To Be Fair In High School When I Told Someone I Loved Them I Also Instantly Went To Super Hell

Terry Pratchett started his career as a crypto-monarchist and ended up the most consistently humane writer of his generation.  He never entirely lost his affection for benevolent dictatorship, and made a few classic colonial missteps along the way, but in the end you’d be hard pressed to find a more staunchly feminist, anti-racist, anti-classist, unsentimental and clear-sighted writer of Old White British Fantasy.  

The thing I love about Terry’s writing is that he loved - loved - civil society.  He loved the correct functioning of the social contract.  He loved technology, loved innovation, but also loved nature and the ways of living that work with and through it.   He loved Britain, but hated empire (see “Jingo”) - he was a ruralist who hated provincialism, a capitalist who hated wealth, an urbanist who reveled in stories of pollution, crime and decay.  He was above all a man who loved systems, of nature, of thought, of tradition and of culture.  He believed in the best of humanity and knew that we could be even better if we just thought a little more.

As a writer: how skillful, how prolific, how consistent.  The yearly event of a new Discworld book has been a part of my life for more than two decades, and in that barrage of material there have been so few disappointments, so many surprises… to come out with a book as fresh and inspired as “Monstrous Regiment” as the 31st novel in your big fantasy series?  Ludicrous.  He was just full of treasure.  What a thing to have had, what a thing to have lost.

In the end, he set a higher standard, as a writer and as a person.  He got better as he learned, and he kept learning, and there was no “too late” or “too hard” or “I can’t be bothered to do the research.”  He just did the work.  I think in his memory the best thing we can do is to roll up our sleeves and do the same.

made this to express frustration with internet censorship and how people talk on tiktok. i don't even use the app but I never want to hear the word unalive again

find more of my art at @tr4nsjester on instagram :p

My cosplay of Aziraphale is nearly finished.

It’s so annoying how some straight/cis people will believe in wild complot theories, but when you question the gender binary in front of them, suddenly YOU are the crazy one that got endoctrinated by the Internet...

i know we're all sick of self-care being a marketing tactic now, but i don't think a lot of us have any other concept of self-care beyond what companies have tried to sell us, so i thought i'd share my favorite self-care hand out

brought to you by how mad i just got at a Target ad

“I’m not a starship ranger… I’m a bug.” I wanted to try doing some fake VHS screencaps of Starship. Like a straight to video movie you rented over and over again as a kid. Man, Joey Richter fucking killed it in that last scene…

this is how they used to have sex back when everyone was smooth down there and when metaphors weighed more than truth or logic

The split physical/mental model of disability is a lot like the gender binary, if you think about it.

For one, the categories are believed to be discrete boxes when in fact they have a LOT of overlap (consider autism/adhd-related dyspraxia - even relatively mild cases can make someone injury-prone enough to justify owning mobility aids just in case and severe cases can be functionally indistinguishable from any other mobility disability - chronic pain and other sensory issues, the fact that sensory processing disorders can sometimes be functionally indistinguishable from not having an affected sense at all, the mental impacts of traumatic brain injuries, and so much more) - depending on how you graph factors around them (comorbidity, noncommittal nonbinary identities based on social alienation, etc.) they might not even be a "full" inverse bell curve but a pretty well flattened one.

For two, the divide is given power by people's belief in it, NOT by any material reality of its existence - which means it's difficult but also critical to criticize people's behavior about it WITHOUT implying or claiming it has inherent merit; you can't just go around pretending that people DON'T act differently depending on what side of the binary they perceive someone as being on, but you also can't just decide that the the fact that people do that as a general thing means all individual people on any given side of that perceptual divide necessarily have the same specific internal experience, and it's totally alien to anyone on the opposite side of it.

Inktober 2019 #12 “Dragon” (& “The Cardinal’s Blades” by Pierre Pevel) 

(Based on a portrait of Richelieu by Philippe de Champaigne and an illustration by Rolland Barthélémy)