Rebloging Because I Can Only Assume The Simpsons Screenshot Is In Reference To The People Who Get Hung

A few days ago, I was prepping garden starts in my dining room when I saw something strange in the sliding glass door to the backyard. Shadow after shadow after shadow fell across the glass as something—or, rather, a lot of somethings—was decending on my front lawn.

I turned and went to the front window to see SO MANY STARLINGS (and one scrub jay) pecking at the grass.

They were there for roughly twelve seconds, and then as quickly as they had come, they were gone.

It was the first time I had seen that in my home (rather than a park or woods), so I'm glad I managed to get pictures!

Idk if it's like this for other queer millennials who weren't able to come out until they were in their 30s, but I constantly feel like the way I express my queerness has to get some kind of approval from a nebulous cosmic judge.

Holding up snarky signs doesn't seem to be working.

For me, it isn't about whether this action is appropriate or not. It's about how this kind of action is inevitable.

I'm going to let Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explain in a quote no one seems to post during his annual holiday.

"It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?"

If you only speak up about a supercharger catching fire and ignore the unheard, you are prioritizing a thing over people.

I am a product of the 1990s and as such I grew up on a steady diet of mecha anime and weird sci-fi/fantasy stuff.

One of my favorite—and I mean FAVORITE—things is what I have always referred to as "bulky 90s future tech."

It's all the super big, chunky, clunky, takes up all the space it can tech that mecha anime and 90s sci-fi depicted as being available in the distant future.

The tech from Cowboy Bebop and Akira are really good examples.

AND APPEARENTLY Y'ALL ARE CALLING CASSETTE FUTURISM OR SOMETHING?! LIKE, WHOMST THE FUCK WAS GONNA TELL ME I WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE OVER HERE DROOLING OVER BULKY 90S FUTURE TECH?! THE GREEDY, GREEDY BARBARIANS KEEPING THIS FOR YOURSELVES!

[cannot find the photo credits; if anyone knows the artist(s), please help me credit them. I am so sorry]

I'm heading out to the backyard to prep my garden beds for the spring. Gotta get them prepped before the frost hits so that by the time the last frost date hits, they'll be ripe for transplanting my starts.

I think there's something to be said about working with your hands, when able, and being outside whenever you're able, as well.

I have fibromyalgia, so I can't always get outside when I want to, but I'm fortunate enough to be able to when I'm having low-pain days (like today).

I wanted to start this post by referencing this quote about when the world is shitty, you should make art, but I can't remember the whole quote or who said it, so I guess whoever is reading this is stuck with just me.

Honestly, not being able to find or think of this full quote is pretty much a good example of where my brain power is right now.

I am so scared and sad and angry that I don't know what to do and can't form coherent thoughts. I feel helpless and all I want to do is make all the bad things STOP.

But I can't do that.

Not realistically. Not by myself.

I'm disabled, and a parent, and I run the tiniest non-profit known to man, so I have neither time nor money to dedicate to protests and riots like I wish I could.

I feel guilty. I feel like a coward.

But I also want to help make people feel safe, and I don't know how.

So...I dunno. I'm making art. It's the only thing I can do—the only thing I know how to do.

I don't know what to call it yet, but there's a story brewing inside me, a throat-tearing scream of a book about the need for community and gentleness. And books and plants.

Idk if it'll go anywhere, but I'll try to share it here.

I just know I NEED to do SOMETHING, even if this is all I CAN do.

Opinions on Trans Werewolves?

I'm a non-binary author, and one of the stories I'm working on has a werewolf as one of the two main characters. Inspired by a remark one of my trans friends made, I initially began writing this character as a transwoman (the idea being that they understand the need to rip off your flesh). However, while discussing my story with one of my non-binary friends, they remarked that the idea of a trans werewolf gave them the ick because it felt a little like saying that trans people are animals or not human, which is NOT what I want to covey whatsoever. Still another trans friend said they liked the idea because when they were first transitioning they only came out of the closet at night, and the idea of being a little bit feral resonated with them (trans rights or I bites).

I had initially planned to have my transfemme bestie and her polycule help me alpha read for this story so I could ensure the character was authentic, and they all really liked the idea, but now I'm stuck.

