re: discussing bland "D&D isn't about being gay why does everything have to be gay there's no room for degenerates in roleplay" mean comments on the Wizards of the Coast rainbow capitalism post
I did end up taking that nap yesterday and it cured what ailed me, I felt a lot better afterward. I also don't think I mentioned it but I took today off as a personal day to try and put a band-aid on burnout; this morning I was agitated and restless and it took me a while to realize that is just what it feels like to, um, have energy. I guess I had forgotten? Or at least I didn't recognize it, but I felt good enough to do chores and go on a run and I think I'm going to do some backlogged tasks today like go through the pantry/fridge.
Also, given the above, today I'm pondering my routine/schedule and how to maybe make some changes, because the humors are definitely out of wack
erikavonkaiser wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2024 3:31 pmAlso, given the above, today I'm pondering my routine/schedule and how to maybe make some changes, because the humors are definitely out of wack
Okay, some broad strokes:
requested a week off in July around my birthday, should know if it's approved or not by tomorrow
I think I'm too exhausted of the entire situation to explain but I did make progress of a sorts with the medical thing I'm dealing with, or at least I'm trying a new tactic (anyone who reads this will know what thing I'm talking about and let me just say goddamn this entire process is excruciating)
I have my planner filled out and my workout schedule set; this isn't a new thing I'm doing, just something I've fallen off lately because the low spoons cycle has gotten to me
I have become the writer who never writes and instead of doing anything about it, complains about never being able to write, and I'm committed to taking ownership of that
(what the above means is I'm still troubleshooting exactly how I want to implement writing more, but this week we're starting with a vague "write 1k in your novel project by Sunday" goal and we'll adjust from there)
I cleaned out the fridge and pantry and I honestly have no idea how to Food Better but I'm going to continue living off salads and sandwiches until I figure it out
We're starting there! Gonna try and do better, I've not been in depression mode necessarily but I've just been deeply caught in the cycle of capitalism/adulting exhaustion and I need to try and take more time for myself.
A while ago @mek mentioned I wouldn't like most of the Rusty Lake games because they're a brand of abstract/weird that tends to make me grumpy and he was 100% correct because I'm watching Gab Smolders play through the Rusty Lake Hotel and what
I like it because I like it when weird art exists but I definitely would lose my patience playing through it
Watching it in the background while I draw works for me though
I think everyone has at least one piece of media they've had a "bad breakup" with.
Harry Potter is probably the kneejerk example, although I would say usually the "breakup" in question isn't that damaging -- J.K. Rowling has a tremendous amount of financial and speaking power she actively uses to cause harm to queer and trans people, so that kind of puts covering up your Deathly Hallows tattoo in a different category than "I just didn't vibe with her work anymore." Usually it's just something you fell out of love with in a harsh way, or that you maybe started to realize was making you and your identity the butt of a joke.
My bad breakup is definitely Destiny, and particularly Destiny 2.
The tl;dr is that it's a game that kinda followed along with me through some tough times, which I'll always appreciate! I played the first game a lot with my brother, and then I went to war and the dark times and spent many years not creating, having hobbies, or really enjoying my life very much at all. When I started to emerge on the other side trying to make some changes, I picked up Destiny 2 and in what was honestly an act of extreme loneliness, looked up what guilds were recruiting to see if there was anyone I could do more difficult content with.
I joined a guild called Accretion Disk, where I met Shane, Masque, Greggo, and Sam; aka the people who are now my best friends and even, in Masque's case, my legal next-of-kin.
This was an extremely important event in my life, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. But as I went along, and especially as I started to become more comfortable in my own queerness, I struggled with Destiny 2's content. There's a lot of reasons why I don't play that game anymore, and I won't go into them all, but today I was thinking of one of my final straws (there were several!) and how it still pisses me off and honestly makes me want to create the most explicitly queer content I can, out of spite
THAT SHIT RIGHT THERE
The backstory for that is Saint-14 and Osiris are Destiny characters who, for most of the franchise, were just background lore characters. Osiris was a prickly Warlock researcher into the Vex and Saint-14 was a dead hero of the past. During an event in Destiny 2 you can bring back Saint-14 from the dead, essentially. He and Osiris at no point speak to each other in-game, and only reference being friends. Possibly close friends, if you squint; I was actually going to reference some art I remember of Osiris at Saint-14's grave giving him what appeared to be a forehead smooch, but I found the art and it was fanart so it doesn't count.
Anyways, Saint-14 calls Osiris "brother" and I really cannot overemphasize how for years after Saint-14 being "resurrected," he and Osiris do not interact, and when they reference each other it is as brothers. Again this was explicitly so, using the actual word "brother." It was a common fan interpretation to ship them, unsurprisingly, and there was some lore that read homoromantic, but by "lore" I mean flavor text on weapons (that you have to go out of your way to view in-game) and little short fiction that some of the writers (notably, the guy above) would post on the Destiny official website.
None of it, absolutely fucking none of it, was in-game, and if it was, it was not easily accessible and not in spoken word or in interactions between the characters.
So when the writer popped out going "um they've been gay the whole time 
" I lost my fucking mind, because how dare you treat the audience like their lack of paying attention is what has caused the queerbaiting?????? How fucking dare you act like you get good boy points for making them gay on Twitter and nowhere else???? PUT IT IN THVisodgoos
PUT IT IN THE GAMe
PEUT T +RDDFH PU I'M MAD STILL
put it in the fucking game!!!!
I think they eventually did, but by then I was long gone, especially in conjunction with their other treatment of queer characters --
(the only wlw characters who exist are tragedy lesbians in the lore or Ana having a girlfriend who only existed in non-canonical comic books; Uldren Sov was a queer-coded villain who died for his crimes and later came back as an incredibly heterosexual good boy; re: Uldren they even went out of their way to make the man he was homoerotic with in lore a married heterosexual later on, like I cannot over-emphasize how out of pocket it was that you click on a gun and the flavor text is Jolyon going "hahaha I sure do love my wife who I have sex with, it's a shame Uldren Sov, who I loved as a brother, is a psychopath" I'M GONNA SCREAM)
-- but to this day I think of "they're gay, always have been" said sanctimoniously of characters who only call each other brother, who never kiss, who never speak lovingly to each other, who never take each other's hands gently, who never sit close to each other with their knees just touching, and I think, ah
No, actually, that's not good enough.
And it won't be, until the people who want me to not exist can't look the other way about it
also like you can't even make a daddy joke about it literally no MLM I have ever met would call the object of his romantic and/or sexual affection "brother"
I'm still mad about it I'm gonna go make my OCs smooch out of spite
erikavonkaiser wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2024 3:01 pmA while ago @mek mentioned I wouldn't like most of the Rusty Lake games because they're a brand of abstract/weird that tends to make me grumpy and he was 100% correct because I'm watching Gab Smolders play through the Rusty Lake Hotel and what
And Hotel is one of the less weird ones
mek wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2024 8:06 pmerikavonkaiser wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2024 3:01 pmA while ago @mek mentioned I wouldn't like most of the Rusty Lake games because they're a brand of abstract/weird that tends to make me grumpy and he was 100% correct because I'm watching Gab Smolders play through the Rusty Lake Hotel and what
And Hotel is one of the less weird ones
Yeah I can kinda follow that the animal people become the spooky silhouette creatures and that there's some kind of alchemy weird thing happening with the black boxes and white boxes but beyond that,
nonsense