Mad Mak: Furry road

i feel like despite being an incredibly politically motivated group that maybe 1 out of 50 trans people actually attempt to understand any sort of political subject at all. which is why we have so many anarchists presumably

Sometimes having an OC is like "this character is an outlet for my insecurity and trauma" and sometimes it's like "this character is an outlet for my love of vampires :)". Sometimes it's both

Sometimes you think it's "this character is an outlet for my love and nothing more :)" and then you look it over later like "shit. product of the deepest depths of my soul again"

I love that Grace says he and Rocky "haven't run into anything where our cultures clash" while they're actively navigating two pretty major points of difference. From Grace's perspective, being watched in your sleep is sort of unnerving; for Rocky it's imperative. From Rocky's perspective, eating is taboo and private; for Grace it's a casual, social activity. When Grace says they haven't run into any culture clashes, he's just woken up to Rocky watching him and now he's eating breakfast. It's obviously not true that they have no conflicts in their social norms! It's just that they instinctively accommodate each other with curiosity and empathy, finding ways to bend on the things that matter to each other and explain when something is really important to themselves. Grace has spent his life holding other people at arm's length, and then in Rocky he meets someone who makes him want to do the work, and that work becomes so natural he doesn't even realise he's doing it.

these are supposed to be my amazing digital thirties

idk it's kind of frustrating. i've genuinely never, ever seen a character that uses a rollator before. not once. i cannot name a single one. i know of multiple ocs who are described to have full-body pain, dizziness, and fatigue that are drawn as cane users and are never shown with wheelchairs or walkers, though

it's also sort of sad? i've been diagnosed since i was twelve years old, and i only heard of rollators LAST YEAR. and that was only because i saw one irl and immediately asked what it was. i wonder how many disabled people out there don't even know it's an option solely because they're completely underrepresented online and in media

if you're a creative with a disabled oc, PLEASEEE check out this link. it's a very nice and detailed guide for telling which mobility aids suit someone's needs best. it's incredibly important to make the right choice for your character! mobility aids tell you a LOT about someone's lived experience. picking the right one will communicate to your audience #1 what your character goes through #2 that you UNDERSTAND what your character goes through!

'A popular fanfic author stopped updating her fic because she said that the stress of being constantly falsely accused of using AI was a witch hunt and it was destroying her mental health to the extent that she needed to take a break from writing, leading to multiple online discussions defending her and debates about AI accusations and how You Can't Really Tell So Leave Her Alone, and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3, and she denied it for a bit but then ultimately admitted that oopsie, she had been using genAI all along, and then she deleted all of her fics off AO3 and people got mad because they were being denied access to their favourite fics, even though they now knew definitively that they were genAI slop, and then it turned out that she'd actually stopped updating the fic on AO3 in the first place because she'd been shopping it around to agents and editors as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, and she'd been in conversations with a publisher which ultimately got dropped because she'd lied to them about her AI use' oh cool, so we're in Hell, then

Let me be clear: if you use AI to write fanfic, paticularly if you do so in the hopes of snapping up a tradpub deal off the basis of the popularity of your worthless slop, then you are an absolute grade A ding-dong, and may the vengeful spirits of our beloved Spirk Elders haunt you via the medium of perpetual papercuts forevermore.

I am unaware of who this is referring to and feel like a small fishing boat that just saw the dorsal fin of Leviathan off the starboard bow

That is so extremely valid, and truly I wish that I had not myself plunged into the depths and seen the truth of the Leviathan (a gigantic plastic fish effigy that's broken off a derelict Fish & Chip shop and washed into the Atlantic: a harbinger of doom in its own synthetic tongue)

So many lessons in fandom and life boil down to make your own works for love of the game, don't go looking for ways to be an asshole to people, don't lie when people ask you something that challenges you to be better, and don't fucking cheat.

people should be allowed to have low ambition, and also be able to feed a family on the salary of a cashier at a convenience store.

I would unironically love this