I do NOT want to accidentally send a bad message or image that I think trans people are less than. This character being a werewolf is integral to the story, so now I have to decide if I want to go through with making them trans or not.

I would really love if some trans and non-binary folks could give me their opinions on trans werewolf characters. I am genuinely looking for constructive criticism.

hey it's probably a really good idea to download a copy of your Master Promissory Note since most of them stipulate that your loans are *specifically owed to the Department of Education* and if you intend to dispute the debt in the wake of the DoE dissolving that will be really good to have

I’m writing this so there’s some kind of record in case I die. When I die, maybe. The longer this has gone on the more inevitable that has felt. I don’t know why this is happening or who is doing it to me. I wish I could point a finger at someone so the cops or whoever finds me after all this is over can get the bastard doing this, but…there’s nothing. Nothing!

I think I’m getting ahead of myself, though.

I’ll start at the beginning.

No one gets regular mail anymore. Everything is done through email or DMs. I mean, people still get junk mail and stuff, but not like mail-mail. I think that’s what made me so curious when I got the first envelope.

It didn’t have my address on it, or any stamps, or even a return address. Just my name written in a tidy script in the very center of the white rectangle. It wasn’t a legal envelope—more like the kind birthday cards come in. I don’t know why, but at the time it unnerved me. It wasn’t anywhere near my birthday, and the handwriting didn’t look like anyone’s I knew.

The envelope isn’t what’s important, though. I mean, it kind of is, but what was inside the envelope was more important.

The flap was tucked into the envelope, unsealed. When I opened it, two Polaroid pictures spilled out into my hand, one after the other in an eager cascade. If I didn’t know better, I would have said they jumped out of the envelope.

Curious and more confused by the moment, I flipped the pictures over.

The first one looked like something out of a horror movie. It showed a large concrete (or what I assumed was concrete) room. Concrete walls, floor, ceiling. In the center of the room was a hooded lamp hanging down over a person, naked, and tied to a chair. They were slumped forward, body weight straining against the ropes that bound them to the non-descript metal chair.

I blinked down at the thing, confused and more than a little worried. I had no idea why someone would send this to me. The shadows in the picture were too thick to make out the person’s face. I wondered if it was someone I knew, if this was supposed to be some kind of ransom demand, but there was no note accompanying the photos. My heart was already hammering as I looked at the other photo, hoping to find answers.

Instead, I found a picture of my face.

There, in halide and plastic, was my fucking face.

A pit opened up in my stomach as I stared down at it and my brain went blank. It refused to comprehend what was in front of it. In the photo, a gloved hand held a fistful of my hair, yanking it backward so my limp head rose enough to make me recognizable. My features were slack, like I was half-asleep or maybe drugged. I looked back to the gloved hand, but the wrist and arm were both covered by the sleeve of a sweater, making any guess as to who they were impossible.

It felt like the air had been punched out of me. I realized I was shaking, but couldn’t bring myself to look away from the half-lidded eyes—my eyes—in the picture.

I thought it had to be Photoshop—what else could it be?—but how do you Photoshop a Polaroid? It was one thing to create a Polaroid effect in the program, but that didn’t mean you could create a physical one. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know much about photo editing, but I supposed it was possible to Photoshop something like this and then take a picture with the Polaroids. But I couldn’t see anything in the pictures to indicate they weren’t legitimate. Either way, I couldn’t stomach whatever sick joke someone was trying to play.

I tossed the photos in the trash, and tried to put it from my mind.

And before you ask: yes, I thought about going to the police, but I didn’t think they would do anything. Technically speaking, no crime had been committed so even if I insisted on making a report, and even if I could convince them to dust for fingerprints or whatever cops do, I had little confidence that whatever this was wouldn’t be filed away and never see the light of day again. And, I guess, part of me just wanted to forget about it. Can you blame me? Those pictures freaked me out and I just wanted to pretend it never happened.

A week later, thought, there was another envelope in my mailbox. Same nondescript white envelope, unsealed, with my name written in unfamiliar, tidy handwriting.

