forms have data validation (but too much data validation actually makes the forms harder, so hit the spot in the middle.) And if you want people to adopt social change, whether it's environmentalism, accepting gay people, or whatever, make it as easy as possible. And don't guilt people about not doing it until it's as easy as possible; instead phrase things more like "wouldn't it be cool if". It's not the fault of the individual that they can't get things done in a bad system. Fix the system.
if users regularly fuck up using a tool you made, and your answer is "you're holding it wrong", the next question you should ask is "why did i make this tool so it's easy to hold it wrong?"
And then you're tech support begging the development team to change something very small that would make the user experience so much better cause they made the tool too easy to hold wrong and development will whine at you because they're very busy with the back end stuff and hey you're the customer facing side why can't you just make them, and no you can't just make them, please development please I'm begging you make the tool less easy to hold wrong.
No, the onus is on whoever is building the system. Most of the time that's not the gay people themselves, because people who are marginalized are rarely in a position to build systems that affect their own marginalization; that's what allies with privilege are for.
A small thing. If you want to support trans and nonbinary people, then on government forms, if they require gender and you can't get around it, allow "other"; better still, don't require gender. If you're building a medical system, and the patient's gender is M, do not gray out all the "female" problems he might be presenting with on the grounds that a man can't possibly have menstrual problems, be pregnant, or have issues with his uterus; likewise if the patient presents as F, don't make it impossible to enter a diagnosis of prostate cancer for her.
Don't set up validation rules that prevent someone with gender M from having a husband. Better yet, let "husband" and "wife" both be covered by the term "spouse", because that is inclusive of non-binary spouses as well.
Because I'm in IT, I think in terms of IT systems. But there are government systems and insurance systems and financial systems and all sorts of systems out there, that should be set up so that a gay person will be able to navigate it as easily as a straight person, and a straight person will see that the available options don't privilege them at the expense of everyone else... a subtle reminder that no, you're not the center of the universe and gay people exist. Why do you think the right wing fights so hard against there being Spanish on forms that are also in English? You'd think, it doesn't harm anyone using the form for there to be both Spanish and English. But they know, the presence of Spanish reminds English speakers that the world doesn't center around what works for them; other options exist. That's what they want to get rid of, the subtle reminder that someone besides them is important too.
This is a discussion about how to make systems work in some way other than If People Would Just, making them easier to promote the result you want, so I'm not sure how you even got "the onus is on gay people to be more palatable", and I get the feeling you don't understand the context of the discussion. I am not even sure how you could devise a system that incorporates "gay people should make themselves more palatable" because that sounds exactly like a thing that People Should Just... meaning, you're relying on humans to behave in the exact specific way you need them to for your system to work, and the whole point of this conversation is that doing that dooms your system to fail. Gay people will never Just Make Themselves More Palatable To Straights, as a cohort, so if your system for getting gay people to be better accepted relies on If Gay People Would Just, your system will fail.
Unfortunately, reading comprehension is also one of those things that If People Would Just, so posting about things on Tumblr is also a system that's doomed to fail. :-)
Having depression is fun because one of the main symptoms is that you want to kill yourself and one of the side effects of the meds is you want to kill yourself but if you at any point even IMPLY you want to kill yourself to your doctors in charge of making you not want to kill yourself, you are forcibly put in "wanting to kill yourself jail".
And I have news that may not surprise you about how "wanting to kill yourself jail" affects your mental state and what it may make you want to do.
If you actually want to help someone with mental health issues, come to their house and wash the dishes in their sink. I promise they have them. This is 1000% more effective than locking them up against their will.
Best way to make someone who wants to die not want to die is to give them a reason to live. (âŠnot verbally.) Often that just means taking things off their plate that are too big or too heavy, and then sticking around for the fallout as they try to paradoxically claw that weight back onto them. Because they got comfortable being smothered whether they knew it or not and feel naked without their rock.
Also. Controversially, and contrary to my point aboveâŠ.dont try to reassure them if they tell you they want to die. Donât try to list off the reasons they should stay, cause theyâll just double down on why they donât want to or feel like they canât. Agree with them, to a fault. People who want to die want to euthanize themselves, effectively. They want to not suffer. Thatâs the goal. Causing more suffering or trying to be emotionally manipulative doesnât do shit.
So agree, from that premise. âOh, I see. How kind of you, to want to end your own suffering. No, truly, it IS a kindness. Do we not call it so when we put our pets to sleep, or let grandma die with dignity on hospice? You are trying to offer yourself that grace, and that is about the kindest thing I think anyone could do for themselves.â
I have repeated some version of the above to most the friends Iâve had call me at 3am, clinging to one last thread of hope and desperation to be seen. I have acknowledged this desperation, too, with more mixed results⊠depends on the person and what attachment they had to me.
