#i loved book five so gd much

[laikaru]

#…i don‘t remember this translation..? #my art #the iliad #troy story #aphrodite #ares #greek mythology #i loved book five so gd much #diomedes 💋💋 hi 💋💋

[callmearcturus]

writer questions meme: 8, 13, 20 if you please

13. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?

It wasn't explicitly writing advice, but I can tell you where I learned what my specific style would be. There was a fic in the Dresden Files fandom called "Cross" by LightGetsIn. LGI was a tremendous writer and a very kind mentory-friend who I attended my first fan convention with. Extremely accomplished adult who I looked up to when I was barely an adult.

"Cross" is a story about the limitations of perspective. It was the first story that really drove home the idea that Character A would not have the same knowledge and understanding of the world as Character B.

In "Cross", the POV character is John Marcone, a non-magical mafia boss who is deeply entrenched in the magical world. He has a lot of factual knowledge of how magic works, but he's an Italian-American Catholic. So when he's pulled into doing magical rites to bring another character back to life, he specifically doesn't pick up on the more pagan symbology of what he's doing, but filters it through a Guilty Catholic filter. Hence the name of the fic, "Cross."

And that story, which isn't even my favorite LGI story, probably taught me the most about how to write Close Perspective Third Person, which is my default style. When I'm writing in a characters POV, I rigorously limit what the POV character knows and picks up on. I will plant clues and information that the audience will understand, but the connections a character makes, the reference pools they pull from, their morality and ethics, all of those inform that POV, and what you and I know does not.

That is probably the most important lesson I've ever had in creating my own writing method.

20. Describe your perfect writing conditions.

8 hours of sleep, small breakfast snack like a croissant, decaf beverage, one dextroamphetamine, and no one fucking talk to me for about 2 - 4 hours. I will write 4,000 words.

8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Lets put this under a cut, and I'll give you some DVD commentary. This is from chapter 2 of you'll need a new name to survive this. It's the point where Benji realizes Ethan is stalking him and does that trick to lose him in the bookshop, then sits outside waiting for him.

Only five minutes later, the door opened, and Bell took one step out before freezing, his eyes falling on Benji.

Got you, Benji thought with a sharp little smile. "You didn't even buy a book? Bit rude."

One of the goals of the early chapters of PT AU was establishing Benji's character as boldly as possible because we were essentially telling a story that canon does not. This is YEARS before MI3, where Benji gets two gd scenes.

To me, the tightrope walk was that I wanted Benji to have a reasonable grip on authority, to be shiny and new and out of his depth but still empowered because of his accomplishments. He has managed to land a good job working for the US government, he successfully emigrated before he was 30 years old, he has an apartment and a cat, he's new to everything in the spy world but he also has a steel spine that frankly he's fucking earned.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that Benji is a bitch and I love him so much.

Bell's face was blank, but Benji could almost feel how fast his brain was moving, weighing his options. Eventually, he settled on huffing out a little chuckle and stepping closer to Benji. "Hi."

Meanwhile, Ethan. MI1-era Ethan is very very smart but very very traumatised. His skillset is rooted in controlling people and predicting them. So Benji, a fucking civilian, catching him off-guard like this is like waving a red flag at a bull. Or dangling a steak over a lion enclosure. Benji doesn't know it yet but he's setting himself up to be a tasty treat for Ethan Hunt circa the late 90s.

"Are you going to kill me or something?" Benji asked. "Is that your spook job, are you a hitman?"

The flash of expression on Bell's face was offended. (This makes me laugh every time. Ethan Hunt is not a killer unless he absolutely must be and he will go out of his way to avoid it. Being an assassin is gross and he doesn't want to be perceived at all bc he's a spy but if he MUST be perceived jfc don't assume he's a HITMAN) "What, no. I just…" Grimacing, he looked away, eyes scanning the other pedestrians around them. "Okay, I'm screwing this up, I can admit that. Can we talk somewhere private?"

Benji didn't even have to think about it. "We can talk somewhere public."

Benji is never going to be an IMF agent but his instincts are wildly correct. And that knowledge comes from a different place! He was a gay punk rock vagabond who dropped out of law school, he knows how to keep out of trouble. He is probably the guy who told his other punk friends "if you are arrested do not say a goddamn thing, just ask for your public defender, don't joke, don't be a smartarse, keep your mouth shut."

The smile that took over Bell's face was lovely, transforming his whole face from storm clouds to something more seasonal. "That's honestly a very smart answer, doc. C'mon, there's a bakery nearby. I'll buy you a coffee. Least I can do."

It really was, so Benji nodded and followed him.

They didn't speak until Bell opened the glass door to another shop and held it open for Benji.

"Wrong hand," Benji said, noticing the small wince Bell let out.

"Inside, doc."

If it isn't obvious, all of the observational skills Benji has canonically have been funneled into his preternatural observation of patients.

Basically, if Benji as a character has a specific set of SPECIAL stats, all of those are the same, he just has different tagged skills in this universe.

Canon Benji is probably.... Guns, Science, and Repair. PT Benji has Medicine, Barter, Speech.

"Not a doctor," Benji said. "You know I'm not a doctor."

"What do you want to drink, doc?"

Ethan is being purposefully annoying and I could write a whole post about Ethan's soft power and the way he manipulates people, but that'd be another post. Short version: some people you seduce, some people you act like a wounded gazelle at, and some people you annoy.

Inside the bakery was loud. It was a strangely open floor plan. A long pastry case cordoned off the seating area for the customers. On the other side was just… the bakery. There were ovens and industrial mixers and rolling racks of cooling bread. In the corner, the espresso machine howled with noise as the milk frother worked.

It smelled divine, like living inside a baguette during a spring shower of dark roast coffee.

It also was a constant racket, which Benji mentioned to Bell as he sat down and slid a dark tea with vanilla syrup across to Benji.

"That's the point," Bell said, slouching back in his chair. "It's very difficult to eavesdrop in here."

Well, he wasn't wrong. Looking to another occupied table nearby, Benji briefly tried to pick out a word of what was being said by the woman seated closest to him. Nothing.

"Right, then," Benji said, attention back on Bell. "Why are you following me?"

"Why?" Bell seemed taken aback.

One of the many moments in the early chapters that establish that Ethan's perception of Normal is not anything approaching actual normal.

"Yes, why."

"Normal intelligence collection."

"On your physical therapist?" Benji asked with a barked laugh.

"Yeah." Bell leaned on his elbows, one hand cupping his own jaw and holding his head up as he made uncomfortably direct eye contact. "You really don't know who I am? Or why some of the appointments on your calendar come with no information?"

Pursing his lips, Benji shook his head.

Blowing out a whistle through his teeth, Bell grinned. "Sorry, that's just… it's new. I'm surprised Dr. Falsion didn't clue you in, but I guess she's not technically supposed to." Lifting his mug, he looked down into it. "People do shit they're not technically supposed to all the time in this town."

Ethan's major trauma at this point is being targeted by Kittridge and the Mole Hunt, and his trust in people to do their jobs is at a critical low that it'll never recover from.

"I don't even know your name," Benji sighed, sipping his own drink. It didn't taste at all like iocaine powder, so he was probably safe for the moment.

Bell rested his temple against the knuckles of his hand, his gaze so intense that Benji didn't know how to look away without making it patently obvious he was unsettled. Whatever Bell saw, it made his lips curve up slight. "Alright. Yeah. My name is Ethan. I work for an organization that shouldn't legally exist, so that's why you don't get anything on me. Even CIA jackboots manipulating local governments are realer than I am." He blinked once. "Also, I was an unprofessional shitheel last session, and I apologize."

Ethan apologizes here because Benji has earned his respect. And also by earning his respect, Ethan is also aware that Benji is not going to be so easy to maneuver around, so he fesses up that he was a prick, softly setting up a different tactic with Benji.

Benji felt his eyes going wider and wider with every sentence until it was a little hard to breathe. So his patient wasn't the American equivalent of an MI5 or MI6 so much as an MI8?

That did sort of start to explain what a pain in the ass he was.

"Shame," Benji managed after a moment of sitting fairly gobsmacked. "I was getting attached to 'Bell.' But I appreciate… all that. Thanks." He frowned. "Are you saying all this because you're actually sorry or are you sick of being stonewalled?"

Benji has a much more cynical mind than Ethan is the funny thing. Benji gets arguably more accurate reads on people than Ethan does. Or, Ethan gets accurate reads but he is continuously poisoned by the hope that people will be better than he expects. So FUNCTIONALLY, Ethan is an optimist and Benji is a realist.

Bell— Ethan— grinned. "That's a very good question. You actually have great instincts, doc. You did a surprisingly good job of shaking me when I was tailing you, especially for a civilian."

One of my favorite running gags is Benji being impossible to tail, so I'm glad we really drove it home the first time it happened. I love consistency in longfic.

"Again: thanks. Don't suppose you'll answer my other question?"

Ethan sipped his coffee, his smile visible around the edge of his cup.

"Right," Benji sighed. At least this felt like progress. And at least he probably wasn't going to be disappeared by a government assassin. That was a relief.

So this entire bit is Ethan reassessing Benji and pivoting his methods and tactics, setting up for a better way of handling Benji. And also being kind of charmed by him.

#relaxed-and-extremely-uneasy #talking about writing #pt benji au

[auncyen]

my brain repeatedly trying to parallel Trousseau-Hikari as guys who want to be kind and put themselves/are put under an incredible amount of stress that isn't good for their mental state

now canonically Trousseau snaps like a twig (Claude and the book are what turned him to villainy but he does NOT come off as the most mentally stable before that) while Hikari pretty much tanks hearing a voice that tells him he should kill, one day he's going to give into it, etc. for eight years. Five of those years he has no gd clue what's even going on there, he thinks it's just him. It's drawn out by blood/violence and he was in the military at age 18 during wartime and probably had been for some time since he's said to have made captain on his own merit. I love picturing other travelers putting these details together and just holding their heads in disbelief. Both marveling that Hikari's so well-adjusted and horrified at what he had to adjust himself to and also that with Ku's bloody history and the nature of the curse, he's probably not the first prince who went to war as a teenager with a voice telling him to kill. No wonder the royal family has been war-happy for generations!

Anyway AU I keep thinking about but would be so much work to write: Hikari actually being part of the Moonshade Order. Him just having so much mental conflict with his shadow during the teenage years that Oboro (and/or Arcanette?) see a possibility and convince him on "your brother's already given in to the curse, eventually it's going to consume you, if you try pulling a murder-suicide to end the bloodline it'll leave a vacuum of power that will have civil war breaking out, no matter what you do you will leave your people suffering in constant war so the best thing to do is join us in ending it all" and Hikari's like YEAH I GUESS THIS IS THE ONLY WAY AN ACCURSED MONSTER LIKE ME CAN BE KIND.

#octopath traveler 2 #octopath traveler 2 spoilers #hikari ku #trousseau

[harryfeatgaga]

There is no way a year from now or five years from now or 20 years from now. Anyone will be able to understand what being a part of this fandom was like during this era. This is Harry's Purple Rain era. It will still be iconic decades from now. He will come back and we will love him but this, this is something special. There were lots of lukewarm fans, or omg, he's so hot fans, and people who went to shows for clout or got on the clock app for funsies or the not like the other girls fans. But us deep dive bitches. The true ones holding it down. Fanfics, Anons, Concepts,Twitter, magazines, books, movies, relationships, unhinged Larries,awards, gossip, silliness, talking every day about every little thing, the inside jokes, a gd university class,traveling when we couldn't afford it just to feel those couple hours of joy,the friends we've made, the bonds forged with complete strangers, camping out, boot scootin, setlist speculations, mean ass barricade girlies (I was always nice but some not so much so I've heard), fandom drama and fights with complete strangers to defend our man, Pleasing,Gucci outfits, Coachella, Satlelite stomps, the search for the ever elusive perfect pair of stompers, ALL of It will be but mere lore, but we got to be part of it. Without us it wouldn't have been. It would've just been another pop star on tour, but we made it special, and because of that, each show Harry did something special for us. Few musicians will ever know something like HSLOT. Very few, and I mean like, the biggest names ever will know this kind of fandom. I love all of you guys even if you don't know me, it's OK. Thanks for making it amazing. Im literally crying, which again is something only you guys would understand. And to you Paige loads of love. And best wishes for your success.