My first instinct was to toss it into the trash without looking at the contents. No way in hell did I want to see more freaky pictures made to look like I was being held captive or…or worse.

To this day, I wish I had listened to my gut and thrown the envelope away—better yet, I wish I had burned it.

But I didn’t.

I can’t explain it. Even if I was a better wordsmith, I don’t think I could put into words the compulsion I had to open that envelope. It would be easier, even, to say that it was as if I was possessed—that it wasn’t really me unfurling the flap that had been tucked into the stiff white paper backing, or like I was being controlled when I pulled the next two photos out of the sheaf. But none of that is true. It was me. I did those things and I will never—never—stop regretting that I did.

Like last time, there were a pair of Polaroid pictures in the envelope.

But the images were…not like last time.

It was still my face in the images, and as best I could tell they—I?—was still in the concrete room. The same black-gloved hand had a grip on my hair, but this time…

(Jesus fucking Christ even just typing the words is hard; my hands are shaking just remembering it)

This time it looked as if I had been beaten bloody. The face—my face—was beaten almost beyond recognition. The only thing I had to really indicate that it was still me was the bone-deep feeling of recognition I had with the person in the image. My lips were swollen, bleeding from a split in the corner of the bottom lip. Bruises darkened my face, a cut on one cheek bone indicated where I’d been hit especially hard, and the eye on that side looked swollen and bloodied. Blood dribbled from my hairline and ran in rivulets down the side of my face.

Just looking at the picture made me feel like I needed to bolt. I wasn’t sure where I would go or for how long, but the need to get out of my home and go somewhere—anywhere else—was intense. But how could I go? I had no way of knowing who was doing this. They could be anyone I spoke to on the street. Someone I knew. A stranger. Where could I even go that would be safe?

I fought to control my breathing as I paced in my kitchen, needing to move my body before I screamed. It took all of my willpower just to stay indoors instead of running out into the streets and just run, run, run.

Finally, I looked at the other image.

A second hand had entered the frame, wearing black gloves like the first one and holding a pair of pliers. The rusted metal tips were inside my mouth, clamped onto a bloodied tooth already halfway out of a socket. My face was still swollen and beaten, lips stretched wide in a silent scream that I could all but hear. Tears made clean streaks through the rivers of blood on my face.

I remembering swearing over and over, my spine slick with sweat as I looked at the image over and over, trying to discern anything that could help me find out who was sending these fucked up images and why, but there was nothing. It felt like there was too much air in my little kitchen and yet I couldn’t get any of it into my lungs.

That was the first time I’d had a panic attack.

I didn’t know what it was until my friends found me a short time later, huddled in a corner and hyperventilating. In full honesty, the rest of that night was a blur. I remember my friends helping me drink water, trying to talk me down from whatever ledge they thought I’d climbed to. Despite my fears and uncertainties of who could be sending the pictures, I made the choice to trust them. Desperate for someone to see what I was seeing and help me figure out what to do or who to talk to, I tried to show them the Polaroids, but when they looked at the pictures, there was only a square of darkness, as if whoever had taken the picture had left the lens cap on.

The pictures were gone.

And yeah, I get the whole ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ thing. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to convince my friends or the police without proof. The next time the envelope showed up, I tried to take pictures with my phone. The one after that, I tried to record a video. It didn’t matter. No matter what I did, the files were corrupted, unusable, or gone. Just gone. Deleted themselves so thoroughly I couldn’t even dig them out of the trash folder in my phone gallery.

At that point, I thought I’d lost my mind. I couldn’t think of a single logical reason why or how this was happening. Not for the Polaroids, or why no one else could see them, or what was going on with the digital files. None of it.

Meanwhile, the images in the Polaroids were getting…worse.

A sick feeling rolled in my stomach daily. As much as I wanted to believe these were some kind of deep fake, there was something about it that felt so undeniably real. It got to a point where I couldn’t go out to my mailbox without the anxiety forcing me to empty the contents of my stomach. I had to wait until someone came to visit and ask if they could get my mail for me. And there was always an envelope along with whatever junk or bills that had been piling up. Every. Single. Time.

