J

Cold floorboards, creaking house, warm sweater, breakfast, kissing, tinny GameBoy tune, jingling...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:29:24 -0400

Cold floorboards, creaking house, warm sweater, breakfast, kissing, tinny GameBoy tune, jingling keys, clanking dishes, frying bacon, cave walls, metal doors, earthen pots, deep pools, I’m on my side grasping at anything with my wrists in the binder, desperately gripping the edge of the bed and she won’t stop hurting me. She’s digging in with the metal thing again, a different intensity from the wand or the ??? (can’t see) or the flogger or her nails. I can’t get away. She’s never going to stop. It’s hopeless. I despair; I sob inside the hood that’s erased my face and she encourages me to sob but she’s not going to stop. I’m showering and dressing the next morning and every moment feels like another from a past that I haven’t thought of in forever, each accompanied by phantom sensations and images. I endured a challenging experience with her; her home is familiar to me by now but it seems new again. I think of travel, visiting new places, being uprooted from complacency in comfort and routine and changed to a fluid state in which I settle, like water, in the places I can find shelter. I rest in her loving gaze before leaving, head in her lap. She is my shelter. She tortured me and she’ll do it again. I’m drenched with possibilities not just for play, but things to write, things to draw. I feel 13. I feel 18. I feel 22. Kink and submission help push me past emotional barriers to knowing I can finally love someone unreservedly. Two years ago, this seemed impossible. Being capable of loving, spending time (for the first time in my life) with someone I can love in this way reignites torches along paths I’d long since considered lost, inaccessible. I get to have a life now.

My kink is a paradisiacal shore littered with remains of the ships of would-be colonists, foremost being the abuse that attempted to assert itself as the origin of both my sexuality in all its manifestations and my identity itself, next being transphobes who’d insist I want to submit because I’m too crazy or stupid to see that my internalized misogyny links womanhood to weakness and submission. I’ve ceased to be human and become a phenomenon in their eyes, a dangerous meme replicating virally through the Internet, and the dynamic they want to lure me into is one where their sadism might find in me a small, vulnerable place that can receive the same command that assaulted it in childhood, now dressed up in the authoritative garb of feminist theory or the clinical language of the medical industry: be a man. Be a man. Be a man. They will not determine my body’s use.

This is about me and her and the hood and the ropes and the assortment of toys and the room smelling of perfume and oil and sweat and me on the floor and me at her feet and and me in a place where the relentless pain suddenly echoes the relentless anxieties I navigate, except it’s safe to be trapped here, safe to be hurt here, safe to surrender beneath that weight here and I’m crying ‘till I can’t cry anymore and then I’m just screaming until it’s finally too much and I scramble up into her lap to be held. Sex, for me, is not the discretely packaged and commodified diversion my culture describes in the same way it might a PlayStation or XBOX, but a transformative experience that radically reshapes how I engage my body and the world it inhabits, allows the union of emotional, intellectual, and chemical drives which once tore me apart as they pulled in opposing directions. This has only become possible after resolving to change my body. The world is new.

Talking about yourself and expressing what’s true for you personally in a thoughtful and...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 16:50:32 -0400

Talking about yourself and expressing what’s true for you personally in a thoughtful and carefully considered way does not equate to policing someone else’s identity.

Is taking a cell phone photo of a cop considered “espionage” yet. I’ll ask every...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 02:05:00 -0400

Is taking a cell phone photo of a cop considered “espionage” yet. I’ll ask every couple weeks until it is.

The police will NOT have access to your phone and Internet data and it’s intellectually...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 02:03:34 -0400

The police will NOT have access to your phone and Internet data and it’s intellectually dishonest to suggest so. They will simply be able to consult systems that link your bio-data to a gestalt “character snapshot” compiled through dozens of non-invasive indexing methods that track that frequency and severity of certain sentiments (classified.) That’s all this is about.

I finally turned into a vampire, which is why cops keep pulling me over, but I’m polite and...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 02:21:53 -0400

I finally turned into a vampire, which is why cops keep pulling me over, but I’m polite and show my papers and keep my body hid under a jacket. Once a police attaches to you, it will follow you for five rounds. Capable of opening doors behind you. After round five, death.

In truth, though, even if it’s sounds uncool to you: Interview With the Vampire feelings. Running around in your new body, finally broken free of something. I cried when I read it at 13, aching with longing that monster movie metaphors could touch but not precisely enough articulate. I, too, am a bestial, supernatural sadomasochist.

There are a thousand ways I feel I’m not supposed to discuss myself now in order for my identity to be “taken seriously” (different camps have different criteria) but I kinda take it as a foregone conclusion that it won’t be no matter what I do or say? If I’m still censoring myself at this point, there won’t be much of me left, so I’ll go to the monster metaphors if they feel true and if someone wants to cringe, they can cringe.

