REALLY amused by the entire mean girl squad approving if you tell the tieflings to fuck off

their identical expressions killed me

I vote for John Green to buy tumblr. Whatever he does with it would be deserved.

Respectfully, I would not buy tumblr for negative one million dollars. No one who is healthy wants the kind of power associated with owning a social media platform.

I forget sometimes that he lives here too

Three Little Words

Astarion leads Aldiirn into the Underdark for a bit of fun - kindof??? Three pages!

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Astarion's gonna go find another set of Drizzt books to steal and read over because what the fuck is up with drow flirting! Should'a stuck to the food pet names buddy.

I had wanted to use the three little words bit during the tiefling party comics but had already done the "little treat" bit, so it sat aside until I got fed up being like "I want these two to SMOOCH" and, still not quite there, but putting them under the mushroom light was nice.

In the Underdark, terms of affection are almost always used ironically so yeah, "I love you" would be a giant joke. "Ussta ssinssrigg" is the closest thing Underdark drow have for "my love" but it's like a greedy love. The part about Darkness and Silence is referencing the game Khaless ("trust") which is basically a game of chicken with lethal consequences. So basically saying like, yeah we're close but not THAT close.

anyway please pray for these idiot men because neither know what they're doing anymore.

Victoria and her relationship with Tinker Tech is so funny because she inherently believes it will explode.

Seriously, when you scroll through Ward, almost any time she is handling Kenzie or Dragon tech, she’s like, “Will this explode if I drop it? If I hold it too tightly, will it explode? It’s out of power right now, can someone make it into a bomb so it can explode?”

Victoria. My love. My dear.

What is the deal with you and tinker tech explosions. Did Dean explode once? Did his tinker armor burst into flame one time and you had to dunk him in the bay? Tell me when a tinker tech hurt you.

YES THIS IS IT

EXACTLY!

Poor Victoria just DOES NOT give Tinker Tech any benefit of the doubt

I tried that thing where you're casually open about your identity, without ever actually trying to explain otherkinity, and it fucking worked??

Went out for lunch with a guy I've only met twice, and he asked about my bison pendant. I just said that if I were an animal I'd be a bison, I relate to their resilience and stubbornness, it's kinda like a spiritual thing.

Later in the day, he commented about my not wearing a jacket in December and I jokingly asked if he'd ever seen a bison get cold (and then said something about my ADHD meds making me overheat).

And wouldn't you know it, a while later he himself made a joke about me being a bison, completely unprompted.

Incredible. I don't know what I was afraid of, I should've tried this way sooner!!

Being a ranger I spend a lot of time alone in the wilderness for hours in the company of one of four co workers.

One such worker for the purpose of this post we shall refer to as Dave.

Dave is a very quiet man. He confesses that if conversation happens too quickly and for too long he gets tired so we often work in silence. He's very polite and good natured but it's obvious that he would happily live and work alone for the rest of his life given the option.

He's very much in the previous generation of ranger, a practical man in his fourties or fifties happy to be kept physically busy for a day and then be sent home with some pay. I had to show him how to use a work issued smart phone.

Meanwhile the rest of the team is made up of the current generation of rangers; openly nurodivergent queer women in their twenties or thirties who work this job because it's the only setting where we can vaguely look sane.

So Dave sticks out a bit. It's really nice when he opens up though because he's an impulsive individual when left to his own devices and has plenty of stories to tell if the mood takes him. I really like working with Dave.

Anyway, one day we've got a job that takes a three hour hike to get to and early on the topic of deer comes up.

I hadn't realised this was the first time we had discussed deer, but blatantly it was. Dave's entire demeanour changes, there's a bit of passion in his voice, but it's also hushed as if he's talking about something sacred.

"Deer are my favourite animal." He says.

I'm also eager to hear Dave talk about himself, so I encourage him to say more.

"I'd love to be a deer myself."

And more

"If a genie offered me the opportunity to become a deer I'd take it. I wouldn't even stop to ask what the price was."

And more

"Sometimes I feel like I'm a deer having a dream about being a human.*

And there I am, a long time commuter to the therian/otherkin community keeping up the encouraging face of someone being politely interested, knowing that this man is straight up a therian with no frame of reference.

And I decided that I wouldn't push the subject outside of the bounds of what Dave is comfortable with, I wouldn't try to teach him the terms "Therian" or "Otherkin" but absolutely I would talk with this man as if he's a deer.

And it's a bit magical really. He's an impulsive individual so I have to talk him out of some risky choices every so often and "this is why deer like you keep getting stuck in fences" has become this magical phrase that allows him to step down from a mistake with a bit of a smile on his face.

I wonder if the number of female v-tumbers with Something Wrong With Them has contributed anything to undoing the inceldom pipeline in any of their male followers. Getting a view of how an actual female human person thinks, talks, and has conversations, wrapped up in a cute anime avatar like giving a dog a pill wrapped in cheese. I'm pretty sure that nothing will shatter your ideas of "women are a cold, calculating, inhuman monolith of evil aliens that know exactly how to use their wiles in order to extract whatever they want from their male victims" like hearing a real human voice behind a cute virtual face arguing with her chat about how her weird little physical quirks that exactly match the textbook symptoms of scurvy have nothing to do with the fact that she lives on nothing but diet coke and imitation crab meat.

why be radically exclusionary abt queerness when you could be radically inclusionary instead. let's inflate the numbers. let's become the majority. the sky's the limit

"we can't let just ANYONE call themselves queer!!" what are you talking about. I'm steepling my fingers and gleefully cackling every time we Get Another One and you should be too. lock in.

Fuck yeah, let's make this little raft we're surviving on big as hell. If I bring my bit of driftwood and you bring yours and we let as many people join in as want to, we might end up with a functional boat.

I heard someone say 'queer is that which accepts queerness' a few weeks ago and I've been thinking about it ever since.

Back when I was active on AVEN (I have no idea what it's like now), we had two definitions of asexual -- an external definition and an internal definition. The external definition, the one that's on the wiki and the press material and that everyone uses when talking about asexuality, was of course "an asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction". The internal definition, the one we kept in mind when talking to each other, was "an asexual is someone who calls themself asexual".

The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.

And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.

Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.

And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.

An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.

An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.

These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.

And that is absolutely not exclusive to asexual communities.

fyi i will be extending some dark tendrils across the sky later today. just a heads up

The Red ones are mine try not to get tangled please

i thought we scheduled around this

i know its last second but is it ok if i send green lightening arching into the heavens while all this is going on?

for fuck’s sake guys

another cursed jerma effigy has hit the subreddit

fyi i will be extending some dark tendrils across the sky later today. just a heads up

The Red ones are mine try not to get tangled please

i thought we scheduled around this

what is this from

the titanic

I FUCKING FORGOT I QUEUED THIS

For all who celebrate man’s hubris!

Somewhat lucid.

Little bonus:

my luminous mama

i was so moved by this picture i had to draw it

This is literally some looney tunes shit you dont even need subtitles

Your next favourite might involve some foul play.

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