sadtimetravellingdork
21 Year Old Gay Demi-Guy
43 posts
Latest Posts by sadtimetravellingdork
It's been a rough few days on the run
The ineffable husbands as "Couple Dancing" by Leyendecker
Painting this was difficult but really fun and rewarding, I love the result!
(I'm @/noixtky on Instagram!)
EDIT: thank you soooo much for the support to this painting ❤️ I've gotten a few comments about getting this as a print so if you're interested in that please read this ^^
I'm definitely using this as book recs having just finished The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet- thanks for the list!
Lizard’s Queer Space Opera Collection
What time is it? It’s ✨ lizard talks about queer sci-fi ✨ time
My family don’t understand how much joy I get from queer stories, and none of my close friend really read space operas (at least not with the same voracity that I do), so I’m appearing here to pass my knowledge on to you, the void that is my blog.
I read a lot of space operas, and I’ve had the incredible luck that the last handful I’ve picked up have been joyfully queer (or maybe we’re just seeing a shift in the sci-fi publishing world. I love it.). This isn’t a comprehensive list or anything, and this isn’t limited to pure space operas, but they are some of my favorites. Hope I can convince some of you to read a couple (and if you do or have read any, please come and shout at me! I want to talk about them! Always!)
I originally wrote these out for my Instagram, and I can’t really be bothered to retype it all so below the cut are my quick descriptions/thoughts on each of the books, but I’ll chuck the list here too
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin
Machine, Elizabeth Bear
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
Winter’s Orbit, Everina Maxwell
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
A Matter Of Oaths, Helen S. Wright
A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine
The Collapsing Empire, John Scalzi
These are just books that I’ve read in the last year or so, and if you have any more recs please tell me!
A couple additions that didn't make it to Instagram:
If you like graphic novels, please give On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden a shot, it's really lovely and quiet and feels like a big warm space hug.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado is a collection of horror short stories, some of which border on scifi, which is why it didn't make it into the main list, but I highly recommend it. My copy was given to me by the lovely @markcampbells
I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter has a bit of a history due to its presentation of gender, and the author actually asked for it to be removed from the Clarkesworld magazine due to the hate comments she was receiving. Still, if you can find it I highly recommend it, as it is genuinely very good.
The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer is. Wow it sure is a book that emotionally damaged me. It's about two boys (men? they're 17 but it doesn't feel like a YA book, except int he good ways) who are on a spaceship heading out to Titan to attempt a rescue mission on Earth's first extraterrestrial colony. There are a lot of feels and ouch.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North. This book isn't a space opera, but it is somewhat sci-fi? anyway, Harry August is one of my favourite books of all time, and it explores a man trapped in what is almost a timeloop, except that time-loop is his whole life. each time he dies he's reborn right back where he started, and it's only through his and the other people like him's actions that the world is ever changed in each repeat.
The Culture series, Iain M Banks. I put this one on the list with a good bit of trepidation and the warning of: these books were written by a (supposedly) cishet white man, and almost all of his protagonists are…nearly cishet white men (with a couple women thrown in in later books). The same can not be said for literally every other character, who are almost entirely trans and bisexual. These books really gave me my love for space operas and if you're a fan of the genre I recommend. Also, the AIs here are amazing. Let us not forget the Ship "Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath". They're great.
(I’m also going to add, I would not recommend his normal fiction. I’ve read two, The Wasp Factory which kind of scarred and disturbed me, and Transitions which was just plain bad. Maybe I picked a bad selection, but I can only in good conscience recommend his sci-fi.)
And that's it my dudes! go forth! read queer space operas!
It's so odd being off my antidepressants for the first time in ages (new GP delays). I've had constant headaches and gotten lethargic really early through the days, and now it's the end of the 2nd day without them and it's like the future just lost meaning again? After I've actually been getting excited about planning for the future for a while now? At least it proves my dosage I guess.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
Holy Trinity.
I’m a cis-gender man which basically means that, when I was born, the doctor went “It’s a boy!” and when I was old enough to understand I agreed with him.
The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man. I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little. I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests. I never cared about sports or cars or guns. I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts. I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.
It’s not physical either. I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard. If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume). I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.
I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me. I’m a man. I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated. I feel like a man because of something beyond that. Something ephemeral. So, why couldn’t others feel the same? Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?
And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one? Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?
Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form? If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap? If so, why? Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?
Why do people feel like they are the gender that they are?
Project 77 - by Martin Deschambault
“I was inspired by rock balancing sculptures! I think it could be epic and scary at the same time to have these giant rocks above your head.”
More selected art for Project 77 on my tumblr [here]
A surreal yet natural image.
This Lion’s Mane mushroom growing in a swamp 😰
Incredible fanart
been watching this with my gf and diggin it, so i decided to get some practice drawing actual humans for once
crazyheadcomics who you can find and follow on Instagram created this artwork. (They clearly state that they allow reposts to other sites as long as proper credit is included.)
A really sweet art of Sanders’ inauguration look.
Lily Van
Some very interesting writing tips, taken from a beloved studio. Less telling than I’d have thought about the studio itself though.
These rules were originally tweeted by Emma Coats, Pixar’s Story Artist.
You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.
Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
Sources: [1] [2]
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