Author, autist, apostate. Trans man, queer, and proud. Thrives in an environment of G-rated villainy. // An elegant, but slightly disgruntled, person drinking tea. // Internet oddity + friendly neighbourhood vampire. // Professional of pain.
…I’m genuinely considering making an academic complaint against anth class from hell professor, for a very stupid reason.
…..I understand why “draw your kinship chart/family tree and describe it using these terms we learned about in anth class” is a reasonable assignment to give. If you are living in the mythical fairyland where everyone has a decent enough relationship with their immediate family that thinking about them isn’t painful or triggering.
I’m “just” going to email the professor about it, I think, but fuck, I want to bite people.
I think that like… mmm… the only thing that most of the Studio Ghibli Canon ™ has in common, narratively/thematically, is that they’re coming of age stories. (and even then, Porco Rosso and Ponyo bend that rule, a lot)
and what ‘coming of age’ looks like is different for every single one of these characters, because they’re all in wildly different worlds and have wildly different wants and needs
for some people “coming of age” looks like “dealing with baby’s first creative burnout while living in a cute little village” and for some people “coming of age” looks like “taking proper grown-up responsibility for your baby sister for the first time while living in the idyllic countryside”
and for some people “coming of age” looks like “well, my youth was stolen from me, I have no fucks left to give, time to go on a Grand Adventure” or “I was born into a hostile world, and the only way forward is to learn to live in some kind of harmony with it”
if you’re a tween boy in Japan in 1943, “coming of age” looks like a fever dream. and if you’re even younger, and in even worse circumstances, you might not get to come of age at all
like I get why “Ghibli style” has come to mean, like, basically Stardew Valley, because there’s not much in the Western canon that has that vibe and it’s good to have Words For Things.
and I also get why people are really really mad about people not acknowledging their favourite non-central example of Ghibli’s range, because yeah, Miyazaki has a lot more to say as a creative director than just “can’t we all just get along”
but like at the end of the day, I think we’ll have more productive discussions about it if we look at it through that lens? where the peaceful/'cozy’ depictions are one way to come of age, and the others are…. other ways?
hello fellow non-Black tumblr users. welcome to my saw trap. if you’d like to leave, please name one (1) Black woman author who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin. bonus points if she’s published a book in the last five years.
A while ago I had the idea to write descriptions of Holmeses (detectives) and Watsons (biographers) from across various adaptations, as though you’re adopting them from an animal shelter.
hey, i need advice from an older trans man or at the very least a bit of hope. due to a lot of reasons (life circumstances, lack of support from my parents) i cant start hrt at the moment as i planned to (im 18) and i just wanted some help to remain optimistic that i will at some point. i think waiting for the right time is the worst part of all this especially with encouragement from my parents to keep putting it off until "the time is right", im scared that the time may never be right and i just wanted to hear advice from someone already on hrt
Hey, Anon, I’m so sorry you are struggling with shifting goalposts.
The time will never be right for your parents. But you can decide when the time is right for you. Build your safety nets, both financial and emotional, and have a plan A, B, C, and D.
I highly recommend reading this article. I delayed my own transition for 10 years, and while I lament not getting the full benefit of HRT (I recognize I still have gotten so much out of T), what really hurt me was how my relationships were stunted, my self-confidence ground down, and how the stress of being closeted exacerbated my existing mental illnesses.
That said, while beginning HRT in your youth tends to be the best time for folks, it’s really never too late to affirm who you really are. I started HRT at 33, got top surgery at 40, and I am incredibly happy, even living in these precarious times.
Much love to you, and I hope this helps you figure out what you want to prioritize. And if you have to wait, please find other ways to assert and affirm who you are and spend time with other trans folks - it will help keep you sane and focused.
A Little on Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy and Lynch Mobs
Something that our team talks about a lot when planning for adventure modules for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is going out of our way to make sure it’s not just, like, a lynch mob game.
Eureka has a lot of contempt for the American “justice” system but on the other hand we try to write the modules so that they aren’t “the liberal police don’t care so it’s up to red blooded Americans to go out and kill Bad Guys without trial.” which is a really really easy pit to fall into when literal monsters like vampires exist in the setting. The problem with cops isn’t that they don’t kill enough people.
As I’ve said in another post linked here and to some extent text in the rulebook itself, self-described “monster hunters” are some of the sickest individuals in the setting.
Oh and anyone currently working on the adventure module game jam, check for this kind of attitude accidentally cropping up in your work too.
To this end, when we write an adventure module for Eureka, we try to make sure that the hook or drive or scenario whatever is set up to facilitate the possibility that the actions of the investigators can be more about prevention than punishment.
The antagonist, if there even is one, is one who has to be thwarted in some way not because they did something bad and now need to be killed or jailed for it, but because thwarting them will prevent further damage. If further damage can be prevented without destroying them, that would be ideal.
If they have to be killed, it’s because the situation is such that the only way they can be stopped is to be killed.
Of course it is ultimately up to the investigators what their actual motivations and ultimate actions are in these situations, and what their actions say about them, but we won’t make our rulebook or adventure modules ones that celebrate masturbatory punitive “justice.”
I just read a recounting in our patreon discord server of a Eureka adventure that I thought would make a great addition to this post. I will be copy-pasting parts of it and paraphrasing and editing others to obscure spoilers for the adventure module being run.
