there is a stripper pole in my attic. i saw it in a dumpster one day, and i went, shit, this is exactly the kind of thing my wife would want. and i didnt really want it in the house, what with it being a used stripper pole lightly seasoned with dumpster juice, but i mentally decided that if she were to see it and ask for it, i would say she could have it, and then sure enough, later that evening, she went soooo baaaaaaaabs there's this thing by the dumpster and i want it but i get it if you don't want it in the house but i have to show it to you- and i went, no you dont, you can have the pole, and that was the most surprised i have ever made her look. even compared to the day when i proposed to her, which she was prepared enough that we both knew she would say yes, and she could also get her hair done up and have a cute outfit, but not so prepared that she was not fucking flabbergasted by the 12 empty decoy ringboxes i sprung on her. i handed her so many decoy ring boxes that day. still one of the funniest things i've ever done to her.
anyway we like pacing around together and ranting in the attic but sometimes instead of pacing one of us will just hang on the pole and spin, and the other person will watch on the beanbag, which makes for these really goofy conversations where the person on the bag will say something that gets the other persons goat, such as, hypothetically, that xylophones do not belong in rock music, and then the other person will go on a tirade about this, but they'll actually only be facing the Hot Take Speaker half of the time, what because of the pole, so the response will sound something like
I can't believe
you would even suggest such
a stupid opinion. You've
been to a Danny Elfman
concert! How can you
have heard Oingo Boingo
live and say with a straight face
that they alone do not justify
rock and roll xylophones
and then that person will continue until they get too dizzy, then they'll get off the pole, and by unspoken agreement, the person on the bag will get up and trade places with them to deliver their rebuttal while also spinning and it just creates this sort of crazy strip-court lawyers debating absolute nonsense for no reason kind of vibe that frankly just really does it for us.
i don't really have any marriage advice for this i guess its just a look at what being married can look like. i thought that being married would involve a lot more stuff like carving the turkey, or barbecuing, or watching the sunset, and if id known how much time it would involve arguing for xylphones in rock music while spinning upside down i might have prepared for it a little differently.
The common thread for me is: I’ve absolutely seen something by the dumpster that I couldn’t countenance leaving there but I’m apology not permission kind of person so I just took it.
Then I called my wife to be like, “Look, there was something by the dumpster and it was unacceptable to leave it there—“
“The painting.”
“…yes.”
“Okay but like. Where did you put it? Because the painting in question was massive.
“The garage. I promise I’ll sell it, but it has brushstrokes! It’s not a print, someone painted this!”
“I know. I knew as soon as I saw it that you’d do this. I’m not mad.”
So I think marriage is knowing what your spouse is gonna want from in front of a dumpster and forgiving them for whatever follows.
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harrow the ninth Book Of All Time actually. gaslights the audience immediately. doesn’t answer any of the questions from the last book until like 300 pages in. complete perspective shift. complete tonal shift. god is making poe references and meme references in the same breath. blink and you’ll miss it lore drops that are actually critical to understanding what’s going on. so so much grief. Book Of All Time.
Hitting you with the full immersion of how disoriented Harrow is at all times. The PoV thing that functionally serves early on to distinguish the time periods(?) and also to act as a layer of depersonalization for Harrow, But Then...
Driving you absolutely feral wondering where the hell is Gideon and feeding you that One Single Line in chapter 3 of "There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow—but she had died before Harrow was born." (Which, crucially, turns out to be completely literal, too.)
And all the while... Well. One of my favorite things I've ever seen anyone say about this book was @again-thepommel describing the effect as: "What better way to make you feel the emptiness of loss than putting emptiness where the loss should be?"
My favorite brand of people are musicians who hear Rush Fucking E, which isn't technically meant to be played by a human at all, and immediately picking up their instrument and going 'bet'.
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IDK who needs to hear this but if there's something in your life that makes you feel better, but you never stick to it,
it's still actually perfectly fine to do it
and you shouldn't stop yourself from starting just because it won't be a permanent change.
Like if starting a new daily planner gives you an amazing afternoon of planning and four days where you feel in charge of your life,
why not do it?
It doesn't matter that it won't be a permanent change - 4 good days is still worth it.
If you ever catch yourself thinking, "I wish I could pray/stretch/prep/plan/do the thing, but I always get started on that and it never lasts more than a couple of days,"
what this really means is, "hey, I can feel better for a couple of days."
if this post is making you think of things in your own life that you wish you could stick to because of how good they make you feel,
just be aware:
you're not thinking of a list of ways you've failed to commit
you're thinking of a list of things that make you happy, and you should give yourself permission to start doing them as often as you want to
Flossing is a great example of this. I simply can Not get into the habit of flossing Every Day Forever, but I *can* floss every day for a week, and then forget to floss for a while, and recently I’ve been able to floss like at least once or twice a week on most weeks. I’m sure I’ll fall out of the habit again in a little while and it’ll be a few months before I get back into doing any flossing. But I’m doing some, sometimes.
