do you ever think about how if you dive into the ocean and go deeper and deeper you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light, and if you go up into the sky and go higher and higher you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light
sometimes a post makes you get out of bed at 230am to spend a quick hour on something like this
“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.
“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.
“Ulysses is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant. His late mother, Julia, was the President’s last living great-grandchild; youngest daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III, and granddaughter of the president’s eldest son, Frederick. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City. He is also on the board of the U.S. Grant Presidential Library and Museum at Mississippi State University.”
And frankly, the novels sound like they slap:
Desmond was nominated for a Lambda Award.
“With his husband of 45 years.” You kids don’t know … they got together before AIDS, at the peak of the Gay Glam Life. They stayed together as their generation died around them, and made through it to the point where they could marry and have a legal family. He looks like a chipper preppie who never had a serious thought or care in the world, but it took *incredible* determination, commitment, and also luck to get here.
45 years ago is 1978.
He and his husband got together when it was a crime to be gay in almost ¾ of the US states. They saw the beginning of the AIDS epidemic - saw their friends die around them, saw the horrific negligence and cruelty of the medical industry and politicians and religious leaders alike declaring they should all die - and managed to stay together through that, through the fight for the right to live together legally and eventually the right to have their relationship recognized by the state.
being a dom is only cool if people like you. otherwise it’s super embarrassing. if you’re a sub you can be like “ahhh i wanna get fucked superrr hard >w<” and it’s kind of endearing. if you’re a dom and you say “i want to FUCK someone.. who will be mommys little KITTY today ..” and no one actually wants to have sex with you, you may as well kill yourself. because there’s no coming back from that
callback to the time I wrote literal pages of lore and worldbuilding, including a universe with a creation story, afterlife metaphysics, and a timeline featuring the rapture, a divine astral plane turf war, and the introduction of gods and magic to the modern mortal world
for a kink scene where I roleplayed as a sexy demon lady
I workshopped my character’s name, voice and personality and wrote an entire universe to hold her. for a scene that lasted about an hour. if that’s not DMing but for sex I don’t know what is
your honor ive been murdered
Good news: At that level of prep I don’t think it’s improv anymore.
Bad news: turned on by amateur theater
Good news: there are so many of us amateur theater nerds in the world
bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”
I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:
something needs to change here
this is urgent
I don’t know how to do it
death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it’s a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don’t have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that’s likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.
you don’t really want to die per se but it’s also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it’s urgent. you don’t know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.
this is the wisdom of bell hooks: daily rituals of meaning and resistance and solidarity are part of slowly building a future where you can make the change you really need. and only alive people can do that. every step you take towards change and power is another step away from death.
A very similar approach is also the main focus of Kate Bernstein’s Hello, Cruel World. Besides the free “lite” version she put out (linked there), the whole book is available to borrow on archive.org.
So… I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about “life-changing writing advice” all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.
I’m going to try it.
I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that…” in prose writing I immediately think “how? How does he know it?” Interrogate your witnesses. Cross-examine them. Make them explain their reasoning. It pays dividends.
All of this, but also feels/felt. My editor has forbidden me from using those and it’s forced me to stretch my skills.
“Writing Advice”: by Charles Palahniuk- In six seconds, you’ll hate me.
But in six months, you’ll be a better writer.
From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs. These include: Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use.
The list should also include: Loves and Hates.
And it should include: Is and Has, but we’ll get to those, later.
Until some time around Christmas, you can’t write: Kenny wondered if Monica didn’t like him going out at night…”
Thinking is abstract. Knowing and believing are intangible. Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing. And loving and hating.
Instead, you’ll have to Un-pack that to something like: “The mornings after Kenny had stayed out, beyond the last bus, until he’d had to bum a ride or pay for a cab and got home to find Monica faking sleep, faking because she never slept that quiet, those mornings, she’d only put her own cup of coffee in the microwave. Never his.”
Instead of characters knowing anything, you must now present the details that allow the reader to know them. Instead of a character wanting something, you must now describe the thing so that the reader wants it.
Instead of saying: “Adam knew Gwen liked him.”