The interesting challenge of drawing something that resembles my current body

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 02:03:13 -0400

The interesting challenge of drawing something that resembles my current body

Photo

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:47:48 -0400

Messy messy messy

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:43:02 -0400

Messy messy messy

Metal coils

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:31:06 -0400

Metal coils

Mommy

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:24:39 -0400

Mommy

Blarg

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:20:06 -0400

Blarg

Photo

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:50:54 -0400

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubbermaid

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 03:26:12 -0400

The Rubbermaid brand was named for its founders’ shared proclivities for rubber maid uniforms. A little backstory: the year is 2045 and the Grand US Matriarchal Court has ruled that delinquent girls must be subject to forced rubberization. You arrive at the train station sweating and nervous, your hands and feet shackled. “Can we please go someplace else,” you ask. Mother shushes you as the Rubbermaid tourguide drones on. The year is 2070 and Supreme intelligence M.A.T.E.R. has ensnared half the Earth’s population in coffins of living rubber.

SmokeMistress blows cloud of smoke into your face

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 02:57:29 -0400

Each cloud has a 19/20 chance of containing 1d4 Smoke Mephits and a 1/20 chance of containing 2d4 Smoke Mephits. Clouds containing 7 or more Smoke Mephits host Mephit Festivals.

rusalka-mask: Apartment Building SECTORS: 1. Museum 2....

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 19:40:44 -0400

rusalka-mask:

Apartment Building

SECTORS:

1. Museum

2. Community Pool

3. Hidden Apartment

4. Shrine

5. Simulation Chamber

freeindiegams: j chastain

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 15:01:21 -0400

freeindiegams:

j chastain

Trigger warning: child molestation

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 14:06:00 -0400

Trigger warning.

I am 7 years old.

“You’re sure I won’t get AIDS? You’re sure I won’t get AIDS? You’re *sure* I won’t get AIDS?” I beg the boy, who walks in a cloud of Cool Teen Signifiers and rock music and comic books and skateboards that I perhaps associate with my absent brother. His friendship is a ticket to hang with older boys who share music and movies and a kind of culture I can’t begin to understand but am eager to learn. I fake like I know what anyone is talking about, am for some reason tolerated, and I feel as though I’ve briefly graduated from the alienating hell that is my “peer group” crawling in the sand or running ‘round creating “bases” out of trees in structureless commando games which typically cast me as “enemy captive.” Faceless Teen Boy needs to show me something in a vacant locker room that the adults utterly fail to keep watch on.

HIV & AIDS are a boogeyman from TV that I don’t understand and I lie in bed convinced I’m probably infected and will soon die horribly, the worst part being when the adults realize it’s because I’m a little faggot.

The virus becomes a supernatural specter that hovers over the rest of my childhood and adolescence with a feeling of grim inevitability, exactly as it’s meant to. The culture surrounding me wants HIV to be epidemic and incurable and terrifying precisely because they think it will validate their loathing of queers as dangerous pariahs and serve as leverage for social control of queerness, the way queerness is discussed, thought of, and depicted.

I’m 29 before I ever talk to a therapist about any of this, and at that time I’ve never had sex, nor been on a date, nor been kissed, this phobia being one of a number of contributing factors.

It was not the incident that most harmed me, but the 22 years in which I did not speak about it, did not properly deconstruct and comprehend what had happened and instead stayed trapped in personal mythologies created by a child younger than 10. This is what I work constantly to finally pull myself free from.

TRASHBABES: Super Sexagon: Embracing Radical Play

Wed, 29 May 2013 23:31:31 -0400

TRASHBABES: Super Sexagon: Embracing Radical Play:

Porpentine & Merritt Kopas wrote a thing about games/kink/etc. that I like

Phantom Games

Wed, 29 May 2013 23:30:06 -0400

Faxanadu’s bewildering, labyrinthine tree is, for me, enmeshed with the night dad stayed out late without calling and the screaming that ensued when he returned. Was there a thundering summer storm outside or were the floor tiles unbearably cold? Did we have the old couch? Carpet or hardwood? What year? What I remember are the castle town walls and the themes of the king and the shopkeep. Time is marked by the procession of games, the games are marked by their time. They are windows into moments in years I deliberately occluded from memory, they are skins shed that reveal the shapes of past selves.

SMB3 is the elation at receiving the cartridge for good behavior and few Incidents during the semester, and the desperate frustration upon realizing it was too difficult for me, and watching The Wizard, understanding nothing but that it was about Nintendo, that I vaguely wanted or wanted to be Fred Savage in danger, that I vaguely wanted or wanted to be his girlfriend in danger, that I vaguely wanted to be crushed by the mean kid’s Power Glove in the same way I lusted for most fictional bullies, and that I clearly needed to be as preternaturally gifted as the younger brother to compensate for my strangeness, emotions raging out of control, the ever present dread that I had to demonstrate my value or risk being Sent Away (as happened in stories, such as Southern gothic yarns about which family members had been in the in-sane asylum.) Mario fell once more into the fucking lava and I covered my arm with a sleeve of bitemarks.