Does this mean my teeth and gums are pristine? No. But they’re definitely cleaner and healthier than if I just threw up my arms and went “I can’t maintain the habit so I’ll give up”. I’ll get to keep my teeth longer when I’m old than if I threw in the towel. I’ll get to tell the dentist that I floss sometimes instead of getting a bad grade in dentist by saying I floss never.
This post is basically a transcript of a speech I give to newbies to the D/s scene all the time IRL. I figured it might be useful not only to people curious about kink IRL but also to smut writers here on the smut writing website.
For the purposes of this post, I am sending specific physical acts out of the room. Right now they don't matter, because you can meet an emotional need through any number of physical acts. So when I say that there are many ways to dom and many ways to sub, I am not referring to many kinds of physical acts. I mean that there are many emotional needs that doms and subs bring to scenes, and those can change the scene more than the choice of physical acts that will occur in that scene.
I say this to newbies to the scene because they tend to have a narrow view of the motivations and needs that bring people to D/s, biased by both the newbie's own preferences and the depictions of D/s they've seen in media. The same is true of people who write kink fic. Kink fic is very biased to a narrow subset of the wide range of emotional needs that people might bring to this kind of play.
It's really important to understand this in D/s IRL because a mismatch or miscommunication about these needs can lead to a bad scene. For example, let's take the approaches of sub-as-beloved-pet and sub-as-object. If a dom treats a sub as a beloved pet when what they really want is to be treated like an object, then a sub who went into a scene needing to be ignored, or at the very least the illusion of being ignored and disregarded, is suddenly in the spotlight of a lot of intense attention and affection. Again, I will note that both of these scenes could potentially involve the same physical acts, just approached differently. Let's say it's a service submission scene where the sub is naked and cleaning the room for the dom. Sub-as-beloved-pet would get frequent praise and lots of patiently repeated instructions, while sub-as-object would get one detailed instruction at the beginning and no reinforcement except a punishment if they get part of the instruction wrong.
I'm going to go through a bunch of different styles of dom and sub, with the emotional needs that underlie them. This list is not exhaustive. I'm sure there's more I haven't thought of or encountered, so feel free to reblog with additions. It may also be a bit dom-biased because I'm a dom, but I think that might be for the best, because the emotional needs of doms are generally less understood than those of subs.
Various consensual kinks discussed below. Kinkshamers in the notes will be blocked with extreme prejudice.
Dom-as-control: This may seem obvious or even trivial, but it shouldn't be dismissed: many doms are motivated by an emotional need to have some part of their life where they have total control over what is going to happen. Something that I love about this style of domination is that I always know exactly what will happen next (except if there's some emergency, safeword, or other issue to address.) There are no wild cards in a controlled D/s scene except for those I explicitly allow (like if I ask a sub to choose which whip I'll beat them with.) This is also a reason why I personally have a very hard time switching; I have difficulty with the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen next. It should be noted that this style of domination is fairly incompatible with the bratty style of submission, as the brat is constantly throwing wild cards into the scene.
Sub-as-blankspace: The other side of this coin is the sub who needs to not have to think anymore. They've spent all day deciding what to wear and what to eat and which toothpaste to buy and they just want to stop. This is a very common motivator. This sub needs specific and clear commands from a dom, without too many steps, or else needs to have a well-established protocol of kneeling and service that they can do by pure muscle memory. This sub does not want the dom to offer them a choice of whips they can be beaten with, because that forces them out of the blissful blankspace of not needing to choose.
Dom- or sub-as-service: The same emotional need can sometimes motivate domination or submission! Many people dom or sub out of a desire to please their partner. It's about taking on a defined role that you know will meet your partner's needs. It feels good to be needed, after all. This motivation for D/s is generally the best understood by the public, especially as a motivation for doms. It's generally more socially acceptable to want to control and torment people if you're doing it selflessly in order to please them. A big part of my motivation for making this speech to people, and for writing this post, is to point out that this is far from the only style of domination, and pleasing their subs is far from the only emotional need that doms might have.
Dom-as-whumper: I'm using this terminology because of the website I'm on. I'm not into whumpfic, but I recognize in people who have a visceral need to see their blorbos whimpering and bleeding the same need I have to tear apart a cute kitten with my bare hands, or to crush a sub beneath my booted foot. It's the cuteness aggression approach to domination: sometimes your sub is so cute your hands itch with the urge to destroy them. This is where domination and sadism bleed into each other; this style of domination does not work well for the sub who wants to submit without being hurt or humiliated.