I just realized this sounds like I wrote in your yearbook😭😭😭

WHAT THE HELLLLLLLL THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL OH MY GOD IM GONNA CRYYYYYYY WHAT THE FUCKKKKFJNVJFIKVBHFJINVJFD 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 WE REALLY ARE LIVING IN THE BEST TIME WITH HARRY RIGHT NOW IM SO HAPPYYYYYYJFHBRJNFBHJKRB 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[wingedshoes]

you didn't rate it on gd so I assumed you haven't finished yet😭😭

but I agree with what you said abt them being a fairytale and realistic at the same time

THEY ARE LIKE MY FAV CONTEMPORARY COUPLE OF ALL TIME THEYR SO FUCKING CUTE AND THE WHOLE BOOK IS SO FUNNY NAOMI IS THE FUNNIEST NARRATOR I HAVE EVER READ I DONT THINK I HAVE EVER ACTUALLY LAUGHED THIS MUCH WHILE READING A ROMCOM AND THESE TWO ARE LITERALLY MADE FOR EACHOTHER THEYRE JUST PERFECT

OH AND NICHOLAS, HE IS THEEE PERFECT MAN LIKE I REALLY WANT TO KNOW WHERE CAN I FIND SOMEONE LIKE HIM SO I CAN MARRY

and bro I get you with reread part, I have reread it five times already😭😭

ALSO BEST OF LUCK FOR YOUR PHY EXAM!!!!!

i made one of my friends read ir tooo and she says she'll blame me if she gets less in her next exam because she can't stop reading which i think i can live with :)))

EXACTLY NAOMI IS BEYOND HILARIOUS. "bouquet of roses from loved ones. Hmm I'll have to find some loved ones" "you're a fopdoodle"

they're so stupid and love each other so unconditionally it's almost too much for my cynical eyes to look at. not them being all we're not going to last the next month we're completely wrong for each other ALSO THEM: LET'S WRITE DOWN THE RECIPE FOR THIS BOWL OF FOOD POISONING AND EAT IT AGAIN NEXT YEAR SWEETHEART

also it's now on my bucket list to burn flowers gifted from a man. girlboss moment. my physics exam was good, i wish it was better because i worked really hard but it is what it is.

DO YOU HAVE ANY MORE ROMANCE RECS IM SO BAD AT PICKING ROMS

#nue <33 #asks #you deserve each other #THEY'RE MY FAV TOO #naominicholas

[space-city-traffic]

yet again im back on my bullshit so... (gazes with mixed feelings at the TV show Firefly) i could fix him.

my extremely long thoughts about my Own Personal Good Version of Firefly (with plenty of spoilers for the show and the movie) under the cut:

things that are getting axed first thing no question:

out with the whole “let’s add in a thin veneer of Chinese cultural aesthetics out of context for ~flavor~” deal. just no.

instead, let’s hire some actors from a bunch of different cultures and work with them to figure out how their characters would bring those cultures into space with them!! and also hopefully bring some experiences with immigration/alienation/travel into it, since the Whole Core of Firefly is about how humanity always brings our doomed and silly and stubborn and unique warmth with us even into the cold void where nothing is familiar or homey in the slightest.

let’s respect our sex worker character shall we?

i do appreciate that Inara’s work as a companion is described as legitimate and well respected in the show. however please stop having your captain and hero call her a wh*re every five seconds against her clearly expressed wishes and portraying this as just a totally acceptable thing

let’s be more respectful of our characters of color and also have some more diversity, shall we?

others have put it better than me but yeah, the way Zoe and Book are treated is very uncomfy, and the rest of the show is depressingly monochromatic. come on let’s do better.

stop the weird confederacy hat tips

again others have pointed these out with much more thoroughness than I could, but the names of some characters and locations, as well as some of the language used to describe the browncoats, has uncomfortably confederate vibes. instead i propose we very Clearly tip our hats to the Alliance equaling space capitalism instead! you can’t go wrong with space capitalism as a villain.

don’t! make! the! psychotic! character! violent!

listen i love River Tam with my whole heart. but you should absolutely not portray your only character with psychosis as violent because of that psychosis!!!!!!! and yeah, a huge part of her character is that her brain got fucked up by the alliance and so she hallucinates and is also a super ninja. but like. she doesn’t need to be a super ninja for her character to work, okay? the crew does not need to be scared of her for her character to work, okay??? more on this later bc it would take a lot of care and nuance to make her character work but i really think it can be done

things we are absolutely keeping:

found family tropes my fucking beloved

this should be self evident. this is why the show is as appealing as it is despite its flaws, at least in my eyes.

malcolm reynolds, the knight in dusty armor

there’s something so appealing to me about what Mal stands for. because at his core is this ridiculous, silly, stubborn, doomed devotion to what he thinks is important and right, a romantic idealism thinly covered by cynical cowboy platitudes that he thinks make his bleeding heart totally invisible. and he is so obvious and entirely incorrect. bless. this is a man who will do anything for his family, who charges into swordfights to defend his friend from a man who wants to turn her into an object despite having no clue how to hold a sword. at his worst, he starts brawls in bars just for the martyr’s thrill of being persecuted for supporting the right; at his best, he inspires downright religious belief from his crew because he represents a romantic and chivalrous and doomed dedication to the right thing over any practical concerns. and then he throws a “selfish” quip over it with 100% confidence that everyone fell for his clever distraction and believes him to be a dirtbag. he’s oblivious and ridiculous and god he makes me want to be a better person because he’s just so goddamned sincere. stupid, but sincere. 10/10 himbo. <3

Mal and Inara ultraslowburn friends to enemies to friends to lovers to enemies to friends to lovers to friends to...

there’s nothing i love more than a ship that’s just two people who know each other way too well, and they’re each the only one who knows the other well enough to call them out on their bullshit. the way Mal and Inara interact in the show sometimes makes me uncomfy but like. the core of their relationship has to stay.

space western aesthetic

i need the cows on a spaceship scene to stay like i need air okay

that sweet sweet religious shit

mal, who lost his faith in gd and a whole lot else during the war. who lost his faith in himself, and now feels he has to hide the part of him that still wants to be good, because he knows he can’t be anymore, and he feels like it’s embarrassing for a guy like him to want something so unattainable. who takes a preacher on board, and the preacher has lost something, too. the preacher has his own past, and his own questions. but not questions like the observant neurodivergent girl, the one who wants to interact with and understand this thing that’s so important to him, but it just doesn’t click with how her brain works and she feels like something needs to be fixed, either the Bible or herself. and Mal takes care of them all, and slowly, he begins to find gd again, not in a prayer but in humanity. humanity doesn’t need to be fixed, like the alliance thinks. the shining imperfect strawberry sweetness of it in his family’s smiles is something to be worshiped and served and devoted to. and he finds he has something to believe in again. (and his crew find that he’s given them someone to believe in, too. and maybe suddenly he’s a saint.)

and finally, my brilliant ideas as to what i would like to add:

TRANS WOMAN KAYLEE RIGHTS

listen her femininity is so important to me okay? it’s so thrilled about everything that’s pretty, from dresses to the spaceship’s electric innards, and it’s so non-traditional and grease stained until it’s not and it’s pink and ruffly and twirly, and she never sees any of it as a contradiction, because none of it contradicts, it’s all just her! her gender is warmth and love and prettiness, feeling pretty and appreciating the pretty and making her friends’ days pretty too.

i want us to find out she’s trans in that episode with the ball, and i want us to find out alongside Mal who just never asked or never realized. Kaylee gasps and squeals at the dress in the shop window and Mal makes an off handed, ill considered comment, and then... someone yanks him aside and hisses a few very significant words in his ear. and suddenly he remembers what the blue white and pink she painted all over the engine room means, and he knows he has something to make right. so he buys her that dress himself and lets her know just how pretty she looks, and when he walks into that ball with her displayed on his arm like something precious, he looks the proudest out of any man there. and she notices. for a few seconds, of course, until there’s chocolate, and ‘nara, and a chandelier—and some horrible girls, but she’s used to that, until—suddenly, she finds her people. a group of old men who light up when she jokes about compression coils and whack presumptuous boys who ask her to dance. they adopt her as a treasured granddaughter, and Mal is beaming at her like a proud dad, and she finds that one of her new elderly friends gazes a little too long at her bracelet, and so she gives it to xem and teaches xem a few new words, and... it’s a good day, huh? it’s a really good day. (of course, then the captain has to go and punch somebody in the face, but it was a real nice party up until then.)

also she and Simon are both transhet t4t im correct and you know it

time for a better River Tam

the first thing we’ve established is that this version of her is not unpredictably violent and the crew is not scared of her!!!! it makes no sense to take a kid who’s primarily brilliant, experiment on her brain, give her telepathic powers....... and tack on the fact that she also has super strength and speed and dexterity and what not, AND say that they programmed her to be super violent. no! no. not only is that extremely harmful rep, that’s also just stupid.

instead!! my version of River is in fact not terrifying to the crew, but is actually the one they feel safest around. River has always been totally blunt, she was one of those kids you could tell realllllly early was autistic, and she doesn’t like being disengenous at all. so you can always trust her to tell the truth and not play weird passive aggressive games or have any hidden agenda, which makes her just a really chill person to be around. also, one of her longtime special interests is music and dance, so whether or not she’s nonverbal on a given day, there will always be some sort of beautiful sound when she’s around. she does have the singing voice of a dying crow unfortunately but that’s ok bc Simon’s is even worse and they’re both incredibly competitive so you’ll at least get free entertainment out of the affair.

my version of River does have psychosis and hallucinations because of the trauma of the experiments, and they are really troubling to her. she and Simon work together to find ways to cope and meds that help, and it’s a process, but there are some things that help.

the only thing she gained from the academy was the ability to hear people’s thoughts and sense the future a little bit. and yeah, that led to her picking up a few spooky secrets at the beginning, which, yikes. and for a while, it was hard to figure out which voices were real and which were hallucinations. but around her friends, she always feels safe to ask “did you just think about triple cheese burritos or was that just a me thing?”, and they’ll always tell her the truth no matter how embarrassing their thoughts are, bc it’s important to all of them to respect her and help her sort accurately through what’s reality and what’s not. and bit by bit, she gets better and better at figuring out what kinds of things tend to be telepathy and what kinds of things tend to be psychosis, and that each one feels a little different. and because of the trust and respect and support of her found family she’s able to do that in a safe environment!!!

trans man Simon rights

listen i wanted to keep him as just a side note on Kaylee’s list but he is my son and he’s important to my heart so here goes

out on the outer rim where Kaylee’s from, gender ain’t much of a big deal, there’s an individualistic quality to life out there, and so if the trail you blaze is the trail of a woman or a man or neither or both, that’s respected even in the rare cases where it’s not outright encouraged. but in the inner planets, where competition and connections and public faces and family names are everything, you have to be what’s expected of you to survive. you can’t change your brand, you can’t be anything other than what your family planned for you since before you were born, it’s incredibly hard to survive in such a hyper competitive environment, and so your very identity becomes just a tool in how to market yourself for better success.

needless to say Simon (just as autistic as his little sister and also very trans) fuckin hated it there. but he was very good at it. correction: he was very good at his very specific field of STEM, good enough to where people stopped talking about how cute he looked in bows and started talking about how impressive his work was from a very young age. and his work had no gender. he could be whatever he wanted to in equations. so that was where he could express himself, and gd, he got so much praise for it, he never wanted to stop.

not until he discovered that his sister needed him, and ran away, and needed a disguise, and realized... suddenly, every stifling rule and prying eye was a million miles away. he was freefloating, freefalling, with none of the charted paths he’d been following all his life... so you know what? fuck it. he’s always enjoyed the name Simon. and since it’s not on any legal records, it’ll make him just that much more untraceable.

and on Serenity, starting over with new people who never knew him before his transition feels like an unbelievable blessing that just dropped right into his lap. he has to keep up the secrecy, he has to make sure they never find out who he used to be, because gd, it’s so nice when they look at him and say his name right, and he doesn’t know if he can handle losing that, not when it’s so new and so important to the person he’s finally becoming. but then one day, the unthinkable happens, the wanted posters for his arrest have an old name on them, they’re looking for the Tam sisters, and... nothing changes. the crew of Serenity could not give even a tenth of a percent of a fuck, and it doesn’t seem like they even know they’re supposed to. huh. that’s new. Simon could get used to that, he thinks.

i’m sure there’s more i could add, but it’s 4:30 in the morning now, so if more occurs to me, ill simply add it in a reblog tomorrow. if you’ve read down this far, i am in love with you. please let me know your Better Firefly ideas, too, bc im always down to yell about this show!!!

#firefly #Serenity #in which i choke out joss whedon with my bare hands and rescue his characters and give them better homes #ollies fix it series #malcolm reynolds #ollies personal good firefly canon

[curiosity-killed]

hello! what are your top five (or more) hualian fics? I can't just keep rereading your fics so I desperately need some recs! c:

adsjhlk anonnn ;A; ah okay so some of my faves pulled from my top tier of bookmarks (which is wildly subjective and depends upon the day and mood but oh well. here we are):

(under cut bc this got real long)

you'll know, you'll fall by mme_anxious

Rating: E

Summary:

“We talked about it,” Xie Lian says, hearing the frustration in his voice. “I want to go to the next step.” “It's okay if you don't—” Hua Cheng started. “I do! God, I want it so much. I don't want you thinking that I don't. I—I think about it all the time, San Lang.” Hua Cheng looks pleased, the tops of his cheekbones flushing to match his red shirt, and his thumb strokes the back of Xie Lian's hand. “What do you think about, gege?” -- Xie Lian seeks a lesson in desire. And another. And another.

My notes (apologies for this one it’s drawn straight from my bookmark notes lmao):

INTIMACY IS WORTH THE VULNERABILITY! TRUST IS REAL! LOVE EXISTS! HOLY SHIT!!!

i might be tearing up a little bit bc of the abundance of love and care apparent both between hualian and in the writing of this fic. it's. A Lot.

Animal and Real by etymologyplayground (but also all of EP’s hualian fics because they’re the fics I most reread ^^’)

Rating: T

Summary:

Ling Wen and Shi Qing Xuan establish the communication array, and then Ling Wen leaps into the well and disappears. Shi Qing Xuan walks over and sits in front of Xie Lian and Hua Cheng. "So," she says. "Dianxia. Crimson Rain Seeks Flower. Fancy meeting you here."

