blue-bismuth

[blue-bismuth]

#yes (all of the above)

[blue-bismuth]

#younger but not by much

[blue-bismuth]

I love it when people make characters I love it when people tell me about their OCs and why they're so cool I love it when people write about their characters and put those characters into different situations I love it when people create characters for existing universes I love it when people create their own universes I love it when people make characters I think it's so cool to express yourself through character creation I love the characters that I've made and I love your characters also please keep making characters

[blue-bismuth]

what if we were handcuffed together and on the run for my serial killer crimes that i roped you into... and we were both boys..?

still versions under the cut:

#HIS FUCKING BOOBS #i hope strahm sucks the life out of hoffman through his titties #sawposting #flashing

[blue-bismuth]

every time some cool aspect of hoffman’s character was removed from saw 3D an angel lost its wings

i sit and think about how we could’ve had shirtless, injured, psychotic hoffman and feel my blood pressure skyrocket

#FOAMING AT THE MOUTH!!!!!! #sawposting

[blue-bismuth]

"no you're wrong everyone here knows that jkr is a terf but they hate us / don't care" my gay psychiatrist who specializes in lgbt patients needed me to explain to him what a "terf" was. another counselor i saw whose brother is gay and works in the transfem community had a harry potter mug on her desk. the political beliefs of a british fantasy book author are not high on american news priorities. please be real. your knowledge is specific and not world-shattering in the scheme of things. venture outside your bubble for 5 minutes and talk to someone who isn't a white queer in their 20s.

[blue-bismuth]

It’s so infuriating that people are willing to reduce sexual assault to literally nothing. People are ready to call CONSENSUAL kinks sexual abuse. Lol. Bye

[blue-bismuth]

why do you guys talk like you think not voting means no one gets elected

[blue-bismuth]

A little piece of advice for Americans navigating what will be an increasing number of posts about US politics in the coming year:

If a post makes you feel angry, upset, and hopeless, while offering no actionable information, scroll on and don't reblog it. I know that is going to feel harsh in some cases. But it's important to spend your political energy on what you can actually do and not be sunk into helpless rage and despair that benefits no one.

[blue-bismuth]

*said with barely contained lust* god that guys a fucking freak

#prev. hoffstrahm forever and ever

[blue-bismuth]

I think an important part of the "D&D is easy to learn" argument is that a lot of those people don't actually know how to play D&D. They know they need to roll a d20 and add some numbers and sometimes they need to roll another type of die for damage. A part of it is the culture of basically fucking around and letting the GM sort it out. Players don't actually feel the need to learn the rules.

Now I don't think the above actually counts as knowing the rules. D&D is a relatively crunchy game that actually rewards system mastery and actually learning how to play D&D well, as in to make mechanically informed tactical decisions and utilizing the mechanics to your advantage, is actually a skill that needs to be learned and cultivated. None of that is to say that you need to be a perfectly tuned CharOp machine to know how to play D&D. But to actually start to make the sorts of decisions D&D as a game rewards you kind of need to know the rules.

And like, a lot of people don't seem to know the rules. They know how to play D&D in the most abstract sense of knowing that they need to say things and sometimes the person scowling at them from behind the screen will ask them to roll a die. But that's hardly engaging with the mechanics of the game, like the actual game part.

And to paraphrase @prokopetz this also contributes to the impression that other games are hard to learn: because a lot of other games don't have the same culture of play of D&D so like instead of letting new players coast by with a shallow understanding of the rules and letting the GM do all the work, they ask players to start making mechanically informed decisions right away. Sure, it can suck for onboarding, but learning from your mistakes can often be a great way to learn.

[blue-bismuth]

#peter strahm but also me

[blue-bismuth]

I don't know how strictly accurate this is, but one of the things I find shocking about watching historical dramas is how many people there are around all the time---according to Madame de... (1953) a well-off French household in the Belle Epoque maintains a workforce of at least 3, and the glittering opera has staff just to open doors. According to Shogun (2024) you can expect a deep bench just to mind your household, and again, people who exist to open doors.

Could people....not open doors in the past? Were doors tricky, before the standardization of hinges? Because otherwise, the wealthy used to pay a whole bunch of people to do it for them in multiple contexts, and I find myself baffled.

[blue-bismuth]

no idea where i was going with this but i abandoned it at the most disconcerting moment possible

[blue-bismuth]

Here's a key part of the transfemme experience that is very overlooked: when you don't pass, people don't actually see you as a man, or treat you like a man.