Sub-as-object: Subs who like to be treated as furniture, robots, or objects are often motivated by a need to enjoy a sexual or kink situation while being free of attention and scrutiny. Obviously, some baseline level of attention is needed for BDSM safety; the dom needs to be able to notice if the sub is injured or upset. But beyond that baseline, it can feel very freeing for a sub to be turned on, blissed out in subspace, crying, drooling, whatever, without anyone closely watching or listening to them, so long as they fulfill whatever their purpose as an object is.
Sub- or dom-as-flex: Both doms and subs can be motivated by a need to feel competent. I definitely feel awesomely powerful and competent when I do a style of domination that requires specialized skill, such as hypnosis. Submission can also provide a feeling of competence: look how long I was able to stay kneeling on the hard floor! Look how perfectly I cleaned the room, exactly as Mistress told me to do it!
Dom-as-troll (or mad scientist): The sibling to this kind of dom is the writer who thinks "wouldn't it be fucked up if....?" and then writes a freaky nasty little horror story about it. A great thing about D/s is that you can have a thought like "wouldn't it be fucked up if I tied up my sub and then ate their favorite snack right in front of them?" and then you can just do it (provided you know your sub likes to be tied up and tormented.) Then you can find out how your sub would react to your terrible ideas and laugh evilly at the results. The emotional need being served here is the goblin part of your brain that wants to break things just to see how they shatter. All you need to do is find someone who wants to be broken.
Sub-as-brat: Brats are often discussed as a single type of sub, but in my experience, there are two rather different emotional needs that drive brats. Some people are brats because they need the assurance that they can act out all they want, and it won't derail the action; the dom is strong or skilled enough to subdue them no matter what nasty tricks their goblin brain gets up to. Other people are brats out of a need to live in a predictable and fair moral universe. Those brats want a very clear system of rules and punishments for those rules. Then they test the rules, and they get meted out exactly the punishment they were promised. Within the world of this scene, the world is fair, and the same misbehavior will always face the same consequences, something that rarely happens in the real world. These types of brats are rather different, because the first kind of brat doesn't care as much if the consequences of their misbehavior are inconsistent, while the second kind cares a lot.
Sub-as-beloved-pet: Or beloved child, if they're an ageplayer. I find that subs that like to be a beloved puppy are driven by an emotional need to be loved, treasured, and supported unconditionally, even if they make mistakes, even if they behave messily or clumsily, even if they look silly, because that's how a good pet owner should treat a pet. There might be discipline involved, but the discipline is very supportive and patient.
Dom-as-nurturer: Some doms are motivated by a need to be in a nurturing role that their non-D/s life may not allow them to fulfill. For example, a man who wants to express affection and tenderness to his partner but has a hard time doing so because of the way he was raised may be able to unlock that ability if his partner plays a sweet puppy and he's playing the puppy's doting owner. Basically, the D/s scene creates a little world and a set of roles in which it's expected and normal for the dom to be nurturing, even if that's not true for the dom outside of that scene.
Dom-as-enfant-terrible: The other side of the coin is a dom who needs to be in a role where they can be unreasonable, demanding, and selfish, a role that their non-D/s life may not allow them to fulfill. For example, a mother who spends all day thinking about her family's needs may relish the opportunity to center her own desires without worrying if she's being "too much." She can be impatient and fussy and demand the sub do things over and over until she's satisfied, all of which she can't do when she's working as a teacher or other caring role.
Dom-as-artist: I think this is a hugely under-appreciated motivator for doms. Many have a need to be creative and imaginative that they fulfill through domination. I've been to workshops and demos at kink conventions where I've been awed by another dom's fiendish creativity. I once watched a hypno dom with a sub who got off on being afraid, and he hypnotized her and crafted an extremely elaborate horror scene in the room, filling it with menacing shadows and phantasms. This is where I'm contractually obligated to link A Dom DM because this is where domination overlaps a lot with game running and game design.
Sub-as-aesthetic-object: The flip side of this coin is that many subs enjoy being an aesthetic object or canvas for a dom's art. Very often these are subs chasing a need to feel beautiful, or at least enjoyable to look at. Subs who want to be aesthetic objects may enjoy wearing special outfits during scenes, or being posed in sexy or appealing positions. Subs in this kind of scene may enjoy letting go of worrying about whether they look good to the dom, because the dom is shaping them to their own preferred aesthetic, whether that's via poses, makeup, shibari, or something else.
Sub-as-sexual-creature: A lot of subs enjoy being called sluts, offered up for free use, or otherwise being hypersexualized. Why is that? Well, our society has a lot of shame and repression around sex, and it can feel much easier to relax and enjoy sex if it's couched in the fantasy that you have no choice because you've been reduced to a purely sexual creature. The sub has an emotional need to give up responsibility for choosing to have sex and be sexual, because that responsibility is a heavy weight to carry.
