Latest Posts by heinous-eli - Page 2

[ not a super specific spoiler for the Ori and the Blind Forest or Ori and the Will of the Wisps, though if you've played neither but plan to and want to go in fresh, don't read this ]

The Ori game creators, probably: By the end of this, you're gonna cry so hard about a traumatized owl.

Me: I did, oh I did.

The Ori game creators: Just wait until you finish this sequel though lmao

The Ori game creators: You're gonna cry twice as hard *at least*.

Me: Oh, because there are two traumatized owls to be devastated about?

The Ori game creators: Well, there are two owls, but.

Me: You mean--

The Ori game creators: (;

You post it only when a bigot dies.

I listen to the 80's version of Crab Rave on the regular.

We are not the same.

Knowledge is knowing that it's Frankenstein's monster; wisdom is not looking for a lab coat when you Find Frankie.

The first nightmare I've had in a while was about being forced to use fabric softener.

If you assume that I

✅ am a millennial,

✅ am autistic,

✅ am fat, trans, broke, but also vain, and

✅ hear "hello, my name is Renae, and I'm an appliance repair tech" often enough to know it by heart,

you'd be right.

I can't believe I've never shared this story with the Internet before. It's how something some random person I don't know and have never met will live in me forever.

It was sometime in the late 90's or early aughts. I was in my early adolescence, so between 11 and 14. I used to regularly read the PennySaver cover to cover. Why? For me, it was one of the few scattered little windows into what everyday life was like for non-famous people outside of my niche world. I also was a fast and voracious reader, but never had enough to read, especially not periodicals.

If you don't know what the Pennysaver is, it was analog Craigslist: That cheaply-printed newsprint booklet that no one subscribed to arrived in everyone's mailbox once a week. Certain ad types cost money to run, plus it ran ads. It was a more family-friendly weekly than, say, your LA Weeklies or, further up the West Coast, The Strangers. Also minus the journalism, I suppose, but there were gay people in it!

Anyway, one week, I'd read something in the PennySaver that started the slow process of catalyzing a change in my life for the better. It wasn't a wanted ad for something I had that turned out to be worth a lot of money. It wasn't a job listing that started my career. It wasn't even for a garage sale that had an item that ended up being important to me.

It was a w4m personal ad. As continues to be the case, those were much rarer than m4[literally anything]. The first sentence was "Thin may be in, but fat's where it's at!"

It was the first time I'd ever seen someone call themself fat in a way that wasn't at all negative, apologetic, or angry. This lady was saying hey, I'm fat! And I think it's a selling point even if the overall culture says it isn't!

I don't recall anything else about the ad other than that it was a woman seeking a man, and that the rest of it was unremarkable. It took a lot of other things to get me to a point of real, lasting comfort with my fatness, of course. But that little quip is stuck in my head for the rest of my life.

Thank you, random lady. I hope you're still alive, kicking, and happy. I hope you found as much love and/or miles of d1ck as you wanted, whether through the ad or by other means.

I'm trying to be charitable, but it's hard for me to not see strong beliefs in manifestation/The Secret/etc. as ultimately victim blaming but with extra steps.

I don't disagree with the idea of setting goals/intentions, focusing on a better future for yourself, speaking desires out loud, etc. Those things are how we as humans help ourselves and ask for help from each other. I do these things, but I don't think it's asking anyone but myself and other human beings for anything. I don't think I'm calling anything forth from the ether.

I also don't disagree with accepting things that we can't change, but I don't believe you have to tack on judgement to do that. This is the world we have, and there's no point in being constantly upset about that, but calling this the best of all possible worlds is dicey.

Like astrology, it seems to be an assumed belief on queer communities especially. It's weird that cis-hets don't generally assume my beliefs in casual conversation, but I'm supposed to go along with it when someone tells me I'm "manifesting" and I'm a big old meanie killjoy at best if I say that those aren't my beliefs.

Trans Life Hack

Take the average age that a cis child would start the puberty you are now undergoing. If you'd like, you can use a sibling or other relative's starting age to guess at what yours would've been. Keep in mind that hormonal shifts start a while before any changes are readily apparent, so the actual starting age is younger than you might guess.