But EVERY SINGLE PERSON I have told this has had an epiphanous reaction, a realization that if they can do that much kindness for themselves, then maybe they can be open to other kinds of self-compassion too. Like letting themselves rest. Like letting themselves be human.
On the record, I did not learn this from therapy, but lived experience. I WISH someone had told me that, and I didnât need to put those pieces together by trial and error and, yes, being put on a very unhelpful lockdown to divest me of even more autonomy and control of my lifeâŠwhich did the very opposite of help.
Anyways. Three things usually are at the root of most suicide attempts:
1. Feeling overwhelmed, too much going on in life or you donât have the mental or physical energy to make decisions or think clearly and critically
2. Feeling helpless to control yourself, your life, or your environment. Often tied to the first, but not always.
3. Lack of social bonds. Which is why social attention doesnât work for long. As my husband puts it, âYou need the oxytocin, gremble.â Oxytocin is THE bonding hormone. Every human alive makes it. Some donât have receptors capable of receiving it, or that donât process it correctly (psychopathy, and to an extent, sociopathy/ASPD, NPD, certain types of Dementia, and Schizophrenia) but every human brain produces it.
The last one is probably the most significant one, or at least has the largest margin of predictability in terms of outcome. I canât find the damn study because google is being stupid about it (is it just me or have they gotten worse about burying scientific data lately?) But people with one or more significant social bonds are not only less likely to commit suicide, but theyâre far FAR more likely to choose less âviolently lethalâ methods like guns or jumping in front of a train.
I dug into that research after looking at a facebook reel that mentioned that women attempt to comit suicide more often than men do (true) but are less likely to succeed because they choose âsofterâ methods. (Also true). But something about that didnât quite add up to me, (nor the implication that women just donât have access to those violent endsâŠliterally 90% of the hunters and handgun owners I know are women) so I looked into it, and the truth was simply that women are more likely to have pets, children, or significant others when they do attempt. Men that commit suicide successfully overwhelmingly come from single-parent homes, are 20-40, and live alone, with a close follow up on 40-60 year old men that are recently divorced or separated. There was no data on that for the type of work they did, but blue-collar men are far more likely to commit suicide than white collar ones and thatâs been true for a very long time.
Point is.
Donât add to the weight. Donât add to the pressure (unless and until they ask for it.) I understand how distressing that can be, especially when youâre trying to convince someone to leave a bad situation. But it is also true: you can not reason someone out of something they did not reason themselves into, and that you can not save someone who doesnât want to be saved.
This is a super confronting addition that is a little uncomfortable, but I'm reblogging it because the fundamental truth - "I'm just trying to give myself release" - is the central truth to every consideration of suicide I've had. The only piece of media, ever, that I have found that talks about it from a remotely relatable and loving point of view is this song.
This is also why arguing that it is selfish and using guilt is so terrible. Great.
I'm not saying this was always an accurate assessment of the situation, but here's what I felt every time; You want me alive so you can use me. Fucking fantastic. Glad to be your pet, your toy, your comfort object, your duty you're being so good at fulfilling, your need not to feel pain even if I'm hurting worse, your favorite thing. In the short run, guilt can work sometimes. And it can for sure work if it's a thought that the person naturally and organically. But it feels like shit, long run. If you are suicidal and someone comes at you with guilt, you aren't the priority, are you? Them losing something is. Their pain over yours, always. That's the mindset of (at least some) suicidal people.
If you cannot understand the horror of being forced to stay alive because of what other people want or believe or are uncomfortable with, until you understand how soul-wrenchingly horrible it feels to be told you have to stay when doing so just means you have to see them suffering over your misery, which makes you feel like you have to stifle and hide everything so they aren't Big Sad (which is extra unpleasant when their Big Sad comes with a side of them being willing to call the cops) and stifling it only makes it worse, you can't fully get it. It makes you feel utterly disrespected and ignored and not understood and like they aren't listening at all.
I'm not saying suicidality isn't often riddled with thought distortions, it often super is, just that you cannot snap them out of it in the ways people seem to like to try.
I don't have an answer for what TO do. I just don't. But I do know it doesn't involve attaching a threat to every last line defense offered to me, or discouraging me from talking to other people in a bad place about it because the Bad Selfish Action might be made too tempting by someone understanding and not spending all their effort trying to get me to not do it instead of really hearing me.
Don't force someone into inpatient. Those places are trauma factories and genuinely statistically result in more suicides and often in total cessation in attempts to seek help that might actually help.