Dom- or sub-as-taboo-breaker: This is a huge motivator for both doms and subs. We all live in a society, and sometimes we feel a need to break the rules of that society. Both domination and submission provide opportunities to do so. It's taboo to piss yourself as an adult, but a watersports scene creates a space where it is acceptable or even desirable for a sub to break that taboo. As a dom, I personally get a huge taboo-breaking thrill from slapping a sub across the face. There's something about the sheer disrespect of it, and the memory of being scolded for doing it as a child, that fills me with impish glee.
Dom-as-hunter/sub-as-prey: For the hunter to catch the prey, there must first be a chase, or at the very least an ambush. This need not be a literal chase (we sent physical acts out of the room, remember?) but it is a dynamic to hunter/prey-flavored BDSM: the hunter has to earn it. This fulfills an emotional need for both dom and sub: a dom who struggles with feelings of unworthiness can feel like they've earned their partner's submission, and a sub can feel that the dom cares enough to put in the effort to catch them. Hunter/prey also allows dom and sub to explore some pretty dark emotions within the safety of consensual kink, such as fear, obsession, and consumption.
Dom-as-shadow: I mean shadow here in the sense of shadow work. Many doms take inspiration from people who bullied them in school (and many subs enjoy re-enacting scenes of childhood bullying in a safe and consensual context.) There is a real emotional need served by claiming the power of those bullies for yourself. Those childhood cruelties can be utterly transformed by the change of context. For example, the catty whispers and sneers of straight girls who bullied me for being queer comes out very different when I perform those same catty sneers as a genderfucky adult.
Sub-as-lesser-being: While some subs like to be beloved pets, and others like to be disregarded objects, some like to be pond scum. There can be a real freedom that comes from occupying a role of being disgusting and horrible. Nothing good or useful can be expected of you, and nothing you do will ever earn praise, and so you're free from worrying about or pursuing any of those things. Sub-as-lesser-being is also a space to explore difficult emotions like shame and humiliation in a safe context.
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Broke: I’m hauling groceries on foot because I ate a cookie and need to burn calories
Woke: FUCKING WATCH ME FLEX THESE LEGS AND CARRY HEAVY SHIT UPHILL BECAUSE I’M STRONK HAHAHAHAAA YOU WEENIES DRIVING TWO BLOCKS IN AN SUV CAN KISS MY VERY MUSCULAR ASS
Where’s that video of that woman with a heavy accent lifting weights and saying, “I don’t work out to look pretty I work out to look like bitch who fights bear in the forest!!”
one of the most enlightening realizations ive had was finding out that non-24 hour circadian rhythm people were a pretty large group and most of us have oddly similar cycles of usually around 28hr internal "days" and this masquerades as "insomnia" but if allowed to sleep and wake naturally we will just advance forward through time an extra 2-4 hours a day at a relatively stable pace. we can't go to school or jobs or even run errands on normal schedules without massive pharmacological and behavioral intervention. most of the people who have been diagnosed or figured it out themselves will report horrific, life-ruining disruption in their professional lives and terrible health from accrued lack of sleep. this disorder is most common in vision-impaired people which seems to suggest it's related to light cues. anyway just thinking about this as extremely loud yard work woke me up at 8am for the second day in a row
lot of people reblogging this identifying themselves in it so i wanted to give you a link to a more detailed desription of Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder, and mention theres a similar disorder called Delayed Sleep Phase disorder where you are on a regular 24 hour cycle but you naturally get sleepy around 3-4am every day and wake up around 10am-12pm (roughly). as far as i can tell, despite the widespread nature of both these disorders, its basically impossible to get diagnosed bvecause sleep medicine is probably the single most useless specialty and if you dont have sleep apnea they dont want to hear about it.
BORN WITH TEETH dir. Daniel Evans
(London Wyndham’s Theatre — 13 August to 1 November 2025)
››› Ncuti Gatwa as Christopher Marlowe
››› Edward Bluemel as William Shakespeare
the locked tomb series asks big questions, like would you sacrifice the memory of those you loved to not have to live with your grief? and what if god was a tumblr user?
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yeah, that lizard comic is cute, but if a lizard is nodding at you, that lizard is doing the lizard equivalent of YOU WANNA GO?? HUH?? YOU THINK YOU CAN TAKE ME???
Or, on occasion, DO YOU WANNA TOUCH--YEAH--DO YOU WANNA TOUCH--YEAH--DO YOU WANNA TOUCH ME THERE?! WHERE?! YEEEEEEEEEEAH. Sometimes lizards are monsterfuckers too.
Source: Herpetology degree, twenty years in reptile rescue.
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