I’m more likely to respond to ask games if you include the question with the emoji. (Thank you!)
I don’t do chain/copy paste ask games, but thanks for thinking of me!
I won’t post fundraisers sent in my asks or submissions. Being responsible for someone's life like that is harrowing, and I just don’t have the energy to vet them besides. I may reblog them, however.
I only accept anon hate in the form of limerick. Please be aware of this before sending or your message will be blocked & deleted without comment. My blog MUST remain a silly space.
Karibu karibu, enjoy your stay!
Blacklist and Personal Tags:
#important - catch-all politics & current events tag.
#this is cassandra - talks tag. From the song by Talis Kimberley.
#sadismposting, #the intersection where the bodies meet - horny violence babyyyy! Largely defunct as I work through some stuff.
#something rotten in the house - incest, haunted houses, and greek tragedy. context
#torture - Torture, trauma theory, and solitary confinement.
#echo's book club - books I've been reading!
#echoes of the past - don't worry about this one.
I can be rather inconsistent when tagging!
Interests:
Opera - #opera tag
Fashion and textile arts, focused historical techniques & materials. I’ve knitted hand warmers from yarn I cleaned, carded, and spun myself! - #textile, #move the sheep and the fences around, #clothing
Sub-Saharan African mythology & cultures, for nostalgia reasons. May rarely post in Kiswahili. - #africa
Farming, homesteading, animal husbandry, etc. No tag. Lots of chickens.
Feminism and transfeminism! No tag. Heads up: TME/TMA is not useful for the kinds of discussions I'm interested in, and I find the terminology personally upsetting; no disdain if you use them, but I will not. I use transfem/not-transfem.
Spiders - #spiders
World mythology, media analysis, meta narrative. Enemies to lovers, too; if the Epic of Gilgamesh did it, I can put it here. #can’t argue with a monomyth, #enemies with benefits, #stories
Character tags: #gawainposting, #gearposting, #ishtarposting, #xipe totec posting, #zoraposting
Misc: #heave ho bitches, #knightposting, #labyrinth, #the mask, #the body, #unified tag for posts like this, #unicorn
Fandoms & medias & sideblogs & such
No Evil (@f-yeah-no-evil)
Abzu, Journey, Sky cotl (@starsfallhome)
Hollow Knight (@bobbinbugs)
Kiwi Blitz (@normalkiwiblitz)
Project Hail Mary (@shitty-eridians)
Books: House of Leaves, The Left Hand Of Darkness, Piranesi, [quite literally everything by Borges], The Last Unicorn
Animations & Animes: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Dungeon Meshi, Blue Eye Samurai, Arcane (loved s1, s2 critical), Epithet Erased, Witch Hat Atelier, Princess Tutu + princess tutu abridged (what I initially started this blog for!), Lego Monkie Kid
Video Games: Death Palette, Outer Wilds, Portal 1 & 2, Ultrakill, Hatoful Boyfriend, Hades, Blue Prince
Podcasts: Mabel, The Silt Verses
Paul Shapera (no longer following but soft spot for older works)
Medieval literature
The Epic of Gilgamesh, Inanna's Descent Into the Underworld, various mesopotamian stone tablets (Agushaya Hymn my beloved)
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I cannot actually be fully honest with potential partners while I live under my parents' roof; to be intimate means being fully honest about what they did to me, and that's difficult when said friends and partners have to see your parents all the time
deeply traumatically bonded to my ex, despite going no-contact; i called her 'my current ex' last night and if that doesn't sum it up
said ex is the only person I know who is carrying certain experiences -- for example, not having certain scars from [___], not even attempting it, and the complexities of being grateful you never tried and wishing you had evidence it 'really was that bad' -- so on, so forth
not ready to date seriously until I have financial independence
hilariously not in any way traumatically bonded to my parents. from age 1 i decided I didn't like them and that has not changed since. then a woman i've known for two years kills something in me that might not ever come back to life and i still love her. what gives!
Hey kids, you need to start worrying a little less about getting “#mogged” and a little more about getting “#smogged”. This is an Air Quality Index public service announcement.
I know I kinda get pithy about shinigami eyes but I’d be lying if it didn’t bother me just a little bit that I, as an entire trans woman, am marked red, and that I know there’s people out there who dismiss me out of hand because of that.
Love being called a terf by my own community. Great job everyone.
LIke, since a couple of months ago when this first started, I've seen a huge uptick in posts I straight-up can't reblog, presumably because I've been preemptively blocked. I have never hear of about 90% of these blogs, and that kinda hurts, yeah.