--

Book 1 ended on a cliffhanger. I fell off.

Alternate summary: "Xie Lian's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" Slowly Animorphs Into "Xie Lian And Hua Cheng Have A Nice Day, Actually"

My notes:

I like...don’t...actually....have words for this LMAO but basically I love, love, love Xie Lian getting to be hurt and hurting and Hua Cheng finding different ways to comfort and help him and actually talking about things (like Xie Lian accidentally hurting Hua Cheng’s feelings and them actually TALKING ABOUT IT) and just hnnnn yeah. this is like my go-to fic haha but I heartily rec all of etymologyplayground’s fics for tgcf (also many mdzs/cql fics but i am apparently behind in reading those orz)

le renard apprivoisé by hilarions

Rating: G

Summary:

If you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others, and hearing it will call me like music out of my burrow. You will understand that the things that are yours are unique in all the world. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

My notes:

Ah gosh. Hua Cheng equating himself with a starving, injured wild thing that doesn’t deserve care or compassion, Xie Lian telling him he loves him the fox anyway, the nature of dessert and love hnnn it’s a good time

Panopticon by @pengiesama​

Rating: M

Summary:

Jun Wu has built a very splendid home for Xie Lian, with gifts and friends and wondrous sights just for him. He will be very happy there.

Xie Lian won't take this house arrest lying down.

(Inspired by the book/movie Coraline, by Neil Gaiman.)

My notes:

Just an absolutely delectable balance of suspense and mild horror and love and aaahhh sometimes I forget that parts of this aren’t canon bc this is basically accepted as my canon of Jun Wu. Also “I was taller than that” will never not be my favorite thing

Tame to Fortune's Blows + Something Foreknown by crowdedcafe

Rating: M and T, respectively

Summaries:

For eight hundred years, Ruoye is Xie Lian’s only companion. It tries its best to ease some of his hardships, to lessen the misery he feels. But Ruoye is only a length of silk, and sometimes its love simply isn’t enough in the face of Xie Lian’s suffering.

Or, Ruoye loves Xie Lian when others don’t know how.

(TFB)

E-ming is born with a hole in his heart and an emptiness in his soul. Through centuries of hearing stories about Hua Cheng's beloved, E-ming grows to love the man he was born missing.

(SF)

My notes:

Just really lovely character studies essentially of Xie Lian and Hua Cheng through the lens of their weapons. personally I think they’re best read together but they are each standalone, canon-compliant fics 

ALSO:

Innocence Died Screaming, Honey Ask Me I Should Know by @eponinemylove​

Rating: T

Summary:

Hua Cheng puts a finger to his temple thoughtfully. He asks, "Who wants to tell me what the deal is with all these damn petals?"

The communication array goes completely silent, a feat almost in itself. Hua Cheng muses silently that gods can, apparently, shut the fuck up—they just choose not to. How convenient.

It takes a moment before Ling Wen manages to speak up. "Your Highness," she says carefully, "what did you say just now?"

"These white petals? There's got to be a hundred of them. The man just—oh yeah, there was a man—exploded into them. What's up with that?"

There's a long stretch of silence where it feels like all of Heaven is holding its breath.

Finally, Ling Wen responds. Her voice is clipped as she asks, "What do you know about the Four Calamities? Specifically, White Flower Mourns Massacre?"

Alternatively: the one where Hua Cheng is a martial god, Xie Lian is a calamity, and nobody is at all what they seem.

My notes:

AAAAAAHHHHH. GOD. THIS FIC. it would be embarrassing to admit how many times I’ve reread it (also I don’t know. late night decisions are not meant to be recorded in the ledger of memory) but it’s so fucking good. The characterization, the threads pulled from canon along with the deviations and alterations and the suSPENSE i am McLosing It. pls god someone come yell abt this fic with me i love it sm

I have such low Fic Reading Energy but. this babe. i see an update email and start vibrating like a gd electron.

Some other authors I trust with my heart and soul: @xihe-jun, merthurlin, atomicmuffin, uhhh I’m definitely missing people orz

#in all honesty i'm p bad about reading fics #after my initial quote-unquote lit review of a fandom orz #after that i basically only read what pops up on my dash #or gets sent to me by people orz #but i do rlly love all of these #long post #hualian fic rec #fic rec #tgcf #Anonymice #asked & answered

[girlactionfigure]

· The world, as we know it, has officially lost it.

Hillel Fuld 

 Black is white, white is black. Right is wrong, wrong is right. Day is night, night is day. 

It is truly unreal to see all the hate for Israel on the internet. It’s not unreal that so many people hate Jews. We’re used to that. It’s also not unreal that so many people side with the Arabs who don’t have to stick to the truth, and therefore have much better PR than us, since our side doesn’t lie. 

What is unreal is the amount of misinformation and straight up lies that are circulating on the internet. I’m not only talking about this latest “Round” of fighting. I’m talking in general. 

The first and most obvious lie being spread by people who are critical of Israel is that it’s not a fair fight. I’m talking about major celebrities and talk show hosts who are spreading this poison to their audience of millions. 

“There are many more casualties on the ‘Palestinian’ side. Israel is much stronger so it has to show restraint”

So let me get this straight. If there were more dead Jews, then you’d be ok with Israel defending herself but since we developed incredible technology to detonate rockets in mid air, since only a few Jews have been killed, we aren’t allowed to defend ourselves? Do you even hear what you’re saying?! You need more dead Jews first before you grant us the right to self defense?!

Furthermore, show me one other war/conflict in which the number of casualties determines the validity of the war. Was WWII justified? Did Germany not lose many many more lives than those who attacked them in order to uproot the evil of the Nazi regime? I’ll go one step further. Do you have any idea how many innocent Germans were killed in WWII? Does that make the war unjustified? 

“No, they weren’t innocent. They elected Hitler to lead them. They deserved to suffer the consequences.”

So if a nation elects a psychopathic regime to lead them, attacking them to uproot the evil is justified? See where I’m going with this?

The Arabs in Gaza democratically elected Hamas, a terror organization to lead them. Need I say more?

Ok, next lie. “The Palestinians deserve the right to self determination. They deserve a state. Until they have one, they won’t stop.”

Ok, let’s dissect. Can you guess how many times the Arabs had a chance to have a state? One? No. Two? Nope. Three? Negative. Four?! Keep going. Five? That is correct. They had five chances and they rejected them all. Why, you ask?

How about because they don’t want a state?! Have you ever reviewed the charter of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization)? 

 “Article 2 of the Charter states that ″Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit″, meaning that there is no place for a Jewish state.”

They don’t want a state. They say it loud and clear. They want no Israel. It’s time we took their word. 

The irony here is actually humorous. The very same people who support the Arab’s cause are the very same people who treat the Arabs like little children who can’t think for themselves. “They say from the river to the sea? Na, they don’t mean it!” They are embracing terror as their primary vehicle to advance their cause? Well, they’re suffering so what choice do they have? How can you blame them?”

Um, how about act like an adult and stop stoning your feet and crying like a little toddler? I mean there are many under privileged people out there. There are many poor people, sick people, sad people. Do any of them blow themselves up or shoot rockets at women and children? Somehow with these Arabs it’s ok, because they’re “Suffering”. 

Of course the fact that their suffering has anything to do with their terror is another lie. Ari’s 17 year old murderer came from an affluent and finally stable family. 

The next lie being spread is that Israel is indiscriminately killing women and children. See, when you are blinded by hatred, facts don’t matter. 

Israel is doing significantly more than ANY other army in the world to minimize innocent Arab deaths. The issue is that our enemies are literally setting up their terror headquarters in hospitals! They are literally making women and children stand next to them as they fire rockets into Israel. So yes, there are many innocent casualties on their side. Whose fault is that? Exhibit A: Hamas. 

Let’s just address one more lie, even though there are about 20 more lies being told right now on the internet. If you have another historical fabrication that you want addressed, feel free to comment below and I’ll try to address it. 

So one more lie. “Israel stole land from the Palestinians. They have to give back those stolen homes.”

Words matter and calling them Palestinians when that term was literally made up by the terrorist, Yasser Arafat, is inaccurate and not helpful. They are Arabs. 

So about that lie. We occupied the Palestinian state, stole their homes, and killed their children. 

When? Serious question. When? In my history book, the UN gave us and them a state in 1948. They didn’t accept and attacked us. We whipped their tuchuses. 

So when did we occupy the so-called Arab Palestinian state? 

Don’t bother Googling because it’s a huge global lie. There never was an Arab Palestinian state. Ever. Those Arabs who call themselves Palestinians? Please go ahead and ask them when their Palestinian state was established. Please ask them to tell you ANYTHING about this so-called state we occupied. 

News flash: You can’t occupy your own land. 

I feel like I just scratched the surface here and there are so many more lies being circulated right now on the internet. 

I guess I’ll just say one more thing. Jews value life. We believe all humans were created in the image of GD. We sanctify life and do everything we can to defend and preserve it. Do you have any idea how much every iron dome missile costs us? 

Each battery of the Iron Dome costs about $100 million. And each individual missile? $50,000. But for us, Human life > All the money in the world! 

Our enemies? They glorify death. While we build highly advanced technology to deflect rockets in real time, they use the billions they got from the US, the EU, and yes, even from Israel (Because we are idiots and compassionate to those who deserve no compassion!) to build highly advanced attack tunnels that start in Gaza and end in Jewish towns. They don’t plan on using these tunnels to deliver candy to Israeli kids. And of course, much of that foreign aid money goes to building those tens of thousands of rockets raining down on our heads. 

Golda Meir famously said “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

Truer words have never been spoken. 

What other lies are there?

[raspberryranpo]

since requests are open though,,, can i request hc’s on the golden deer girls perfect summer day? (i.e. beach trip, pool day, movie night, etc, whatever you can come up with!)

a perfect summer’s day

fire emblem three houses: golden deer girls

this is so wholesome. i love the gd girls so much. 😭

also, i’d just like to say thank you to everyone who’s waited since may for me to write your request!! i am very slow & i’ve had a lot of exams, but school is over now so hopefully i’ll be able to write a lot more

when hilda demands that the golden deer girls go to the beach in the summer, none of them are actually expecting much to happen

a lot happens. quite a lot happens, actually

marianne just sits under the umbrella and reads her book, outright refusing to change into a swimsuit

nobody forces her to because they are respectful. hilda definitely tries to force her but leonie & lysithea quickly stop her

leonie is buried under the sand & hilda turns her into a mermaid. leonie promptly complains about how she hates being a mermaid and how she would much rather be sculpted into captain jeralt’s picturesque body which immediately makes everyone extremely uncomfortable

she talks about jeralt for the next half hour but the only people listening were the crabs and marianne

hilda and leonie team up to throw lysithea into the water and lysithea cries

it’s kind of awkward for a while because marianne hasn’t spoken a word the entire day & lysithea has just finished having a temper tantrum over being thrown in the water (the water was incredibly shallow, leonie argues, and there definitely weren’t any fish where she was thrown… definitely)

hilda then suggests going to the town nearby, which everyone immediately agrees to - it’s a small, picturesque little village, right next to the beach, with lots of food stalls and tiny bookshops

hilda is determined to have a proper girls’ day out at the beach and she won’t let any temper tantrums and awkward introverts get in her way

they end up losing said awkward introvert the second they get into the town because she’s mesmerised by this really sad looking fish on a fish stall

when they go back to get her, they discover that seteth and flayn have been hanging out in the town too. flayn has an entire basket of fish and is still holding more in her arms. there are fish flying out of her dress. there’s just so much fish and nobody has any idea of where she’s getting it from

and seteth looks like he’s about to cry. he’s never hated fish more than right now. the last things he’s ever wanted to see were fish coming out of his sister’s dress and now he’s witnessed an entire shoal fly out. he’s traumatised. everyone’s laughing

this finally gets marianne to laugh which instantly brightens the mood & flayn decides to join them because flayn is golden deer too, technically

she leaves seteth with the endless amount of fish and runs off with the girls, leaving her distressed older brother to completely break down in the middle of the path

they all spend the next few hours in the town, buying anything that piques their interest

leonie ends up buying five different coloured shirts and a hat that all say “i ❤️ fish” in big bold letters. she insists on wearing it for the rest of the day & everyone is extremely embarrassed to be around her

flayn buys one of those mood rings for both her, lysithea and marianne, knowing that they’re obviously fake. hers turns a bright green, constantly changing colour, lysithea’s keeps changing from pink to green (much to her dismay) and marianne’s stays as a dark blue. it’s kind of sad to look at but marianne thinks it’s great

hilda and leonie see the rings and run straight back to the stupid souvenir shop to buy matching keychains for everyone. the matching items never end and by the end of the day, they’re all completely matching from head to toe

they get a lot of stares from everyone else in the town but everyone actually thinks they’re really cute

lysithea internally cries because she doesn’t have the courage to ask to go into the pastry shop

leonie notices and asks to go in there herself, dragging everyone else with her - she winks at lysithea who immediately goes bright red

when they all return to the monastery after a long day out, they’re the most popular topic for the entire week. everywhere you go, everyone is talking about leonie’s shirts and marianne’s permanently sad mood ring

seteth also tells tales about the endless fish in flayn’s dress but nobody believes him. the fish end up becoming a myth of garreg mach

#fire emblem #fire emblem three houses #fire emblem three houses headcanons #fe3h #fe3h headcanons #golden deer #golden deer headcanons #fire emblem memes #hilda valentine goneril #fe3h hilda #leonie pinelli #fe3h leonie #lysithea von ordelia #fe3h lysithea #marianne von edmund #fe3h marianne #flayn #fe3h flayn #seteth #fe3h seteth #my posts #headcanons

[star-anise]

An ask I got recently:

hi so i’m a transmed and i’m not sure if you’ll answer this because of that but i saw your post about transmedicalism and was wondering if you could expand on that? you seem like a genuinely kind and judgement-free person, thank you darling x

My response:

Heh, you call me “judgement-free” and ask for my opinion on a topic I’ve formed a lot of judgments about… I get it though, I’m not into attacking people for what they believe so much as providing FACTS. As a cis queer, my insight into transmedicalism isn’t really about the innate experience of trans-ness so much as using my education and professional experience to talk about social science research, diagnostic systems, and public health policy.