You’ll have to say: “Between classes, Gwen was always leaned on his locker when he’d go to open it. She’d roll her eyes and shove off with one foot, leaving a black-heel mark on the painted metal, but she also left the smell of her perfume. The combination lock would still be warm from her ass. And the next break, Gwen would be leaned there, again.”
In short, no more short-cuts. Only specific sensory detail: action, smell, taste, sound, and feeling.
Typically, writers use these “thought” verbs at the beginning of a paragraph (In this form, you can call them “Thesis Statements” and I’ll rail against those, later) In a way, they state the intention of the paragraph. And what follows, illustrates them.
For example:
“Brenda knew she’d never make the deadline. Traffic was backed up from the bridge, past the first eight or nine exits. Her cell phone battery was dead. At home, the dogs would need to go out, or there would be a mess to clean up. Plus, she’d promised to water the plants for her neighbor…”
Do you see how the opening “thesis statement” steals the thunder of what follows? Don’t do it.
If nothing else, cut the opening sentence and place it after all the others. Better yet, transplant it and change it to: Brenda would never make the deadline.
Thinking is abstract. Knowing and believing are intangible. Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing. And loving and hating.
Don’t tell your reader: “Lisa hated Tom.”
Instead, make your case like a lawyer in court, detail by detail. Present each piece of evidence. For example:
“During role call, in the breath after the teacher said Tom’s name, in that moment before he could answer, right then, Lisa would whisper-shout: ‘Butt Wipe,” just as Tom was saying, ‘Here’.”
One of the most-common mistakes that beginning writers make is leaving their characters alone. Writing, you may be alone. Reading, your audience may be alone. But your character should spend very, very little time alone. Because a solitary character starts thinking or worrying or wondering.
For example: Waiting for the bus, Mark started to worry about how long the trip would take..”
A better break-down might be: “The schedule said the bus would come by at noon, but Mark’s watch said it was already 11:57. You could see all the way down the road, as far as the Mall, and not see a bus. No doubt, the driver was parked at the turn-around, the far end of the line, taking a nap. The driver was kicked back, asleep, and Mark was going to be late. Or worse, the driver was drinking, and he’d pull up drunk and charge Mark seventy-five cents for death in a fiery traffic accident…”
A character alone must lapse into fantasy or memory, but even then you can’t use “thought” verbs or any of their abstract relatives.
Oh, and you can just forget about using the verbs forget and remember.
No more transitions such as: “Wanda remember how Nelson used to brush her hair.”
Instead: “Back in their sophomore year, Nelson used to brush her hair with smooth, long strokes of his hand.”
Again, Un-pack. Don’t take short-cuts.
Better yet, get your character with another character, fast. Get them together and get the action started. Let their actions and words show their thoughts. You – stay out of their heads.
And while you’re avoiding “thought” verbs, be very wary about using the bland verbs “is” and “have.”
One of the most-common mistakes that beginning writers make is leaving their characters alone.
For example:
“Ann’s eyes are blue.”
“Ann has blue eyes.”
Versus:
“Ann coughed and waved one hand past her face, clearing the cigarette smoke from her eyes, blue eyes, before she smiled…”
Instead of bland “is” and “has” statements, try burying your details of what a character has or is, in actions or gestures. At its most basic, this is showing your story instead of telling it.
And forever after, once you’ve learned to Un-pack your characters, you’ll hate the lazy writer who settles for: “Jim sat beside the telephone, wondering why Amanda didn’t call.”
Please. For now, hate me all you want, but don’t use “thought” verbs. After Christmas, go crazy, but I’d bet money you won’t. End ID]
Last year I wrote about what happened at Pride when a couple of kids didn’t understand why us older folx were so bitter about Reagan.
This year, I have something a little softer.
Someone who looked a little older than me came up to the booth wearing a pink t-shirt proclaiming him one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, San Francisco chapter. As I was ringing him up, I asked if he’d been involved for a while.
“Yes,” he said, “for a bit,” in that way us middle-aged people do when we’re sort of wincing and feeling old.
