Check your cheese again!

An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib

sapphic books coming out in 2026 🎀

what sapphic book are you looking forward to in 2026?❓ what was your favorite sapphic book of 2025?❓

Hey.

Don't post online about what protests you plan to attend.

Be safe. Be smart. Don't fall for the weird pressure to liveblog political actions when we live in a surveillance state.

And for fuck's sake, stop posting unredacted pictures of people at protests. It's not a fucking party. It's a political action and you could get someone killed. I have a personal friend who was doxxed and harassed for MONTHS in 2020 after their photo at a protest got passed around by neonazis. Do not be a part of that happening to someone.

don’t bring your phone

[Description: a TikTok video showing someone holding up a Macbook laptop with an incredulous look, with a caption reading "Alan Turing after I bring him to 2026". The person inspects the laptop, and as they do so they say "Oh my god. This is—this is incredible. Like, I just—I can't even comprehend what I'm looking at here. Like, I just never thought that like in a million years society would ever, ever be able to create something like this." They pause and look at the laptop screen, and say "And you said they're both hockey players?" /End description]

More pieces from the Vinita Cultural Center from last year's basketry exhibit

i NEED someone to talk to about The Thing I Enjoy <- says the person who shuts down and says nothing when they get the chance to talk about The Thing They Enjoy

One of the big things I struggle with functions-wise is getting stuck in what I call optimization loops. Where there's several tasks that need doing, and some would be optimized by having another task done first, but it can't be shaken out into a clear executable task list.

Simple example: I need to shower, eat food, and go to grocery store. I'm hungry and don't have energy to cook, so the easiest food option would be to get a deli item at the grocery store. But I want to shower before leaving the house. But I don't have energy to shower without eating first.

It feels very silly to get stuck on such a minor dilemma for as long as I have! But there are times I've spent hours looping through this list, trying and failing to start it anywhere. And the only way out, I find, is to manually override it: to catch it happening and say, fuck it! I can go to the grocery store stinky! It's fine!!

It could be considered a subset of perfectionism, because the override very much involves hitting yourself with the idea that it's ok to do things suboptimally. But it feels like it comes from a slightly different place. As someone who struggles with executive function, I get myself through a lot of tasks by trying to optimize to the smoothest, lowest-friction way through. The task order that minimizes having to do any step more than once, or having to remember too many things at a time. If I can arrange my tasks just right, sometimes I can get one task to cover part of the work of doing another! And if I can put my tasks in an order that feels natural and ideal, I can lower the energy of activation it takes to get moving. And, sometimes, avoid the choice paralysis of not being able to pick a task out of a list of equal priority.

Except that, obviously, sometimes the optimization process throws up glitches of its own. There's the closed loop I described, and there's also another catching point where a task I have the mental energy and wherewithal to do gets stuck behind a task that's too big/intimidating/difficult to tackle. For example: I just sent some emails I've been procrastinating on for over a month, because I need to set up a new email address, and I was telling myself it'd be better to get that set up before I contacted people, because it would save me the hassle of dragging a bunch of conversations over to a new account when I did get it set up. I still haven't made the other email! But I realized that hypothetical future hassle was not worth the delay of not sending those emails for as long as it's going to take to actually get my brain together to figure out a new email service.

Surprisingly, doing something like this often actually makes the difficult task I was stuck on easier! Another thing I struggle with is a flinch reaction from tasks that are both pressingly important, and unapproachable to do. The more I need to do a task immediately, the more stressed and overwhelmed and self-recriminating I get about the fact that I don't know how to even start doing it. It gets so bad I can't even think about it directly - I think about the general shape of it, flinch, and divert my attention so I don't panic.

And when I've got a minor, pressing task stuck behind a big nebulous scary task, it presses the unapproachable task forward, makes it urgent, and that makes it harder to figure out how to do. If I can get around it, and do the actually pressing task in some contrived way that pushes some miscellaneous messy consequences forward, it takes pressure off the big task. And then I can actually think about it, without panicking, which makes it possible to actually work on doing it.

That last point also often applies to asking for help. I have a weird hangup here: I find it excruciatingly difficult to ask for help if I haven't at least *started* the thing I need help with. Which gets into the same dynamic: I have a big unsorted task I can't think about directly without panicking, or the path of steps to doing it that I've managed to figure out starts with one I can't make myself tackle, so I'm stuck doing nothing with no way in. Asking for help means admitting to someone that there is going to be mess, that I can't tackle the problem in the optimal front-to-back way so there's going to be inconvenient problems generated in some of the steps that will have to be dealt with at other steps, and some of that inconvenience might be to people other than me!! But just managing to say this, to admit this upfront, is sometimes enough to cut the gordion knot of not being able to start anywhere.