Yes, reach out, for God's sake reach out, don't leave them alone with it if they don't want to be. But please be a safe person to talk to or just Be Near. We can have incarceration and abuse on demand, or inflicted on us in minutes, but have really fucking few safe people and safe spaces. Which one are you going to commit to facilitating?
whenever i see people call random edgy but not-at-all harmful artists "degens" i would like to refer them to the first sentence of wikipedia's "degenerate art" article
Reminder that this is the type of art the nazis were referring to:
(Kandinsky)
You cannot "well but I'M not referring to that kind of art, I only mean Dirty Pictures" your way out of this. You are being harmful and need to stop, not rationalise why it's okay for YOU to be doing it. You need to understand
censorship violates the universal human right of free expression and freedom of speech.
fiction is not reality. Fictional characters are not real people.
if someone SAYS a work of fiction inspired them to do bad things, that is not the work of fiction's fault. The person who did bad things is STILL at fault, because they have free will and must be assumed to understand the consequences of their actions.
discomfort is not harm. If a piece of art makes you uncomfortable, that's actually fine. That's the POINT of certain pieces of art. You need to learn to tolerate discomfort.
It is not in fact the government's job to enforce a set of morals on people. That violates people's universal human right to freedom of religion and creed.
There is no such thing as "just a little bit of" censorship.
It does not matter what kind of art it is, when you use the term degenerate to refer to art you don't like, you are using a word that is deeply rooted in bigotry. A word used to target marginalized groups.
this is VERY funny and I don't want to step on the gag but as a former food service worker I simply cannot NOT explain the place crushed Oreo cookies have in the service industry because I think it's really cool, actually
So Oreos! Truly a 100+ year old institution (although we can argue about whether Hydrox came first/are better but that's not what this is about). Oreo was manufacturing using pretty modern equipment very early on right here in beautiful Manhattan in the old Nabisco factory that is now Chelsea Market. But an unfortunate issue with mass producing millions of very thin, very fragile crisp cookies is breakage. A lot of the wafers (the chocolate part) will crack or crumble before reaching the end of the production line. The machinery can be adjusted to reduce breakage but the nature of the wafer means breakage will never be zero. Sometimes the cookie gets to the sandwiching stage & filled with the creme before it cracks, but more often it breaks before then. That's why you have some bits with creme and some without.
So what does a cookie company do with all the broken pieces? The dough is already cooked at that point so it can't be reused to form more cookies. So Oreo comes up with a plan: develop recipes and alternative uses so they can sell the crushed cookies, too. This happens a lot in manufacturing! Leftover bits are repurposed for other products to reduce waste and cost. Probably the most famous example is animal feed; the husks and rinds and cast-offs from human food production often get processed into animal food.
Sadly this means most commercial Oreo dust is a pre-crushed situation. I grew up working in my family's restaurant and the Oreo pieces would arrive in sealed plastic bag inside a big box. We'd use them for pie crusts and dessert toppings. Being a sneaky lil shit, I'd sometimes dip a soup spoon into the Oreo dust and take one big, chocolatey bite as a snack. No need to crush them by hand.
Sorry to add real-world facts to a very good bit. I just really love manufacturing. And cookies.
See also: The humble Swedish 'Dammsugare' ("vacuum cleaner"). On the box it's called 'punchrulle' ('punch' being a very sweet liquor used as flavouring) but we all call them dammsugare.
The contents of the dammsugare* usually consists of crumbs from the factory production of various other pastries. I can't swear that all manufacturers do it that way, but at least the major actor on the scene - Delicato - does it that way.
But this isn't just a little fun fact about how a pastry manufacturer reduces cookie waste, oh no. Sometime during the 2010s, some dammsugar-enjoyers pointed out online that in late December through January, the dammsugare tasted much more gingerbready than during other times of the year. Some liked it, some didn't.
This was of course due to the factory making loads of gingerbread - pepparkakor - in November and December, which made it into the dammsugare. Delicato saw an opportunity and started to hoover up the gingerbread crumbs separately and made seasonal gingerbread-rolls! They're delicious.
*it just so happens that this is one of the many Swedish words where singular and plural are identical - one dammsugare, two dammsugare. I hope this won't cause any confusion :)
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Jag vill vara din. Jag förstÄr inte varför du ville kyssa mig. Jag förstÄr inte hur saker förÀndras med tiden. Jag vill ha dig. Jag vill veta om det nÄgonsin fanns en chans att fÄ dig. Vill veta om det nÄgonsin kommer finnas en chans.
30 THOUGHT-PROVOKING QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU BECOME MORE SELF-AWARE
⊠how much self-control do i have with things that i know are bad for me, but tend to indulge in?
⊠how do i respond to someone who is different from me or whose ideals and beliefs i don't agree with or understand?
⊠how do i deal with being misperceived or misunderstood?
⊠how do i respond when someone judges me, makes fun of me, or calls me names?
⊠how do i deal with other people's mistakes and unpleasant behavior?
⊠how do i deal with people who have hurt me in the past?
⊠how do i spend my free time?
⊠how do i deal with negative people?
⊠how do i deal with stressful situations? do i tend to worry a lot? what else do i do?
