#barbequeue

its fine

Smoked a brisket for 14 hours yesterday. Started at 7pm on Christmas Eve and finished at 9am Christmas Day. I was dead tired but it was so worth it. Lol.

Smoked a pork shoulder today. For Al Pastor tacos. Took 10 hours to cook and then 4 hours of resting. So total of 14 hours lol. Now it’s shredded and cooling down. So tomorrow all I have to do is heat back it up in the sauce in the crock pot. Merry Christmas everyone.

Damn it’s a good thing I’m aro, the crippling fear of intimacy is a lot more manageable when you don’t have to care about that whole social train wreck.

My spiral OCs are TOTALLY fine, they absolutely cope with Situations in NORMAL and RATIONAL ways, why would anybody ever think differently?!

Can someone please explain to me why pet names usually piss me off in fiction?

In fanfic it’s obvious because 9 times out of 10, the characters either don’t actually call each other that or don’t use them with that level of openness or frequency. So it feels awkward and cringey and OOC and breaks immersion. Which is totally allowed BTW, it’s your fanfic, I just personally despise it.

But this is something that I feel equally irritated and put off by in original fiction. Which is really weird because I am a serial pet-name user irl. 4/6 of my immediate family members get referred to with pet names, and many of my friends and I call each other “dear,” “darling,” “love,” and even “sweetheart.” But whenever fictional characters do it, it just feels kinda wrong.

I think the problem is multifaceted. We’re going to set aside the obvious issue of when the closed-off, distant, formal, and other characters who just don’t feel like they’d use pet names start using them (especially when it’s just with one specific person). Also, assume a U.S. English-centric perspective, since most of the authors I read have that as their history and first language (because it’s my history and first language). Let’s just look at why it breaks immersion for me even when it’s in character.

The first is when I’m in a fantastical setting and the characters still use weirdly real or modern pet names. While I can’t think of specific examples right now, mostly because if something annoys me that much I put it down and try to wipe it from my memory. But a good counterexample would be Hadestown—Orpheus and Eurydice (and Persephone and Hades) call each other “lover,” which would be a hard no in anything without some level of poetry to the dialogue but feels surprisingly natural in their folk opera setting. This is more an issue of a lot of stereotypical pet names being a relic from decades past, so even if all the dialogue is modern, it sounds real odd when they break out the Darlings.

The second is that a lot of the time, these pet names come off feeling very generic for how close the characters are meant to be. With the friends that I call dear, darling, etc., it’s a phenomenon that encompasses the entire friend group. No epithet is reserved for a specific person because they are inherently non-specific endearments. My mother refers to all her children and her husband and even her baby sisters as sweetheart when we are being sweethearts, it’s not saved specifically for one person.

Third up, we run into the issue that while these characters would use pet names, they have a kind of teasing or combative relationship, so the pet names wouldn’t be openly affectionate. As another example of this done well, I LOVE how Nick Wilde’s “Carrots” in Zootopia evolves into a genuine form of endearment while still maintaining a level of “I’m not taking you seriously right now.” It adds a lot of tension and emotion to moments like when he thinks Judy has drowned and you can hear his panic progress from “Carrots?” To “Hopps!” To “JUDY!!!” Which is pretty much the opposite of how the irritating pet names get used.

A note on this, people who tease each other like this for fun generally won’t stick to a single insult since that gets stale quick and will have some rotating material for the bit. Nick (with varying intent behind it as their friendship progresses) also calls Judy “Fluff” and “Dumb Bunny” and “Officer Toot-Toot” and the like.

I also find that there’s a weirdly lacking category of pet names in fiction—the ones based on a specific incident. I call my brother “Goblin” as an affectionate insult a lot. This is half to pair with his pet name for me: “Gremlin,” which is short for “The Little Gremlin I’m Related To.” But the other half is referencing a very specific semantic debate we had about different breeds/species of dice hoarders and concluded that he’s more a Dice Goblin than he is a Dice Dragon. My internet alias “Abby” comes from a girl in my scout troop completely but confidently misremembering my name on our second meeting and deciding that was her nickname for me now. I think this is one of the most common categories of pet name I encounter irl and I see people ignore it in favor of stilted tropey ones far too often.

And that’s really the crux of it for me—pet names are just really tropey. And a lot of authors use the trope as a crutch instead of a tool. They go “okay, I need to signify that these two people are very close so I will make them use pet names,” instead of writing people with distinct speech patterns and developing relationships organically using a pet name that actually suits the situation. And when something uses tropes like that, it just comes off feeling boring at best and cringeworthy at worst.

Just food for thought.

