malymin

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The library where I work gets regular donations of eggs from a patron who raises chickens. They're stored in the break room fridge. They're intended for any staff who want them; any employees are free to take the eggs home, but many of them don't. When I ask, my coworkers say it's because they already know people who raise chickens, or raise chickens themselves, and so don't really need the eggs. For the first year or two I was working at the library, I didn't bring eggs home, either. I live with my parents, and they were already buying eggs from the grocery store on a regular basis. But I kept note of the opportunity, in my back pocket.

Then the price of eggs went up this year, and I noticed the eggs were still piling up in the break-room fridge. So I brought up the Library Eggs to my mom. Ever since, I've brought home two dozen eggs every week.

It's funny. Because these eggs are free, rather than being bought with my family's funds, I feel more free to actually eat eggs, instead of leaving them all for my sister and dad under the feeling that "I would be stealing from them if I ate them." I haven't had fried eggs, really, since I stopped visiting my Grandmother's house on weekends, where she would make me eggs and pancakes every morning as a kid and teen. Last year, she died - and before that, was undergoing a decline from some form of dementia that started slow and accelerated as time passed. She hadn't been able to cook for herself for a while - and now, I'll never have her eggs ever again. So, I figured, it was time to learn some self-sufficiency. It was time to cook eggs for myself.

I keep screwing up - the first few times I did it perfectly, the pan unscathed and the whites and yolks in perfect platonic form. Then I got cocky, and now seem to end up not greasing the pan properly, or making mistakes as I flip the eggs over. Even though I end up making a mess, though, they still taste good. I cook three or four at a time. Not for breakfast - I don't have the time to spare in the mornings. For dinner or lunch when I've gotten home. I make some pancakes, too - using the same pancake mix brand my Granny fed me. The recipe on the box makes a whole batch of little pancakes, but my Dad taught me his adaptation for just making a single, thick pancake. Dirty dishes by the end? One pan (reused for eggs and pancake), one measuring cup (pancake mix, water), one spoon (mixing the pancake mix), one spatula, one plate, one fork.

I think a lot about "renewable" animal products - the kind you get without killing the animal. I love the taste of meat, I'll admit - but for so much of history, beef and pork and chicken were not everyday foods for the average person. I'm only able to enjoy them as much as I can due to relative luxury - and, honestly, a deeply fucked up system of industrialized modern agriculture. You sink so much into raising an entire animal for meat. Eggs, milk, honey. Fruit trees and berry bushes of the animal kingdom. We've built entire types of food that don't exist in nature off the backs of eggs, milk, and honey, mixed with our domesticated plants and yeasts. Cheese doesn't exist in nature. Cakes don't exist in nature.

My ideal farm sim doesn't really exist, because quite frankly Stardew Valley stops being a cozy pastoral fantasy once you're grinding for endgame rewards. I want to keep my farm a relatively small operation, chickens I pet every day, not create some kind of massive automated plantation where junimos harvest crops for me en masse and I create massive grids of monoculture crop space of the Single Most Profitable Crop as I grind towards the Golden Clock that I need to buy to achieve "perfection" to 100% the game. I hate "perfection" as a mechanic. I hate that the golden chicken is locked behind achieving "perfection", when one of my goals on literally every save file prior to it being introduced has been to acquire one of every variety of livestock.

I want an in-depth chicken simulator. Or a dairy animal (cow, goat, etc) simulator, or beehive simulator. I want a sim that's focused on managing the health and mood of a particular animal. A pet simulator with a side of profit, more than a business simulator. Use the money I acquire from selling their product to acquire better creature comforts for my animals, peruse a catalog of real breeds and landraces as potential future stock. Those eggs I get every week - the patron has chickens that carry the "easter egger" gene, introduced relatively recently to the hobby-chicken genepool from a Chilean strain, mixing greens and blues into the common browns and whites. They're exciting to bring home - nothing says it's not a grocery store egg like that. One of my coworkers mentioned that she used to have a hen who laid exceptionally blue eggs, robin-egg bright - then one night she forgot to shut the coop door, and a fox got the hen. I want to manage my animal's feed (or flowers, for bees) and genetics to influence the characteristics of their product. I want a game that asks me to pay attention to my animal's health condition in the same way that the 90's fishtank simulator Aquazone included real world fish diseases. I want to breed for particular colors. I want achievements for breeding healthy members of rare and endangered varieties of the specific domestic animal, like how Zoo Tycoon rewards me for conserving endangered species.