⊠how do i deal with inconvenient life situations?
⊠how do i respond to situations that i have no control over?
⊠how do i deal with negativity in my environment?
⊠how do i deal with challenges in my life?
⊠how do i respond to situations that force me to get out of my comfort zone?
⊠how motivated am i to change my life for the better?
⊠how much do i follow through on what i preach and talk about?
⊠how do i deal with uncertainty, the unknown or a future event that i have no control over?
⊠how do i respond to obstacles, hardships, and "bad" things that happen in my life?
⊠how do i respond when i don't get what i want?
⊠how fulfilling is my everyday life?
⊠how do i respond to new ideas and new ways of thinking?
⊠how do i respond to bad or inconvenient news?
⊠how do i deal with the violence, hate, and suffering in the world?
⊠how do i recharge, rejuvenate, and replenish my energy?
⊠how much do i prioritize spending time and energy on myself and on my passions?
⊠how do i deal with change? new job, new house, new lifestyle, new people, new rules, new technology...do i tend to avoid it, welcome it, fear it, like it, complain about it, stress out about it, worry about it?
⊠how do i deal with emotional pain?
⊠how do i respond when plans change or plans get cancelled without my say so?
⊠how do i respond when i make a mistake or when i fail at something?
Iâll never not be amused by the fact that I can drop the words âcrucifix nail nipplesâ into a conversation and some of you who have been with me since the livejournal days will join me in the flashbacks, screaming and crying all the way.
I require context. Because this is a very interesting start of a story, and now I need the rest of it. Could I get a link, or a summary, or something? Pretty please?
All right buckle the fuck up kids, itâs the year 2012 and Iâve just been handed what should be an easy editing gig by my senior editor. Itâs a vampire erotica story because one of the final Twilight movies is about to come out, and everything is vampires. Everything. I havenât edited a single thing in months which isnât about vampires. I am ready, I can do this. So I open the file and notice thereâs a typo in the title, which really should have been my first inkling that something horrendous was about to go down, but you see Iâm not quite dead inside yet so I carry on, bushy tailed and bright eyed with my faith in humanity intact. Itâll be dead by page 24, but I donât know that yet. Iâm just editing one more vampire boner fest.
The MC is a girl who weâll call Sue. Sue is a Good Girlâą, Sue is Not Like Other Girlsâą, she is pale and awkward and a virgin and has somehow managed to find herself a Bad Boyâą for a boyfriend. Weâll call him Dickhead.
Now Dickhead as previously stated is a bit of dick, he tries to pressure Sue into sex because he knows she is The Oneâą but he loves her really so itâs okay. Except itâs not okay because Sue is a Good Girlâą and holding out till marriage which heâs fine with except heâs got such a bad case of blue balls that one night walking home an attractive stranger lures him into an alley with the words âhey studâ and he follows, dick out before sheâs even finished her sentence. Well turns out that was a mistake for Dickhead because sheâs a vampire, but not just any vampire, a Dick Biting Vampire. So what started out as a skeevy blow job behind a club that heâll feel bad about in the morning, turns into him being bitten on the dick and drained of his life essence and left for dead. Except DBV fucked up and now heâs a vampire. Are you still with me? Good, cause itâs about to get weirder.
Realizing he is now an abomination, Dickhead flees, becoming a creature of the night and feeding on animals rather than humans to repent for being such an asshole in life. Sue meanwhile is heartbroken, but carries on valiantly with her life and goes to bed each night crying for the loss of her One True Loveâą who she would do anything to bring back. Well guess what Sue, Dickhead never really left you! Heâs been âinstinctively protecting her from rapistsâ by hiding out on her roof and fighting hobos who try to get to her open window via the fire escape for months now. Because thatâs not fucking terrifying at all.
Upon learning of his predicament and how it happened, Sue can do nothing but blame herself. Oh if only sheâd let him touch her secret places, then perhaps all of this could be avoided! Meanwhile Dickhead is having another dilemma of his own, realizing too late that his vampire powers have given him super senses and now he can smell her blood and he canât decide whether he wants to get with her or eat her. And I donât mean in the French sense. But he is strong! And over comes his base manly vampire instincts and neither rapes not kills her. Hurrah! And this is so romantic that Sue gives it up, but not before she launches into a theory about how in all fairy tales, True Love saves the day, so maybe her magical pure vagina that has never been touched by anyone, not even her, can bring him back to life. So Dickhead being a dickhead agrees and rips her clothes off, but not before he takes one last moment to marvel at the beauty of her purity, because he will never again look on her again and know she is Pure.
If youâve only vomited once by now, I applaud your resolve.
