• if you’re reading this before i actually post them brace yourself i guess

• why is there a whole streak of posts that are just wordplay with no joke

today i was thinking about how it might suck to be the guy whose face is plastered all over the “she i mean they” image.

is this like “the worst person you know just made a great point” pic, where some unassuming guy in a stock photo become synonymous with assholery? but hm, maybe they did something to prompt being associated with the misgendering meme, probably easy to check‍-​

oh. okay. yes this person probably doesnt need to worry about a tumblr meme being the first thing you associate with him. (it’s ryan gosling)

• i forgot how i was going to finish this thought

i’m in communities with people who are somewhat thoughtful yet also fond of guilty pleasure like isekai and fantasy world with video game powers and the general mold of shounen level up magic systems.

this means endless litigation and handwringing about what constitutes “slop” or “popcorn fiction”. one of the central promises of these genres is that they go down easy, give you a drip feed of pleasure without much complication

and on occasion i’ve checked out these stories, and found them boring and outright intolerable to read. to be clear, i take no issue with the concept‍ ‍‍—‍ i’ve read millions of words of naruto fanfiction where characters become mass murdering ninja while still in elementary school. i’ve endured downright dreadful prose while digging deep in the yuri mines.

power fantasy is cool, but it’s not my fantasy.

still. just. imagine having a whole industrial complex dedicated to giving you comfort media

• i forgot if i was going anywhere with this

#he was willing to let a parasite play with his insides ofc

i get it now. i Understand

i’m biased against this theory because of who proposed it, but in a chatroom we noticed that a lot of higher beings are not bugs. pale king was a wyrm, white lady is a root, unn is a slug, and i have no idea what the nightmare’s heart is. radiance is kind of the odd one out, being a moth

which is the basis for this theory: the radiance isn’t a moth. if she even held that form outside of dreams, it was akin to pale king’s transformation, an affection simply for the sake of appealing to and manipulating her followers

no, if you want to know the radiance’s true form, look at the infection. that’s what she is, pure and simple

sometimes you’re talking with someone, relating about your shared interests or they’re just intrigued by you as a person, and then they say something and you’re reminded ah right, i walk alone on this earth forever and always.

probably for the best real life doesn’t have those [Character disliked that] notifs, talking to me would not be for the faint of heart

• if you think this post is about you
• don’t
• this happens so often that i don’t need anyone specific in mind or prompting this

#I understand getting nostalgic for old fights boss #but when the heroe swings you gotta dodge!

can i not indulge my arch‍-​nemesis now that i’ve decisively outpaced them? certainly i’m allowed to be sentimental on the eve of conquering the home that foolishly rejected me. it’s not like any hit from an old rival past their prime could pose a real threat, regardless of the runes etched on that blade

wait where did my protective aura go

there’s an interesting evolution of baiting and asshole behavior where see, you have the garden variety asshole that’s just a jerk to people, pushing their buttons and breaking rules

then you have the one step savvy troll that notices assholes get punished, so they’re careful to never break any rules, but still go as far as they can in that domain of deniability.

but this is old news, the concept of the line‍-​toeing troll so widespread everyone recognizes it

i think this creates a niche for an even more socially conscious kind of malevolence, a kind of homeopathic trolling composed of singularly acts of button pushing without every getting carried away, or even losing the support of the crowd

me when aro or allo people complain about how annoying it is to see sex and romance all the time: (internally) valid, but ngl i’m getting tired of hearing about how tiring it is

me half the time i see people posting about sex and romance: holy shit shut up,

• this draft was so old it was tagged with haven’s emoji

• to the people reading in the present
• i’m mostly done but i have some mini‍-​essays that take more work to finish
• to the people catching up on the backlog
• good luck!!

it’s a struggle reading or writing in a niche that’s adjacent to a kink if the worldbuilding is much more important to you than pandering to the kink

because even if there’s people writing ostensibly related stuff to enjoy or take inspiration from, a lot of them will just not be doing the same grappling with the justifying assumptions, let alone making interesting tradeoffs for realism instead of erotic appeal

for a tame example you have stuff like mind control or transformation, where i’m sure it’s very exciting for this to be some overwhelming magical effect you’re powerless against‍ ‍‍—‍ but to me that sucks and i think it’s much more interesting if it’s limited and messy

similarly, when you have killers and cannibals or others taboo acts, if it’s eroticized then this means that you’ll mostly get one‍-​shots or long‍-​form stories that warp the logic of the world in favor of the perpetrator, sucking all of the tension out of the story as they always get away without consequences

there’s something acute about realizing just how much of a failure you are. this may sound melodramatic or ridiculous from someone whom people look up to, with achievements and success that so many people would be and probably are envious of.

but that makes it worse, to me? i have the potential, i’ve proven myself, but i still can’t hack it

How many works do you have on AO3?

Six Seven, but there’s several on my site I probably ought to publish already.

What’s your total AO3 word count?

231k

Your Top 5 stories by kudos?

As I only have six seven stories, the odd ones out are Tines of the Devil’s Fork, that drabble chain no one much cared for, and Lucid Hours, Inverted Nightmares, maybe because I posted it after the fandom had started winding down

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I try to reply to every comment I get, since I think it’s encouraging‍ ‍‍—‍ I certainly lose steam commenting if I don’t know if the author cares for it.

Do you write crossovers?