[blue-bismuth]

"why are people suddenly saying kink isn't always sexual" hello! you seem to have picked up on something that is actually de facto considered true in IRL kink scenes and often trotted out as one of the basic foundational truths of kink in educational contexts (i.e. beginners' workshops, it'll be in guides for first-timers at dungeons, etc). come take my hand and let me introduce you to the vast and wonderful world of IRL kink.

"kink," contrary to what a lot of internet-only kinksters seem to think, is not referencing your relationship to a concept--it's referencing the concept itself. for example, "bondage" in this context is not referring to "being turned on by tying someone up/being tied up," it's referring to the concept of being tied up/tying someone up itself. this is one of the most common kinks you'll see people playing with in entirely nonsexual contexts--most rope groups have at least a handful of players who are asexual or entirely sex-repulsed, for example. at a lot of rope play sessions, sexual activity will be banned entirely & you'll generally be expected to not show signs of sexual arousal while in that space. because it's not the space for that--sexual play parties are their own thing.

so what makes something a kink vs. a "normal" interest, if it's not a sexual aspect? mostly social stigma. the group of interests considered "kinks" have developed a shared umbrella due to a shared societal pathologization of those interests in similar ways, and one of the ways that pathology manifests is by considering those interests fundamentally sexual. there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a sexual dimension to your kink, to be clear--but society sees sex as inherently disgusting, and sexualization is frequently weaponized to pathologize all kinds of people.

portraying interest in domination/submission as inherently sexual, for example, means those explicitly navigating consensual d/s play are relegated to the realm of "the bedroom" and signifiers of their relationship (i.e. a collar) are considered "obscene" and not fit to exist in public--even when equivalent signifiers of vanilla lifestyles are allowed and not considered obscene, i.e. a wedding ring. if you portray an interest in roleplaying as a dog as inherently sexual, it means anyone roleplaying as a dog in public is subjecting the public to nasty, perverted sex, it can be classified as obscene, you can arrest people for barking and wearing leashes even if they are deriving zero sexual pleasure from it whatsoever and are not exposing themselves or harassing anyone.

why are most kinks expressed sexually to some degree, or have a sexual dimension to them? because sexually active adults tend to enjoy sex. i don't know how else to explain this, genuinely. if you are a person who experiences sexual arousal and sexual attraction, then you will often be aroused by your interests in a sexual context.

like, i am really into fandom. i love a lot of different things about fandom. one of the things i love about fandom is that it's horny; i'm a big enthusiast of smut, horny cosplay, et cetera and so on. but that doesn't mean that i don't like fandom in completely non-horny contexts, or that my interest in fandom is always sexual and can never be separated from sex. just because i cosplay erotically doesn't mean that i don't also cosplay in other contexts entirely. cosplay turns me on, and i also love cosplaying at conventions and for entirely non-horny reasons.

kink is the same. sometimes the exact same person is both turned on by petplay and interested in it nonsexually. this is actually like... really common, it's not even just "sometimes," i would say it applies to the vast majority of IRL kinksters active in my local scene, and i would hazard a guess that this isn't a major outlier, it's fairly common in scenes across the world. but if you can understand "i like cosplaying, and sometimes i'll cosplay at a convention, and sometimes i'll cosplay for sex, and sometimes i'll cosplay for fun alone in my room, and sometimes i'll cosplay to jack off, and sometimes i'll cosplay for money, and none of these are The Only Reason I Like Cosplay, and sometimes when i cosplay i will do it in a way that only includes some of these reasons and not the others at all," it shouldn't be too hard to apply the same reasoning to kink.

anyway, trying to relegate "kink" to only and solely refer to "this set of stigmatized interests and relationship dynamics, but only in reference to sex specifically" is closing the barn door after the horses are gone. sorry y'all but the kink community developed in response to medical pathologization and severe social stigma. there's no post-hoc way to turn it into an ontological classification of some form--kink is messy and abstract as a category because it isn't a category based in, like, scientific observation or ontological meanings of words. it's a category based in "we think these people are freaks and we need a diagnosis for their freakishness" lol. the forcible sexualization of every aspect of kink is part of the initial classification of this loose social realm as "fetish" and/or "paraphilia." sex is not evil or scary or bad but equally the structures doing the pathologization do consider sex to be evil and that's not something you can just ignore when discussing how sex is utilized rhetorically in these discussions.

[blue-bismuth]

my dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “public transit” 😳💊 you’ll be going wherever you want for an affordable price 💯👨‍💻

me: yeah whatever i dont feel shit

5 min later: dude i swear the bus should have been here by now

random guy at the bus stop with me: the transit app is lying to us