This ended up really long, so the tl;dr is, I think transmedicalism as I understand it:

Misunderstands why and how the DSM’s Gender Dysphoria diagnosis was written,

Treats the medical establishment with a level of trust and credibility it doesn’t deserve, at a time when LGBT+ people, especially trans people, need to be informed and vigilant critics of it, and

Approaches the problem of limited resources in an ass-backwards way that I think will end up hurting the trans community in the long run.

TW: Transphobia; homophobia; suicide; institutionalization; torture; electroshock therapy; child abuse; incidental mentions of pedophilia.

So first off I’m guessing you mean this post, about not trusting the medical establishment to tell you who you are? That’s what I’m trying to elaborate on here.

I have to admit, when you say “I’m a transmedicalist” that tells me very little about you, because on Tumblr the term seems to encompass a dizzying array of perspectives. Some transmedicalists believe in what seems to me the oldschool version of “The only TRUE trans people suffer agonizing dysphoria that can only be fixed with surgery and hormones, everyone else is an evil pretender stealing resources and can FUCK RIGHT OFF” and others are like, um… “I have total love and respect for nonbinary and nondysphoric trans people! I qualify for a DSM diagnosis of dysphoria but that doesn’t make me inherently better or more trans than anyone else.”

Which is very confusing to me because according to everything I’ve learned, the latter opinion is not transmedicalism. It’s just… a view of transness that acknowledges current diagnostic labels and scientific research. It’s what most people who support trans rights and do not identify as transmedicalists believe. But I kind of get the impression that Tumblr transmedicalism has expanded well past its original mandate, to the point that if a lot of “transmedicalists” saw the movement’s original positions they’d go “Whoa that’s way too strict and doesn’t help our community, I want nothing to do with it.”.

Okay so. Elaborating on the stuff I can comment on.

1. DSM what?

The American Psychiatric Association publishes a big thick book called The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, called the DSM for short. This is the “Bible of psychiatry”, North America’s definitive listing of mental disorders and conditions. It receives significant revision and updates roughly every 10-15 years; it was last updated in 2013, meaning it will likely get updated sometime between 2023 and 2028.

The DSM lists hundreds of “codes”, each of which indicates a specific kind of mental disorder. For example, 296.23 is “Major depressive disorder, Single episode, Severe,” and  300.02 is “Generalized anxiety disorder.” These codes have information on how common the condition is, how it’s diagnosed, and what kind of treatment is appropriate for it.

Diagnostic codes are the key to health professionals getting paid. If there isn’t a code for it, we can’t get paid for it, and therefore we have very few resources to treat it with. The people who actually pay for healthcare–usually insurance companies or government agencies–decide how much they will pay for each code item to be treated. They’ll pay for, say, three sessions of group therapy for mild depression (296.21), or they’ll pay for more expensive private therapy if it’s moderate (296.22); they’ll pay for the cheap kind of drug if you have severe depression (296.23), but to get the more expensive drug, you need to have depression with psychotic features (296.24).

Healthcare companies, especially in the USA where the system is very very broken and the DSM is written, are cheap bastards. If they can find an excuse not to fund some treatment, they’ll use it. “We think this person who lost their job and can’t get off the couch should pay this $1000 bill for therapy,” they’ll say. “After all, they were diagnosed as code 296.21, and then saw a private therapist for five sessions, when we only allow three sessions of group therapy, and you’re saying they haven’t had enough treatment yet?”

A lot of the advocacy work mental health professionals do is trying to get the big funding bodies to pay us adequately for the work we do. (This is a much easier process in countries with single-payer healthcare, where this negotiation only needs to be done with a single entity. In the USA, it needs to be done with every single health insurance company in existence, as well as the government, sometimes differently in every single state, and then again on a case-by-case basis as well.) Healthcare providers have to argue that three sessions of group therapy isn’t enough, that Medicaid needs to pay therapists more per hour than it costs those therapists to rent a room to practice in, or else therapists would lose money by seeing Medicaid clients. DSM codes exist a tiny bit to let us communicate with each other about the people we treat, and a huge amount to let us get paid. The fact that their existence lets people make sense of their own experiences and find a community with people who share common experiences and interests with them is a very minor side benefit the DSM’s authors really don’t keep in mind when they update and revise different diagnoses.

So when it comes to convincing insurance companies to pay for treatment, humanitarian reasons like “they’ll be very unhappy without it” tend not to work. The best argument we have for them paying for psychological treatment is that it’s economical: that if they don’t pay for it now, they’ll have to pay even more later. If they refuse to pay, let’s say, $2000 to treat mild depression when someone loses their job, and either refuse treatment or stick the person with the bill, then that person’s life might spiral out of control–they might, let’s say, run low on money, get evicted from their apartment, develop severe depression, attempt suicide, and end up in hospital needing to be medically resuscitated and then put in an inpatient psych ward for a month. The insurance company then faces the prospect of having to pay, let’s say, $100,000 for all that treatment. At which point somebody clever goes, “Huh, so it would have been cheaper to just… pay the original $2000 instead so they could bounce back, get a new job, and not need any of this treatment later.”

Trans healthcare can be kind of expensive, since it often involves counselling, years of hormone therapy, medical garments, and multiple surgeries. Health insurance companies hate paying for anything, and have traditionally wanted not to cover any of this. “This is ridiculous!” they said. “These are elective cosmetic treatments, it’s not like they’re dying of cancer, these people can pay the same rate for breast enhancements or testosterone injections as anyone else.”

So when the APA Task Force on Gender Identity Disorder (a task force comprised, as far as I can tell, entirely of cis people) sat down to plan for the 2013 update of the DSM, one of their biggest goals was: Treatment recommendations. Create a diagnosis which they could effectively use to advocate that insurance companies fund gender transition. Like when you go back and read the documents from their meetings in 2008 and 2011, their big thing is “create a diagnosis that can be used to form treatment recommendations.” So that’s what they did; in 2013 they made the GD diagnosis, and in 2014 the Affordable Care Act required insurers to provide treatment for it.

A lot of trans people weren’t happy with the DSM task force’s decisions, such as the choice to keep “Transvestic Fetishism,” which is basically the autogynephilia theory, and just rename it “Transvestic Disorder”. The creation of the Gender Dysphoria diagnosis, basically, was designed to force the preventive care argument. They didn’t think they could win on trans healthcare being a necessity because healthcare is a human right, so they went with: Trans people have a very high suicide rate, and one way to bring it down is to help them transition. One of the major predictors of suicidality is dysphoria. The more dysphoric someone is, the more likely they are to attempt suicide (source).  Therefore, health insurers should fund treatment for gender dysphoria because it was cheaper than paying for emergency room admissions and inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations.

I have spoken to trans scientists about what research exists, and my understanding is: The dysphoria/no dysphoria split is not actually validated in the science. That is, when you research trans people, there is not some huge gaping difference between the experiences, or brains, of people With Dysphoria, and people Without Dysphoria. Mostly, scientists haven’t even thought it was an important distinction to study. The diagnosis wasn’t reflecting a strong theme in the research about trans experiences; that research showed that trans people with all levels of dysphoria were helped with medical transition. The biggest difference is just that dysphoria is a stronger risk factor for suicide. Experiencing transphobia is another strong risk factor, but that’s harder to measure in a doctor’s office, so dysphoria it was.

(I’ve seen some transmedicalists claim that dysphoria’s major feature is incongruence, not distress. And I’ll just say, uh… in psychology, “dysphoria” is the opposite of of “euphoria”, literally means “excessive pain”, and is used in many disorders to describe a deep-seated sense of distress and wrongness. As a mental health professional, I just can’t imagine most of my colleagues agreeing that something can be called “dysphoria” if the person doesn’t feel real distress about it. If you want a diagnosis that doesn’t demand dysphoria, you’d need Gender Incongruence in the upcoming version of the ICD-11, which is the primary diagnostic system used in Europe, published by the World Health Organization.)

2. Doctors are not magic

Medicine is a science, and science is a system of knowledge based on having an idea, testing it against reality, and revising that knowledge in light of what you learned. We’re learning and growing all the time.

I don’t know if this sounds painfully obvious or totally groundbreaking, but: Basically all medical research is done by people who don’t have the condition they’re writing about. Psychology has a strong historical bias against believing the personal testimonies of people with conditions that have been deemed mental disorders, so researchers who have experienced the disorder they’re writing about have often had to hide that fact, like Kay Redfield Jamison hiding that she had bipolar disorder until she became a world-renowned expert on it, or Marsha Linehan hiding that she had borderline personality disorder until she pioneered the treatment that could effectively cure it. Often, having a condition was seen as proof you couldn’t actually have a truthful and objective experience of it.

So what I’m trying to say is: The “gender dysphoria” diagnosis was written and debated, so far as I can tell, by entirely cis committee members. The vast majority of psychological and psychiatric research about LGBT+ people is written by cisgender heterosexual scientists. Most clinical and scientific writing has been outsider scientists looking at people they have enormous power over and making decisions about their basic existence with very little accountability.

And to show you how far we’ve come, I want to show you part of the DSM as it was from 1952 to 1973. It shows you just why so many older LGBT+ people find it deeply ironic that now the DSM is being held up as definitive of trans experience:

302 Sexual Deviation This category is for individuals whose sexual interests are directed primarily toward objects other than people of the opposite sex, toward sexual acts not usually associated with coitus, or towards coitus performed under bizarre circumstances as in necrophilia, pedophilia, sexual sadism, and fetishism. Even though many find their practices distasteful, they remain unable to substitute normal sexual behavior for them. This diagnosis is not appropriate for individuals who perform deviant sexual acts because normal sexual objects are not available to them.

302.0 Homosexuality 302.1 Fetishism 302.2 Pedophilia 302.2 Transvestitism […]

Yes, really. That is how psychiatry viewed us. At a time when research from other fields, like psychology and sociology, were showing that this view was completely unsupported by evidence, psychiatry thought LGBT+ people were fundamentally disordered, criminal, and incapable of prosocial behaviour.

My favourite retelling of the decades of activism it took LGBT+ people and allies to get the DSM to change is from a friend who did her master’s thesis on the topic, because she leaves in the clown suits and gay bars, which really shows how scientific and dignified the process was. The long story short is:  It took over 20 years of lobbying by LGBT+ people who were sick and tired of being locked up in mental institutions and subjected to treatments like electroshock training, as well as by LGBT+ social scientists, clinicians, and psychiatrists, to get homosexuality declassified as a mental illness. And that was homosexuality; the push to change how trans people were listed in the DSM is very recent, as seen in the latest version listing “Transvestic Disorder”, a description very few trans people ever use for themselves.

Here are a few more examples of how people with a condition have had to take an active part in the science about them:

When HIV/AIDS appeared in the USA, the government didn’t care why drug addicts and gay people were dying mysteriously. Hospitals refused to treat people with this mysterious new disease. AIDS patients had to fight to get any funding put into what AIDS is, how it spreads, or how it could be treated; they also had to campaign to change the massive public prejudice against them, so they could be treated, housed, and allowed to live. Here’s an article on the activist tactics they used. If you want an intro to the fight (or at least, white peoples’ experience of it), you could look into the movies How to Survive a Plague, And the Band Played On, and The Normal Heart.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a little-understood disease that causes debilitating exhaustion. It’s found twice as often in women as men. Doctors understand very little about what it is or why it happens, and patients with CFS are often written off a lazy hypochondriacs who just don’t want to try hard. There are basically no known treatments. In 2011, a British study said that an effective treatment for CFS was “graded exercise”, a program where people did slowly increasing levels of physical activity. This flew in the face of what people with CFS knew to be true: That their disease caused them to get much worse after they exercised. That for them, being forced to do ever-increasing exercise was basically tantamount to torture, so it was very concerning that health authorities and insurance companies began requiring that they undergo graded exercise treatment (and parents with children with CFS had to put their children through this treatment, or lose custody for “medical neglect”). So they investigated the study, found that it was seriously flawed, got many health authorities to reverse their position on graded exercise, and have made strides into pointing researchers to looking into biological causes of their illness.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rare but debilitating disease that isn’t researched much, because it affects such a small portion of the population. The ALS community realized that if they wanted better treatment, they would need to raise the money for research themselves. In 2014 they organized a viral “ice bucket challenge” to get people to donate to their cause, and raised $115 million, enough to make significant advances in understanding ALS and getting closer to a cure.

