“Don’t you know it’s rude to turn up in a woman’s bedroom uninvited?”
Art
{advertisement}
Was Megatron Right? A Critical Examination of Beast Wars
Megatron is not a good person, that much is clear. But what of his cause?
Continue reading “Was Megatron Right? A Critical Examination of Beast Wars”
Some Crab Memes to Brighten Your Day
Some days, the inspiration does not come. Some days, none of the things you have been thinking about feel worthy of becoming essays, whether because they seem too obvious, have been written too many times already, are too incomplete to distribute safely, or cross the threshold from shareable musing to private contemplation. After spending a large chunk of today banging my head against that particular brick wall, I have accepted defeat.
So here are some funny captions on pictures of crabs.
Building Your First World
“World-building” is a challenge that faces many people: novelists, RPG hosts, screenplay writers, and most other categories of storyteller. Settings are the literal and figurative background of tales large and small, and for all that they are rarely the focus of a narrative the way characters and plot rightfully are, they are critical to that narrative making sense. Worldbuilding can be a forbiddingly large task, but it can be both efficient and rewarding if one keeps a few pointers in mind.
Lovecraft Letters: Leznard Twitruvian, World’s Sexiest Man
Encounter the Neural Network’s Sexiest Man below the fold…
Continue reading “Lovecraft Letters: Leznard Twitruvian, World’s Sexiest Man”
Protected: Doctor Alyssa Compilation – Patrons Only
A Very Alyssa Playlist
I often think that the earliest sign of how my gender would eventually unfold was my taste in music. From the earliest I gravitated to pop music performed by women, and even as I grew older and this fondness became tinged with new feelings about the singers’ exposed skin and shapely bodies, there was something there that my male peers didn’t share. My autism aimed me at euphonious, smooth sounds and clear vocals that ruled out the harsher forms many of my peers preferred, but that wasn’t it, either. Before I knew what that meant or why, I could tell, they spoke my language. It was more than titillation, sensory needs, or aesthetics that drew me. The songs were about love and relationships and feelings, and all of them were expressed in magnificently feminine terms, and that made them real in ways that the male-led songs I gravitated toward in adolescence never managed to be.
I learned to be ashamed of this fondness, keeping it hidden. I’d gotten enough odd looks and dismissive noises to know that this was, at best, a child’s fancy best discarded, and more likely, something that contributed to the tumultuous awfulness of my adolescence. I forced myself to appreciate music led by men. I succeeded, but I never gave up on my old favorite sounds.
The future vindicated me.