illuminesce

[illuminesce]

Interface Dramas are are games that tell stories through software.

Featuring...

a phone in tall grass by Niandra!

It is as if you were making love by Pippin Barr

Desktop Explorer by Recurring Dream

Pro Office Calculator by Rob Jinman

This streaming was inspired by the interface dramas that I've been introduced through the Interface Drama Master List.

Huge thanks to everyone who sent us their own games as well as others' games—it has been such a treat to play everyone's games. I'm looking forward to showcasing some of these cool games and sharing them with you all.

Twitch link is here!

#interface drama #interface drama master list #a phone in tall grass #it is as if you were making love #desktop explorer #pro office calculator #indie games #ui games

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Literally anyone who has lived in Dallas knows someone like this

#shared by turquoiseproject #heritage post #imo #yum i could go for it

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was reasing your post about koudelka/shadow hearts and saw that you mentioned kikuta is a collaborator for penny blood. do you have a source for this? i don’t see his name mentioned in the kickstarter or in any press releases.

Thank you for pointing this out! I also went over the Kickstarter as well, and turns out I mentioned Kikuta's name in error. I updated the original article to reflect Machida's collaborator (among many collaborators on Penny Blood) as Yoshitaka Hirota, the original composer for Shadow Hearts.

#yoshitaka hirota #shadow hearts #penny blood #asks

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A guide to using cohost

Look, y'all don't have to jump ship to cohost. In fact, there's a lot of things tumblr does better than cohost.

Me, personally, I'm tired of large-scale social media stuff and wanted a smaller, more sustainably-run blogging site.

#cohost #tumblr refugees #how to use cohost

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I'm glad you like it! <3 <3

@illuminesce picked up a bunch of Japanese-exclusive Saiyuki merch for me, including a couple of these small-sized organizational notebooks <3<3<3. I've been using this one to handle con logistics because it gives me an excuse to look at Minekura's lovely art :3.

#japan goods for good friends #saiyuki

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Originally posted on my cohost.

The End of IWAKAN Magazine

Have you ever discovered something so inspirational or fascinating only to find out that it's no longer around?

I heard about IWAKAN Magazine in November. Iwakan (違和感) is an uncomfortable feeling or sense of discomfort. The magazine's tagline is, 「IWAKANは、世の中の「当たり前」に「違和感」を問いかける雑誌です。」or "IWAKAN is a magazine that questions discomfort with what is "normal" in the world." It is part art magazine, part queer zine, part activist discourse, featuring interviews from a host of performers, drag queens, queer community activists, feminists from in and outside of Japan.

It started in October 2020, during the worst of the pandemic and published about an issue every six months including video interviews that are up on their Instagram. Looking at the contributors, there were many folks I know in the Japanese LGBTQIA+ community, many whom are personal friends, who were interviewed or made illustrations for the magazine.

There are interviews with Japanese trans men and nonbinary folks on how their relationship to masculinity has changed over time. With lesbian sex workers on how they approach love as entertainers. With kabuki performers about how they personally inhabit the masculine and feminine spheres as they switch roles. It's an incredible archive of personal stories from the Japanese community, and many are radical and awe-inspiring.

I have heard blanket statements about the LGBTQIA+ community in Japan—how it's behind the U.S. by twenty years or how the community is non-existent, and that it's hopeless. The government and laws in Japan are painfully slow to change. But it's personally frustrating for me because in the streets of Ni-chome I see people organizing, protesting, taking action and fighting. There is hope. And IWAKAN is a record of those conversations, especially during a time when people were sequestered in their homes.

On December 20th, 2023 IWAKAN posted a blank white square on their Instagram with the words, "The end - IWAKAN" and a brief message: "We know this is a sudden announcement, but IWAKAN will cease production as of the end of this year...thank you to everyone who supported us."

My heart fell into my stomach when I read that. Only a month after I discovered this publication and they were ceasing production. There will be no more IWAKAN this year, the year when Japanese government is hearing the lawsuit for same-sex marriage.

But those voices are still alive. And their website (for now) is still alive. So I wanted to share my discovery with you.

You can still buy IWAKAN...for now

Until the end of this month (January 31st, 2024) you can buy physical copies of IWAKAN magazine on their store. Volumes 01~05 are only in Japanese, and Volume 06 is in English and Japanese.

If you live in Japan, please consider buying a copy.

Official store is here.

I made an unofficial translated archive

At the end of the month when the store deactivates, I am worried that we will lose the summaries, table of contents, and photographs of the magazine as well as a critical piece of Japanese queer history.

The degradation of Site Formerly Known as Twitter and shifting TOS of social media has made me aware about how we preserve queer media, especially personal stories about sexuality and gender. Some of the images of the magazine would be flagged as "porn" by social media sites though in context they are about discussions of queer liberation in sexuality.

I decided to make a small archive of each of the IWAKAN issues with photos of them and English summaries, translated by me. I hope this can preserve a piece of history online for longer.

Volume 01 特集 女男 (Feminine/Masculine)

Volume 02 特集 愛情 (Love)

Volume 03 特集 政自 (Government/Individual)

Volume 04 特集 多様性？(Diversity?)

Volume 05 特集 （不）自然 ([Un]Natural)

Volume 06 特集 男性制 (Masculinity)

未来の男性へーIWAKAN書簡集 (Dear Future Men - Letters from IWAKAN)

Please be aware Japanese is not my mother tongue, so if I have made errors, please get in touch to let me know.

Please spread the word if you find this interesting and want to spread this gem of Japanese queer culture.

