ashinadash

Male, Female and Other. Very inclusive, also props for including "fuzzies" as a race. Gaming was woke before most of these pathetic Gamergate 2 losers were even born. Maybe even before YOU were born!!

Every time I'm on the character creation screen of a cRPG now, I say "Where are my three genders! Gaming has fallen!!"

Second weirdest post I've ever made. Third maybe? Idk. My best attempt to kill you with secondhand embarrassment alone. It's the lamest trauma anyone has ever had.

Hi chat, so I'm kind of weird when it comes to fiction, big fan. Oftentimes being a big reader goes hand in hand with being a writer, and yeah that's in me somewhere. I'm not super far removed from Ao3 users writing sweaty gay fic about whatever show they like, I guess. Recently though thinking about writing gives me huge panic attacks.

I'd written in bits and pieces through my childhood and stuff, but (yes, again, I swear ot's important) when I read Nevada by Imogen Binnie it really completely busted my brain. Not just in that it alerted me that there were books with queers in 'em, not just in that I swore an oath to search out every fictional trans sapphic I could find, not just in that Maria Griffiths became like half of my personality, not just in that I still can't shut the fuck up about it a decade later. On my 77th re-read of Nevada, I was like "Yeah but what if it was t4t and also a romance and also the leads were younger than sad thirty year old transbian. That would be rad!"

Through my last year of high school, I wrote like 70 pages of a novel manuscript (the formatting was apalling) for that, and even worse than that I started showing it to people. It must have been the autism, but it just never occured to me not to show off this freakishly weird too-personal work-in-progress I was writing. I started by showing it to my awful girlfriend at the time, and then to my parents, and then to people in the writing class I was in at the time. If people didn't know what .odt was, I'd print a copy off, which horrifically means there is still evidence of this Out There Somewhere.

I got nothing but positive reactions, which to be real was probably all of these people trying to be nice to the absurd little autistic trans kid. It was nice except that nobody ever discouraged me from sharing this, so when this older (like 50s-ish) lesbian showed up at a queer youth group I was at and talked about publishing novels, I obviously asked if I could send her my dumb story to look at, and the response I got was the .odt file with so much red pen that the wordcount had more than doubled.

I didn't even get past the first few pages, I get that what I was writing was bad but I was sixteen ma'am, please be a little nicer? My instinct is that a lady in her fifties could have been a little nicer to my bright-eyed, painfully unaware self. I think that's unironically where I got all of my rejection sensitivity stuff from, or at least when it crystallised. I quit writing that shit right there and then, and did not write any fiction from then on. I still wrote giant rambling analysis posts or essays or whatever on video games or movies or books I liked, trying to keep the writing muscles from weakening, but I think the idea that that could eger happen again, and that some random fuck would just completely viciously shred anything I write, before it's even done, kind of messed me up.

By the time I got the guff up to want to write again, I couldn't really do it. I'd sometimes get struck by the lightning bolt of "WRITE SOMETHING" and scratch out some notes, a plot plan, or maybe a page or two of actual story, but nothing ever got far. Always felt stilted and awkward somehow - the shit I wrote in highschool was bad, but I really envy that little bitch for her total lack of self-consciousness. I feel like I'm pre-emptively policing myself all the time or judging and critiquing my own writing as I'm writing it. It stops me all the time, in the last eight years I have successfully completed one short story, six pages and I did not like how it turned out. I'm worse than the "haha I have ten unfinished stories on my hard drive" person; I have like 20 different concepts for stories and maybe five .odt files with less than two pages completed.

It just gets worse and worse it seems, like I have tried showing people my writings since then but the rejection sensitivity is so fucking jacked that I just can't. At this point even when I do get a good idea, and my brain starts the process of boiling over with ideas and dialogue and stuff, my body goes into fight-or-flight mode and my breathing gets unsteady, my chest gets sore. Shit is exhausting and it's why I'm awake now. (3am!)

So, uh, do you have experience with getting over internal cringe response and rejection sensitivity with regard to writing, I guess? It would be cool if I could just idly type out big long stories about women kissing, that's what I'd want. Idk any advice is welcome I guess, not sure what else the point of this is.

If this gets no replies I will delete the fuck out of this post

tbh if it does I might still, this hurt to type and its weird lol

Special thanks to @[email protected] for this incredibly sick banger. It's kind of like if Black Dresses and Sleigh Bells kissed, which I dig.

Idk if there's a better comm for this, but.