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sometimes merely existing in the world as a trans woman with principles makes me feel like i'm going insane. what do you mean people think prisons are a good thing. what do you mean diverting from monogamy is considered ludicrous. what do you mean people think one's nature is unchangeable. what is considered 'normal' by the overwhelming majority of people is fucking topsy-turvy land to me. i dont understand it at all
read this book on magick and it was like "a great and powerful magickal technique practicable only by accomplished magicians is, to utterly change oneself and commit to the change, going against the world, changing your mind, your wardrobe, your identity-"
the best thing a woman can be is gay and suicidal and miserable and utterly unlikable and unpleasant to be around and prone to addiction and abused and traumatized and not breaking the cycle and
grace, en route to erid, lying down under a quilt in the dark: *whispering* hey rocky
rocky: shhh grace asleep now
grace: no, 'm awake
rocky: grace asleep now, command.
grace: I just wanted to say--
rocky: grace need sleep now, you always stupid when you try to speak at this time.
grace: I just wanted to say that if you're, I don't know, still a little mad or resentful about me trying to operate on your radiators and almost killing you that one time--
rocky: no no no, we talk about this before, rocky not mad. not happy about it, either, but understand. I live, is okay.
grace: yeah yeah, I remember, you were weirdly calm about it in a way that was a liiiittle concerning. so, yknow, if you were upset and holding something back to try 'n be nice--
rocky: rocky is not nice.
grace: okay not true. BUT, right, if you DID have some feelings that you weren't letting yourself vent, I was just thinking that, like, if you wanted to make it even and express some of your frustration, I would let--I mean, if you wanted to, and if you asked, if you thought you could get something out of it, like, either scientifically or emotionally or something, I wouldn't actually say "no" if you said that you wanted to. yknow. operate on me. like as mini-revenge.
rocky:
rocky: rocky no want "revenge." statement.
grace: aw, are you sure? 🥺
rocky:
grace:
rocky:
grace: ...I have been awake for, uh, twenty-two hours. sooo maybe we just forget I said any of that? maybe ignore all of that? ha ha. ha.
rocky: no I will remember this clearly until my death.
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Hanahaki disease is a psychosomatic illness. It's a thing that your body does in response to stress over constantly repressing/concealing your feelings in settings with high background magic. It's like you've been ignoring pain for a long time and suddenly your vision starts going dark, because your affected body is just YANKING on random alerts trying to get you to PAY ATTENTION there is a PROBLEM. Yes the flowers do really exist. So do non-magical psychosomatic symptoms. The flowers aren't special.
This does of course open up the trope to options for non-romantic concealed feelings. Which I think is great. There is something viscerally satisfying about the person who seems so outwardly chipper coughing and hacking and spitting up Depression Flowers so now everyone has to know they're hurting. Isn't there?
An ambitious young intern watches their rival getting the promotion they wanted, and ends up in the company bathroom, wretching Envy Flowers into the sink.
A doctor guides a family through the loss of a loved one, helping them express their pain. She coughs discreetly into a hankerchief, so that the petals of her own Grief Flowers aren't distracting.
A glamorous pop idol fields yets another press interview about a fan killed by the Hanahaki disease that was a direct result of their unrequited love of him. When the cameras aren't rolling, he chokes on Shame Flowers in his dressing room.
Another alternate hanahaki disease that's aroace friendly: When relationship-specific, hanahaki is an expression of an idolization and love so intense that it cannot possibly be requited. The only solution is to stop worshiping your beloved, or fall out of love.
Thus, you keep the intensity (feeling so strongly you choke) and stakes (you will die if this isn't dealt with) without some nasty subtext (if you don't love someone back you'll kill them with your apathy!!!) and with the possibility for a happy ending (you've stopped treating them like an idol, in all senses of the word, and love them as a person). This also means you can get hanahaki for someone you are actively in a relationship with.