I don't think I can convince my family to keep chickens for real - managing just cats and a dog seems to be a handful enough for us. But I eat my eggs, I think about how they came from a chicken. An animal just as varied in personality and form as our mammalian pets, perhaps the most common domesticated avian on earth - unless that's the pigeon, long past its prime as a kept animal but omnipresent in its feral form. What a marvel of biotechnology, that we live in a world with chickens! We don't appreciate it enough. We take it for granted.

Pure subsidence farming is unpleasant and awful - romanticized mainly by those with enough distance to not truly remember it. But I wonder if more Americans are going to start supplementing their diets with locally-raised, home-raised, and neighbor-raised foods. After all, all our national food quality control is being dismantled at the same time that prices are raising. Will the FDA even meaningfully exist, by the end of the Trump administration?

I should be working on the next chapter of my fanfic, but I've been addicted to Caves of Qud instead...

I don't know how to describe it to people who haven't heard of it. It's a roguelike, but to most people "roguelike" refers to a genre modifier rather than a genre in itself, and CoQ is very specifically a "roguelike as genre" game inspired by old ASCII dungeon crawlers...

I love the tantalizing ambiguity of old, low-res spritework. As a fan of the Mother series, I think people don't appreciate enough how Mother 1 has a lonely, eerie feeling that's enhanced by its technical limitations. It is frustrating in those limitations in a way that hurts it, sometimes, but the large expanses of empty wilderness between settlements, the lethality of even ordinary wildlife like bears amidst the aliens and robots, the strangeness of the pink seashell world of Magicant, the inability to fully parse out exactly what some objects and creatures even are. Qud has so much quality of life improvement over genuinely old games while still leaning into the sense of danger and mystery that very old RPGs are good at.

Project Voltage

First, some special April 1st additions to the Miku-centric *Project Voltage* Vocaloid x Pokemon crossover. The first new art is "April Fool's" by KEI, designed to match a the Project Voltage announcement artwork made by the same artist for Project Voltage in 2023. The second artwork released was of Kasane Teto as the rival to Hatsune Miku's protagonist, by the artist "take", made to be a counterpart to take's earlier Project Voltage artwork of Miku as a Psychic-type trainer. For context, I'll include the corresponding Miku art (the originals) next to the new, Teto pieces.

made with nex3's grid generator

Obviously, in the original Miku artwork by KEI, she has Pikachu because it's the Pokemon franchise mascot, not much deeper than that; however, the more quirky inclusion, Farfetch'd, is there because it's associated with spring onions/leeks, just like Hatsune Miku is. There's some really cute details here in the matching Teto image, regarding her origins as a "fake vocaloid" and 2chan trolling scheme. As I've mentioned before, Kasane Teto is deeply intertwined with lies, mimickry, and trolling; she was born out of 2channers from the VIP board trolling the still-new Hatsune Miku fandom on 2chan by inventing a fake new bank and character for Crypton Future Media's "character vocal" product series, complete with a website and NicoNico video announcement. Her original character design, the one still used for her UTAU voicebank, deliberately mimics design elements of the CV series' characters: Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin and Len, and Megurine Luka.
Nohkara on Bluesky notes:

Wow the amount of symbolism. “Sudowoodo” is called ウソッキー which means “lie tree” in Japanese.
Mimikyu comes from “mimic you”.
The pokeball she’s holding is a lure ball. In Japanese trolling or baiting is called 釣り(lit. “Fishing”)

Rook on Bluesky adds:

i find it slightly funnier how sudowoodos japanese name also has the ッ for the glottal stop (?) but coincidentally that specific character becomes "tsu" when full sized, so you can totally misread "usokki" as "usotsuki" which is straight up "liar"