Determine the amount of years you've been on hormones. Subtract any amount of time you weren't able to consistently keep up with it. If you went through a period of significant dose adjustment, you may want to set your starting clock at when you got on the right dose for you, not when you started trying it out.

Add Steps 1 and 2 together to get your True Gender Age.

Compare your changes to cis people of that age, not people your own age.

So much about The Hunchback of Notre Dame was lost on me as a sheltered child. My main memory from my first watch is thinking "I AM DISCOMFORT AND I DO NOT KNOW WHY. I NEED AN ADULT".

I think the most striking thing I noticed in this re-watch was the difference between Esmeralda's actual dancing and the way Frollo sees her in the flames. In her actual dance, there's sensuality and appeal, no doubt, but she's playful and mocking. She's messing with him and everyone else drooling over her. On the other hand, during his "Sorry 4 My Boner, Plz God Don't Send Me to Horny Hell Jail" song, Fake Flame Esmeralda is giggling and mincing in a way she never does in reality.

The modern versions of that most godly judge are dudes who think the stripper like totally wants him for real, trust me bro, she'd totally bone him if it weren't against the rules.

Inside of my house (and heart) are two cats.

One of them prefers for you to pet him without paying too much attention to him. He will run away if you focus on him with anything resembling intent.

The other will give you a firm skippity-bap with her giant paws if you don't pay attention to her as you pet her.

It's OK to confuse the first for the second. Woe betide anyone who dares to absentmindedly treat her as though she were him.

Real talk re calling yourself an atheist vs. saying you're agnostic:

If you're willing to have believers preach at you because they think you're open minded and indecisive, say you're agnostic.

If you'd like to skip the preaching and go straight to the anger at you for daring to so shamelessly exist without belief in a deity, say you're an atheist.

Either way, they're going to be mad at you. I prefer to save myself the trouble, personally.

(For the record, I'm technically an agnostic atheist, but that is a concept almost no one gets, so I say one or the other when I'm not in the mood or place for giving a big philosophy lesson.)

You know what I find personally annoying about AIs?

Not professionally as a kinda-techbro. Not morally as a human being. Not ethically as someone who trying to be a decent person. Not semantically as a philosophy major. Just personally?

The same behavior y'all hate in people like me, you adore in a chatbot.

I was today years old when I learned that not only do African Queen and European Queen exist, not only are they not joke edits, but also the original was European Queen.

In honor of the ratio we celebrate today, let me tell you about the day I first learnt of its existence. It was the 90's. I was attending a religious elementary school in West Covina at the time. Yes, it's a real city. Rachel Bloom didn't make it up for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

At this very real school in a very real place, I had been absent the day before. I don't know if I had been sick or if it was a family thing, but whatever it was, I had missed a lesson. So when my math teacher kept referring to a term I'd never heard before, I figured I would look it up later, no big deal. There was a glossary in the back of the book that was usually very helpful.

It wasn't helpful that day, though. I spent way too long trying out different spellings for the term my teacher had been using. It couldn't have been more than 10 pages of terms and definitions, and I was an advanced reader, yet I couldn't hunt the term down. I eventually gave up.

The math teacher was warm, lovely woman with a very heavy Jordanian accent. If you know anything about Arabic accents, well, then you'll understand what had happened.

And that's why I can truthfully say that I unsuccessfully tried to look up the word "bi" in a math book while I was a pupil at an Islamic institution called Straight Way School.

π Happy Pi Day, everyone π

I never understood why the Hindi word for brother-in-law, "saalaa", doubles as a casual, not quite swearing insult. I thought maybe it was because there's codified hatred for in-laws in many cultures.

I just figured out a much more plausible theory. The Hindi swear word equivalent for "mother****er" is "bhenchod". Sister-****er.

ಠ_ಠ

(If you know better, please correct me!)

It is WILD to me how different people my age and older who didn't grow up with paranoid parents feel about cell phones.

