Post King’s Tide Doodles (not Sad)

The Green Knight

F-femgrim..... Femgrim my beloved.......

captain general kitten and magnus my beloveds

Not Aurora-related, but I really like your answer in the recent OSPod about just clicking w/ the ace label but not having that same certainty about romantic orientations, because I think I'm that but in reverse-- it's only important to me that I'm aromantic.

So, thank you for putting it into words ^^ Have a nice Pride Month!

Ultimately we all gotta remember that labels are tools, not obligations. If a label helps you understand your wants and needs better, fuck yeah! If the label instead feels like a prison denying you growth and possibility, it's not helpful and you can drop it!

I think our growing awareness of the diversity of human sexuality and gender identity has sort of resulted in a feeling of "everyone has a special box they fit in with a flag and a community and a predictable suite of wants and needs". The problem is, almost nobody understands themselves down to the minutest perfect detail with no possibility of error, growth or change. What is an orientation, if not a broad-strokes categorization of "what kind of relationship would make this person most happy"? How bizarre is it to try and lock down a concept THAT complicated on the first try??

There's a joy in recognition of "oh, this is ME, I didn't know it was an option but there I am." In my experience it's a sense of sudden freedom - specifically the freedom to simply exist as one naturally and comfortably exists. But trying on labels that DON'T invoke that feeling can sometimes result in the exact opposite sensation; rather than giving oneself freedom, it feels like it's cutting off possibility. For instance, "am I gay? Then I guess I can never find men attractive, that's a shame…" is an indicator that this label may not be helpful to apply. Accuracy is not really the concern, but the "everyone has a box" mindset makes it SEEM like the concern. It's not about being comfortable or fulfilled, but about being accurately categorized.

Very personal anecdote on that note: I, like many people, spent some time questioning my gender. I have been tomboyish since pretty much day one, and was frequently bullied for unladylike activities as well as broadly battered by garden-variety middle-school misogyny. I was made to feel wrong for pursuing the interests I had while being female - whether that was sports, STEM, gaming, tree-climbing, wearing unfashionable pants, or a million other completely genderless things I happened to enjoy. It made it difficult for me to tell if I felt unhappy because I was being MADE unhappy, or if it was because I was fundamentally wrong about myself and could not be happy as I was. Eventually I concluded that every time I thought "maybe it would be better if I was a boy", it was in the specific context of "so I could do <thing I wanted to do>" or "so people would stop being shitty to me about <innocuous thing>". I realized I enjoyed being perceived as a girl and I enjoyed being capable of "manly" things. I liked being strong, gruff, loud, chivalrous, reliable - and I liked being pretty and having long beautiful hair and nice boobs. Admittedly it took me having an honest to god stress dream about growing a beard to finally shake the intrusive thought of "what if I'm wrong about everything and I really CAN'T be a girl while liking these things???" Internalized misogyny can fuck you up pretty hard, but in hindsight, the gut-wrenching disappointment I felt whenever I contemplated that possibility was a good sign that it didn't personally fit me. The trans friends I discussed this with affirmed my conclusion - "dread" is not the appropriate response to self-discovery in the pursuit of happiness. In my case I had simply been told "you can either be a girl OR you can do all this cool shit you like" and all I ever wanted was both - abandoning either one felt like giving up on something important to me. I did the gender questioning, concluded I was a cis woman, and then stopped thinking about it. And that was fine.

This is why I think the label "queer" is absolutely invaluable. I may not know exactly what my romantic orientation is and I don't know what exact subgender I could be classified as with "girl but in a dude way", but I know I'm sure as hell not what society assumed I should be. I don't know what box I fit in, but I'm dead certain where I DON'T fit. Who cares about the specifics? Nobody can know me better than I know myself, and demanding categorization I can't provide helps nobody and stresses everybody. The core desire of the queer community is to be able to exist in peace and pursue happiness. If a label helps you do that - an acknowledgement that you are known, seen, and not wrong or broken to exist as you do - then that's perfect. But if you don't NEED to categorize yourself in certain ways to be happy, you do not have to. Overlabeling can stress you out, and sometimes "oh no, what if I'm <thing> and I'll NEVER be able to be happy unless I COMMIT to that???" can be a very dangerous and intrusive headspace to spiral into. Things done in pursuit of personal fulfillment can NEVER be treated as obligations. It's okay to not be sure, and it's okay to NEVER be sure.

if it sucks hit da bricks <- litany against sunk cost

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

now say something beautiful and true <- litany against irony poisoning

sketch……

Was discussing Guilliman's Farm Thing and there's something I need to break down for y'all here.

Guilliman is not a farmer. Guilliman knows jack fucking shit about what life is actually like for a farmer, or any other working-class, or middle class, or non-aristocratic class person. Like I am 100% certain he has read tons of statistics and books and whatnot but that is very different from actually living the life.

Guilliman is a chronic overachieving workaholic who was forced one (1) time to take a vacation when he was briefly stranded on an agrarian planet during an especially stressful time in his life, and he enjoyed that break so much that he has spent the rest of his life fantasizing about it. Has he ever taken a vacation since? No. Has he even realized that what he really wants is the peace and quiet of a vacation rather than the """"""""simple""""""" (FARMING ISN'T SIMPLE YOU COLOSSAL FUCKWIT) life of a farmer? Also no.

Guilliman is a very, very smart person who is, on occasion, a giant fucking dumbass. Thank you and good night.

More favourite mad science tropes:

Flashy explosions as a result of errors in procedures that have no conceivable reason to involve any explosive substance  

Lab coats in non-laboratory settings  

All mad scientists being versed in mad psychology regardless of their ostensible mad field of study  

“It comes to life and starts eating people” being a potential failure mode of literally every experiment  

WIldly unethical ways of accomplishing goal that could have been achieved more easily without the crimes against humanity  

[noun] reaction/inversion/overload, where [noun] is something that one would not customarily regard as being capable of reacting/inverting/overloading  

The way that you can pinpoint the popular anxieties of the era of the story’s publication by looking at the form factor of the thing that turns people into face-eating monsters (e.g., weird potion versus nuclear radiation versus psychiatric fuckery, etc.)  

QuAnTum  

World-ending superweapons that are also people even though being a person has no bearing on the world-ending part  

“What in God’s name?” “God had nothing to do with it!”

So I’m reading The Green Knight for my Medieval English lit class and I went back and watched your Arthuriana videos for fun nostalgia, but I noticed when you were covering the Green Knight you called Arthur tired. Was there a specific reason why you did that or is that one of those things that, if you decided to redo that video, you would change? I just found it interesting bc the poem clearly states Arthur as boyish and his reason for initially accepting the challenge was pride.

The character of King Arthur that lives in my head has a little more "has been through the Arthuriana timeloop too many times" malaise than any proper characterization of King Arthur in the original stories. The story drifts and changes over time but Camelot always falls, because Arthur is a good king - some would say the perfect king - but that still isn't good enough.

I've been seeing a lot of knight posts recently. pretty great