Pinned Post
I’m Bri. You’ll see explanations for frequently used tags under the cut.
What if we kissed in the abandoned lab (and we were both mad scientists? 😳👉👈)
- Mad science power exchange kink dynamics
- Extremely unethical experimentation (homoerotic)
- A man-turned-monster (tragic and misunderstood)
- Shameless old man objectification
- The Trans Agenda
- Toxic lesbian representation
- Creepy cemetery caretaker (a classic)
- Secret underground tunnel system
- Kidnapping for fun and profit
- Murders, crimes of passion, mutual obsession
Live your MS4MS (mad scientist for mad scientist) horror-romance dreams nightmares; read A COMPANION IN VICE →
Seriously, if you're a student writing an essay, the #1 easiest thing you can do to make your essay better is go back over it once you're done and cut out sentences about how interesting, cool, or important the subject under discussion is. Those are fluff you put in there because you were trying to write faster than you were thinking. The 'um's and 'ah's of essay writing. You do not need them and they do not improve your essay. They are most often found near the start of an essay, because that's typically before you get into the swing of things.
When I was doing my PhD, my advisor gave me a rule: everything I wrote needed to start with a sentence that fully summed up the main point I was about to make. That's a little more draconian than is necessary, but it's a great exercise in making your writing sharper and more concise. If you're not able to write a sentence like that when starting your essay, that's a good sign you need to think things through a little more first. Otherwise, you'll find yourself having to cut fluff later.
my hetero married mom is turning 65 and I shit you not she’s being denied Medicare unless she changes her legal name back to her maiden name on her birth certificate
she’s been contacting attorneys and speaking to every possible office and administrator and I’m like mom you might want to go to the news tbh
she is a very mildly unusual case because she had to shorten her first name when getting married so that her name would fit on the license form in 1990 and so now she has to petition for a name change to undo both that and taking my father’s surname because MAGA hates trans people so much lmfao
This reminds me of a surreal experience I had in law school, when I learned that my law school had LITERALLY no way to change your name in the system or on your ID. I pointed out that I knew multiple people who had gotten married while in law school, and asked the person at the registrar's office what they did in those cases, and he said that he guessed that they'd just have to not legally change their name while in law school?? I asked him if this was perhaps because the law school had introduced this system back when they still expected to be able to keep women from attending indefinitely, and he got really silent for a bit and then told me that he was busy and I should leave unless I needed something else.
Btw, I've gotten a LOT of traction with conservative folks with this story when I've told it, to the point of some fairly right wing people even agreeing with the much stronger position of "yeah, and why the fuck should you need a court order just to change your name either?" It hits all the right notes of absurdity, and of the government and other institutions intrusively reaching into other people's lives, while also demonstrating that that overreach is a clear attack on people with traditional values too. I always present it as "Now, look, I know it's not as fashionable for a woman to take her husband's name anymore or whatever, but she should at least be able to if she wants to, right?" and I don't even get people trying to argue slippery slope about it, most folks we just jump all the way onto the "preferred names are an issue of freedom" train.
Which is all to say that yeah, your mom should absolutely go to the news about this.
Wilhelm Kotarbiński (1849–1921)
“Angel of Sadness” a.k.a. “Angel in a Cemetery”
oil painting, c. 1900
i was a dummy and forgot what coffee + adhd meds does to me
b/c of my comics class, my interest in long-running stories & settings (franchise IP in industry terms), and my long fascination with mythology I have been very fascinated with the way long running stories (what Marie-Laure Ryan calls “proliferating narratives”) and the way they make up a modern pseudo-mythology.
Obviously in this space you have your Supermans, your Batmans, your endless interpretations and reinterpretations of these figures, their reinventions in contemporary spaces and then reinventions in new contemporary spaces. Moving beyond comics you even have stories like Lord of the Rings which people take into their lives and make part of their personal narratives and iconography (not even touching on Disney adults here though that’s the same phenomenon, just hyper-commercialized).
As a writer and artist I’m incredibly fascinated with that space. My experience as a Dungeon Master and writing my own stories has been the intimate and personal experience of building mythologies with friends. But as an anti-capitalist I don’t love the way corporations have such violent control over these mythologies. Calling it franchise and IP feels so violent.
Doing a “read more” here, these thoughts got rambly and long.
Edgar Bundy (1862-1922)
"Death as general rides a horse on a battlefield" (1911)
Watercolor
terribly misspelled denouement in an in-class essay (denumouent) - I must be put down like a rabid beast