#iwakan #japanese #japanese culture #japan #queer community #queer #lgbtqia+ #queer zines #patriarchy #queer activism #japanese queer culture #genderqueer #design #illustration #zines #trans community

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My ideal woman is cursed with murderous intent, and can down a tall one in one go

#nier replicant #kaine #ideal type

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I keep telling people, the best way to win people's hearts is a cheese board

And here it is

The yaoi cheese board

The Official BobaVerse Holiday Fundraiser

It’s that time of the year again! That is, the time for the official BobaVerse Holiday Fundraiser, with discounts all across our projects!

Whether it's a ship ownership certificate, a yaoi cheese paddle, or cool stickers, we have the perfect gift for your friends… or yourself!

Project 1: RobinBoob, the Ship Ownership Marketplace

For the first time, we have a just-implemented RobinBoob discount code! Use code FOLGERS_SEASON for 15% off, and get an additional 5% off exclusively during Cyber Week.

Project 2: FujoBoard

Remember the old Yaoi Paddles? This is them now!

Serve your fujin friends some festive treats in style with our engraved cheese paddles! This holiday, we have 5 new styles up for grabs: blorbo, smut, fujoshi, fudanshi and fujin!

Again, code FOLGERS_SEASON 🛒

Project 3: BobaBoard

If you prefer more bite-sized merch that supports indie developers and artists, head to store.bobaboard.com for stickers, charms and more! Want these AND FujoBoards in one single order? I hear the FujoBoard footer might have a hidden xmas egg for you!

Want an EVEN BIGGER discount? Time for a read more.

For an EXTRA 10% OFF, and to see more projects like these (as well as more underrepresented folks in coding and open source), $upport our project lead @essential-randomness directly to help her continue her work in 2024!

Find her support me page here!

...and now that you made it all the way here, follow us on our other socials too!

BlueSky

Twitter

Fediverse

#yaoi #bl #cheese board #honestly cheese tho #cheeseposting

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Preach.

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

#uncensored slurs #long post #queer community

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Today, I profess my deep, undying love for khachapuri.

Once, I went to Moscow. The khachapuri they served there was huge, clearly for 3 people to share. I wanted one, and I would order it, my lack of fluency in the Russian language be damned.

The waitress looked suspicious.

“Salad?” she asked, pointing at a salad. A reasonable choice.

“No,” I said, “Khachapuri.”

She shook her head and tried to explain to the dumb American that no, I was one person, and this was for three people.

“Khachapuri,” I repeated, undaunted. *I will eat this cheesy garlic bread with the force of three people.*

She told me I would order a salad, and then…then she would bring me my dearest khachapuri. I relented.

And that’s how I ended up eating three people’s worth of bread and a salad, just to spite the waitress.

No wonder I ended up gluten intolerant.

#polls #khachapuri #russian food #my love

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Badass as hell

#badass #comics

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@perroquadrado sent me this album and mentioned The Rot had some Dominique x Eytan vibes.

I love a good moody soundtrack, so I drew all the Terranova boys at their scariest.

Happy Halloween 🎃

(Left to right: Dominique, Eytan, Hikaru, Isaiah)

#happy halloween #terranova #Terranova boys #Hikaru Takeda #Dominique Gonzales #Eytan Musayev #Isaiah Mallory #my art #sketches #indie games

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Bookmark design, perhaps?

#love #watership down #rabbits #hares #illustration

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May I present: Leda and the Swan Princess! It's based on this post about a swan princess who refuses to go quietly in obscurity when cursed. (If you liked this one you will probably also like my other comics which you can find on my pinned post).

If you enjoyed and want to support a queer art student, you can tip me over on my Ko-fi! Tips help me out dramatically while I'm still in school!

#comics #leda and the swan #queer comics

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It takes work to curate your online spaces, but if you don't do it, corporations will do it for you using a couple harmful key principles. 1) Negative emotions hold your attention better than positive emotions. 2) Calm/contented people are less likely to spend money.

#QFE #good post

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how to keep following people when a major social platform implodes

(...and you don't want to join 20 new websites)

First, get an RSS reader*:

Desktop: Feedbro (browser extension), QuiteRSS, Raven Reader

Android: Feeder

iOS/Mac: NetNewsWire

You'll be able to make a custom feed to follow blogs, webcomics, social media feeds, podcasts, news, and other stuff on the web all in one place. To follow something, find its "feed URL"-- often marked by an icon that looks like this ↓-- and paste it into your reader of choice as a new feed.

Some feed URLs for social media:

Twitter: Feedbro can use Twitter profile URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, use nitter.net/username/rss (or other Nitter instance) (You can get a CSV file of all the accounts you follow using "Download a user's friends list" on Tweetbeaver)

Tumblr: Use username.tumblr.com/rss or username.tumblr.com/tagged/my%20art/rss to follow a blog's "my art" tag (as an example)

Cohost: Use username.cohost.org/rss/public (WIP feature)

Mastodon: Use instance.url/@­username.rss

Deviantart: Info here

Spacehey: Info here

Youtube: Go to a channel in a web browser, view page source, and use Ctrl-F/Command-F to find a link that starts with "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id="

Instagram: Feedbro can use Instagram profile and hashtag URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, Instagram doesn't have RSS feeds, and due to aggressive rate limiting on their part, it's not so simple to generate a feed URL.

Facebook: Feedbro can use public Facebook group/page URLs as feed URLs.

(If you know an artist who exclusively posts to Instagram, you may want to gently suggest that they crosspost elsewhere...)

Also see how to find the RSS feed URL for almost any site. Try using public RSS-Bridge instances or Happyou Final Scraper to generate feeds for sites that don't have them (Pillowfort, Patreon, etc).

*You can set up your subscriptions in one reader and import them into another by exporting an OPML file.

#rss feed #it’s on my site too!

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if the video game industry were a just place this would be the best selling game of all time

incredibly funny that this guy is a senior gameplay animator at sucker punch like… you can literally see the ghost of tsushima in this…………

#indie games #video games #dinosaurs