Let's say, purely for the sake of argument that I am currently on a super-cool prescription painkiller that works great. Let's also say for the sake of argument that the bone/sinew structure that's supposed to hold my ribs together is trying to kill me constantly by conspiring with the base of my skull to cause me unbearable chronic pain. If I skip more than like one day of the cool prescription painkillers, then even just walking around becomes challenging. But also, if I just keep taking the cool prescription painkillers, I'll build up a tolerance. I'm on like 75mg a day right now and even that could be playing with fire.

I need something cool that's gonna dummy out my pain receptors long term. What's a good painkilling solution? I've tried cymbalta, taking way too much paracetamol and ibuprofen, and this cool highly addictive prescription thing. I'm game for any suggestions.

Help I love UGLY DEATH NO REDEMPTION ANGEL CURSE I LOVE YOU so much

Occasionally late at night, this one burns in my brain and I cannot get to sleep for thinking about it. This is a lil ramble about Imago by Tristan Alice Nieto, a short story from Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, which was Topside Press's final publication and is in print from LittlePuss nowadays. I'll put a CW for discussions of death, murder and bodily decay (and also chronic pain) but I promise it's not that bad. (though it is somewhat morbid obviously)

||Imago is easily the best short story to come out of either Topside anthology collection, which is saying something given that Meanwhile, Elsewhere is actually pretty good across the board. No other short story tugs at my stupid brain the way Imago does several years after I last read it though, so I'm having to write this. I guess I'm feeling a bit corpselike lately.

The thrust of Imago is that it's a soft-scifi future where people can get their eyes swapped for stereoscopic camera sensors, and other biotech-y things. There's been a huge plague on the planet at some point, dubbed the "white plague". (lol, lmao) Since people have been dying all over the place as the world goes to shit, the development of Revivarol seems like a great idea: a shot of oxygen directly to the brain, essentially kick-starting a recently deceased person and putting the body's repair mechanisms into overdrive. The final frontier! Death defeated! Except that the kind of oxygen deprivation among other things that happen when the body dies tends to mean that Revivarol patients are cold, distant and often irritated, with badly fragmented minds not even resembling the person they were in life.

This is where we find Tabitha;

"It’s phrased as a question, but I don’t know the answer. Am I Tabitha? I think that was my name, but I don’t know if I’m still her."

She's been murdered, her eyes are missing, and a few days later the cops have shot her with Revivarol in a morgue, hoping to get answers on her murder. Brain death being what it is though, the worst parts of a Revivarol resuscitation have long since set in.

So immediately this is like, Oh, Yeah. It's hitting the general fear of death in a very specific and unique, physical way, by making decomposition a livable experience, and also it's bringing a loss of self and identity into the picture. A ragged grinding corpse, days out from death and with degrading grey matter: find out who killed you. Couldn't really tell you why this hits, but personally I guess I feel instant and all-encompassing sympathy for Tabitha, in life a sad transbian who was murdered and in death an agonised thing living within a broken body. I love how harrowing Imago is, I can never sleep after I read it. Bonus points because her family can't bear to deal with her in her revived cadaver walking around, double bonus points for when she talks about rising agony held off by diamorphine, her drugged body crumbling inside, or her wrists grinding angrily around, or the pain that shoots through her head when she turns it. Being dead leaves you stiff since decomposition has already begun, but also hey, that's just chronic pain right? I'm a decaying corpse animated by too many painkillers. Joints coming apart and body failing! I know how that one is. This shit fucking sucks.

The murder aspect makes it worse, because at least if you get Revivarol'd like 18 hours after a peaceful death, you'd come back to a pretty intact body. Being stuffed into a suitcase for three days after being killed means Tabitha is covered in slash marks, tire tracks, rope burn, bruises, her elbow is hyperextended, shit like that. Plus, there are postmortem wounds, which never clot (dead) and don't stop bleeding. Gotta drink hot tea with sugar to keep your muscles from going into rigor mortis, (again) your saliva flowing while it lasts. Total failure of the flesh automaton, neurotransmitters animating dead flesh.

Getting to watch this at a remove through the camera-eye the morgue gave her, as she examines her body at a distance in first person, adds a cool level of queasy dissociation, looking at her own corpse. It's kind of a horror story I guess, which I hadn't considered before, but it gets at the ugliest and most tangible fears about death imo. That's kind of what the whole thing is about, I guess, as much as death: the abandon of a failing body. Sure, humans shouldn't link their visual implants up to ultraviolet cameras to see, because their brains will essentially melt from getting that much visual info for more than a week, but who cares? Tabitha is already dead. Fuck it, just another bit of failing flesh. She doesn't have more than a few days anyway.