So they hop on the good foot and do the nasty, except she is literally so pure in spirit, her flesh burns his. And I quote you from memory because these words are burned into my soul: âher breasts bit into his hands, like crucifix nail nipples tearing at his flesh, but he did not care because he loved her so and couldnât stopâ
This phrase haunts me. I dread that it will be the last thing I think about on my death bed and my last words will literally be âgod fucking dammitâ as I die, carrying that mental image with me into the afterlife. My own solace is in knowing that I inflicted it on other people too, like @ahzuri who is somehow still with me after all these years.
When the magical burning sex fails to heal him and leaves her bruised, battered and broken with âa dainty blue bells of bruises around her secret flowerâ (I am genuinely quoting this, I could never make something as horrendous as this up without being on acid) Dickhead leaves. Yeah. Off he fucks, leaving her to the mercy of the hobos at her window, and into the night to be the true monster he really is. But wait, thereâs more. Remember the dick biting vampire? Well turns out she has figured out she made him into a vampire and has also been stalking HIM and is totally jealous of Sue, so tries to kill her. But again Sues Purity saves her, because sex before marriage which was done out of True Love is not a sin, so she is still a spiritual virgin and Iâll be honest, I started drinking heavily at this point and itâs all a bit of a blur.
A fight ensues some pages later after Dickhead returns, realizing the mistake he has made. And he rescues Sue from the Dick Biter, but not before he assaults Dick Biter, and calls her a slut for luring innocent men into alleys cuts her heart out by cutting her breasts off, at which point i screamed âTHATâS NOT HOW YOU REACH THE HEARTâ and my brain short circuited completely and I have no idea how it ends because I realized there was 30 pages left and my soul couldnât take it. I emailed the chief editor like ?????!!!!!!????!!!!!! and the book was immediately pulled from the work line and the author dismissed from the publishing house. Turns out she was a friend of a friend and that was how she got the manuscript past our entry levels for requirement.
And thatâs the story of how an author sent me death threats for over a month because I stopped her shitty vampire porn from ever seeing the light of day. Youâre all fucking WELCOME.
I hope the author finds this post one day, has a great sense of humor about it, and submits the manuscript (which she wrote as a teenager) for all our lulz.
I can tell you, she absolutely does not have a sense of humor about anything, lol. At the time when this happened they had to change my company email because she was sending me unhinged death threats from multiple Gmail accounts for âsabotagingâ her lifeâs work. She was also at the time, in her 30s.
That was on top of the prior abusive emails she sent demanding to know why Iâd changed things in her perfect manuscript. Like, y'know, grammatical errors and typos. Or her batshit concepts of human anatomy.
I also regret to inform everyone in the notes discovering this for the first time and wanting to believe this was satire, it was actually Christian Erotica (which is actually a very profitable sub-category of the genre).
This was a wholly sincere attempt at writing scintillating sex.
Also, to the people ten years ago who said I was a mean hater and said I couldnât do better? Fucking bet, lmao.
Concerning (things about) Hobbits: Meeting the Big Man
One of the most important characters in Lord of the Rings is someone you like and trust. You quote him often, remember him fondly, and rely on his word.
You don't know his name. Fanart is nonexistent; thereâs no Ao3 tag, no breakout film portrayal, no Amazon money-milking series for this character. You know his voice, have memorised his words; you've probably never read any meta about him.
I'll bet Iâm the only person you've seen on Tumblr who really talks about That Fucking Guy, and I hate that man with a cold academic passion. (I also love him. He's my blorbo. He could be yours.)
I think you shouldn't trust him as much as you do.
Here is why.
This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history...
That is the first sentence of The Fellowship of the Ring.
The prologue of the Lord of the Rings is iconic. Swept away by the story, we forget weâre reading at all. It's understandable. Who can resist the overwhelming charm of the writer, and the bewildering excitement of being taken by the hand and invited into The Fellowship of the Ring.
But even people with deeper takes on Tolkien tend to miss the significance of the Prologue. Itâs a place where critical reading abilities and political processors usually turn off entirely - fair enough, it's probably a relief.
Let's talk about the Narrator.
Meeting the Narrator: Time, Place, Person
The Prologue is narrated by a Mannish (Big Folk) Narrator, a modern human being, from an accessible academic standpoint. We are encouraged to think of him as Friendly Professor Tolkien, although you really do need to remember that he is clearly addressing us from within a fictional narrative world. He is a character. Even if he is Tolkienâs self-insert, intended to be read as Tolkien Himself, he is still a character who can be analysed and interpreted. This is a fictional character.
The Big Man deliberately addresses the reader as someone with a shared background, in what is presumably somewhere in the early-to-mid twentieth century. It is stated multiple times that you (reader) and Narrator are both Big Folk together - there is no chance that you, the Reader, are a scholar of another race.
It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves.
Pick out the âlater estrangementâ and park it for now.
The casting of the Narrator is a deliberate alignment with Professor Tolkien, and we are certainly intended to understand him as an academic, avuncular, rather unworldly male professor in the British Isles.