In the "protagonist" and "rival" images of Miku and Teto that take drew, they actually have the same Pokemon - Meloetta! However, Miku's shown using the Normal/Psychic "Aria forme", while Teto's shown using the Normal/Fighting "Pirouette forme." Miku's image color has (especially early in Vocaloid fandom's history) sometimes been identified as green, instead of or in addition to blue; Teto, likewise, has been treated as both a "pink" and a "red" character depending on context. So matching Miku with the blue-eyed, green-haired Aria forme and Teto with the Pirouette forme is cute.

Finally, 23ki (the producer of Mesmerizer and Obsolete Meat) released a song for Project Voltage, using both Miku and Teto (UTAU) vocals.

New Voicebank

The main thing getting in the way of writing as much meta as I want to write, other than lack of time or energy, is that a key part of my process involves, like... throwing ideas out to other people, discussing those ideas, rotating them like a rock tumbler as we polish the idea, as they offer criticisms and I explain myself.

I've really been wanting to write meta about Mytho from Princess Tutu. However, it's hard enough to find fans of the show to talk to - harder still to find people who are passionate about this specific character, rather than brushing him off as "boring" and nothing more than a prop for the development of the "real" characters: Duck, Fakir, and Rue. I also will need to directly cite parts of the source material, and I'm unsure of how to do it. Hand-transcripting the subtitles is a pain, and I'm never sure where to put line breaks. How do I balance space efficient readability, and communicating the pace of a character's monologue or dialogue? In addition, sometimes the characters' facial expressions or body language are important, and I feel the need to include screenshots because I don't know how to properly describe these things in text. People definitely did include screenshots for some meta back on Livejournal, but I still worry about overdoing it. And what do I even begin with? I have textual evidence that Mytho's "emotionless" state fuctions is actually severe alexithymia, but I'm unsure how to properly introduce my argument and line up the evidence. I feel like I have something to say about how Mytho reads as a character with a dissociative trauma response (and I don't just mean season 2's unfortunate invocation of Evil Split Personality stuff, I'm talking season 1 stuff like the Fear Shard episode), even though his condition is textually magical in nature - but I'm worried I'll get something wrong and it'll feel disrespectful. I have thoughts about little bits of dialogue with implications about his thought processes and personality, about the existential horrors of his existence as (in-universe) a fictional character manifest from a tragedy into the real world. About how Mytho reads as disabled, about how Mytho reads as mentally ill, about how Mytho is objectified by other characters and his relationship to femininity despite being the manifestation of a male "prince" character archetype. But they're a formless stew in my head that I don't know how to refine on my own.

It's really hard to explain why my post-canon fanfic is the way it is without explaining how I see Mytho. One can argue that there's no point in interpreting the character that deeply, but isn't part of fandom supposed to be that we find value in both finding and inventing depth? It's what always drew me to the subculture, not shipping - analysis, theories, that sort of thing. We're supposed to interpret characters! I'm thinking a lot about T. H. White's notes on his interpretation of Lancelot, specifically the version of Lancelot that exists in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. The Once and Future King, T. H. White's own telling of the Arthurian cycle, uses Malory's work as its primary source. A transformative work, if you will. White's notes on Lancelot remind me a lot of the sort things a person in fandom might say about a character they're deeply fixated on (in Tumblr parlance, a "blorbo"), right down to the completely undisguised projection where White lists himself in a slew of people he thinks Lancelot as a character resembles. I'm thinking about this commenter's description of White's notes:

I'm touched by the seriousness with which White takes Malory. I've read Malory as a grad student, taught him, and read a fair pile of scholarship in preparation for teaching him, but I've rarely seen anyone so thoughtfully explore Malory's Lancelot as a coherent character rather than a mere series of actions—but then, White appreciated Malory with a simplicity that I suppose isn't permitted to many grad students and scholars.