A common treatment for Autism is Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), which is designed to encourage “desired” behaviours and discourage “undesired” ones. The problem is, the treatment targets behaviour an Autistic person’s parents and teachers consider desirable or undesirable, without consideration that some “undesired” behaviours (like stimming) are fundamental and necessary to the wellbeing of Autistic people. Furthermore, the treatment involves punishing Autistic children for failure to behave as expected–in traditional ABA, by witholding rewards or praise until they stop, or in more extreme cases, by subjecting them to literal electric shocks to punish them. (In that last case, they’ve been ordered to stop using the shock devices by August 31, 2020. That only took YEARS.) Autistic people have had to campaign loud and long to say that different treatment strategies should be researched and used, especially on Autistic children.

So I mean… I get that the medical model can provide an element of validation and social acceptance. It can feel really good to have people in white coats back you up and say you’re the real deal. But if you get in touch with most LGBT+ and transgender groups, they’d say that there’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to researching trans issues and getting scientific and governmental authorities to recognize your rights to social acceptance and medical treatment.

Within a few years, the definition you’re resting on will turn to sand beneath your feet. The Great DSM Machine will begin whirring into life pretty soon and considering what revisions it has to make. You’ll have an opportunity to make your voice heard and to push for real change. So… do you want to be part of that process of pushing trans rights forward, or do you just want to feel loss because they’re changing your strict definition of who’s valid and who’s not?

3. Scarcity is not a law of physics

One of the major arguments I see transmedicalists push is that there’s only a limited number of surgeries or hormone prescriptions available, so it’s not okay for a non-dysphoric person to “steal” the resources that another trans person might need more. This makes sense in a limited kind of way; it’s a good way to operate if, say, you’re sharing a pizza for lunch and deciding whether to give the last slice to someone who’s hungry and hasn’t eaten, or someone who’s already full.

When you start to back up and look at really big and complex systems–basically anything as big, or bigger, than a school board or a hospital or a municipal government–it’s not a helpful lens anymore. Because the most important thing about social institutions is that they can change. We can make them change. And the most important factor in how much the world changes is how many people demand that it change.

I’ve talked about this before when it comes to homeless shelters, and how the absolute worst thing they can have are empty beds. I used to work in women’s shelters, which came about when second-wave feminists started seriously looking at the problem of domestic violence in the 1960s and 70s, It was an issue male-dominated governments and healthcare systems hadn’t taken seriously before, but feminists started heck and did research and staged demonstrations and basically demanded that organizations that worked for the “public benefit” reduce the number of women being killed by their husbands. Their research showed that the leading cause of death in those cases were when women tried to leave and their partners tried to kill them, so the most obvious solution was to give them someplace safe to go where their partners couldn’t find them. Therefore the solution became: Women’s shelters. When feminists committed to founding and running these shelters, local governments could be talked into giving them money to keep them running.

(Men’s rights activists, the misogynist kind, like to whine about “why aren’t there men’s shelters?” and the very simple answer is: Because you didn’t fight for them, you teatowels. Whether a movement gets resources and funding is hugely a reflection of how many people have said, “This needs resources and funding! Look, I’m writing a cheque! Everyone, throw money at this!” In other news, The BC Society for Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse does great work. People should throw money at them.)

When the system in power knows there are resources it wants and doesn’t have, it finds a way to make them appear. For example, in Canada, the government knows that it doesn’t have enough trained professionals living in its far North, where the population is scarce and not very many people want to live. Doctors and teachers would prefer to live in the southern cities. But because it’s committed to Northern schools and hospitals, they create incentives. For example, the government offers to pay off the student loans of teachers or health professionals who agree to work for a few years in Northern communities.

Part of why trans healthcare resources are so scarce is that for a long time, trans people were considered too small a part of the population to care about. Like, “Trans people exist, but we won’t have to deal with them.” Older estimates said 0.4% of the population was trans, which meant a city of 100,000 people would have 400 trans people. A single family doctor can have 2000 or 3000 clients, so the city could have maybe 1 or 2 doctors who really “got” trans issues, and all the trans people would tell each other to only go see those doctors because all the rest were assholes. And the cracks in the system didn’t really seem serious. A couple hundred dissatisfied people not getting the healthcare they needed? Meh! Hospital administrators had more to worry about!

But the trans population is growing. A recent poll of Generation Z said 2.6% of middle schoolers in Minnesota were some kind of trans. which is 2,600 per 100,000. That’s enough to make hospitals think that maybe the next endocrinologist or OB/GYN they hire should have some training in treating trans people. That’s enough to make a health authority think that maybe the state should open up a new gender confirmation surgery clinic, since demand is rising so much.

Or well, I mean. Hospitals have a lot on their minds. This might not occur to them as their top priority. They’d probably think of it a lot sooner if a bunch of those trans people sent them letters or took out a billboard or showed up by the dozens at a public meeting to say, “Hello, there are a fuckload of us. Budget accordingly. We want to see your projected numbers for the next five years.”

When you’re doing that kind of work, suddenly it hurts your cause to limit your number of concerned parties. Sure, limited focus groups or steering committees can have limited membership, but when you put their ideas into action, to protest something or lobby for political change, you need numbers. If you want to show that you’re a big and important group that systems should definitely pay attention to, you don’t just need every trans or GNC or NB person who’s got free time to devote to your campaign, you also need every cis ally who can pad out numbers or lick envelopes or hand out water bottles or slip you insider information about the agenda at the next board meeting. You need bodies, time, and money, and you get them best by being inclusive about who’s in your party. Heck, if it would benefit your cause to team up with the local breast cancer group because trans women and cis women who have had mastectomies both have an interest in asking a hospital to have a doctor on staff who knows how to put a set of tits together, then there are strong reasons to do it.

Basically: All the time any marginalized group spends fighting over scraps is generally time we could spend demanding that the people handing out the food give us another plate. If you don’t think you’re getting enough, the best answer isn’t to knock it out of somebody’s hands, but to get together to say, “HEY! WE’RE NOT GETTING ENOUGH!”

That kind of work is complicated and difficult! It’s definitely much harder than yelling at someone on Tumblr for not being trans enough. But if you do any level of getting involved with activist groups that fight for real systemic change, whether that’s following your local Pride Centre on Twitter or throwing $5 at a trans advocacy group or writing your elected representative about the need for more trans health resources, you’re pushing forward lasting change that will help everyone.

#staranise original #transmedicalism tw #transphobia tw #homophobia tw #my problems with sj let me show you them

[daesungindistress]

Warning: rant ahead. See the replies to this ask for backstory/context.

Excuse my language, but why the fuck are there still VIPs who blame BIGBANG when confronted with the idea of them agreeing to go on without Seungri? As if the members are at fault for acting like normal healthy people just trying to make the best of a bad situation and pick up the threads of what they love and carry on? Fans who look down on them at the thought that they’re not waving away his decision to leave like it never happened? Fans who think less of them when it’s suggested they aren’t rejecting reality and refusing to let him go -- nevermind that he’s already gone and has been for over a year? Fans who slam them for not stepping in and saving their fave from his self-imposed fate?

Who in their right mind, to this day, after all this time, still holds the current members responsible for the ex-member’s rescue? GD, TOP, Taeyang, and Daesung do not exist to be Seungri’s guardians, saviors, or personal pillars of support. Especially not after they spent years publicly pointing out the growing distance between him and them outside of work and begged him before enlistment to please be on your best behavior, please don’t get in trouble, if anything happens it will be the end of us. “It will be goodbye for real.”

Speaking of keepers... Seungri had one. It wasn’t his bandmates, it was his manager. His manager who was fired by YG after YG found him in breach of contract for accepting Burning Sun funds from Seungri under the table. Sounds like hush money to me, but what do I know. All I know is he was in on something he wasn’t supposed to be with Seungri and so was promptly let go.

If Seungri thought his bandmates would cover for or stand by him he wouldn’t have ended his work relationship of 12 years with them so abruptly and so absolutely. Wouldn’t have peaced out the day he was booked on his first charge (the first of many). He dropped his singing career like a hot potato and used his newfound freedom to shamelessly give sit-down interviews while he was a suspect in an active criminal investigation -- one of the largest and most disruptive in kpop history.

Daesung could have done that too, you know, when his commercial building came under scrutiny last summer and he found himself facing many of the same accusations as Seungri. But Daesung didn’t pull a Seungri and pull the plug on his place in BIGBANG. Daesung stayed. But then, it helps that he wasn’t outed as a member of any controversial chats.

VIPs think a military court (hypothetically) ruling Seungri not guilty behind closed doors on at best a fraction of his charges means he’ll miraculously reverse his decision to retire and return to BIGBANG? Fans conveniently forget that the memory of TOP’s media storm turned three years old this summer, and though he’s making progress, he’s still on shaky ground. His own company acts like he barely exists. Like he’s still in exile. You know, the company BIGBANG re-signed with recently? The company that just last year Seungri nearly toppled when his scandal set in motion a series of controversies that drove them into the negatives? So this blind optimism for Seungri so much as showing his face within the next five is a sad joke. Really, him rejoining YG and being utilized by them ever again is a stretch.

When a VIP snidely says things about the members like “For the guys to ignore over 10 years of history together is a little shallow to say the least” and “Just because they’re not open about it doesn’t mean they ditched Seungri” and  “The members seem too loyal for that,” and so on, it gives me such a headache. We are edging into fall of 2020. This disapproval toward the BB members by their own fans if they don’t support Seungri and bring him back is so 2019. Shallow, ditched, (dis)loyal. Everything you need to know about affiliations is right there in those words. This is someone who favors the one who’s gone over the four we have and is hanging around hoping they’ll risk everything for him. Anything less is grounds for criticism.

Let me remind y’all real quick that they didn’t ditch Seungri, Seungri ditched them. He took the initiative. Retiring was his decision. Per his announcement, which is still there on his Instagram for all the world to see, he formally cut ties with them. He ended it. Whether he made that decision with or without the others’ agreement we don’t know but it does not matter unless you think he’s a child who isn’t capable of assessing a situation, making his own careful, calculated decisions, and following through with them. Like his “big brothers” have to hold his hand and be there with him when he signs on the dotted line.  VIPs applauded his independence right up until the day he left. And ever since, they’ve acted like nothing he does is final without their permission.

It’s backwards as hell. So can we please, for the love of God, stop laying this unfair expectation on the members to stick their necks out and “right his wrong” or whatever? To put their careers on hold and wait around indefinitely for a former member’s highly unlikely homecoming in the distant, dreamlike future? To welcome him back with open arms and... I don’t know, bring them to the brink of disbandment a second time?

This reminds me of an ask I received last year suggesting that Jiyong had failed him. For not stopping him from getting into such trouble, for not keeping him from killing his career. Like the members didn’t tell him more than once that his friends seemed trashy and they didn’t care for them. Like they didn’t express concern about him sinking deeper into the world of business with said friends while drifting away from music and away from BIGBANG. Warnings. All of which, as far as we could tell, he laughed off.

They knew they were losing him. They knew he would leave. They talked about it often enough. Hell, Seungri himself knew the dream wasn’t likely to last forever, if his comments about getting into business as a backup plan in case a scandal were to end his singing career are any indication (Radio Star 2018). Well, damn, now it’s happened, and we need to recognize that though it was unexpected for us, it wasn’t entirely unexpected for him (or BB for that matter). So VIPs can stop acting like it was a decision he made impulsively, without due consideration. And they can stop putting pressure on BIGBANG to undo it for him.

Honestly, the way Seungri’s fans expect the members to pick up after him you’d think he was still in diapers. When TOP’s problems surfaced in 2017 I don’t recall anyone pointing fingers at the other members and asking why they didn’t keep a closer eye on him even though the members spoke often of worrying about him and affectionately referred to him as their baby hyung. Like Seungri, many of us sensed something was wrong, but when shit hit the fan I didn’t see people placing blame on anyone but the man at the center of the controversy. Because everyone seemed to recognize back then that he is his own person not perpetually under his bandmates’ care. Even now, in 2020, he gets thrown under the bus by VIPs aggressively caping for Seungri. Meanwhile Seungri gets coddled and indulged and forgiven like the most helpless of babes. And somehow his downfall is everyone else’s mess to clean but his.

A certain subset of VIPs think it’s “shallow” of BIGBANG to pick up the pieces and prepare for a new future as four, when really, it’s shallow and selfish of those VIPs to want them not to. Worse, to block their path, create obstacles, pressure them into standing still, and call them zeroes (“5-1=0”) because they don’t have the maturity to come to terms with the departure of one a whole 18 months ago. How would you feel if you were a world class artist and your name and reputation, your legacy of over a decade that you and your friends built from the ground up, was on the verge of collapse and you had people who claim to care about you belittling you for wanting to put the troubled past behind you and do the best you can to carry on with your friends? Your friends who are still with you on this wonderful-terrible journey, not the one who said fuck it and left.

By the way, in the ask replies to this post I used a divorce analogy because, though perhaps not the best comparison, it involves 1) terminating a contract, and 2) the breaking up of a family unit, both of which have been points of contention among OT4/5 VIPs: the binding nature of a contract and the sentimental value of a found (not blood related) family. Whatever your thoughts on either, this expectation that a person left behind should put everything on the line for one who left, as if something more is owed, and express disappointment when they don’t meet that ideal of limitless loyalty, is not okay.