The party started out investigating some mysterious occurrences in an attempt to help those affected, and, when attempting to capture the paranormal individual responsible, she killed one of them, so they killed her.
Before that moment, they had come across another name in their investigation that they hadn’t followed up on yet. They decided that since this man was involved, and might even be a paranormal creature himself, he had to die too.
“As far as they thought, this [man] must have also caused this mess and gotten Glitch killed, and he could be a supernatural entity himself. So, he had to die. There would be no questioning or searching for context. No need to solve a mystery when there’s justice to be done.
Doro really, really did not like this approach.
Frank and Higgins found [the man]’s address, and the gang drove there to stake out. Doro insisted on driving, causing another argument with Julius, which she won this time, and briefly considered just catapulting the van and everyone in it off a cliff before they kill a man they only knew by name. After waiting in the van until 3am with nobody entering or leaving the house, the gang decided to break in. Doro decided to stay in the car. It wasn’t just because she couldn’t enter the house. In her mind, she was giving fate a chance. Who knows what they’ll do in there? Maybe [the man] will surrender and talk? Maybe he really is another supernatural thing like [other person they killed] and they’ll all die? Maybe the idiots just fuck up regular and die.
Julius and Higgins bumbled into the house from the back, alerting [the man]. They opened the front door for Frank, who stepped in holding Glitch’s machine pistol with a new suppressor attached. There would be no chances for magic bullshit this time, and no cops, not if they can help it. They breach each room one at a time, Frank taking the lead. Eventually they get up stairs, and Frank opens [the man]’s bedroom door.
[The man] fired both barrels of his shotgun, the rolls were 4 and 9. A positive woo roll obliterated Frank’s hat. Frank went next and unloaded the suppressed machine pistol into [the man], killing him instantly. I rolled a 1 and a 2 for the noise of the unsuppressed shots, so nobody called the cops. Doro though, was waiting near the door, and registered the specific sound of the machine pistol. The idiot bastards really went through with it. Well, Higgins is alright. She hummed and hawed in her thoughts… That noise has to mean [the man] died right? Her empty veins helped her decide. She silently stepped through the threshold, eating the composure roll.
[Unbeknownst to any of the players or PCs, Doro had been a vampire the entire time.]
Higgins had gone back downstairs to work through [the man]’s computer. Julius was relieved. Frank was mourning his hat. Doro looked over the mundane corpse of [the man]. Executed by new amateur monster hunters just for being mentioned. She sighed and came to the conclusion she’d been hoping not to. Besides, she was thirsty. That could make things easier.
[Doro remanifested as a giant bat monster as there was just barely enough room, and attacked the others. She swallowed Julius alive. he went in kicking and screaming, failed to get out of the ‘Hold’, then failed to shoot his guns, then successfully equipped his necklace and prayed. When Doro turned back into a human to chase the others through the smaller parts of the house, Julius’s flesh, blood, and bone was rapidly 'digested,’ leaving anything else solid, like his gun and clothing, painfully wedged in her stomach until those quietly vanished some time later.]
Doro was hoping Higgins would run. He didn’t. He stood there like an idiot trying to shoot her. She still refused to drink him, just seemed wrong. Frank could have tried to run. Instead after his gun broke he started trying to light the house on fire. All that drew the cops too. Not much of a problem really. Doro slinked off into the night, [quickly tied up one loose end in the mystery that would be a spoiler], and was never seen in [that town] again.
Also that before this these players had only played [D&D5e]. At the same time this stuff was happening, its like another aspect of the game was clicking for everyone. They had felt it coming on and had read the section about stuff like this but it still felt like it was inconceivable for them until it happened.”
I’m sorry but this photo got me emotional - this moment could have been from any time in the last 500 or more years and not a thing about the composition would have changed. Certainly, for hundreds of years, monks have worked in these gardens and stopped to pet animals in need of scritches. A monk 300 years ago dressed in this same style in these same gardens probably stopped to pet the ancestor of that cat. The only difference between now and then is that this time there was a camera. If you went to any monastery or temple in the world you could find similar scenes playing out.
Rose genetics and the law of unintended consequences (or, ten rose bushes, reviewed)
I have a number of longposts in the backlog, including updates on a number of garden improvement projects I undertook over the winter, but I kept putting off posting them because there kept being Horrors. However, spring is here - in California anyway - and plants wait for no one.
Over the winter of 2025, as a coping mechanism for the aforementioned Horrors, I got really into roses. Because of who I am as a person, deciding what roses I wanted to buy also made me feel obliged to reconstruct the history of rose breeding, just to make sense of the teeming confusion of the tens of thousands of named rose varieties. Humans have been raising roses for food, medicine, and beauty for untold centuries, and so they’ve really grown up with us. The history of the development of roses, it turns out, is the history of the development of humanity in miniature.
This post has it all: history, some light phylogeny discussion, material analysis of English folk ballads, a conceptual framework for understanding how different kinds of roses vary and why, a #haul breakdown of what bare-root roses I got and what I thought of them, and some philosophical musings on what it means for an organism to be subjected to a long-term selective breeding process, to be remade wholly in the image of human desire. All that, and pictures of roses, under the cut.