So, ok, it is a little bit about perfectionism. But perfectionism that comes from a slightly sideways place: the desperation to avoid creating problems in the future, to the point where instead you create problems now.

hope this is okay to reblog - those optimization loops are absolutely my most disabling exec dysfn issue, too, and i often have to remind myself of this comic--ESPECIALLY "get rid of secret rules." that's been the most helpful piece of advice for me, personally, largely because it puts into words even the idea that there might be secret rules i don't even notice i'm following. now that it's something i even think to check with myself, it has become so so so much easier to realize that i can just Stop Doing That.

people should be allowed to have low ambition, and also be able to feed a family on the salary of a cashier at a convenience store.

My very first job was at Taco Bell, and most of us working there were horrible young adults with horrible young adult problems, but one of my coworkers was a woman in (I think) her 50s.

And us horrid young adults would ask her why she still worked at Taco Bell, because it was starter job and who would want to stay there forever? Her response?

“I make enough money to make sure I always have roses in my bedroom.”

This answer changed me as a person. It changed the way I thought about what makes someone successful, and made me step back and realize that I was so caught up in what I thought success and happiness should mean that I didn’t know what I wanted them to mean.

Which is to say that sometimes ambition is making enough money to keep fresh roses in your bedroom, and you should be able to do that working at Taco Bell.

Noise pollution really is underrated as a source of stress and decreased quality of life

Author Applications for “Beyond the Galactic Tide” are Now Open!

Happy recruitment opens day! I’m so excited to announce that now through January 31st, 2026, we are accepting applications from authors interested in writing for our next anthology, Beyond the Galactic Tide!

Are you a fanfiction author? Have you been wanting to break into publishing your original fiction?

If the answer to both these questions is “yes,” then this may be the perfect opportunity for you! Duck Prints Press (the spiffy indie press founded by fandom author unforth to publish the original work of fancreators) is looking for approximately 15 authors to write all-new, original stories, 5,000 to 7,500 words long, for a minimum pay of $75 per story! What will these stories be about? TL:DR, ACE…. IN…. SPAAAAAACE! For the slightly longer version, we’re soliciting pitches for stories about asexual characters in outer space settings. Are they exploring? Are they settling? Are they traveling? Are they just livin’ life and vibing? You tell us!

Every pitch must include:

Curious how to apply? If you are over the age of 18 and have posted at least 3 completed fanfiction works totaling a minimum of 10,000 words, then you are qualified to apply, and you should follow these links to learn all the deets – how to apply, what to submit, how long pitches should be, and more! Only applicants who meet our fanfiction requirements will be considered!

The application period ends when the last timezone in the world hits 11:59 p.m. on January 31st (which I approximate to 8 a.m. Eastern time on February 1st), so make sure to get your applications in before then!

READY TO APPLY? Authors who’ve never worked with us before, use this form!

Are you a returning author – one who has written with us before? Use this form!

Feel free to drop us an e-mail at [email protected], send an ask to our Tumblr inbox, or join our public Discord and drop a question in our mod shout chat.

Now Available: Our Anthology “Scholarly Pursuits”

Our most recent anthology, Scholarly Pursuits: A Queer Anthology of Cozy Academia Stories, is now available for general sales. Miss the Kickstarter and want to get a copy? Hearing about it now for the first time? You can buy Scholarly Pursuits from the Duck Prints Press webstore, request it from your library, order it at your local bookstore, or purchase it from one of the many retailers who sell our books!

Blurb:

Buy your copy, as an e-book or print book, today!

We also have limited quantities of leftover merchandise from the crowdfunding campaign!

If there was any merch you wanted, there’s no time like the present to make sure you get it before supplies run out.

This, and lots of other awesome anthologies, books, stories, and bookish and queer merch are available on the Duck Prints Press website!

i'm going to say something insane. i think the overall pronounced fandom cultural slide away from complex plotty violent work and towards kidfic and coffee shops AUs and cozy domestic romcoms is a symptom of fascism.

okay actually this is a great phrase for it

Reblogging this for the term "neopastoralism", because I think that's fantastic.

Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.

However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.

The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.

The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.

To me, there's something very uncanny about it.

I've made this observation before, but there's a distinct and strong correlation between "wanting simplistic, saccharine, and morally binary media" and "authoritarianism". It's not a 1 to 1, which is where a lot of people seem to misunderstand things; it's not "If you like fluff, you're a jackbooted authoritarian." Very much not. This is a pattern that grows up out of thousands--hundreds of thousands--of individual interactions, out of culture, out of a shift of perspectives on what is seen as the norm and what is seen as outrageous.