It's very soul-crushing to see a whole bunch disillusioned, bitter ex-fandom Tumblr users describe deeply identifying with fictional characters, wanting to explore their psychology, and even openly projecting on them as... a sort of perversity, a moral sickness caused by Late Capitalism, and in a better world these impulses just wouldn't exist. It makes me feel shame about caring so deeply about frivolous things. But when I don't care about anything but the serious and terrible things in the world, I can't stand to live. But I struggle to explain what's important to me about my little things! The words turn to worms in my mouth before I can fully articulate them.

Nice Lady Therapists

Sometimes it’s – crossing a physical line. Touching in a way they have no good reason to be touching. Or touching over the objections of the kid in a way that is in no way justified by therapy goals. Sometimes sexually, sometimes not. Sometimes in ways that are against ethical standards of practice, sometimes not. But intimately, invasively. And if you say no, she patiently, lovingly, explains that you have nothing to be afraid of and that everything is ok. And that if you just trust her, you will have fun and get better. And when her profession has professional training about boundaries and appropriate touch, she thinks or even says “women don’t do that.”

Some male therapists do many of these things too, but there’s a gendered version of it that usually comes from women. And that can cause a problem for people with disabilities who are recovering from this. Most things about trauma and abuse of power are about misogyny in some way. They’re about men hurting women, and taking advantage of power dynamics that favor men to do so. Those descriptions are important because that pattern is common. But it is not the only abuse pattern, and it is not the only gendered abuse pattern.

Female therapists are subjected to misogyny and the power of men just as much as any other women. But they also have tremendous power over people with disabilities, many of whom are deeply dehumanized. The assumption that women have neither the power nor the ability to hurt anyone gets really dangerous really quickly for children with disabilities receiving therapy.

And it also means that people with disabilities often have a different relationship to gender than most nondisabled people. If you’ve been harmed by women over and over and assured that you liked it, it complicates things. If you’re a girl, it can make it hard to see a group of women as a Safe Space, especially if they think the thing making it safe is keeping the men out. If you’re a boy who has been repeatedly harmed by women who believed they were powerless, it can be hard to understand that the gender hierarchies that feminists and others talk about actually do exist.

This article is from 2014, but I think it's still relevant today. It feels frustratingly difficult to talk about how the sexist positioning of women (specifically cis white women - trans white women, cis women of color, and especially trans women of color are usually not afforded this kind of assumption of passive, doe-like innocence) not only enables the abuse of women by men, but also allows specific kinds of abuse by women (to other women, to certain men) to be taken less seriously or assumed nonexistent.

It makes me uncomfortable when I see people position women and girls as "more good" or "more pure" than men and boys, and that's Why We Need Feminism - rather than that oppression and gender essententialism is fundamentally wrong. (And let's be real - when nonbinary or genderqueer people are even acknowledged, they're arbitrarily sorted back into a binary box based on the speaker's own biases.) Because I was mostly physically abused by boys and mostly emotionally abused by girls - that's what bullying is, it's abuse of children by their peers. (Though I was also physically abused by a girl a grade younger than me, in first grade. I considered her a friend at the time because, unlike other girls, she was willing to be physically near me.) And I don't think the abuse the girls did caused less damage just because it didn't leave visible bruises. I don't think my kindergarden teacher locking me in a dark closet (a thing I don't even remember, but that people in my life remember me telling them about at that age) is made better because it was done by a woman. When a next door neighbor, or second cousin's dad, was physically and/or emotionally abused by their wife, I remember hearing adults implying it the man's fault for being weak-willed and spineless, for letting her walk all over him.

I don't really see myself as having a gender, but I was assigned female at birth, and I let people perceive me as a cis woman because it's easier to not assert myself. If I started taking testosterone, and was perceived more as a "man" than a "woman", would the things I've experienced suddenly become less serious? Would they have turned out, retroactively, to not have been serious? I already feel like such a burden on other people, like I take up too much space, being perceived as a girl. When I make characters for TTRPGs, I gravitate towards small characters - kobolds and the like - I want to take up less space, that's my power fantasy, not being strong or sexy or popular. Or I gravitate towards being the token non-humanoid, because it's easier to be a mascot or a pet than a person. It feels less bad if I don't know how to relate to my peers or be taken seriously if I'm just everyone else's crusty little white dog. I'm only afforded any grace as a human (a failed human, autistic, a dog trained to walk on its hind legs) in that I'm perceived as harmless, despite all the ways that I know I'm not.