The stress made my life impossible. I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t go to work. I couldn’t even leave the house most days. If I did, there was always the chance that my tormentor could find me and make good on all the threats they’d been sending me. At that point, that was all I could think of those Polaroids as: promises of violence.

Even now, I feel like I’m marching toward an inevitable pain. A future filled with only pain and suffering and that no matter what I do, there’s no stopping it. Only delaying it.

But I digress.

One of my friends said I needed to get help. Maybe I should have listened to them back then, but I was convinced that if I couldn’t get proof of the pictures themselves, then I would get proof of whoever was putting the envelopes in my mailbox. I figured I could at least that that to the police.

I ordered one of those self-installation security systems—the one with the off-brand Ring doorbell, cameras on my front door, mail box, etc. I even bought extra locks for my doors and windows. I spent the rest of the day setting up and testing my new security system. By the end of it, I felt pretty proud of myself. I was certain I was going to catch whoever was doing this and could turn them into the cops and all of this would just be a big bad dream. But I was wrong.

Sure enough, the security system picked up on movement around midnight that night. The new motion sensor light on the porch sprang to life, illuminating a figure wearing a dark hoodie. I jolted as fear struck me like lightning. They were tall, wide, imposing. They seemed impossibly large. Unavoidable. Undeniable.

I was watching them through the lens of a camera with two locked doors between us, and yet I felt as small and vulnerable as if they were in the room with me at that moment.

My eyes roamed the figure over and over, trying to find some kind of distinguishing features, but they angled themselves so the light shone from behind them. They became a dark silhouette—a shadow of death.

They stood there, still and stone for what seemed like hours. Even with the video on fast-forward, they hardly even swayed. Near 3AM, they turned, very slowly, toward the camera as though they knew exactly where to look for it. With agonizing slowness, they reached a gloved hand into their pocket and pulled out three polaroid photos. The camera refocused as the figure brought the pictures closer to the lens.

The first picture showed me duct tapped to the same chair with the figure standing behind me. Instead of pliers, they held a knife. The figure on my screen held up the second photo. In one hand they held the knife. In the other, an ear.

I wanted to look away, wanted to delete the video and crawl deep, deep under the covers of my bed, but I couldn’t move. I was transfixed at a cellular level as the figure showed the third picture. The same bloodied knife hovered over the image of my downcast head. For a moment, I thought all that had changed between photos was the position of my head, but I soon realized something else had changed. The ear in the hooded figure's hand...it was the other ear.

My hands were shaking as I watched the figure pull the photo away from the lens. They dropped them onto the doorstep and walked away into the night.

I was practically soiling my pants but I took the security footage down to the police. When I pulled it up to show them…you guessed it. The file was corrupted and unusable. The police told me that without evidence or a suspect, they couldn’t even make a report. Useless bastards. No wonder people don’t like cops! I was basically trapped in my house, terrified, at my absolute wit’s end, and they couldn’t even make a report?!

Anyway, like I said at the beginning, I’m writing all of this in the inevitability of my death.

It’s been a few weeks since I was able to capture that first video, and my large friend has been on my doorstep every night. They don’t always have pictures. Sometimes they just stand there, staring at the camera lens as if they can see through it and into my eyes. My soul?

On the nights when they do have photos, they’re…I can’t even say. Each one is worse than the last, detailing my slow and steady dismemberment.

I can’t explain why, but I know that once the photos finally detail my death, that this figure is going to come for me. It isn’t going to matter how many locks I have on my doors, or how many weapons I horde in order to protect myself. It’s going to get in here and it’s going to take me and it’s going to do to me every single thing that happened in those pictures.

I still don’t know how or why this is happening, only that I can’t avoid it any longer.

I’m scared. God, I’m so fucking scared, but I don’t know what else I can do. If there’s even anything that can be done.

My friends have given up on me and I don’t have any family. Not even a pet. I’m alone. Just like in those photos. So, if you’re reading this, know that they’re my last words. I needed someone else—anyone else—to know what happened to me. I don’t know if you’ll believe a word of it, but if nothing else, can you do me a favor? Remember me. Please. I’m so alone and so afraid and I know that eventually I’m going to disappear. I just don’t want to be forgotten, too.