Cake and bones

it was the end of slumber, there would be object lessons, butter, sugar, cake and bones, but never the times we talked late into the fire and adored one another the way we were just there

[I]n many ways, that complaint has only gotten louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.

It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.

I start to consider what I might be, if my girlness hasn’t counted simply because it wasn’t overtly confessed. I think about my boyness—about my childhood and adolescence—how my experiences with boys deviated from what I was taught to expect. I change my major and spend a year writing about non-gay-identifying male femininity from the Aesthetics of the late 1880’s to vaudeville radio stars. Eventually, as a love/hate letter to coming-of-age films of the 80’s, 90’s and early 00’s, I write my thesis on the friendship and sexuality of American males and its representation in television & film. One piece of feedback is “I am so sick of boys writing about boys.” I think about being told I was not allowed to speak about femininity. I wonder what a person like me is allowed to speak about.

I couldn’t help wondering if a place like Rainbow Valley persisted as a kind of hallucination more than anything. I was in a “good place” that didn’t actually exist. The after-burn of the seventies shimmered around me, but remained ultimately unreachable. The party was over—but then again, had the community’s intention ever been fully realized? Or had it always been in-progress, and then, all at once, a nostalgic memory? After all, it’s one thing to see a rainbow at a distance, arcing across the sky; it’s quite another to follow a rainbow all the way to its end. Where illusion meets earth, there’s nothing but nothing.

Two studs wide and angled at 45°, the ubiquitous “2x2 decorated slope” is a LEGO minifigure’s interface to the world. […] At a glance, the variety of these designs can be overwhelming, but it’s clear that some of these interfaces look far more chaotic than others. Most interfaces in our world contain a blend of digital screens and analog inputs like switches and dials. LEGO panels are no different.

You can’t control what anyone else is doing. You can’t control whether someone has “your” idea or not, whether it’s “better” than yours or not, or whether they get there first. Obsessing over it is only going to slow you down, sap your creativity, and you’ll be letting them “beat” you before you even get out of the gate.