SapphireStream

Grace, haltingly on the keyboard Rocky built for him: Wassup bitches. Fucking jazzed to—

***book spoilers ahead***

I want to do a quick dive into the infamous scene between Grace, DuBois, and Shapiro in chapter 17 (pp. 283–285 in my copy) because an idea occurred to me and I can’t rest until I dig into it. This is the scene in which DuBois informs Grace of the sexual nature of his relationship with Shapiro.

Something about the conversation didn’t sit quite right for me. Upon reflection, I wanted to take a step back from (or perhaps, as it happens, a step further into) my aroace reading of Grace and get to the bottom of what Weir’s intention was in writing it. While I do believe that the aroace reading is strongly supported by the text, I don’t believe that it was specifically intended, which brings us to these points:

The Empress of Salt and Fortune

Nghi Vo 

With the heart of an Atwood tale and the visuals of a classic Asian period drama, Nghi Vo's The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a tightly and lushly written narrative about empire, storytelling, and the anger of women.

A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully.

Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

At once feminist high fantasy and an indictment of monarchy, this evocative debut follows the rise of the empress In-yo, who has few resources and fewer friends. She's a northern daughter in a mage-made summer exile, but she will bend history to her will and bring down her enemies, piece by piece.

PRIDE BEES!!!!

Any opinions on the new asexual flag?

(Personally. I like it because it has yellow which connects it to the aroace flag)

lol fuck that noise

Like, I'm sorry, there is no reason to change the ace flag? When the lesbian flag got a redesign, it was because the creator turned out to just not be the kind of person we wanted to stand behind and we didn't want to have a flag created by a racist biphobe. This was a reason for a redesign.

I tried to look it up but the most I found was on a post from the creator of this flag that people were bothered that the meaning of the white stripe...? How would that constitute a redesign at all. Much less a redesign into a flag that still has a white stripe. It's almost like you, personally, could just decide what the colors mean for yourself.

This is so fucking wild and unnecessary, also just the gall to decide to that you should get to redesign a widely known and beloved flag. With the lesbian flag, it really was a community wide decision, it spanned multiple platforms, there was an actual valid reason behind the change of our flag, and it was a huge process of choice. But one person deciding they wanna change it and doing polls or whatever on their instagram with their followers? That's not a decision made by the community.

Also, I find it incredibly inappropriate that anything I came across that acknowledged a backlash to the flag redesign just instantly boiled the reason for that down to racism, just because this person is black. Sure, she is definitely facing racist accusations here too because racists always come out of the woodwork when black people do anything and she most certainly does not deserve that, but you do not get to pretend that racism is the only reason why other members of this community might take issue with one single person deciding to redesign that community's flag for no reason.

Be real for a second here, if a white girl decided to add an orange and a green stripe to the bi flag and discussed it with their facebook followers, you really think the rest of the internet would go "oh yeah slay queen" and just accept an unnecessary change to a well-known and beloved flag and start using that new flag unanimously with nobody saying "hey, hold on I actually like our flag and don't think this change is good or necessary"?

If you are someone who sees the ace pride flag and cringes away from it, I need you to stop and examine why that is. Is it really because of the colors, or the (honestly kind of obscure) meanings of the stripes? Or is it because you associate that flag with a stereotype of ace people as boring / cringe / grumpy / etc?

Because, newsflash: Maybe you're too new to know this, but we as a community kind of went through this four fucking year long hate campaign called 'Ace Discourse' where people specifically crafted that stereotype to discredit us and exclude us from the queer community.

Changing the colors or design of the ace flag won't change that. It won't undo the harm we suffered to our community. It won't bring back the aces who went back in the closet and abandoned the community to save their mental health. It won't repair the damage done to our reputation by that stereotype, that continues to be perpetuated by bad actors fighting to keep the 'discourse' alive in 20-fucking-26

Like it or not, THIS is our flag. This is the most widely known symbol of our community. We can either continue to stay divided and obfuscate our identities under a dozen different color schemes, hoping against all reason that one of them will be the bandaid that fixes everything, or we can hold up OUR flag with pride and finally rebuild our community as a united front

14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."

and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.

so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.

on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.

the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.

but also sometimes the tags are just… commentary, like a little side whisper you attach to the post that only lives in your corner of the swamp unless someone else decides to pick it up and carry it with them like a note in a bottle that has somehow developed opinions

and there are actual comments, which follow the post, but tags don’t, so tags are like speaking into a parallel dimension where only people who specifically go looking for it will hear you, and also the original poster, sometimes

so you can react to something without technically adding to the post in a way that propagates, unless someone sees your tags and goes “no actually this deserves to be part of the text” and manually copies them onto the post like a form of peer review, tags so good they achieved publication

and then it can also function as a PS on your own post, like an afterthought that didn’t quite fit into the main body but you still needed to say it, so you just tuck it into the tags like “also btw [unhinged addendum]” and send it drifting downstream