June has ended, the time of Queer Pride is over, which means we resume our normally regular scheduled broadcast of Queer Wrath. Please do not adjust your set, we will continue to bang on pots and pans (both the metal object, and the people who are into lots of genders). Pride Month is the month where we party, the rest of the year is when we arm ourselves, you see.
But with that in mind, let’s check out a bunch of stuff I wrote and made this month and why you, you, you, might want to go back and read it, and see the cool things you missed!
Starting the month with our five game pile articles, threeeee of which were videos, we got:
- Kings Quest I, a game commonly seen as the historical foundation of the narrative adventure game, and how its place in history is closer than you think it was.
- I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, a truly amazing game designed, it seems to drill a hole in my skull and take up residence permanently.
- Fallout New Vegas, and the question of why this game persists as a meme as a signifier of the trans community, specifically trans women
- Girl By Moonlight, a Blades in the Dark hack that explores a genre that is mostly about women and tries to decouple it from the assumptions of Blades’ vision of Truama and how it changes you.
- Playing With Tier Lists, where Fox and I talk about a bunch of characters for Pride Month that came out in 2022’s absolutely ridiculous anime seasons.
Then over in the Story Pile, we got:
- Harrow the Ninth, the continued story of The Locked Tomb, and oh no I am going to be one of those people who just wants to recommend every book in this series aren’t I
- Sword Art Online Alternate Gun Gale Story, a yuri series that also features a bunch of guns and a really insightful examination of the videogame structure of Sword Art Online
- GGWP — Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games, a manga about girls who want to do sick wavedashes as a metaphor for kissing
- Call of The Night, a horny anime about a not-very-horny vampire, and the not-very-romantic boy who is trying to fall in love with her.
I wrote about the Hanamusa ship, which got attention from Kiana Mai, and therefore, it got fantastically large amounts of attention on tumblr. That was cool, that meant that there were people meaningfully engaging with the point of how Delia is a character you know can’t do some things, and you know that Jesse is a character who you know would do most things (that aren’t sensible).
I also wrote about queerness in D&D and my worldbuilding. I talked about how heterosexuality as a cultural frame has to be invented, and that means everyone in Cobrin’Seil exists at a level of background queerness we can’t. I talked about the forced gender locking of two different heritages in the 4e book Heroes of the Feywild, and the way that gender transition in 3rd edition was cheap enough to build infrastructures around.
The Story Piles were kinda overloaded this month – if I’d wanted to, I could probably have done nothing but anime for weeks! I summarised a bunch of queer anime that I didn’t really want to write about entirely as that. I also talked about the way that Wreck It Ralph echoes a story of a trans identity while trying to make that identity invisible. Then I got nostalgic about the woman who scared me about the sin of Pride because she was freaked out by a talking cat plush toy in a book for four year olds.
This month’s shirt design is a design that’s meant to evoke the Ulysses jacket from Fallout: New Vegas, which is a killer shirt design and I like it a lot. I might not buy it myself, because I am currently pretty poor, but that’s not the important thing. The important thing is filling my Redbubble store with stuff that makes me think: hey, I bet X would like this design.
I’m not always right but it’s what I’m trying.
If I could, I’d put this design on the back of a soft jacket. I don’t want it to be a hoodie, because the hood would hang over the top of the design, but maybe a long-sleeve shirt with this design on the back. Not sure.
At the start of this year in my journal I wrote this:
I want to do a better job of the things I know I care about.
Source more.
Plan ahead.
Double check.
Early bedtimes.
Permit softness.
This June, I knew I had some real bad days for early bedtimes. I got to bed at 5 AM one night because I was trying so hard to get marking done before a key date (which I messed up, hilariously, and had more time than I thought). Thing is, this is also a month where I was able to get myself to go to bed at 10 pm every day of the week until the weekend, and that’s good! That’s a really good difference in how I relate to sleep normally, especially since ‘get to bed at 10pm and then wake up at 7am’ is a great way to get more work done.
Elli also got more walks, more walks with both Fox and I together, that’s also great. He loves to walk in the sunshine. Bright, sunny days and he has this way of walking that I call ‘high steppin’, where he kind of struts and bounces as he walks, like he’s much more interested to look around than he is to snuffle around underneath the grass of things.
There was a big windstorm. There was Fox’s birthday, and my sister’s birthday. There was a lot of family stuff this month too. Bloodwork also got to take precedence – I was able to make sure I spent time on that, and time on my literature review.
I feel like I can do more. I want to do more. I want to do better.