In an exchange about deciding to separate from Seungri they said, “I don’t believe BIGBANG have exhausted all their resources yet.” In other words, they don’t believe GD, TOP, Taeyang, and Daesung have done enough for Seungri. I wish this was the first time I’d heard this sort of thing from Seungri’s fans, but it’s not. My god, the audacity of a fan to judge these men for the amount of effort they have or have not put into making it work, holding the members to their fannish standards of how much effort they think their favorite is worth...!

The current members of BIGBANG have been burned enough by criticism; the last thing they need is fans dragging them over the coals for a has-been who's g o n e. He retired and they re-signed, and there is no sound reason to think this means they’re doing anything but accepting what’s happened and going their separate ways. The “work” they’ll put in now is work with what they’ve got. Not backtrack and bend over backwards for someone who acted as he saw fit, which was to narrowly avoid taking them all down with him via a curt (I would even say snippy) retirement announcement. And if VIPs find the guys doing what’s best for themselves in the aftermath of disaster so distasteful, well, I’m sure there are plenty of other so far untouched groups out there that can satisfy that longing for absolute, crippling loyalty. You know, groups that haven’t suffered the same blows as BIGBANG and had the illusion shattered.

#whew #bigbang #burning sun #seungri #my post

[jafreitag]

Grateful Dead Monthly: Gaelic Park – New York, NY 8/26/71

Fifty years ago today, on Thursday, August 26, 1971, the Grateful Dead played a concert at Gaelic Park in New York City.

Gaelic Park is located at West 240th Street and Broadway, five miles north and east of Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx. In 1926, the Gaelic Athletic Association purchased it to host the Gaelic Games. What are Gaelic Games? I’m a sliver Irish (just learned that a few years ago from a cousin who did some DNA stuff), but I didn’t know about such games until I asked the Google machine. Here you go, from the Wiki:

“Gaelic games (Irish: Cluichí Gaelacha) are sports played in Ireland under the auspices of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). They include Gaelic football, hurling, Gaelic handball and rounders. Women’s versions of hurling and football are also played: camogie, organised by the Camogie Association of Ireland, and ladies’ Gaelic football, organised by the Ladies’ Gaelic Football Association. While women’s versions are not organised by the GAA (with the exception of handball, where men’s and women’s handball competitions are both organised by the GAA Handball organisation), they are closely associated with it.”

Some to unpack there. What’s Gaelic football? It’s basically rugby. (The rules are probably way different, but this is a music blog, so don’t judge.) And hurling? Rugby with a small ball and sticks that look like sporty pizza paddles. (Again, don’t judge.) Gaelic handball? Racquetball, except you use your hands and you’re outside, not in some bougie health club from the ’80s. Finally, rounders? It’s actually alot like baseball. Pretty cool.

Why were the Dead there? A 9/2/71 piece in the Village Voice by Carman Moore, now archived on the Grateful Dead Sources blog, said that Gotham promoter Howard Stein, a Bill Graham competitor who booked the Dead to play at the Cap Theater in Port Chester, NY and the Academy of Music in NYC, had turned “the drab little Riverdale soccer field … into a summer rock mini-festival.” (Check out the poster above.) Moore’s writing has an early-70s sizzle, and he refers to his colleague, now-legendary rock scribe Robert Christgau. Here’s an excerpt:

“Last week’s Grateful Dead concert up at Gaelic Park was a usual Dead session, meaning that the band-to-fan-to-band electro-chemical process for which rock music is famed was on like high mass at Easter. Although I think I know most of the time what they are doing musically (Christgau will like this notion); I don’t quite understand them electro-chemically. Like the New York Knicks of two seasons ago, they can do excellent things together though they are not a group of deathless superstars. Garcia gets his songs across, but he can’t sing, and Bob Weir’s voice rises to about average…maybe better when he gets to screaming and the music sweeps him along. I still find it difficult to recognize the Dead songs that aren’t “Truckin'” or “St. Stephen” one from the other. I am not one of their fans, but seem to be one of their admirers. Their music speaks in a special language to their live listeners, and that language has the vocabulary of everybody else, but a convoluted syntax all its own. The note sequences are not completely dependent upon musical factors but are also dictated by how involved the band feels and also upon what kind of heat the audience is giving off. I’m trying to get to some essences of this thing.

The drama of a Dead concert revolves around the fact that wherever the band plays they know that a certain number (several tons) of their partisans will be there and that their crowd knows the Dead potential to excite them, but they also know that the Dead may not get into gear until the crowd begins to apply some heat, and so forth. Both parties also know that the concert will be long enough and informal enough for anything to happen on either side of the footlights, and so audiences improvise (smoke, go to the hot dog stand, kiss and snuggle, cheer, dance, listen like star-struck fools) just like their musician friends on stage (who play light and funny for awhile, retire backstage awhile, stand around, or get lost in a piece and turn on the heavy jets). Like good lovers, the Grateful Dead know the secrets of good foreplay, taking your time, surprising the partner for awhile, and then just reacting for a spell.”

The timing of the show seems odd. The band was on the East Coast in July, but began August back in Cali – LA, SD, Berkeley – before a three-night run at Chicago’s historic Auditorium Theater. Then they trekked back to NYC. Our resident Deaditor ECM explains that aspect: “This show was supposed to be played the day before the Yale Bowl concert on July 30, but some issues with the equipment trucks and/or weather prevented it from happening from the scheduled date. There are a few stories on the web about people who didn’t get the message (no twitter back then!) and dropped some acid only to show up to an empty stadium. Haha!”

Moore said that the show reminded him of “a high school stadium I used to know – low stands, unfulfilled infield grass, mud holes here and there, beer sold at one end in some quantity.” He continued:

“The formal shape of the concert was a general crescendo, light at the beginning and heavy-groovy at the end – not a shooting-star, call-the-law finale, just a heightened physical-emotional climate…the goods delivered as promised…sort of like good preaching in a church known to be a happy place. I did not enjoy their country-westernish opening tunes; maybe they didn’t either, because the pieces were awfully short. But by the three-quarter mark they had involved themselves, the crowd, and me too.

First they got the rhythm engaged and finally, courtesy of Jerry Garcia’s lead and interplays with Lesh and Weir, they went into the soloing and jamming which are the real magic music territory of this band. Much is made of the Dead soloists, but it became clear to me by last Thursday that bassist Phil Lesh plus those two drummers create the atmosphere that makes the Dead thing possible. The drummers were exceptionally understated, but Lesh kept bopping and thrumming away, heavily at all times, until his patterns were consistently getting the other players off. In the middle of “St. Stephen” there was a special coming together: Lesh had found a nice ambiguous but compelling set of licks; Garcia eased into a solo; Weir strummed a cross-time lick over all of it; it built; it quieted; Garcia started to play strange classical kind of lines; the drums dropped out; the audience got quiet; nothing at all could be predicted for a minute or so; then Lesh began to grope his way out with two chords and rhythms which began to regularize; audience began to jump and then to clap; guitars began to straighten out; the band came home to the cheers of the fans. Good music-making. The listener goes home without a little tune to whistle, but he hears music. As if they were finishing off some personal solos based over the last riffs heard, the fans went out of Gaelic Park without a thousand encores and without a lot of fuss on the streets outside.

It’s all very interesting, surprising, and I guess mystifying as before. All I know is that the Dead, or their fans, or the combination of both lure you into planning to return when they’re all assembled and back in town again.”

Apparently, there was some grief about bootlegs at this show. The GD Sources blog has a post that archives a 10/6/71 piece by the excellently-handled Basho Katzenjammer (Basho, the 17th Century Japanese haiku master; Katzenjammer, the German word for hangover) that gripes about an army of 200# “muscle freaks” at the direction of tour manager Sam Cutler liberating a handful of tapes from 100# weakling Johnny Lee. It’s a truly fun read. An excerpt:

“The biggest piece of shit spewing from Cutler’s mouth is about the reasons the Dead have for being so pissed off: they don’t like the quality (remember Garcia’s line in “I Got No Chance of Losin”? He says, “I’m only in it for the gold.” Yeah, music has a way of being more honest than the artist intends it to be at times…) The “quality”? Anyone who has bought a bootleg recently will know and agree that the bootleg stereo album called “Grateful Dead” is one of the best underground products yet. The tape was taken from a concert the group did at Winterland, on the coast a few months back. Yeah, Garcia fucks up a bit on “Casey Jones,” and Pigpen’s ego may have been deflated a bit by his voice coming over poorly on “Good Loving” but that was a concert. You do a concert and you stand by your performance, good or bad. That’s show business.

This effete artistic bullshit doesn’t matter anyway … When you’re out to get all the money you can out of your gigs, like the Dead seem to be (like all the groups seem to be) you might be accused of being a bit piggish; when you use strong-arm shit to insure that you get every last penny that you deserve — by making Amerikan standards — you are a Pig. Jerry Garcia, is that you?

Nobody buys that anti-bootleg shit about the artistic integrity of the artist in saying what goes out. One, you stand by your performance; two, even if you don’t want to, Jerry, somewhat, and say “all your private property is fair game for your brothers (especially when they sell records of concerts that don’t compete with coming releases) and your brother (who’s gonna continue to dig you as we live off your comets we’re gonna keep ripping you off because it is possible. As simple as that.” If you and Cutler and Stein continue your shit, though, we’ll just have to sing the song the same old way, you guys being put in the position of being the same old reactionary establishment that we’re all ripping off. It’s all around. You break your back playing gigs for ten years and suddenly success is staring you in the face. Bread: lots and lots of bread. You turn your back on your poor, ripping ’em off roots and start to tighten up. You’re in the biggest rip-off industry around, but no one cares as long as they’re having fun.

Money. That’s the whole story, isn’t it? If these were other times, in another land under a different set of rules maybe you could justifiably complain about the people who want to give your recorded performances out free because you didn’t screen them and pick out the sections you didn’t like and do them over for the cat, ’cause no one charges for their music, and because the means of production belong to the people, and they can turn out all the good sounds they can, and you have a natural right to screen all releases. But we’re here. Now. You guys are making millions — or soon will be. Money is power, especially as the concept of money is crumbling nation-wide and power freaks like Stein are cornering the market on it. The channels that the green-power the Dead bring in travel aren’t the healthiest for the generations of revolution to come. Stein is one of these hopeful images of a freak with a chance to change things positively gone sour, who uses all his power to consolidate his power; who’ll go to any extremes to insure the natural expansion of that power. Fuck him. Fuck you.”

Speak, Basho! Quaint that the beef about bootlegs back then was sound quality, rather than copyright. Stuff got figured out at some point, I think. Like when Bobby shut down the LMA, lmao.

Ed featured part of this show in the 2016 edition of his epcot 31 Days of Dead project. Here are his listening notes, which are typically spot-on (and better than than the not-quite-on-the-bus commentary from Mr. Moore):��

“Less than three weeks after Pigpen’s definitive performance of Hard To Handle at the Hollywood Palladium (8/6/71), the Grateful Dead play the final date of their summer tour in 1971 at Gaelic Park in the Bronx. It will be Pig’s last show until December and the last time the band will ever perform in their original quintet configuration of Jerry, Phil, Pig, Billy and Bobby. By September, Keith will be rehearsing with the band to assume a full-time role on the keys. Perhaps anticipating his absence, Pigpen leads the band through 6 of his songs including the rarely-played Empty Pages and the last Hard To Handle. It is also one of the last performances of Saint Stephen, until the band revived it in 1976 with a major facelift, never to be played the same way again. When you consider these historical milestones along with the departure of Mickey Hart and the closings of the legendary Fillmore East and West earlier in the year it makes you realize that this concert carried a little more weight than anyone could have ever foreseen at the time. It truly was the end of a chapter in the life of the Grateful Dead. As you listen to each song you can’t help but feel a certain degree of nostalgia.

For me, the hidden gem of the show is the outstanding version of Uncle Johns Band. Jerry’s first guitar solo is an absolute joy to hear. His notes sing with irresistible melody and happy sunshine which perfectly capture the nostalgia of those carefree early years. If you listen closely you can hear Pigpen playing the wood claves.”

Speaking of Pig, this show features the second and final performance of Empty Pages. The NYS Music blog, which has a nice write-up of this show, describes it as a McKernan original that “pairs his traditional crooning style with a slow blues jam that’s nicely peppered with fiery guitar licks from Garcia. It’s a true rarity and a shame that the band wouldn’t be able to further develop this one.”

I feel like this was a try-hard post. It might be tl;dr, idk. Here’s the true goodness…

Transport to the Charlie Miller remaster of the soundboard recording HERE.

More soon.

JF

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#IFTTT #WordPress

[squid-rp]

River Jones

Angry Blind Werewolf living off of a modest fortune that was shrewdly invested. Respects his alpha (is the most loyal but isn't going to say it openly without good reason), adored his mother and sisters, having to deal with his great-niece showing up out of the blue with her five-year old daughter and keeping them safe on top of everything else going on.

Looking for: His great-niece (just left a bad marriage, has some vague knowledge of the supernatural. Is probably just human, but I'm open).