Corrupt Combustion might count as a JJK crossover in some sense, but I’m only really interested in fusions. In most regards I view crossovers as an unserious endeavor incompatible with my suspension of disbelief & investment in a fictional reality.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I’ve never posted anything technically explicit, but at a certain point my sensual descriptions of maiming and blood drinking might as well be smut. (I have written some smuttier stuff, but it’s all short and pretty hard to find.)

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

closest I’ve come is a fic that was briefly titled the same as mine before I talked to the author about it

Have you ever had a fic translated?

not yet

Have you ever co‍-​written a fic before?

not yet

What’s your all time favorite ship?

J/Uzi, was there ever any doubt?

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but probably never will?

Corrupt Combustion I think. evil answer would be Hostile Takeover, but never is a long time and HT is ironically less ambitious.

What are your writing strengths?

prose and dialgoue. I like to think I have a way with worldbuilding and plotting, and some agree, but I’m largely potential man in that department. When I first started answering this, I would have said my ability to spit out thousands of words of rogue draft at the slightest prompting, but sic transit gloria mundi.

What are your writing weaknesses?

when I mentioned this on FBV’s server, someone say I should go: “My weakness is that I care about tag games so much I spend too long perfecting my answer” which is probably a fair cop‍ ‍‍—‍ I have a awful streak of perfectionism. another failing of mine is that I don’t value clarity, and perhaps put too much stock in subtext and technicality, and consequently my writing is simultaneously littered with jargon and attempted poetics but the most long standing problem is that my stories can be awfully slow paced.

What’s a fandom/ship you haven’t written for yet, but want to?

for ships, I mean to say Juzimily or JuziV, but have put some effort into writing them. better answer might be purple malice (Nori/Alice). for fandoms, torn between hollow knight, pokemon, and feng shui engineering.

What’s your favorite fic that you’ve written?

probably Even in Debt‍ ‍‍—‍ Dreams, just on grounds of having a vision and just flat out achieving it.

• i said qpr and the author said i was coping

ok i’m normal now. my drafts are empty for the first time in years.

to those who were here live, thanks! and to those who weren’t, enjoy the scroll

feeling an urge to reconstruct my site’s entire infrastructure from the ground up. wish there was a static site generator that just did everything i want and nothing i dont

unfortunately there isn’t even a markdown→html converter that does everything i want. i’m at the point where i’m seriously considering inventing my own markup language

• but i don’t know if i have the energy for such endeavors this year

re: previous reblog, i was going to put this in the tags but it ran a bit long and is probably inappropriate on a meaningful post

but basically the setting i’ve been working on has a species of intelligent spider that has a sort of domestication/mutualism relation with a species of moth.

the relevant bit is that the spiders’ sexual dimorphism and gender ratio is so extreme that males are diminutive and uncommon, and do not advance beyond the rudimentary level of development necessary for mating nor do they survive the act

thus: to the spiders he/him pronouns would connote a status as pet or farm animal

the moths meanwhile inherit their culture and values from the spiders’ hegemony. so male moths are she/her and present feminine since that’s synonymous with personhood. and the propagation of feminizing wolbachia infections means that being physiologically male may as well be an immature life stageo

• this wasn’t actually vermin cathexis believe it or not

• just describing what i see out of my window

i admit, i hate monster and alien romance as genre. frankly, i’m disgusted by it. why are these things fucking humans?

i would much rather they write proper relationships you can enjoy and relate to, like a romance between two creatures

• i feel so guilty every time it happens even though it’s rare

i wonder if there is much mileage to get out of a concept of an isolated demand for disbelief

this is a common failure mode of “bad on purpose” storytelling, where a certain development in a narrative serves to almost explicitly say to the audience, “wait, did you actually believe what you were told? didn’t you realize how ridiculous it sounded? be serious.”

this feels clever, but it’s pretty risky. because if you truly accept the suggestion of “don’t believe ridiculous things”, then most stories vanish in a puff of logic

be careful inviting scrutiny you can’t withstand

turns out the reason i feels like ass whenever i sit down to draw is because i had a fucked up tablet configuration for years and whenever i thought i fixed it i did not

now i doodle a bug and i smile

it always annoys me when people talk about “shortening attention spans” as if it’s a real and meaningful thing.

once you learn that the origin of the concept was advertisement research by companies concerned that people were learning to ignore their ads, you become terribly aware of how little grounding in citation these conversations have.

every day someone will offhandedly remark on our ever‍-​shortening attention span, but do they know that? or do they just assume it since it’s obviously happening and all the regurgitated popsci communications they’ve been exposed to corroborates the framing?

louis234567 replied:

You know I end having to look up the definitions for a lot of words on your posts (this isn’t an insult, I like learning new words), that being said, I still don’t know what this means.

canmom reblogged

this extreme is unnecessary. even accepting the above hypotheses, introjection is just as ethical. no need to completely reinstall the OS when you can dual boot or run virtual machines

• i want to be a parasitoid mind virus though

writing system designed to be written with two claws, whether dipped in ink or scratching clay, and thus there are several types of stroke that can only be efficiently draw this way; the claws tracing even parallel lines, moving in symmetrical opposition, or letting one follow in wake of the other before cleanly branching

perhaps humans could imitate it with technique akin to dexterous use of chopsticks…

here’s a certain blessed dismay i feel, when after a day spent repeatedly, untenably distracted, i finally start writing, ideas at last taking shape‍ ‍‍—‍ then i glance at my email and notice a fic i love just updated.

most of the time it can wait, but this one happened to be on the short list of fics i drop everything to read…

there are some antiquated words that we really need to bring back, but there are some where you can see exactly why they fell off

like “rattener”. what are you doing. linguistic equivalent of a 3 note post