Looks like were in Kansas my straight wife

Really need to read a bunch of phan-fics before I inevitably actually rewatch Danny Phantom so that I can actually enjoy it before I am ruined by watching canon and then looking at the most prevalent fan theories and going “that’s fucking stupid actually”

I made Memphis style BBQ in my crockpot with some homemade slaw. Not as good as from a smoker but it turned out pretty good.

face of a doll, body of an ancient greek sculpture

to beatnik or not to beatnik
that is the question

man sometimes i just wanna be someone’s chew toy frfr. i whine really pretty, my default is begging too. also im really squishy, my hips and thighs are like perfect to bite into. if you make me bleed i will go crazy stupid about it. the more bruises the better hehe

listen i think that all i need is to lose a bet and be put in a skirt and lacy panties while a bunch of guy friends keep upskirting me and making fun of me and feeling me up “"jokingly”“ while we hang out. bonus points if we all go home or get a hotel room because we’re bored and. and um. ummmm. hehehe.

one thing my mother and i have (silently) disagreed on is how open i am about my medical issues. her family, for some reason, is very ashamed of it, even though they have a history of chronic illness (eczema and asthma). when i first got diagnosed with depression and got prescribed with antidepressants, she told me to not tell anyone, including my sisters (which is impossible. ofc theyd suddenly notice i was taking a new mysterious pill every night. ny older sister is practically my twin). over the years, ive just stopped giving a shit and just started being open about how nervous and twitchy and itchy i am. and honestly? its changing my family and my acquaintances’ minds on a bunch of things.

like for example, i was talking with someone about their joint pain (because they knew that i got knee pain and chest pain sometimes), and she was like ‘hmm i got this medicine for it but i dont know what its called, it just makes me shit violently!’ and i gently suggested to her that she could ask her doctor about maybe changing medicines if the side effects were uncomfortable or maybe ask for ways to manage the side effects and it was like a lightbulb went off on her head. she didnt realize she could ask her doctor normal things about her illness and her treatment. it’s like we’re so focused on obedience we forget its a two-way relationship!

and one time i casually said to my sisters (who has been exposed to my mother saying that you shouldnt take medication too often bc you’ll get addicted to it) 'you know, ever since i went on my psychiatric medicine, my life started getting better, it’s like a real lifechanging device for me!’ and my younger sister started thinking and she was like 'huh. so its like…. maintenance meds? or something essential for you to stay alive properly’ and i was like yes :). and lately shes started taking painkillers when she gets headaches or joint pain and those things you take for sore throat

and i even got my dad to ask about situational anxiety lol once. but he asked it so clumsily that i thought he was making fun of me and he never brought it up again oops 🙃

its a bit like pride but for being sick lol. people around me feel less ashamed for needing help bc im open about it.

i dont really know how to end this post other than saying that lately ive been doing the same thing to the nurse-to-be next door, she basically only interacts with me in a semi-formal medical environment, and she’s (casually) homophobic and im pretty out as a masc trans… whatever, and shes respected me before i outed myself, and now that im out i still act as smart and nice to her as i did before, and i can see how shes hesitating a bit and thinking around me. but i think she’ll come around. it helps that she thinks im hot when im masc 😁

Me: *sees a Blake/Yang fanart*

Me: “Why does Cass have cat ears in this StephCass?”

Have a photo of my fat bastard who crawled into my lap immediately after I sat down. >:(

He’s been purring for the last 10 minutes and I’ve been unable to move since he settled in.

I haven’t posted original content in a while and I’m at work alone (so no drawings til maybe tomorrow?)

So have some photos of my fuck ass weird cats

The white and brown tabby tub of lard is named Nelson. He weighed in at 22lbs when I adopted him (his previous owner was a little old lady). He’s stinky but loving. Sheds like a mother fucker though. Knows he doesn’t get food in the morning until he is sitting proper TWO FEET away from the food dish. Enjoys sitting on my shower bench (pictured above) immediately after I’ve showered. Doesn’t like baths.

His long haired and orange sister is Honeycomb. She amazes me daily with her capacity to catch the collective braincell for all of ten seconds and lose it again. She knows she’s not supposed to eat my cacti, and prevents her brother from crunching. And then proceeds to bite the cactus, get mad that it hurts her mouth, and pulls it out of the pot to fling onto the floor. And then gets mad that it’s on the floor.

There’s one collective braincell in my apartment and it usually floats up 2 floors to the neighbor’s dog.

Enjoy.

Does uhhhh

Anybody else like drawing their Player Characters during work hours?

I do. :)

More than I probably should actually :[

In any case, this is Nova (wow ✨️)

She’s a Viera Bard, and y'all can expect a hell of a lot more art of her.

My boyfriend laughed at me as I finished the Vault, so expect a lot of that art especially.

Teammate made a joke last night that the only reason I flub returns is because I have to switch out of cheerleader mode and into hit-ball mode <- gets too excited about hyping people up that I lose concentration