mosaic of everyone i know

The funniest character in A Secret Garden is the nurse who hates dealing with her hysterical patient so much that she decides "hey, what if I brought in ANOTHER temperamental rich kid and had them fight like pokemon". and it works.

For one month, I am opening my ko-fi shop, where you can access my short story, "melting you're a daydream", a sapphic short story about bengali trans and lesbian schoolgirls, as a downloadable PDF for 15 dollars (starting price). desis and broke kids like me, not to worry, I will upload the story later without a paywall. but I ask the rest of you to consider that I'm a brown trans writer trying to get published, and any sort of financial support and feedback at this early stage for my creative projects is greatly appreciated.

For those of you who choose to buy the story, please do not circulate copies of it with your friend until I have uploaded the free version later. Please respect my creative integrity. I cannot do anything if you go against this, but I hope that you will not.

(The art is by @toripar . The artist will be paid in full for the profits generated by the proceeds of this.)

Indian people who can afford it, if you want free access + artwork, feel free to reach out for the GPay (I don't like sharing it publicly) I'm sorry again to charge but I have to survive and pay my bills and I cannot put up my creativity without charge.

i love how house of leaves makes turning the page a terrifying prospect, never knowing what fresh horrors await for you but getting an idea not from reading but simply from glimpsing the layout, dread in the anticipation of reading. for example, sometimes you turn the page and it's all johnny truant font bullshit

I do not want my fantasy media to be realistic. I want my fantasy media to be convincing.

Genuinely and unironically my philosophy abt music has expanded to “stop writing off music because it’s from a specific genre” and I think that could be applied to most mediums actually

Is country music really all bad or are you only catching snippets of christonationalist propaganda on the radio? Are horror movies always shallow torture porn or are you just thinking of trailers you saw for slasher movies? Are fantasy novels only for kids or was the last one you picked up Harry Potter? Is anime always fan service or are you just running into ecchi clips online over and over and over? Are you looking for good media or are you finding bad media and considering it representative?

parents are so crazy because they can say the most fucked up shit to you when your brain is forming and it sets the tone for your whole adult mind set and then they forget about it the next day

“what if people transition and then regret it?” ok. let’s do that with everything. no more straight marriages until the heterosexual divorce rate is below the detransition rates

ABCDEFGHI KLMNOP RSTUVWXY

23/26

all a girlie needs is to be surrounded by her trinkets and have ambient lighting and maybe an open window with a slight breeze

I hate the trend of just describing books with what minorities the main characters represent and nothing else. not only does it feel weird + exploitative to me it's also such a shoddy ineffective marketing technique. "this is my book with queer polyam disabled vampires you should buy it" ok great but what is it like. about. what are the themes. why should I read it

And I hate both the fact that publishers no doubt force authors to do this AND the fact that independent authors do it of their own volition too. and that it works on most people. actually let's just abolish the way that people on tiktok and some extremely annoying parts of tumblr talk about books in general forever

they're taking persephone out of the public domain because every possible version of that story has already been told. you have to do a modern queer feminist retelling of the scorpion and the frog now.

As much as I appreciate Vaishnavi Patel for wanting to incorporate feminist narratives into the Ramayana, particularly with much maligned characters like Kaikeyi and Manthara, and as much as I dislike Ram as a mythological figure for personal reasons, I cannot help but feel that the author is really, really reaching with the whole "Ram is a raging misogynist and evil since childhood and Kaikeyi is a poor girlboss who only did what she did because of circumstances". Like with The Palace of Illusions, the Draupadi Karna subplot was a little heavy handed, but still rooted in some semblance of credibility, but this whole cartoonish villainizing of Ram feels like a reach and a half. And once again, I don't even like him.

Also another thing,

Feminist 21st century retellings are very readable and are actually fantastic entry points if written well (case in point Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's aforementioned Palace, The Last Queen etc or Michelle Moran's Nefertiti) but if you are going to study a non-Western culture through its folklore, history or mythology you should compulsorily do extensive research instead of limiting yourself to the modern retellings with their snazzy diversity rep or blatant black-and-white political correctness.

A crapton of the Goodreads reviews are like "this is such a fantastic fantasy story which does great justice to a maligned woman!" while also admitting that they have never heard of the Ramayana and this was their introduction to the text. This includes authors like RF Kuang who is unacquainted with Hindu mythology but recommended the book in glowing terms as a feminist text, without understanding that feminism does not exist in a vacuum and that the conditions that created the canon of Ramayana as an epic did not allow for the sort of political correctness that readers are finding in Kaikeyi because she is an aroace feminist.

By all means, read and enjoy the book but don't expect practising Hindus to be a-okay with the idea that this villainous figure from their myths was actually a queer women's emancipator all along. Because that's not how it works. We need to stop the Percy Jackson-Lore Olympus-Madeline Miller-fication of myth and history.

Suzanne collins is a certified GENIUS because by making most of the book about the PUBLICITY of the rebellion and not the fight itself, she was telling us that wars are won by who persuades more- who controls the narrative .

taylor opening the show with the song that says “it’s you and me that’s my whole world” and “i counted days, i counted miles to see you there” i’m sobbing

“it’s been a long a time coming” after almost 5 years without touring 😭

Everything everywhere all at once is a film about a girl ripping the entire universe apart just to find a part of her mother that she feels understands her. And everything everywhere all at once is a film about a mother ripping the entire universe apart just to understand her daughter. And my chest feels like it’s caving in when I think about it too long

someone take one for the team and fall in love with me