They think of them as symbolizing a lack of freedom, where kids have to check in with and are instantly reachable by their parents, if not outright GPS tracked.

I think of my first phone fondly. It was the only reason I was allowed to go anywhere or do anything at all. Sure, I was expected to answer my parents' calls immediately and call them the minute I knew it if I was going to be even a millisecond late, but I was ALLOWED to do at least a few things thanks to them knowing that I always kept my phone charged with the ringer on.

I guess when you're not caged, a leash looks like restriction, but if you are kept under lock and key, a leash means a little taste of freedom.

I sway, in place,

The two tupperware genders are spaghetti sauce/tamatar ki salan (reddish) and tumeric/haldi (yellowish).

One of the first "oh wow, theory can actually make the world seem less obtuse" moments I ever had was about perfume ads. It seemed to me like everyone had somehow decided TV perfume ads had to be weird but also that TV ads for perfume *must* exist and there was no other way for them to be.

I took a class where this came up and I finally read what's obvious to me in hindsight: The one sense that perfume appeals to is the least conveyable via any other senses. The closest thing to a straightforward pitch you can do with perfume is to list off its scent notes, but those aren't necessarily meaningful to most people, and even to those who know, we can't know how the scents work with each other and on our individual bodies.

So they sell some kind of fantasy of how the smell will make you feel instead. All ads for anything sell a fantasy, but perfume can't pretend like there's anything else there but the fantasy. It's like a distilled, pure kind of cynical consumerism there. Like the Eau de Parfum of capitalism, where other types of ads are Eau de Toilette.

A lot of things that seem like they came out of nowhere are easily explained. This isn't just a classic science/skepticism thing. There are historical, sociological, and cultural explanations that make the world seem a lot less weird to me.

Granted, the explanations can be horrifying rather than comforting. So much of what we consider to be American norms and values are just eugenics, for example. Still, I prefer wrapping my head around it to shrugging and ignoring.

This is all to say, the Gucci ad with Elliot Page, A$AP Rocky, and Julia Garner is more interesting to me than I thought it would be :3

I remain forever unconvinced that normality is normal.

I hear there's a show called "24 Legacy". Soooo, is it not rewatchable?

Kids these days and their googling their crushes. Back in my day, we had to steal pictures of them from the stacks of photos being passed around at social events and hope no one noticed or make do with grainy yearbook images.

All That She Wants (1993) is just a coward's Maneater (1982).

just some things I got in trouble for as a kid

Accidentally stepping on a classmate's foot because I was afraid of some of the older girls so I moved quickly out of the way.

Helping a girl who got sand in her eyes to escape the center of a sand fight that broke out on the playground. The girl was normally an instigator of that kind of thing, but not that time; she truly was hurt and scared and crying and disoriented. I also got in trouble later for telling the truth about it, that it wasn't her fault that time.

Being interested in the Titanic. My immigrant teachers only knew about the Titanic as a "filthy" movie, so they assumed I was reading trashy smut. I was actually reading boring non-fiction about a ship.

Writing an honest and well-researched report about Ronald Reagan. My teacher said I shouldn't have picked a president I would criticize. I didn't pick him, my dad forced me to pick him because he worships Reagan.

[ toxic positivity, allusions to CSA/religious abuse ]

Inspirational speaker at work event, singing a song called It's a Gift: "All the people, in the prisons and cathedrals, we're all the saaaame."

My brain, immediately: "Definitely not the same. One place is full of thieves and abusers, and the other is a prison."

I'm pretty sure I peaked ~10 years ago. I made this meme while slacking off at work. Took me like 4 minutes in MS Paint (XP version).

Diogenes, throwing unshelled peas at Joe Rogan's studio: "Behold, a podcast!"

Ibuprofen, a poem

[ content notice: OTC drug abuse, menstruation, manipulative/emotionally abusive relationships, references to fellatio/sex work, emesis, self-unaliving and self-harm attempts/impulses]

2006

The bottle sits in the medicine cabinet. No one tracks it, at least not very closely. No one thinks much of it. Everyone knows I need it from time to time.