Bo Brighton

A Regular Ol' Human Hunter in the Circle of Orion, Bo is a diamond in the rough from a midwestern town with a genius intellect who had the misfortune of falling in love with the girl next door when she broke through all his logic and theories of the world with a charming fairytale about falling stars. Vera ended up moving away when her parents divorced, but she and Bo exchanged letters all throughout the rest of their childhood and adolescence . While he didn't look like traditional hunter material in his late teens, Bo was scouted by a set of Hunters who crammed his genius brain chock full of lore of the supernatural and taught him how to fight for himself. He ended up joining the Circle of Orion right as letters from Vera stopped, leading him to wonder if the Supernatural was behind her disappearance.

He's too smart for his own good, tends to ramble, has piss poor social skills at times and has a bunch of knicks and cuts and burns from trying to cobble together some sort of new invention... or make the perfect soufflé (or both).

Looking for: Because I'm terrible, you know full and well that Vera's a GD supernatural. Whoever picks her up gets to pick what she is.

Sarina Corwin

Brackish Siren turned during an adolescent summer afternoon by the river gone terribly wrong. Sarina's sudden change of both diet and demeanor led to great tragedy, leaving her ostracized and out of touch and struggling to learn the ropes on her own. Years spent learning on her own and avoiding hunters has led her to Colorado, where she relishes helping bby supernaturals without a clue find their way in life, while also keeping them safe from hunters.

Looking for: Her concept is still formulating, so she doesn't really have any want ads at this time.

Neriah Hanlon

The Petal and Vine Shop has been a staple of Crow River since the town's inception, all operating out of a dreary-looking Victorian manor owned by the Hanlon family who seems to pass the business and the property from Mother to Daughter throughout the years. These days, the shop is owned by Neriah Hanlon, a Changeling who has secretly been running the shop the entire time. Neriah is something of a town darling -- always willing to lend a helping hand to those who need it, and who would literally give you the shirt off her back and knit you a whole closet if she felt you needed it. In truth, Neriah helps people forget when needed, and as a neutral agent, has probably offered her services to many of the factions within town provided that she gets proper payment of... a secret, a story, a little trinket that has some sentimental value -- anything with meaning.

And for anyone who would threaten her, she'd like to remind you that oleander is such a beautiful bloom, but can be so very poisonous.

Looking for: Still an evolving concept. I kind of want her to be a Mom friend to people, but who can also snap into being TERRIFYING if trifled with. Give her employees at her floral/tea shop/parlor. Give her people she's helped in the past. She's SUPER OLD, and has probably known some of these characters since they were knee high to a grasshopper.

Genevieve Thorne (Née Durand)

Born to a prominent and well-respected family of New York old-money sorcerers, Genevieve was born out of a magically political union and was expected to do the same. While her magical talents were not neglected, Genevieve was always thought of as "less than" when it came to her older brother, even when she proved more capable, more ambitious, and more willing to learn and be more. When the time came, Genevieve ended up showing up to her marriage ceremony, only to end up murdering the groom and most of the wedding attendees (including her own family) with the help of a Vampire that she had fallen head over heels for. While the pair officially tied the knot later, they would refer to that instance as their true wedding.

Genevieve has arrived in Crow River arm-in-arm with her husband, and has made powerful friends to gain a foothold in the city (it does help that Ariana is rather charming and useful) and to gain knowledge. Genevieve's true goal is to find some magical way to render herself immortal while still retaining her magic. Lord only knows if she'll actually find it.... and god help everyone if she does.

Looking for: Her husband, namely. It might also be fun if someone were coming after her for that wedding fiasco.

Everly O'Reilly

A curious creature from her earliest days, Everly had a habit for constantly being underfoot and eavesdropping on everyone's business as a child, which didn't earn her a lot of friends, but did leave her with plenty of time to read and soak up as much knowledge as she could about random subjects during her childhood. As she grew older, Everly became less of a pest and more of an it-girl with an Instagram following to match. She was her school's prom queen, but also the Valedictorian, and she was a shoe in for going to school on a scholarship for journalism. Instead of taking that road, Everly decided to be her own boss and became a Podcaster for things dark and strange and twisted that most people would have balked at investigating. She gained a huge following and her work enabled her to travel the world...

Which is how she ended up in Crow River. Crow River was going to be a quick stop on the way to something greater, but Everly ended up seeing something she shouldn't have seen, and one moment she was snapping a photo... and the next there was darkness...

And then she was literally clawing her way out of the grave in the woods she had been tossed into, newly reborn as a Vara Vampire.

Looking for: She's got "her Yoda" as she likes to say, but I would like to figure out wtf Everly saw that she really shouldn't have, and if anyone needs an accidental Vara bby fledgling that they didn't mean to create, hit me up!

James J. Jamison

A few years ago, James would have said that he was the most unordinary of the unordinary folks. A supernerd to the max (complete with the comic book collection and fondness for dungeons and dragons), James grew up being ostracized by most of his peers because he was VERY HANDS FLAILING ANIMATED LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS THING I LOVE. Cue toilet swirlies in the bathroom during recess and lunch. James made friends with another nerd aficionado in elementary school, but said aficionado never learned a healthy way to heal from the psychological trauma of bullying and turned mean instead, quickly becoming a bully himself once he and James reached high school.

And everything would have been all hunky dory had James not pulled his best "What would Lara Croft do" moment and stood up to his ex-best friend, which ultimately earned him the beat down of his life, but earned him a sea of friends who respected him for what he did.

Flash forward a few years, and James was studying to be a graphic artist and was supporting himself in Portland, Oregon by being a pizza delivery driver...

The last thing he saw was the grill of his ex-best friend's car heading right for him... and the next... being cradled in someone's arms, the wet rain, and then... fire and smoke and ash and...

Confusion. James reawoke as a Phoenix and has been trying to piece things together ever since. Luckily, his parents put out a missing person's report for him and he was quickly picked up by a patrol car. After a few weeks of confusion and therapy, James decided to try and go back to his old life, even if he couldn't remember most of it...

But then a letter beckoned him to Crow River, and like Frodo leaving the Shire, James set off on his quest.

Looking For: I would love it forever if someone wanted to be the person inviting James to Crow River. Like, we can hash out that plot together, but I need it like breathing.

Levison Harding

I admittedly do not know too much about Levison beyond a vague concept of him being a native son of Crow River, and a werebear. He left some odd years ago to do things, and just came back after being captured by a group of individuals who hunted supernatural creatures to make a black market of parts for magical rituals, Vampire blood, etc. I think they originally captured Levison for vampire blood and didn't know he was a werebear until he broke out and murdered the lot of them, taking all of the captives with him in the process of escape.

Now seen as the leading figure for a group of Supernatural refugees, Levison has returned home to try and figure out what his next steps are for both himself and the small group of a misfit found family that he's become the head of.

Looking for: Give me the black market group that he's run afoul of now, and give me his found family. There are no alternatives.

Maira Joshi

Another prominent Crow River family, the Joshi's have been present in Colorado records as early as the late 1800's, and they gained a strange notoriety of mostly having daughters within the family. The current head of the family, Faria, hides her status as a seer in plain sight by offering psychic readings and "mediumship" skills to those who aren't in the know, and her abilities as a seer to those who do. Maira is the youngest of her granddaughters, and showed little affinity for magic and happily went along to become an elementary school nurse. She would have stayed that way had she not started having ominous visions all swirling around Crow River, prompting her to take a position in Crow River and move in with her increasingly ailing grandmother for further instruction. Maira -- by her grandmother's own description -- is a sweet and empathetic soul, more likely to slip into someone's dreams to drive away natural nightmares or induce states of calm on the panicked and suffering. Between her growing skills as a Seer and her knowledge of first aid, her true goal is to help where she can, and to stop the terrible future she occasionally still sees from coming to pass.

(SHE IS VERY SOFT Y'ALL.)

Looking for: Other Joshi seers? IDK, I'M JUST EXCITED.

#arsrp #oh god they're all disasters #have some characters everyone

[kendrixtermina]

I’ve found the interview! Or parts of it

Other fun points beyond Claude’s real name.

A lot of my headcanons have been confirmed!

Silver Snow was the first route written (maybe that’s why it’s the weakest? It took them a while to find their Mojo)

El wasn’t just a driving figure in the plot but also in the writing process, ie, the other lords were then developed as contrasts.

Dimitri’s eyepatch was also improv apparently one person just randomly suggested it halfway through, the original model was then used for CF. It was intended to show that he had a hard life in the last 5 years

They say they took some influence from “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”

CF was indeed intended as a “secret” hidden route holding a distinct place - it was originally supposed to be harder to unlock - they also underestimated how many players would always go explore on the first day (apparently the option is only open in the first day - which makes sense, later she’s already departed)

Edelgard is indeed Byleth’s foil/ counterpart / rival / contrast as someone with roughly equal power

So developement wise you might draw some parallels to Elsa (the developers gradually realized this character had more potential as a hero than a villain/ was actually pretty sympathetic - part of why they made joining her easier) and also Rika from Digimon Tamers (they realized the figurines of the girl characters didn’t sell, so they made the primary girl the ‘rival character’ which always sells. Rika was indeed hugely popular, probably because your average anime ‘rival character’ tends to be complex, cool,  and one of the most powerful chars in the setting)

Lysithea was indeed just a prototype, Edelgard had a much more advanced procedure done on her (hence why she generally seems a lot more “super”)

They originally planned for her to be able to stop/interfere with divine pulse but that didn’t end up making it into the final game

You have to consider that a game is not a book or a movie - something might be a cool concept on its own but if its implementation is annoying to the player it’s worthless

However I will take this as confirmation to my headcanon that she has some mild timewarping going on, and that this is what happens when she can attack multiple times (as per ‘raging storm’ or in her Hegemon form)

That really IS Sothis on the mural

An aspect that I didn’t personally consider but adds to my observations of how Rhea is a really interesting take on the concept of a demigod: They stress that to her Sothis doesn’t just represent her mother but also the creator/ her god. She very much does worship her and has goals beyong just wanting back a family member

(Indeed she does tell Byleth that she can’t wait until “Our creator rules this wayward land once more”)

And here’s yet another account of the war of heroes. In this i must admit defeat because others called this and I didn’t:

The Nabateans were in fact ruling over humans, and people were in fact resisting/standing up to that

The Agarthans having their own sinister motives,  invented the methods to make crests/ relics

At this point you DO get greed and powerlust involved - people like Nemesis started trying to kill dragons to gain their power left and right and the balance of power shifted

Rhea didn’t so much “make” the Elites into heroes - The (human) people really did see them as liberators and that was too big to change, so Seiros kept the broad strokes manipulating the details so that all tied back to the goddess.

So they replaced an aristocracy of Nabateans by an aristocracy of people with Nabatean-like powers. There’s an interesting dynamic here

So Edelgard was almost completely right.

I’m sorry I doubted you El!

That said I still get the impression that Nemesis was definitely in it for the power and still massacred civilians.  He’s like the Ten Elites’ secretly evil teammate.

So on the one hand, Rhea didn’t do this unscrupulous act of making people she hates into heroes just for control, on the other hand the war of Heroes was alot more muddy

On the other hand this makes Silver Snow a bad end in my book. “Happiness in Slavery”.

I did talk about how SS didn’t have Byleth growing out of their character flaws the ways the other routes, but now... wow they were a tool until the end

I still can’t believe that Sothis, Seteth or Flayn are evil though, Sothis seems compassionate and disliked Rhea’s methods - but was she even around then, actually? Because she was asleep for a long time after the war with the Agarthans. So the Nabateans, perhaps already under Rhea’s leadership, were already semi-corrupt.

(That obviously doesn’t justify slaughtering them all down to the last child - Zanado was the civilian population)

Seteth might have been as much of a tool now as then. Though I still hold to my opinion that he’s the last one to hold to Sothis’ “real” mission - which was guard not rule

Of course Rhea believed almost to the last that guarding was precisely what she was doing

Heavens this has so many layers and complexities I love it I want to make a full drawn out novel based on a similar premise

That said they specify very clearly that Seiros and co really did just want to keep the peace. They are benevolent/ paternalistic overlords basically

Almyra seems to have an “Ottoman Harem” situation going on where the King has multiple wives and the heir is whoever is worthiest/strongest rather than the eldest. So from the beginning Claude had many rivals as if the bullying he experienced wasn’t bad enough

So Claude/Khalid is different from Dimitri who was always the rightful crown prince, and Edelgard who never expected to inherit and suddenly found herself catapulted up the line of succession. For him it was always a “maybe”.  

This is an interesting contrast to Edelgard. Her father also had many concubines but it seems she had a good relationship with her siblings regardless.

“He won’t hesitate to plea for his life and considers survival as the ultimate victory. That’s also why Claude is the character who survives in every route. “

The original plan was to slip up and have Nader call him the wrong name. i see why they cut it, it would make everyone involved look like they don’t take the situation seriously

The moment in non-GD routes where he couldn’t predict that Hilda and Judith would sacrifice themselves is ascribed to him “having different values than the people in fodlan”. Ouch. So good at reading people but the cultural difference still bit him in the ass at the worst possible moment.

If you see the Church as Seiros as an analogue to a corrupt medieval church, this certainly fits with the common observation by ppl of different backgrounds that christian countries tend to have an undercurrent of glorifying suffering and self-sacrifice in ways that seem masochistic to ppl from other backgrounds or even local non-believers

The beard was supposed to make him look “adventurous”

“He’s a very good guy” - I mean, yeah.  

