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A beautiful bounty in an annoying bone container

@toolusingmammalgirl / toolusingmammalgirl.tumblr.com

I plucked these views from the Slurry of Moral Relativism and I'm quite fond of them

HWÆT

I’m Alexi, she/they; beyond that, I don’t like centralizing my character sheet

I’m making a webnovel, Mission Critical, about 24th-century space exploration and Lunar sociology and the weird mixed feelings of being from what-was-once-North-Korea and sending out messages that can never be responded to and corporate mascots uplifted to sapience and interplanetary wire fraud and amazing human progress with plenty of petty dysfunction around the edges

(Beyond that, my Ao3 account also hosts a bunch of shorter stories in various stages of completion)

I have a semi-outdated art portfolio on Carbonmade, although I’m not open for commissions right now

From 2016 to 2019 I made a webcomic, Parhelion; it ended prematurely, since it no longer worked with my life’s schedule, but it has a lot that I’m proud of and is a neat fossil record of my artistic growth

From 2019 to 2020 I made a worldbuilding blog, The Solar Symposium, which I hope to return to someday, or at least expand its ideas into bigger stories

(Mission Critical is a distinct setting from the other two, which blur into each other a fair degree, but there are plenty of common themes and a fair number of Easter egg references among everything I make)

I also have a few things up on itch.io, and I’m on Mastodon here, here, and here.

me & your fourteen other closest friends have recently noticed that we all vaguely correspond to members of “the felt” from the web comic homestuck,  with sufficient consensus for none of us to feel insane for this conjecture & we are not concerned or upset per se but all wondering what exactly is going on with that

Someone will say "as a queer person in the heart of empire, my life is in danger every day" and you'll find out they're a developer for Amazon and live in San Francisco or Seattle or some shit, and then you'll meet a trans girl from Alva, OK who's like "Yeah, things are pretty good. AutoZone moved me to full-time."

Someone in a queer group in my current blue city said that they didn't like expressions of solidarity because it "diluted their oppression".

We're all state in the eyes of the faggots <- me informing my fellow electron particles that we are being observed by some pervert ass quantum physicists

Listening to Do It and my brain collapses the lines "What are your prospects / do you make your own cash" into "what are your classpects"

lol because of your post I learned that Devi is playing in my city this weekend tyvm

sorry 2 hear that the Sox game sucked

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Hell yeah, hope to see you there!

And yeah, I hadn't been to a sporting event in forever, and while I can be interested in sports at the zoomed-out Jon Bois level, I just can't get invested in any particular team due to the gambling and transphobia, and so an event all about caring about specific teams just did not go well for me

Then I got some shockingly ass lo mein, but things improved nicely when I got to hop on a call with friends, and I plan to be at the Clarendon Park tgirl baseball game on Friday if I'm not utterly drained from getting tattooed immediately prior

My sorrows vast, my meat huge: I can't go to Dyke Mud Wrestling on Sunday because I already have a ticket to see Devi McCallion

However, it looks like I will be able to hit up a tgirl baseball game on Friday after my tattoo, which is especially nice after I went to a Sox game tonight and got confirmation that I am incapable of enjoying sports played by cis people

My sorrows vast, my meat huge: I can't go to Dyke Mud Wrestling on Sunday because I already have a ticket to see Devi McCallion

The thing is that IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS would be a genuinely banger name for a techno-thriller

people routinely try to invert orientalist fiction to try and prove how bad it would be like "oh, you think white guy learns karate and becomes the spiritual karate badass in asia is ok? well what if a billionaire from a tier one chinese city crash landed in north dakota and became chosen as spirit cowboy by jesus christ?" and like, what if we did reverse Lawrence of Arabia, and the thing is man it always slaps. Ok, what if we had an arab muslim become the king of being a 1950s greaser? yeah it would kick ass so severely.

if you made a movie where Hou Ming Hao was granted the blood of christ to become the greatest rodeo gun slinger texas had ever seen every single white maoist would fucking kill themselves because that movie would become the highest grossing film of all time after like a third of Chinas population pays to see the movie three times. CPC party members are posting up photo shoots of them in rhinestone chinese civil war era cavalry officer uniforms with cross draw guns akimbo mauser broomhandles with mother of pearl grips, drinking tsingtao out of red solo cups, they're smoking ribs in Szechuan. White american communists would cope and seethe so hard they would all have a brain aneurysm and die.

because this type of "ok, let me invent the coolest fucking shit ever, wouldn't that suck" isn't actually demonstrating what is wrong with orientalist fantasies of mr honky becomes the kung fu master. the problem is that those stories suck and aren't actually that interested in the meat and potatoes of those cultures. T.E. Lawrence may have been a weird freak pervert, but the thing is he was able to hang out in the tea shop and after everyone got over his terrifying blue eyes and him being insanely faggot coded, they were like oh shit this whiteboy can hang.

All these orientalist isekai fantasies are so boring because it's people that want to be the Lawrence of Arabia whiteboy orders shwarma in perfect vernacular Arabic, whole country rebels against the Ottoman Empire, but they never put in the sheer autistic homo effort to truly become arabic the way a T.E. Lawrence, they lack the humility and sense of wonder. They do not have the love.

Ari (in the midst of a Sherlock Holmes hyperfixation): I don't think Doyle would've had Watson get married if he knew how long the series would run for

Me (who has hardly ever read or seen Sherlock Holmes media at all): he can get married if it's part of a bizarre polycule thing that none of them have the vocabulary to discuss in depth and they're a bunch of autistic weirdos just figuring it out as they go

Ari: you're so right

saying this as mildly as possible but the anti ai posting tenor on this website (not last post, but in general - i have been biting my tongue for a long long time) is one generally oriented towards a maximal amount of self-righteousness. in my experience, self-righteousness only ever produces martyrdom and a punitive desire for "justice" that can never quite be quenched. none of it is actually conducive towards good politics around the matter in question, least of all ai, which is frankly poorly understood and thought about on here. a little more compassion and thoughtfulness and a little less solipsistic self-absorption perhaps is in order.

  • finally! a type of pollution i am not complicit in
  • finally! proof my art is innately virtuous in at least one way
  • finally! a perceived theft of which i am invisibly the victim
  • finally! a perceived laziness which i can avoid falling into

Surfers' desire for the best possible waves to ride with their surfboards make them dependent on conditions that may change rapidly, given the unpredictable nature of weather events and their effect on the surface of the ocean.