Individual people liking cutesy fluff? Not a problem. Thousands of people insisting that fluff is the only acceptable option and if you dare make them think and consider, you're the problem?

That's a Problem.

It's the shifting of norms in culture, and fandom is not an isolated bubble--it's a representative of larger trends. And the trend right now in our larger culture, especially in America, is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism that has gone past "creeping" and is now "prancing", "dancing", "galloping", or dare I say goosestepping. Of course that's going to have an impact on the cultural scenes, including fandom!

And there's a correlation in societies that want saccharine fluff and their own authoritarianism. I can point to numerous examples--Victorian England with the censored stories for children. The USSR with an entire kitschy style of stories and art. The USA before the rise of Trump with Thomas Kinkaid's art. And that's just scratching the surface.

The main point in bringing this up is to be aware of the trend, not to take it as a personal attack for enjoying fluffy stories.

And I think the way to keep this from pendulum-swinging into “fluffy stories bad” (because we know this does happen with any observation of problematic trends—see: feminist critiques of objectification turning into puritanical sex-negativity, critiques of appropriation turning into enforcing cultural “purity”, etc) is to shift the focus from the presence of this kind of fiction to the proportional absence of the alternative.

Obviously, the presence is easier to spot—you can actually see something that is present, but you can’t directly see something that’s absent—so it makes sense that this is the first piece of evidence in building this critique, but the critical thing that makes this an issue is the absence of engagement with challenging works, not actually the engagement with unchallenging ones.

Positive emotions and things that make us feel safe and cared for are as important a part of the human experience as for the negative. And safety-seeking can be as much a response to the rise of fascism to get away from it as an indication of people falling into it. We just can’t only have the safe, unchallenging stuff. Because it is that censorship and cutting out of fundamental parts of human experience that feeds into the social conservatism & puritanism of authoritarianism.

parental controls on the internet should go the other way around. my mom should not be spending her screen time this way.

I feel like it's a really common trope to have a non-biological entity disgusted by squishy bio things like secretions and flesh and stuff but. Wouldn't they utterly lack revulsion to those things? The reason we are repulsed by things like blood and shit and corpses is because they are intimately connected to our bodies, are uncomfortable reminders of our animal mortality, can be vectors of harm, or are a signal of danger. A being made of energy, metal, or plastic does not have the same sympathetic connections to these things that we do, except as a kind of intellectual sympathy for what people they care about fear. Disgust is repulsive, and you can only repel something if it's close to you. I think the things that viscerally repel a non-biological mind are not going to be biological.

Hmm... Maybe not as extreme as a corpse, but if you handed someone composed of mostly metal an extremely corroded piece of copper, I could see them reacting like you just handed them a very moldy orange.

To reach "handed a decomposing roadkill squirrel" level, maybe give them something with identifiable parts similar to what is in their body, like corroded circuit boards, batteries, wire connectors. That's a more direct reminder of mortality.

burn it 🔥

(he/him) 🐇

said this on bluesky but:

i genuinely encourage non black people to engage with this, who might be worried they can't because of the word "nigga" because they feel like it's overstepping. the only way it would be overstepping is saying it to me when ur not black, but please don't be afraid to engage with black art.

i kinda get annoyed when non black people police other non blacks on how to engage with black culture because it creates a problem where non black people avoid us all together which can be extremely isolating and create even MORE tension and overall being uneducated.

Ten questions to ask a friend who just read your novel

Here are ten questions to ask that will not put your friend in a tough spot, but will still give you some useful input on your novel:

1. At what point did you feel like “Ah, now the story has really begun!”  2. What were the points where you found yourself skimming?  3. Which setting in the book was clearest to you as you were reading it? Which do you remember the best?  4. Which character would you most like to meet and get to know?  5. What was the most suspenseful moment in the book?  6. If you had to pick one character to get rid of, who would you axe?  7. Was there a situation in the novel that reminded you of something in your own life?  8. Where did you stop reading, the first time you cracked open the manuscript? (Can show you where your first dull part is, and help you fix your pacing.)  9. What was the last book you read, before this? And what did you think of it? (This can put their comments in context in surprising ways, when you find out what their general interests are. It might surprise you.)  10. Finish this sentence: “I kept reading because…”

Your friend is probably still going to tell you, “It was good!” However, if you can ask any specific questions, and read between the lines, you can still get some helpful information out of even the most well-meaning reader.

Source: Examiner

This is really useful advice, especially if the person you’ve shared your story with hasn’t had much/any experience critiquing. 

It does a great job of asking for a balance of both positive and negative feedback in a way that’s comfortable for both the author and reader. 

Ooh, these are excellent, and I have a hell of a time coming up with good questions to get more than a cycle of “I liked it!” “Great, what did you like about it?” “…It was good?”