So excited to finally be able to share my piece for @wildheartzine, a free NSFW AOS Spirk digital zine! Here's Jim and Spock indulging in a fantasy in the captain's chair.

Pentel fude pigment brush pen, watercolour, and white ink on hot pressed paper, A5 size

Full (E rated) image HERE or on AO3

and do go check out the FREE zine for so much more incredible art, fic, and other works 👀

big day for the marvey community

From instructions on how to opt out, look at the official staff post on the topic. It also gives more information on Tumblr's new policies. If you are opting out, remember to opt out each separate blog individually.

Please reblog this post, so it will get more votes!

And again, please reblog this post!

So far: 34 votes, only 5 reblogs.

I've said it before and i'll say it again: THAT IS NOT A FUCKING METAPHOR, JOHN GREEN

Thanks for tagging me in this. I agree that what Gus thinks is the metaphor is not the metaphor in The Fault in Our Stars, but I do think there is nonetheless a metaphor lurking there.

In The Fault in Our Stars, Gus is indeed engaging in classic teenage attention-seeking by putting a cigarette in his mouth but not smoking it, and he justifies this by claiming it's a metaphor for his agency, for his control over what happens to him. "You put the killing thing between your teeth but don't give it the power to kill you." As if you have the power.

But of course, the reader knows this is not a good metaphor. This is not how power or agency work--you don't actually have control over what happens to you, and (as Gus eventually realizes at the very end of the novel) you don't have any say in whether you get hurt in this world.

The actual metaphor is that despite our furious attempts to establish a feeling of agency, we never actually have it. And so of course Gus is wrong when he says, "It's a metaphor." The actual metaphor is that when Gus desperately needs to express his agency over what happens to him, he's not even strong enough to buy a pack of cigarettes, let alone make a choice about whether to smoke them. That's the metaphor--Gus thinks the cigarette stands for the control individuals have over their fate; the actual metaphor is that the cigarette stands for the control we lack, for the fault that is in our stars.

Okay i actually love this analysis

WAIT WAIT WHY ARE Y'ALL ADRESSING JOHN GREEN DIRECTLY

PLS TELL ME JOHN GREEN DID NOT RESPONDED TO MY SHITTY POST PLS TELL THAT'S NOT TRUE

Sorry, @sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog is the John Green

THIS IS MY WORST NIGHTMARE JOHN GREEN IT WAS TRULY A JOKE I HAVE MEDIA LITERACY I SWEAR

I feel like there's two levels of chronically online. There's like, the variety where you recognize obscure memes and stupid drama and post constantly but have some sort of tether to reality and have friends in the real world and read the news from time to time, and then there's the kind where you genuinely don't realize that your political position or feelings about popular media are not just non-mainstream but actively fringe and that it's not emotional labor to pick people up from the airport.

it is, i think, symptomatic of the way larian has built this brand: bg3 was always marketed as being mature (read: sexual), and that was one of the big draws for players - myself included! especially as media pulls more towards extremes, with mainstream video games starting to get increasingly graphically sexual, graphically violent, and the vogue for 'grey morality' becomes the norm, those boundaries get pushed, and it becomes more and more of a selling point.

larian obviously focused on this, along with the How Do You Do, Fellow Kids brand, the increased accessibility of game devs on twitter, and adopted it heavily into their marketing strategy, and are now pretty reliant on the horny gamer crowd for a lot of their audience, and more importantly, they're doing this on purpose.

which is how you end up in situations like this.

characters (white men) the players want to fuck get centred: they get updates, they get more content, they get favoured. halsin's gone from a side character in EA to a half-fledged romance option, to a full romance option: he shows up in the promotional material, is larian's poster boy for the sex scenes, he gets more content with every update.

now gortash gets more heavily implied situationship lines with the dark urge, because players are horny for him. nevermind that some people aren't playing that way, or that he was originally set up to be a lower-level antagonist; nevermind that if the durge's storyline needed expansion, it should've been with orin and sarevok and bhaal, or that it muddies the writing for the rest of gortash's arc + characterisation: people want to fuck him, so it gets put in the game. it's not even to do with karlach, whose quest so desperately needs expansion! it's specifically catering to the people who want their character to have a Relationship with the slaver, because they're either not interested in or not able to focus on strengthening the weak spots in the narrative: they're just doing things that will net the 'my favourite dating sim' people lmfao.

meanwhile, literal main character wyll gets his quest demoted to a subquest, doesn't get bugfixes, doesn't get a single unique romance greeting after 6 patches and months of requests. he's not a Horny character, so he doesn't get the focus: he's not a player favourite, so he gets nothing. it's just... so unbelievably, indisputably racist, and it's incredibly grim and disappointing to watch it happen in real-time.

When a trans woman says “do not call me dude or bro,” that is not an invitation to explain to her why you are going to call her that. Simply do not use the words. If you are told “do not misgender me,” it does not matter how much you explain how you aren’t misgendering her when you use a term that’s misgendering her. It does not matter if you don’t think you’re misgendering her by using a masculine term in a gender neutral way.

All you are telling her is that you do not care about her as a person and will misgender her as long as you feel like you are justified in doing so, which is the exact same logic used by transphobes in misgendering trans people. You cannot tell someone what their gender is. You cannot see their true gender, better than them, and decide what words you want to use.

When you say you are using bro or dude in a gender neutral way, you are not calming her down. You are telling her that she is to blame for the dysphoria caused by your misgendering.

All you need to do is not use the words she tells you not to use. Oftentimes it’s two words. All you need to do is not call one person two specific words. It’s tiring seeing people willing to die on this hill, defending their right to misgender trans women because they can’t let go of two words for a little bit.

Hi stephanie,

I hope this email finds you, as the search and rescue team is otherwise completely out of ideas

saw a screenshot on twitter and couldn't resist speed drawing through it

Original

Flooflers

i'm not actually mad i just like the comedic delivery of righteous but pointless anger

…i may have put way too much time into this

Can’t say I was expecting that.

#I know the TARDIS has a lot of rooms but the empty control room shot absolutely implies#that this is just the TARDIS vibing by herself with the others are out saving the day etc#and that makes this for me (via @starsailorstories)

She isn’t alone 12s passed out on the floor

@amtrak-official

This is so me, I really really want good cities and high speed frequent transit

Is it just me or are the new tumblr users convinced there's a penalty of some kind for using this site like it's meant to be used?

reblogs have always been in short supply for artists, sadly, but it's hitting the shitposts and even the cat pictures lately. Gotta keep getting the word out that reblogs are good and keep people posting new material that will be passed around for the next 12 years

They’re used to other social media sites, where the only equivalent of reblogging is straight-up content theft; so the idea that you can put someone else’s stuff on your page and have it not be a bad thing is a strange experience for them.

They’re likely also used to an algorithm recommending content based on what they hit “like” on, so they probably think that that’s how this works, too.