(Sidebar: for convenience I gender the Narrator as male. I think there's evidence for the Narrator being intended as male-by-default, which can be provided on request, and I personally feel the Big Man narrator is the translator/propagator of the silly convention of referring to modern humans as âcapital-M Men.â )
The Prologue is written charmingly, a framing device of an academic translator giving the context of background information before presenting someone elseâs text (the translated Red Book, etc). Later, this Prologue connects to the Appendices in The Return of the King, where the Narrator returns in his persona of the translator of the works. Our Narrator is certainly a strong, influential, deliberate character, with a specific and distinctive voice!
Anyway, whether or not you choose to picture the Big Man Narrator as Tolkien Himself doing a folksy Bit, OR as a character Tolkien created - Remember! The entire story is fiction and the Big Man Narrator is a created fictional character. Why would you assume he is telling the truth? Why assume that he is an expert? Where are his biases?
Look what the Big Man Narrator actually says. Look at what he chooses to tell, and what he finds unimportant. There are so, so many posts that pick over the fascinating bits of Concerning Hobbits, mining canon for more information, as if it is a pure source of truth. I suggest that the next time you do, you try this fun exercise.
Before we go into the Magic Thing, the narrator also notes AGAIN that hobbits exist today, but are shorter than they were;
They seldom now reach three feet; but they have dwindled, they say, and in ancient days they were taller.
This continues and reinforces the framing of âhobbits still exist now,â and sounds rather as if the Big Man has interviewed modern hobbits (âthey say,â) which weâll also park.
We move on, parking "it's assumed you're a Man, receiving information from a Mannish professor", the "future estrangement" and "diminished hobbits are available for interview."
The Magic Thing
I was provoked into writing this by a fun Tumblr post pointing out that "hobbits are said to 'not study magic' - does that mean that they don't HAVE magic?" which went off into a separate and funnier reblog chain.
I want to analyse this again, noting that this is information received from Big Man.
Letâs examine the âhobbit magic thingâ noting that we are being TOLD all of this by a CHARACTER.
Hereâs how the passage about "hobbit magic" starts.
Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today;
In our time, weâve just been told, hobbits still exist, but had a population drop and are vanishing. To the point where a reader is not expected to have ever heard of them. Chillingly, in typical mid century British academic fashion, the Big Folk Narrator assumes that the reader is also British; when he later mentions that the remaining hobbits only live in the British Isles, itâs a little alarming. Thereâs a species of humans native to these islands, so rare and so politically silent that youâve never seen or heard of them.
Hello?!
for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.
We are told here that Hobbits are going extinct because they cannot readily survive due to, essentially, habitat destruction. (we feel the Narratorâs annoyance about the Industrial Revolution spoiling the âpeace and quietâ strongly here, more strongly than the buried implications for indigenous people).
They no longer have any land. Not only have they lost the Shire, they have no towns, small villages or even farms. âWasâ is very much past-tense, and they âhauntedâ land in the past, ghosting lightly and leaving no traces of their presence, rather than living there. so in our modern day thereâs certainly no Shire, no Bree (mixed human/hobbit town) and no Michel Delving, which in its time was a market town with above-ground buildings and a museum. For context, it takes a decent amount of work for the British Isles to lose towns, especially on the level of development that Hobbits had - famously anachronistic, they have waistcoat buttons and watermills and good china and museums and smoking habits, while all the rest of medieval-ish Middle Earth is not as developed.
Itâs hard to lose all that, without any trace at all, in crowded countries. Wholesale loss always means that Something Happened.
They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.
âDo not and did notâ is further reinforcement of a still-living people. (I love the âunderstand or likeâ thing, which is charming - the implication that hobbits are perfectly capable of UNDERSTANDING machinery in textile factories, but would hate it.)
Something that makes the Big Man nuanced as a character is that he obviously adores hobbits, and studies them because he likes them. The fondness and admiration comes through, even as he is showing his own privilege and bias.
To me, the way this passage about machinery is framed - lumping together those machines as âabout the level of technology hobbits are comfortable withâ - is something that someone standing post-Enlightenment, probably post-Industrial Revolution, would do. The implication I take from this passage is that this is a modern writer describing the current status of modern hobbits; a mid-century British scholar, a self-insert of Tolkien.
This sense of time matters, because of everything else he says, and the temptation people will have to excuse the Big Man narrator as âa product of his time.â This isnât a medieval writer looking back on Middle Earth. Itâs a highly educated man writing in the 1940s: computers existed, there were several Disney films out, women had the right to vote, and feminist essays were published from Tolkien's own workplace.