The timeskip designs were supposed to “radiate their life style over the last five years” - I certainly see that with, say, Dimitri or Bernadetta

#fe3h #three houses #fire emblem: three houses #fire emblem three houses #Khalid #claude von riegan #edelgard von hresvelg #edelgard

[youarejesting]

Femme: 04

[MASTERLIST]

Summary: The year is now 3019. Women were going extinct, cryogenics was the only hope for society. Now Femme Industries is the provider of Females, they use computer analysis and algorithms to match a femme to her male applicants. it is common for femme’s to match with multiple applicants. When you match with seven handsome young men, it is a challenge. But you love a challenge.

Pairing: BTS - OT7 x Reader, Kwon Jiyong (GD) x Big Bang, Eventual TXT x OC

Rating: Fluff so far

Length: 1.2k words

Dinner ended with no more incidents and the seven refused your help in cleaning up, you nodded and sat down awkwardly alone. There would be a time when you were all comfortable with one another and you could help out, so you weren’t too worried. The awkwardness was broken by Jimin who sat beside you his hands behind his back. You looked at him were they finished cleaning already, however, when you turned the boys were still working together cleaning. Jungkook had taken it upon himself to put away left overs while sneaking a few bites.

“I made dinner so I don’t clean” He said and you turned back he was acting shy and running his hand through his hair. The action was sexy. Jimin’s every move was elegant and breathtaking. With a nervous giggle he turned. “This is uh a gift from my eomma, Halmeoni an’ myself”

He handed the small box over and it was filled with a soft pink tissue paper inside was a pretty box with a perfume, opening the box and pulling out a red and gold potion looking bottle. Opening the cap and spraying a little on your wrist and gently patted it onto your neck. The smell was a beautiful and complex. At first it was sweet and fruity but then with a little more you could smell Jasmine and white chocolate and as it warmed against your skin it had a musk and wood scent behind it.

“I made this. With uh” he turned to Namjoon and spoke quickly the two exchanging word in Korean and English before he turned back “Litchi, Kiwi, white chocolate and Orris root an’ an’ more”

“You made this yourself, Jimin this is beautiful I love it” you smiled and noticed the second gift which was a beautiful antique brush set. The brush, comb and hand mirror sat on a small red velvet cloth. The handles were beautiful and the gold filigree was so delicate. “Jimin this is beautiful are you sure?”

“This was my Halmeoni’s, she want you to have” he smiled and you held the box to your chest and you felt your eyes begin to water. Placing the box on the coffee table you launched yourself to him and gave him a hug. You were overwhelmed by how nice all the boys were being and how thoughtful their gifts had been.

“Thank you Jimin” You whispered and there was a knock on the door and Jin went to answer and some boys came in and smiled talking rapidly you carried the box to your room and placed the perfume on the shelf with your make up and the brush set delicately on the small velvet cloth they had rested on whilst in the box. You smiled at the book and there was knock at your door.

Yoongi opened the door slowly peaking in before stepping inside. He placed a tiny piano on the shelf. It was a figurine of a black grand piano. He twisted a little handle and a tune started playing. It was sweet and you listened to it. “I um wrote the song for you”

The song started again and he went to leave. You thanked him quickly and he smiled over his shoulder before passing Namjoon in the door way. The song came to a stop and Namjoon smiled “Our neighbors have come to say hi would you like to meet them or would you rather wait”

“I would love to meet them” You smiled fixing your hair and stepping out and smiling everyone was strewn all around the living room. There were five new young boys in the room they were all very cute and tiny. “Hello”

The scrambled to their feet and bowed to you. Greeting you together as a group. You stepped forward and smiled giving your name. They all introduced themselves and you smiled at their nervousness. They blushed when you called them cute and answered your questions as best they could. They were all still in school.

“Noona you are so pretty” Soobin smiled his eyes were round much like Jungkook’s and you wonder if he looked like Soobin when he was younger. “I hope one day we can have a pretty femme just like you”

“You all live next door?” You asked and Yeonjun smiled widely and nodded “Well if you need anything, I will be here to help”

They all bowed again making you laugh and bow back. You felt so embarrassed when people bowed at you, hopefully you would get used to it soon. The boys left and you sat on the couch with a sigh. Jungkook and Taehyung were now sat on the floor playing video games on the television.

You had a knack for moving unnoticed, however, you assumed due to being a new part of their life and house hold. It was one of the most awkward moments of your life. You closed the door to your room and grabbed some pyjamas. They were a deep blue satin button down with a pocket and collar a contrasting thin pink piping trim and ribbon on the shorts.

You headed to the biggest of the three bathrooms. It was so open and light you walked in and there was a small white plush bench beside a beautiful indoor plant. Stepping up three stairs you saw the vanity and two sinks in front of a huge mirror. There was a section already for your products and toothbrush. On the wall opposite the vanity was a large cube storage the bottom few had baskets to hold clean and dirty washing the top held towels and the middle held more products or decorative items.

There was three different colored robes hanging and an empty hook. There was a knock at the bathroom door, you placed your clean clothes into the top basket and walked to the door unlocking it to see Hoseok.

“Uh I have a gift… for you” he said blushing you nodded walking over to the bench. He sat down with you and held out long box with a bow on it. He held the lid fiddling with the ribbon. You could tell how scared he was you leaned down, look up at his handsome face. He caught your eye and couldn’t stop the bright smile that pulled his lips.

Handing the box over, he rubbed his hands on his pants. Inside was a red silk and a round red wood box with gold edges and tiny gold ornamental details similar to the brush set Jimin had given to you. It was beautiful. You gently picked it up and turned the key, the interior was red velvet with small sections for different jewelry.

“It was my mother’s old Jewelry box, but we made it new, to same Jimin’s present, we all tried to same gifts” you hugged him and he hugged back and he pulled out the red silk and smiled.  You couldn’t help the laughter that filled the room as he acted cute. The robe was a beautiful red, he hung it up on the hook next to the dark purple one. “Next to JK’s, you are our family”

“Hoseok” You called as he picked up the Jewelry box and went to leave, you walked over to him and hugged him again he was grinning so happy. “Thank you all of you so much”

Femme Media 04

Next Chapter 

#bts #bts seokjin #bts jin #bts yoongi #bts suga #bts hoseok #bts jhope #bts namjoon #bts jimin #bts taehyung #bts jungkook #seokjin #jin #jin x reader #yoongi #suga #suga x reader #jhope #jhope x reader #namjoon #namjoon x reader #jimin #jimin x reader #taehyung #taehyung x reader #jungkook #jungkook x reader #bts x reader #bts ot7 #bts femme

[missbecky]

Okay, time for another long post about a cool weird thing that happened with my cards last night. I still don't know how I feel about deities, I don't know that I'll ever worship one, as that's just not me to worship. But I have felt as though there was an entity, goddess, force, something trying to reach me. Any time I've tried to glean information on who it was, I kept getting a door slammed in my face. I kept getting messages that I wasn't ready. And I was totally fine with that.

I'm unemployed right now, I'm a single mom, and I live with my disabled mother to help take care of her. With COVID-19, we don't take chances as my mom is in the high risk category. What that all means is that I've had way too much time on my hands. So I've been like a sponge, soaking up all the knowledge I can when it comes to witchcraft. Not being ready wasn't that big of a deal, because it just meant I got to do more research and keep putting off stuff I didn't really want to do.

Yesterday, I did my daily card draw, and the message was suddenly way different. Change has always been in the messages, but also the stopping in order to be ready for the changes. Yesterday morning I drew the the star, the chariot, and the hanged man reversed. I took that as a go for it.

Later that day I was prowling all the research servers, and the went to Google something about deities, and found an article/blog post someone had written about wishing people would stop using a very specific tarot spread for deity identification. Naturally, I decide to do that very spread. It was a five card spread, I wrote down what I wanted to know, and started shuffling. I shuffled for what felt like forever, and then when I laid the cards out, without thinking, I laid out 7. At first I was going to put the last two back, but decided to leave them. And the cards were all over the place. But I looked at it, and thought, "whoa, whoever this is, is not messing around.

So this is what I laid out.

Before I get into breaking down what these cards meant and how each one directly correlates to one specific deity, I want to point out where my head was at going into this.

I basically really actually got started with everything like 2 weeks ago. I'm basically still a newborn, right? Anyway, as soon as I start researching, I keep getting drawn to Deities. That's weird because I'm an agnostic and basically have no interest in higher powers. If they're there cool, if not cool. I have always believed that if there is some kind of being that could mold and shape the world, then my puny human brain can't comprehend them anyway, and it's really none of my concern. So, it's been really strange that this repeatedly keeps sticking out for me. I get the distinct impression that whatever energy is reaching out to me is female, a tie to the moon, the feeling of 3 was there, I knew it had to be associated with motherhood, and just a general overall feel of the empowerment of women. Naturally, I just kind of assumed Hecate, but that never actually felt correct to me.

So the 3 of cups being the first card just kind of reinforced the sense of 3 to me, and the whole sisterhood aspects of women empowering women. I wrote down 3, sisterhood, and good times. In the spread that was supposed to be 5 cards (and I did 7), the first card was supposed to sum up who the deity was.

I love my tarot deck for the strength card the most, I think. Strength is a mama bear. Again, this confirms my feeling of being tied to motherhood. The second card was supposed to represent the deities weakness. I wrote mama bear, power, and overly protective.

The third card was the chariot, and according to the spread this was their strength, their power. I wrote down action, strength, determination, will-power.

Then I get to the 4th card, the lovers. This is supposed to be what they rule. This one had me scratching my head. Now the author said this one will be harder to figure out, because the deities could even try to be snarky with this. I didn't even know what to do with this card, but like it made sense later. As I was going through each card individually, however, I came up with nothing, and in turn wrote nothing.

Card 5 was to be their symbol or association, and I had drawn 7 card. Anyway, I began analyzing the reversed hierophant, and the reversed 2 of cups. By that point I'm feeling personally attacked. And then the King of swords felt like a slap in the face. Words like logical, smart, level headed came up, which is honestly the person I've always prided myself on being. What was that person doing trying to contact a deity? I basically had to stop and ask myself wtf I was doing.

Like all shadow work, I decided to go browse the internet to distract myself from having to think about it too much. So I start googling triple Goddess and love, even though the lovers definitely didn't feel right, I'm like what the hell? Why not? Hecate and Diana come up, well that's not right. So I decide to take away the triple deciding I could just be way off base with the whole 3 thing. So I Google goddess of female empowerment and found a list of badass goddesses, and Artemis stuck out to me. But I'm like, no, that can't be right. This peace loving hippie couldn't possibly identify with the goddess of the hunt (which was the extent of my knowledge about Artemis). I then Google goddess of sisterhood, envisioning a woman running with a girl gang fucking shit up. What the fuck do you know, but that is Artemis.

After that Google search, I decide I clearly don't know enough about Artemis, and had recently downloaded some Greek mythology books, have never had the slightest interest in Greek mythology, but I saved them in my Google drive just in case. After finding out a bit about Artemis from Google, I turned to the digital books I had.

It was crazy how each of the cards began actually tying into the mythology of Artemis. She traveled with like a gang of nymphs, which I'm sure there was some sisterhood there. She helped her mother deliver her twin brother, and became like the patron God of childbirth. She defended babies and Young girls. She only ever wanted to belong to herself and so she requested everlasting virginity. From what I read she was very protective, straight up murdered rapists, and she was strong to a fault, which made sense why the strength card was listed as weakness. Apollo challenged her to hit a target way out in the ocean that she couldn't see, telling her she couldn't do it, she did it to prove she could and there was no better sharpshooter than her. The target was Orion, the only person she ever loved. So the reversed two of cards made sense. The reversed hierophant made sense because she was not traditional, she went against the grain. Her story is far from ordinary, even by mythological standards. She was a straight up badass that lived life on her terms and no one else's. There's nothing more rebellious than a woman with such control of her own life and destiny. And of course the chariot would be her strength identification, she was nothing but action oriented. The lovers could be interpreted several ways, but I take it as a woman who loves herself so fiercely she had no need for any other kind. But also when I think of love, I don't think of romantic love, I think of the bond i share with my daughter. She fiercely loved her brother, and maybe because she helped with his birth it connected her to him similar to that of a mother and child? That of course speculation. But the lovers card could also be a jab at her eternal virginity. And the King of swords sounded exactly like Artemis.

So I'm convinced this spread is talking about Artemis, but I can't shake the aspect of 3. Can't let that one go. Don't know why. So I'm looking through the l The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, and in it he speculated that Artemis was in fact a triad/triple Goddess!!!

Needless to say, I lost my fucking shit after reading that one. I was right in what I felt about what traits I felt the energy having, and the fucking spread related with every gd card.

Oh, and apparently Artemis chose to spend most of her time in the mountains. One of my favorite thing in all of the things is the mountains of Colorado, second only to my daughter, and I even identify as connected with earth elements the most because of my love for mountains. Makes me wonder how long Artemis has been trying to get my attention 😉

Anyway, I don't know what this all means to me personally yet. I've been ridiculously drained today, it's already 11 pm, and I only just now felt like I had enough energy and focus to write this out. So haven't had much time to sit with everything I experienced and felt last night.

However, it was very exciting! And I had to share my experience!

#witchcraft #witch community #tarot #witchblr #magick #Artemis #deity #deity work