My mind is going and going and going. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what’s happening to me. It feels something like puberty, when, some seven years prior my body’s core was opened so that the flesh nest I didn’t know I had built could be shed before it went septic.  My body has remade itself fully since then. Time for something else to be torn apart.

The bottle sits in the medicine cabinet. No one tracks it, at least not very closely. No one thinks much of it. Everyone knows I need it from time to time to the point where I’ve learned to dry-swallow so that I don’t have to leave class to take a few to dull that familiar deep ache punctuated by sharp spasms.

I think about the time 7 years and 7 more before when I had stumbled upon a stray pill the brand-name one with the sweet coating looking like a light brown coated chocolate on the beige carpet the best color of all the M&Ms, which were the best candy It didn’t feel like one in my hand. I immediately told my mother what I had found and handed it over. What a good girl.

The bottle sits in the medicine cabinet. No one tracks it, at least not very closely. No one thinks much of it. Everyone knows I need it from time to time. I’ve been getting it for myself for years now.

I reach up towards the high medicine cabinet shelf. Press and turn the safety cap. I am too tall and too dexterous at that point to be child-locked or shelf-blocked out of it. Should I be? After all, the air freshener, which I didn’t even know was a drug says “Keep out of reach of children and teens” right on the label. Mom and I had laughed about that. I am too mature to be in need of any such safeguards. I got my twelve-year molars at nine and my period at ten not exactly the type to suck down fumes in hopes of a high.

The bottle sits in the medicine cabinet. No one tracks it, at least not very closely. No one thinks much of it. Everyone knows I need it from time to time and this new anguish feels like one of those times.

I fill my palm with the rounds. They don’t look like the pretty, long-discontinued light brown M&M. Don’t make a nice sound when making contact with each other. We’d long switched away from that smooth-shelled, sweet-coated name brand. These were dull and rough, harder to suck down but by now, I can dry-swallow up to four of them without my teacher noticing. However many these are, they don’t stand a chance against me. I’m home, in no rush, no need to hide anything with a glass of water if I want it just a few feet away. I can hold these for longer, since the coating won’t melt in my hands. They don’t melt in my mouth, either.

The now nearly-empty bottle sits in the medicine cabinet. No one tracks it, at least not very closely. No one thinks much of it. Everyone knows I need it from time to time.

I suck down enough to make me lose time. I drift, lost to time, swallowed by the rounds. I sleep all evening, all night, all morning. For once in my overregulated life, I’m left to be. I’m in college, so I handle my own schedule and alarms. I’m on my period, so no one reminds me of Maghrib, Isha, or Fajr. No one thinks much of it. I wake up, realize I’ve been dead to the world from Asr to Zuhr but not dead enough to leave the world.

The now nearly-empty bottle sits in the medicine cabinet. Mom eventually notices it’s almost gone and adds it to her shopping list. No one thinks much of it, including her aside from admonishing us to tell her when things are running out. Everyone knows I need it from time to time.

I successfully play it off as my usual monthly troubles. The boy I like, the one who’s been taunting me into tearing myself asunder tells me that I have what is essentially a hangover. I need a thick, hearty Irish stew. He asserts, with that full-smirk half-innuendo that keeps me hooked on him that if it weren’t for my parents, he’d bring me some and feed it to me. I don’t tell him I’m too nauseous to swallow water let alone enjoy slurping on some exotic new dish.

The new bottle sits in the medicine cabinet. No one tracks it, at least not very closely. No one thinks much of it. Everyone knows I need it from time to time.

Approximately 2 body-remakes later

The bottle sits in the medicine cabinet. No one tracks it, at least not very closely. No one thinks much of it. Everyone knows I need it from time to time. It’s there, but he’s more incapacitated than usual.

What’s wrong, I ask?