One of the most groan-inducing things I've ever realized spontaneously was that Anne Mcaffrey very specifically only chose color names for her dragons' types that start with "g" or "b." The golds and greens are all female. The bronzes, browns, and blues are all male. It always struck me as an arbitrary set of colors (and arbitrary assignment of colors to sexes, relative to sex-based color dimorphism in irl animals) until I realized.

It's... "G" for "girl" and "B" for "boy."

I've never even read the Pern series.

You really can do anything and get away with it if you don't lampshade it, I suppose.

This was very obviously taken from someone's deviantart page or something, right? The artist wanted to redraw a design they liked, or "fix" a design they disliked, and placed the two side by side for comparison. I've seen this sort of thing a lot. There's a signature in the bottom right corner, but it doesn't give me enough information to look up the original artist. In any case, it's obvious this was never intended for use as clipart.

Any idea who might have made this drawing? And, for that matter, the artist and origin of the dragon drawing on the left - the original design? The redraw strikes me as the work of a young 2000's hobby artist heavily influenced by anime - and is obviously digital. The original drawing feels more in line with professional fantasy art from the late 20th century (though it could be more recent), and feels like it was potentially made with traditional media.

EDIT: Source found! Thank you, caramelchameleon!

Tineye reverse image search brought me to a 404 page but the overall deviantart gallery is still up and clearly matches the style of the redraw: https://www.deviantart.com/draknairy/gallery

The original artist's portfolio site has it filed under "concept art": http://guro.com.ua/concept/2, and there are two more images that seem to be from the same series, showing a young woman with a raygun who appears to be the main character and some enemy designs. (The latter doesn't show up in the grid view but it's there if you click the dragon and navigate to the right). That's all I can find.

One thing about the Sims franchise is that it has always been pretty aggressively abelist?

Mostly an ableism of absence. I can't make a blind sim, a deaf sim, or a sim who uses a wheelchair, or any number of other physical disabilities. Walking canes exist, but only elderly sims are allowed to use them, and even for them it's purely aesthetic. I struggle to find a way to represent developmental disability, or traumagenic illness. Sims, more often than not, feel deeply allistic to me as an autistic person, no matter what traits I give them to try to model how I or other autistic people think. You can't really make any kind of plural sim, at all - but then again, I don't trust the Sims to handle that.

Because the Sims also has a pretty bad history of making psychosis and other divergences labeled as "insanity" a punching bag. The "insane" trait in the Sims 3 is so deeply, deeply rooted in abelist ideas of mental illness, of severe mental illness as both morally depraved and a hilarious laughingstock. Look at how the list of "lifetime wishes" that "insane" sims naturally roll are largely associated with villainy. The "erratic" trait in the Sims 4, originally also called "insane" at launch, is at best slightly better, for not explicitly aligning "erraticness" with the concept of evil... but I don't think it's by much.

I can't speak for the Sims 1 or Sims 2. But I doubt it's much better there. And you know, the Sims has never had a way to adjust a Sim's height, so of course you can't make a sim with dwarfism or gigantism, either - because you can't even make someone at the "typical" extreme ends of short and tall.

The closest I've ever felt the Sims 4 has gotten to modeling what disability feels like is its take on werewolves, where they end up skipping from work and ruining their social lives because of meltdowns, developing individualized "temperaments" that make anything from loud noises to being indoors to intellectual pursuits more stressful and draining. And that's... a fucking werewolf. I love werewolves, I love monsterhood as a metaphor, but if the only way I can make my sim feel disabled is by making them nonhuman, something is... wrong.

No matter how much the series tries to improve with regards to race and queerness, disability gets left behind in the dust.