This particular iteration combined with the above opens up a third possibility: traumatic bond hanahaki. An affection so intense that it transcends any pain, humiliation, and morality, but it will literally kill you.
baby airplane abandoned on tarmac and rescued has not yet molted and so must be held/lifted above the play rug to simulate successful takeoffs for his enrichment and learning
typically the baby plane's immune system would be built through nursing and again later with saliva transferal during feeding (this species / model feeds similar to penguins after a phase of exclusively nursing) but without a plane mother we must be very careful when first introducing the infant to a new environment. the same goes for light exposure, as the infant planes (of this species) would spend the first few weeks tucked under the mother plane's winglets, only emerging at night. this of course makes flying more difficult for her and is why mother planes are largely grounded for the fledgling period . occasionally survival calls for a takeoff anyway and this is why runt planes can sometimes tumble onto the runway where the mother must make the difficult decision to circle back or to leave them behind in the interest of the rest of the litter
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Blue Prince and its inspiration, Christopher Manson's MAZE
Rolled credits on the main story in Blue Prince a bit ago and learned that one of the minds behind it was Christopher Manson, artist of one of my favorite, and most disturbing, childhood books, MAZE. Part of an '80s trend pairing book-long puzzles in the form of children's books with real-life treasure hunts and contests, MAZE's haunting black-and-white imagery straight out of German expressionism ensured it a shelf life beyond its initial prize hunt.
The book presented the tale of a group of wide-eyed visitors to a labyrinth, accompanied by a guide who may not have their best interests at heart. Each illustration presented one room of the maze, decorated with cryptic visual hints - rebuses, codes, literary allusions - and presenting several numbered doorways. Readers turned to the page number of the door they wished to take and were encouraged to find the shortest route to the center of the maze, Room 45, then out again. Those who sent in this shortest route, as well as the solution to Room 45's visual puzzle, were entered in a contest to win $10,000.
Fair enough, but this maze had a life of its own, and not in the welcoming sense. Devils performing in a play pop out of stage trap doors while spectators turn and shush you; blindfolded statues, beckoning with pained expressions to doorways beneath their feet, cast consuming shadows on the walls. The maze is a melange of classical architecture, denoting something timeless, far older than the alleged slight diversion initially presented - something so transcending culture and time there has to be a greater, unspoken power behind it. The rebuses and codes boldly, almost maliciously, announce themselves on the walls, proud not to make sense. Rooms are fashioned after living-room baseboards drilled with mouse holes, dwarfed by the claw-foot furniture, or modeled on rat cages in scientific experiments. Doorways would often yield a glimpse of the leg of a denizen departing on unknown business, or furnishings and indistinct shapes in the room beyond. Things were going on in the corners that you didn't understand, that didn't want you to understand them.
The ongoing story doesn't help. The visitors, initially out for a lark in the opening, quickly become lost, hapless, and distracted, uttering non sequitirs that make sense only to themselves. The "guide" clearly knows what's going on but doesn't feel inclined to share, amused at his overmatched charges' distress. Make the wrong choices, and the visitors can find themselves in an inescapable loop - or cast into a dark, doorless pit, populated only with numerous pairs of eyes staring up out of the darkness. There was mystery and intrigue in the labyrinth, yes, but also: bad things happened here. The overwhelming vibe of MAZE, the element that earned it immortality, was the subtle, underlying but unrelenting sense of malevolence, lurking just out of sight - until it's too late.
(There are, as of this writing, scans of the book up at archive.org, though one of them has the corresponding story pages out of step by one page with the illustrations.)
Decades later, an obsessed megafan of MAZE took it upon himself to post an image-by-image dissection of the book - a thorough page-by-page solution, currently up at intotheabyss dot net. The achievement was monumental, even including an architecturally-coherent, multi-level map of the maze based on room connections, and it was really neat to see what the book's riddles were trying to convey - if not always successfully. Some puzzles wowed me, such as the collection of three-dimensional shapes, depicted side-on, that spelled out the correct door to take if envisioned from above. Others…impressed less, such as the one where the right door is allegedly indicated by the tree branches kind of pointing at it. (Hey, the branches are also pointing at the other doors; why aren't they the solution? Because shut up.) Seeing (almost) everything hidden in the book that enthralled me as a child laid out was extremely satisfying after all those years - but it underlined how the real triumph of MAZE, the element that gave it its longevity, was not the craftsmanship of its puzzles but its imagery, the atmosphere it created.
I'm glad to see Manson credited in Blue Prince, to see new work from an old friend from childhood after so many decades - and, though it did not hit me in the same way, I'm also glad that someone built upon their experiences with MAZE to create an expansive puzzle of their own that's won a good deal of popular acclaim. Odd, though, that Blue Prince, while claiming inspiration from Manson in other ways, presents a setting and story so remarkably sterile and inert - a shadowless, glassy world of dull blue and slate gray; a cast of stuffy, lifeless aristocrats who never become more than abstract entries on an archived genealogy. For all their tutelage at the feet of MAZE, the creators of Blue Prince didn't quite learn that the vibes you send are often more important than the collection of information you present.