"Oh, I needed them but we were out two weeks ago And I know we’re broke so you know" I don’t know. Do you know? Love of my life, look at me. By now, you not only know that I would not only

Get a payday loan Put up the car as collateral Swallow cum along with some mild disrespect Swallow some of my pride and ask my sister Swallow a bit more of my pride and e-beg Sell my soul, if I still had one Swallow what’s left of my pride and ask my parents

just so that you could be the slightest bit less uncomfortable but also that I could. Because I have. You were there. This is a basic that costs less than a tank of gas one that we both need, if differently, to boot. I drop everything post-haste to get the dual-pack of bottles rattling unpleasantly with their full capacity of rough brown pills.

The bottle sits in the medicine cabinet. No one I tracks it, at least not very closely. No one I thinkso much about it. Everyone knows I need it from time to time. It’s there, but he’s more incapacitated than usual.

What’s wrong, I ask?

"Oh, I needed them but I couldn’t find it" Love of my life, didn’t we decide on the spot together-- Never mind. From here on out it lives right here, right at your desk along both your sight-lines from every angle.

The bottle sits in the medicine cabinet on his desk, under his eye. I track it. I thinkso much about it. Everyone knows I need it from time to time. It’s there, but he’s more incapacitated than usual.

What’s wrong, I ask?

“Oh, I saw you take it from my desk so I thought it wasn’t there” Love of my life, didn’t we decide on the spot together-- Never mind. From here on out I will sit at your desk when I open it so you know it will never leave you.

The bottle backup sits in the medicine cabinet. The bottle sits stays on his desk, under his eye. I track it. I thinkso much about it. Everyone He knows I need it from time to time. It’s there, but he’s more incapacitated than usual.

What’s wrong, I ask?

“Oh, I saw you take some the other day and you’re on your period And it seemed like it was running low I couldn’t finish it while you still needed it could I” Love of my life, didn’t I say I was tracking it and weren’t you there when I bought the new ones-- Never mind. From here on out I will never touch it. It’s all yours.

The backup sits in the medicine cabinet behind his bottle. The His bottle stays on his desk, under his eye. My bottle stays in my bag, rattling unpleasantly. I track it his. I thinkso much about it his. Everyone He knows I need it from time to time. it’s his. It’s there, but he’s more incapacitated than usual.

What’s wrong, I ask? “Oh, I forgot to tell you I was running low And you know I can never remember the one in the cabinet” Love of my life, I didn’t expect you to remember the cabinet The new one was right behind the old one-- Never mind. From here on out I’ll open the new bottle and I’ll pour the old ones atop the new and I’ll discard the old bottle so you don’t get them confused.

The backup sits behind becomes his bottle. His bottle stays on his desk, under his eye. The bottle formerly his goes into the trash. My bottle stays in my bag, rattling unpleasantly. I track his. I thinkso much about his. He knows it’s his. It’s there, but he’s more incapacitated than usual.

What’s wrong, I ask?

“Oh, I saw you throw away the bottle I thought we were out” Love of my life, didn’t we talk about this last time-- Never mind. I tell him I’m so sorry. I’ll do better. From here on out, I wait until he’s asleep so that I can open the new bottle and pour the old ones atop the new and discard the old bottle so he doesn’t get them confused out of his sight, so he doesn’t think we’re out.

The backup becomes his bottle. His bottle stays on his desk, under his eye. The bottle formerly his goes into the trash doesn’t exist. This is an infinity bottle of ibuprofen. Bulk shopping has progressed so much these days. My bottle stays in my bag, rattling unpleasantly. I track his. I thinkso much about his. He knows it’s his. It’s there, but he’s more incapacitated than usual.

I choke so hard I cannot ask. What’s wrong he asks

The choking merges with a memory of excess and nausea. I slurp down an entire bottle then put my fingers down my throat so I can give it all to him. What else have I left to give?

It's a crime that no one has done an adaptation of the Iliad where the gift horse whose mouth went tragically unexamined is a mint vintage Ford Mustang secretly rigged up with explosives.

"Short Skirt, Long Jacket" by CAKE was the prototype for the new breed of fauxminist d00d who claims he is supportive of his partner's career success, but really just wants to rely on her for all of his needs, including financial. In this essay I will