Even in ancient days they were, as a rule, shy of âthe Big Folkâ, as they call us,
We then proceed to see, across three books, examples of hobbit behavior in âthe ancient daysâ, which may serve as an example of this shyness. Several different relationship with Big Folk are outlined, in which fairly chirpy hobbits, characterised by their ready emotional availability, cohesion, and incredible abilities to build relationships and form massive political alliances, seem to do well on the strength of that. Hobbit shyness may involve glaring ferociously at Big Folk for a moment, but within a few days they are sitting on your lap, and then itâs all over. With this evidence in our memory, casting a coy âshynessâ as the reason for their avoidance of âusâ becomes uncomfortable.
and now they avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find.
The Narrator is handwaving, in avuncular fashion, why the Reader has never seen a hobbit in their lives, and needs to be lectured, from first principles, on a living indigenous people of the British Isles. Do marinate on it for a moment, though. The tone of a professor or a parent, whimsically explaining to Victorian children why you donât see the Tooth Fairy - she hides! Teehee.
They avoid us with dismay.
Behind this airy statement, what happened? Massive betrayals, the loss of their land and political power, loss of the conditions they need for their survival, massive loss of their people, and a total breakdown in trust. Humans and hobbits, in the prologue and main story, are shown as natural allies; close kin who understand each other well; humans are shown owing a tremendous amount of their own political influence to hobbits, and even cold/reserved humans end up liking them after a conversation. Hobbits are especially shown for being loyal friends who do not break down under war; noted for retaining cohesion and resisting corruption; who, under unimaginable conditions, will still resist harming or betraying friends.
Hobbits and humans have clearly had some significant breakage of our kinship since the events of the LotR cycle. The Big Man knows this.
Earlier in the essay, when the Big Man told us that âhobbits are closest to (us)â he gave us a lot of additional information, didnât he? He refers to âlater estrangement.â (He also tells us clearly, in that subtext of that sentence, that no hobbit will ever read the book in our hands, no hobbit will ever be addressed as a reader, no hobbit will enter academia, no hobbit will be able to fill in the gaps that the Big Man waves his hand over. Certainly no hobbit scholar contributed to the Big Manâs translation of the Red Book. Theyâre not just going, theyâre functionally GONE. This is what I mean!) Anyway, even the Big Man notes that there was âan estrangement.â Something that has caused them to flee from contact with us in dismay.
whatever happened in that estrangement probably doesnât reflect well on the Big Folk. A species facing extinction and hiding, dismayed and estranged, from their closest kin, is not having a pleasant time on this earth. Especially when we understand that theyâre basically trapped in the crowded and inhospitable British Isles (and still managing to hide from us to the point of the public not being aware of their existence!)
The Big Man Narrator isnât interested. This is the point where you ought to start wondering about academic bias on the part of the Big Man Narrator. He's fond of hobbits, and has interviewed/met them, but would never treat one as a colleague.
[âŠ]They possessed from the first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently, when large folk whom they do not wish to meet come blundering by; and this art they have developed until to Men it may seem magical.
so hobbits have an inherent ability of being invisible/undetectable, which they still practice today (teehee, thatâs why itâs okay that youâve never spoken to one) and which is pretty damn effective. Effective enough that people in modern times are completely fooled, effective enough that it still counts as âdisappearing,â and the elusiveness of hobbits is so perfect as to conceal their existence from the general public. Effective enough that the few adults who DO discuss hobbits could conceivably think it could be magic. The Narrator has probably rolled his eyes over a rivalâs paper about âSlipping Into The Shadow-Realm: how hobbits shift space and time to conceal their vital signaturesâ (Sayers, 1934).
further, theyâve specifically developed this âartâ - from whatâs implied to be an instinctive/animal ability - to a higher skill, indistinguishable from magic. The âartâ is SOMETHING material and quantifiable, if it was innate-and-continually-developed.
But Hobbits have never, in fact, studied magic of any kind,
Here is a point thatâs been discussed on tumblr, and it is correct to note that âstudiedâ is doing a lot of work. Especially when contrasted against the previous sentence, with the interesting term âartâ. âIt isnât science/magic, itâs an instinctive artâ.
To me - remembering that this is intended to be a mid-century British academic speaking to us - it resonates with how romanticism of marginalised cultures was treated by academia, in the generation the Big Man Narrator wouldâve studied in - full of romantic, unexamined, politically revealing statements like, âThe Celts are skilled in the art of music, but have never properly studied it.â
What Iâm saying here is that we should not assume the Big Man is a good judge of the difference between âartâ and âstudy,â especially since the next bit reads:
and their elusiveness is due solely to a professional skill that heredity and practice, and a close friendship with the earth, have rendered inimitable by bigger and clumsier races.
Hobbit invisibility is an âartâ through âheredity,â but also a âprofessional skillâ refined through âpractice.â It has been âdevelopedâ until it is mistaken for âmagic,â but against this, we are told that hobbits âhave never studied magic of any kind.â In the cleavage point here, we can see the definition of âstudyâ that The Big Man is working with. This definition is possibly what makes something âmagicâ or not. Have you seen this before?