My experiences with 8- and 16- bit games were co-authored by a child mind I can recollect or simulate but never truly return to. I can work to understand what they meant to me at those times in my life, but setting out to make a Zelda game I’ll enjoy in 2013 the same way I enjoyed Zelda in 1987 is charting an expedition to a continent that sank. Adventures in this vein are usually founded on the premise that we can understand those experiences as adults clinically surveying the work of other adults. We say that NES Metroid, as a piece of design, isn’t supposed to be bewildering and glitchy and impossible; Super Metroid refined it into an experience anyone could complete without consulting a guide, and in doing so set a template to be cloned endlessly for the next two decades (and beyond.) When I solved Super Metroid’s puzzles, I felt like the baddest bounty hunting bitch in space. NES Metroid lived in a TV screen in dismal rainy Northern Georgia and it was a craggy, ugly, jagged, sprawling, claustrophobic deathtrap designed to crush me as I tried to escape the stress of travel, the stress of beercans and adults bellowing with laughter as they morphed into pod people for the evening, the stress of encounters with a branch of family irretrievably corrupted by real evil. There was no catharsis in defeating virtual, yet tangible demons as proxies for real, yet intangible ones. The labyrinth of the game was the struggle against the invisible given form. It was an articulation of despair, loneliness, suffering, boredom, subservience to icy, remote, indifferent authority and a gradual grinding down of the will to continue.

This was my experience with many such games that held me in a kind of erotic thrall as I tested their boundaries and found it was safe to be defeated there, safe to be weak, safe to be angry but helpless, safe to be ashamed, safe to cry like a baby when again my little surrogate hit the lava, the spikes, the electrified floor. I ostensibly played these games to win but I mostly only ever lost. In those deaths, in the monsters and structures that caused them, in the Game Over screens was a simple acknowledgement: I had been harmed.

My child mind was not capable of dissecting an experience to understand how it met my needs or selecting an experience targeted towards seeing those needs met; this was all as haphazard and stupid and arbitrary as much else in my life at the time. In my present life, when I need to be crushed I can directly ask someone nice to crush me. Where does that leave Link and Samus?

What happened when I played Metroid was real, in that I did experience it, and unreal, in that you won’t find it on the cartridge. I could say the same for most anything else I touched in that era. Understanding those experiences takes time, patience, introspection, and observation. That those primal experiences (which also constitute the Important Canonical Works in the Medium) are broadly understood instead as pieces of code or level maps to dissect is why so much game design and criticism is stalled on the notion that games “progress” in the same way we understand “progress” in the development of e-mail apps or household appliances.

Narratives of progress aren’t a threat to games, they’re a threat to you. If you’re roughly my age and feel you hold almost the whole of home gaming history in your head and life experiences, you’re poised to declare yourself master of a world that will disappear in ten minutes, when the next wave of kids have no idea what you’re talking about, when changes in the means by which games are produced and distributed render obsolete concepts and working methods you may have accepted as intrinsic to any interactive medium. The canonized Metroid and Zelda are specific accounts of what the experiences of those games were. A canon is curated to describe the present by charting the past, and embedded within is the notion of locating the origins of key concepts and tracking them through subsequent works; beware self-serving analysis which constructs an artform’s history in just such a way that the architects of the list are centered as the present torchbearers of The Fine Old Lineage of Ideas.

If you want to reach into the past, do the personal work of understanding what was fascinating or lovable or useful in your experiences. Don’t look in a software catalog—go to your memories, to pieces of your actual life where the software happened to be. Find those invisible, half-real phantom games and, in creating, give those phantoms their offspring.

http://trashbabes.com/Chastain/PhantomGames/phantomgames.html

COMMENT ON A HORRIBLE DANI BUNTEN ARTICLE (WHICH THE SITE OWNER PROBABLY WON'T PUBLISH)

Thu, 23 May 2013 23:33:57 -0400

COMMENT ON A HORRIBLE DANI BUNTEN ARTICLE (WHICH THE SITE OWNER PROBABLY WON'T PUBLISH):

What you do if you want to write an article about Dani Buten is you write an article about Dani Buten. The most fundamental bigotry in this piece and in your subsequent comments is that you act like calling her Dani and using her preferred pronouns is a “discussion” of her identity that transforms the entire piece into one on “trans stuff.” That transformation is happening for you alone, inside your mind, where the rest of us don’t see it. What you’ve told us is that you feel entitled to deconstruct her life and her identity and decide, for yourself, which bits are or aren’t valid. You’ve told us that you think Richard Garriott and Bill Budge are worthy of being called by their own names and you have judged that Dani is not.

Anyway, the tone and the language of the trans talk in these comments is some seriously clueless 1970s TV movie shit and it’s actually possible to both cling to your old video game obsessions and engage with actual living human beings (even the ones you haven’t tried to understand) but w/e, I just wanted to point out how lame this all is and I don’t want to mislead you into thinking we’re going to have a “dialogue” now.