“Okay, well,” I said, sitting at my register in my queer booth full of queer clothes and patches and pins, topless in public for the first time. (I had pasties on for my own comfort bc I was working, but I live in the city of the Naked Bike Ride, and I took full advantage). My baby brother and both of my partners ran around behind me, my brother wearing a loose tank top that makes his scars visible.
“I need to tell you that you all helped keep me alive.”
He blinked at me as I continued, “I was a kid in high school in the early 90s. I lived in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania, and what you all were doing was so loud and so out there that even I heard about your work. It was one of the things that kept me alive. So thank you, and please thank the rest of the Sisters.”
I heard about them through people in my parents’ church complaining about them, and then I sought more information through the beginning of the internet, through newspapers, through anything I could find. I found the cover of Newsweek that one of the Sisters was on. I read about their “exorcism” of fundamentalist preachers whose books sat on the shelf in my parents’ basement and probably still do. I saw how loud and colorful and unapologetically queer they were.
The knowledge that someone was out there, so full of defiant joy, refusing the shame that people kept trying to put on them? Oh, that kept me alive. I saw them, and I knew I could make it through. I wrapped my hands around that knowledge, and I held on so tight.
It took me a long time - a long, long time - to unwind most of it for myself and get to the point where my fat butch ass was sitting bare-chested in the July breeze, looking up at him as he held out his arms and said “you’re actually giving me chills.” I answered, “I mean every word. You helped keep me alive. So thank you.”
I never know what to say when people come up to me in public and tell me that I helped them or changed their life in some way. I appreciate it, and I genuinely love the people who apologized for “fanpersoning” at me last weekend, I just never know what to say. I’m incredibly grateful that the Sister I spoke to was incredibly gracious, saying “usually we give blessings, but I feel like you blessed me.” Another member of the party let me pet their tiny dog, who was not very interested in me, and that’s okay. It was an overwhelming day. Then, they moved on.
Me? I’m still sitting with the fact that I looked last weekend into the faces of people who didn’t know they were holding my head above water, and that I got to tell them the work they do matters. It’s a rare thing to get to tell someone, “You saved me,” and I’m treasuring it.
Last weekend, I wore my new battle vest with nothing underneath it, unless it was too hot, and then I just sat in my chair, chatting and ringing ppl out with my skin free to the air. I decided last year that top surgery isn’t for me, but that also I’m going to love this body unapologetically, and it’s no less a transmasculine body because the soft new dark hair on my belly isn’t accompanied by pink scars along my ribs.
I didn’t get here on my own. I got here because someone else cut through the undergrowth ahead of me so I could take another step forward. Here I am, decades later, still taking step after step, one at a time, and trying to lay paving stones behind me.
Last weekend was another step along that way, another step through unwinding the fear and shame and sadness that my parents and their church built into me. Another step out of hating myself for hiding parts of myself for so long, for acting out in other ways to distract people from my queerness, for feeling so much guilt when other people tell me I’m brave, because I know how much of myself I hid for how long because I was a coward, because I was afraid.
I was really delighted to see that @drchucktingle was beatified by the Sisters recently. It’s a really fantastic thing to see these wonderful, loud expressions of queer joy and resistance together.
Dr. Tingle exemplifies the same kind of thing I was talking about above – you don’t know who sees you trotting your trot, living your best life, being your kind of joyful queer. You don’t know who hangs on to the mere existence of that joy like a buoy in rough water. You don’t know who sees your light in the distance and navigates by your small star and a million others, navigates out of their own darkness.
You don’t owe living out loud to anyone, and you owe yourself safety and comfort first – please don’t get me wrong. I’m at a point in my life where I am relatively safe, and for a large portion of my life, that simply wasn’t the case. But those of us who can shine for those of us who can’t, and to me that is a sacred responsibility.