The point I am making here is that the Big Man is speaking to us from the position of a âcoloniser.â There are some worldbuilding implications to unpack from this. One is that the Big Man is speaking from a place where magic can be studied, not even requiring hereditary aptitude (if hobbits were excluded from magic by physiology, This Fuckin Guy wouldâve said it) but that it is an academic practice. Hobbits are not just nearly-extinct and terrified out of contact with humans; they are fully excluded from academia (they do not translate or contribute to translations of their histories; they do not study) and if they cannot formalise their practices in acceptable study as the Big Man defines it, it cannot be magic. This is exactly the tone in which majority cultures dismiss other practices of culture/medicine/science, by stating it is NOT a form of science, because it is not practiced with the academy, because it is definitionally not allowed in the academy.
We can then go to a higher level of political analysis and reading, and ask: who benefits from a definition of âmagicâ that includes (academic study) but excludes (hobbit arts)?
You can certainly do some delightful worldbuilding answers for yourself, and say that âperhaps magic is spells, material changes, great works as performed by Elvish or Maiar Ringbearers, etc.â But if we look at the political stuff Iâve just pointed out, why not examine the definition and who it serves and why? Given that weâve seen this pattern before - colonisers deliberately bundle, define and dismiss marginalised practices as primitive, animalistic, instinctual and unschooled, as part of the PURPOSEFUL WORK of colonisation - I read the Big Man definition as: âMagic is formalised by the bigger races and defined by excluding the practices of the smallest race.â
Who does this benefit? Well, the Bigger Races could in some ways. Magic must be studied, hobbits donât study, hobbits donât have magic, hobbits are The Only Unmagical Humans - despite having practices indistinguishable from magic - this could be something. Big Men would have some reason to define âmagicâ to exclude hobbits. Normally this is done in order to take resources or drain resistance from marginalised people, but as hobbits have had virtually no remaining resources or resistance since long before the Industrial Revolution, you could open this up to other worldbuilding implications - maybe, Big Men didnât really MIND hobbits going extinct.
An interesting point here is to re-read sections of this work with different interpretations of who the Big Man is. Where are his biases? Who is he as a character?
I personally read him as a friendly, Tolkienesque academic who likes hobbits, follows his linguistic interests, and is too blinded by his bias to think about their political position. He seems unaware of the horrors he's talking about. Perhaps that's down to innocence.
A character crying out to be analysed.
Landless and Dismayed
That sums up a lot of information that can be mined from one of the very first paragraphs of the Fellowship of the Ring. But here's another message to toy with - hobbits exist in the modern space; landless, estranged, fleeing from us in dismay. Quite likely to have been betrayed.
Do you think Desmond has moments where he has to remind himself his ancestors are dead? That the people they cared about are too?
âLeonardo would love this.â
âI should go see if Malik has need of me.â
âI should go back to Davenport and check on everyone.â
He spent years with them, he cared for them. Do you think he ever sees a white feather and thinks about his mom Maria? Does he ever look at a plane and feel joyous laughter bubble up because
âLeonardo, look at what theyâve done! Flying machines just like you built!â
Does he smell a new tea Shaun buys and for a moment go âMalik would like this.â
And everytime it happens he has to remind himself that theyâre not there.
Oh the grief he would feel at each moment. Theyâre dead, theyâve been dead for centuries and yet he feels like he just lost them. And he did, because just a month ago he was sitting on a bench with Leonardo talking about weapons. It wasnât that long ago that Malik cursed him for drawing too much attention to him. It was even sooner that he watched two of his friends get married.
And oh, doesnât that grief feel stolen? Itâs such a raw feeling. An emotion that burrows in your chest. It makes your head feel too heavy for your shoulders and your throat feel like itâs closing. But itâs not his is it?
He grieves for friends and family who donât even know he exists. He never met them, and wouldnât that make it so much worse? The feeling of wrongness makes grief so much more powerful does it not?
Theyâre not his to mourn. Theyâre just another thing pushing him closer to insanity.
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Det skÀr i mitt hjÀrta att ha uppehÄll i kommunikationen. Jag stÀnger in min bubbliga Àlskande person. Du bryr dig vÀl inte. Det Àr vÀl skönt för dig att fÄ vila.
Jag mÄste hitta nÄgon som matchar min energi men det finns fan ingen. Jag Àr en idiot. Jag önskar att jag kunde avsluta imorgon.
if fallout 76 really is a world where âevery character is a real personâ & thereâs no NPCs im making it my civic duty to be like this lowly tavern barkeep and then once iâve established enough of a rapport iâm going to nuke all of west virginia and it will be in characterÂ