"I feel like someone pulled a bag of greasy chicken bones out of the rubbish and called it a person. Have I been in formaldehyde all this time? Was I pushed off the shelf?"

Among all this, Tabitha ends up rifling through her ruined grey matter for more on the remaining memories that stand out the strongest: her girlfriend, long deceased, who she can remember adoring but not the name attached. In with the rot and death, the thread of trying to recall her lover (clashed violently against the memory of being murdered, of her corpse failing) is what grounds the story and keeps it from being completely unrelentingly grim:

"My mind naturally floats back to the one source of emotion I have left – my nameless lover. I stare at her image, her abyssal eyes and bold, crooked smile. It has the quality of the last surviving work of some lost, forgotten master. The one thing I managed to save from my gallery of memories as it went up in flames."

I have a habit with Imago, wherein it enters my brain late at night (like 3am, 5am) and refuses to get out, so I sort of traumatise myself with it, for catharsis. I think it's good if you've been feeling low or flat, 'cause if you have any sort of opinion about being a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters, little sparks of electricity moving your flesh, it's probably hard not to feel things about it.

It feels weirdly healthy, I guess, the way Imago tangles so directly with the concept of death, with understanding in full the gravity of your own. It's an experience, getting to see Tabitha told by a cop that they've got her murderer once she points him out. She gets to remember a lot of what he did, she gets to know his name and face, his record. She doesn't feel much about the stabbing or the man who stabbed her, but it could be either emotional reactions dulled by Revivarol or the human brain being incapable of having an opinion on one's own murder.

"The truth is I don’t really feel anything for this man. The vague sense of pity I feel seems to stem from a deeper kernel of anger, of disappointment and betrayal. I can’t really tell what I’m angry at. Maybe it’s society, or the system that failed him, failed both of us. Or maybe I’m just disillusioned at the notion of justice – the idea that there’s anything he or Danielle or the entire police force could ever do to make this even remotely fair, let alone right. As if finding him would bring me any kind of satisfaction."

That can't be all for her, though, so after talking to her murderer a bit she sets out knowing that her eyes were stolen deliberately, to get them back. They have wireless connections and an AR uplink, so. The scene where the Revivarol is wearing off is both disgusting and fascinating, though: muscles like steel pistons, joints fully broken down. Knowing that you were killed just for your eyes must be kind of galling;

"This will be my last action on this earth, even if it ends up meaning nothing."

It's a weird, gross and honestly sad story, my kinda thing, but it ends very well which is why I like it. It's bittersweet and wonderful after all the gristle and blood and dying. When I get to feeling morbid and shitty about a body that's failing, about flesh that can't do what I need it to, Tabitha's shambling-corpse journey and subsequent final memories of her girlfriend always leave me feeling wistful but satisfied (and pretty gay) after everything. It's a good dose of death, sadness, lost love and a lil bit of trans positivity. I'm still not bored of rereading it even though it's short, and I doubt I ever will be.

Objectively perfect & deeply beloved album ❤

Sorry the LP was all I could find cuz the remasters are absolute dogshit.

Slide guitar gettin goofy lives rent free in my head

Also Awaken would be the most underrated Yes epic if not for Endless Dream. Shouts to Awaken! Very nice!

It's right, I have not done anything useful since bear website radicalised me

I simply became angry, bitter, depressed and started alienating everyone I know

Also speaking in ridiculous hexbear memes irl

Once a lib always a lib

So my teeth used to be heavily crowded and impossible to floss, plus as a teen I had very serious depression and executive dysfunction. My teeth were a disaster by the time I got braces on, and those things seriously impeded my ability to brush and stuff. I got them off a few years ago; one of my molars legitimately broke in half when I bit down on soft chocolate, it was so bad.

It's been a lot of repairative work and I've been lucky to have access to it. I'm told I'm doing well on caring for my teeth now which is rad. But two seperate people, my dentist and one of his guys, made a funny suggestion.

"Yeah sis, you got this super strong toothpaste right, 1.1% sodium fluoride? Just leave some of that on your teeth every night, in your lil plastic retainees, trust me sis."

This feels so incredibly wrong, like I didn't even rinse my mouth, and now there is toothpaste on my teeth. I'm supposed to sleep like this? This shit is as bad as upper lip estradiol absorbtion. Why am I tormented by silly sensory suggestions lately? 'Just leave the toothpaste on'...

He swatted at my phone and tapped the PPB at the bottom of the page, feline warfare

I will not stop posting, however. A cat's view of my posts is irrelevant unless they say "meow, nyan" to me.