I feel pretty lucky to be living on this Earth at the same time as Dr. Tingle & the Sisters. It’s pretty cool.
we were inspired by the London sisters to come out as bi in the 80s (when we were still stuck in the trans closet, and then we made friends with one in the late 00s just before we came out as trans and agender, and then they came out as trans inspired by us, so we’ve come full spiral together and it’s lovely
here’s a documentary about the english sisters if anyone’s interested - our friend is in there
The “Americanization of the global internet” post and slow deterioration of local native culture gave me an idea: many users don’t even know there is native language communities on this website, so if you know of a regional group/“subculture” on Tumblr, reblog/comment with the tags they use so people can find them and connect with other folks from their countries or speakers of a language they’d like to learn
I will try to update this post with every new addition to hopefully make a comprehensive list of Tumblr regional communities
The list so far:
Europe
• Czech
#česky, #hezky česky - general Czech language posts, frequently featuring user-written poetry, art, sometimes politics and current events, warning: often contains vent posts
#čumblr - Czech but frequently used by Slovaks as well, primarily memes and fandom things, shipping, art, cultural things, frequently overlaps with #česky
#obrození, #obrozujeme - memes and fandoms as well but with more emphasis of maintaining and developing Czech culture, is a mostly humorous parody/self-proclaimed continuation of the Czech National Revival of the 1800s, overlaps with #čumblr and #česky
#slav, #slavic, #slavposting, #slavic stuff - mixed Slavic, usually cultural things, memes, art and photography, sometimes politics, sometimes visited by other East Europeans
• Irish
#gaeilge - Irish, general posting but especially cultural things and memes, often features posts for language learning
#jumblr, #frumblr - general stuff, history, discussions, posts mostly in English
Romani
#romani, #rroma, #rrumblr - romani sides of tumblr, general stuff, history, discussions, mostly in English
Please share around wherever you’re from, US American local cultures are welcome as well, especially indigenous (though that should go without saying)
Reminder that this is a post made to allow people to find others of the same culture/language, be respectful and do not use these tags to target groups and spread hate
i love pitting classically trained magic users against self-taught magic users in sci-fi/fantasy but it shouldn’t be snobbish disdain for them it should be terror
“WHO TAUGHT YOU LIGHTNING BEFORE BASIC TELEKINESIS. LOSING MY MIND WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU JUST DID IT. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAST WITH YOUR BARE HANDS”
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT YOU’VE ‘HACKED’ MANA DRAIN
WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘DRINK SOME JUICE’
WHAT IS ‘LOW BLOOD SUGAR’
WHY IS THIS WORKING
I HATE YOU SO MUCH
Okay but other direction can ALSO be a lot of fun
“What do you mean I don’t have to burn half my blood to create a fireball?”
“Why can you teleport more than once without vomiting? WTF is ‘quantum displacement awareness’???”
“You know HOW many spells? HOW? … What do you mean ‘my spell book’?”
“Ooooh, you’re just summoning water portions from the Plane of Water… Lol I thought I HAD to combine hydrogen and oxygen molecules to generate water in small amounts. That’s so much easier then what I was doing!”
Hey folks, if you want to fight back against the twitterfication of tumblr USE IT LIKE IT’S TUMBLR!!!!!! REBLOG THINGS!!!!!! USE THE TAGS TO SCREAM AT YOUR FRIENDS!!!!!!!
Woke up to this having more reblogs than likes! Keep it going! Do it on every post! REBLOG THINGS ON THE REBLOGGING THINGS SITE!
My favourite thing about the D&D movie is it never stops trying to be a D&D movie even down to the most minute, unsung details. There’s initiative order gags (I’ll go last!) there’s rolling a 1 gags (setting off the trap on the bridge by inexplicably just walking up to it) there’s stat gags (nobody had high enough Intelligence to be in danger from the Intellect Devourers). Almost every spell is identifiable, from Xenk using smite to Sofina whipping out Finger of Death. Simon’s character arc is about his self-confidence being tied to his mastery of magic because Charisma is the spellcasting stat for sorcerers. The era of movies based on games being afraid of their source material is over.
And the second best thing about it is that none of this makes it inaccessible to newbies who have never played the game, it works great as a pulp fantasy story, with a truly great mix of genuine character moments and humor. It takes the subject matter seriously but also embraces the absurdity of living in a world where a cat could fall down your chimney then turn into a young woman and walk out your front door.
