tattoo artist who can encode magic into tattoos but doesn’t want people to know she can so she just puts low-level luck spells on her clients’ bodies without telling them
jeweller who makes body jewellery and pendants which have amulet properties and draw love and luck and happiness to their wearers without them realising it
piercing artist who keeps the remnants from her piercings and puts them all in little jars in the back of her shop to work sympathetic luck spells on all her clients
and then all three of them slowly realise what the others are doing and end up in a poly relationship living in a little shop in the shitty end of town, which gets curiously less shitty the longer they stay, and people think it’s just the development of the area but the three artists know
and they’re never rich and they’re never famous but they’re always happy because they have everything they need
they have the shop and they have their customers and they have each other
and when their customers are happy and content, they pack up and move on, all together now, to find another space with skin to be coloured and jewellery to be made and magic to be done.
this is beautiful
DETROIT – The three body modification artists were arrested today on charges of voluntary manslaughter after a past client suffered a fatal stroke, allegedly due to thaumo-alchemical interactions between her prescribed potions and a luck charm that had been placed on one of her tattoos without her knowledge.
…
“Some potions and drugs are known to react with common charms, which is why it is absolutely essential that your doctor and pharmacist have a complete and accurate list of your active enchantments,” says pharmacist Patricia Patil. “Putting an enchantment of any kind, no matter how minor, on someone without their knowledge or permission is playing Russian Roulette with someone else’s life.”
…
The victim, Carmen Jackson, was 36 at the time of her death and is survived by a husband and 4 children.
“#death tw #yes this #I did not think this *exact* thing #but I did wonder why we were assumed to sympathise with people tricking others into taking spells”
Because consent isn’t part of our cultural narrative. Patriarchalism is – people assumed to be “wiser” doing what’s Best for other people without needing input from those stupid lower-class people who would reject the help out of fear and superstition and who never know what’s Actually Good for them.
Us, the lower classes and poors in this country, we know we’re shat on, but it’s still a long row to hoe challenging this internalized narrative, that if somebody who Knows Better than you (upperclass, educated, ~the Wise~) is doing what’s Good for you, they don’t need your consent or even to tell you what’s going on.
In skiffy, there’s a trope of the person who has to Decide The Fate Of Others angsting about it, feeling unworthy, actually addressing the fact that they’re making big honkin’ decisions about people’s lives without their consent… but the angst isn’t about whether the decisions should be made (and in skiffy there generally isn’t time or any achievable way to get everybody’s input), but over whether THE PERSON ANGSTING is “worthy”, is Wise enough, because they weren’t brought up to feel that deciding the fate of others is their job, they feel it’s the job of those higher up the totem pole who’ve done the deciding on the person’s own fate. If they had more time, the ability to consult, it’s not suggested that they should take the opinions of the people whose lives will be affected, but of their superiors who have more of a “right” to fuck with people’s situations.
It took me five minutes to figure out ‘Skiffy” was sci-fi, but other than that I love every bit about this commentary.
It’s true. The angsting is always that the decision is “above my pay grade” – i.e, something that should be decided by higher ups. Not angsting that this is something that should be decided by those it affects, or should not be decided at all.
Okay, so I mostly try to avoid commentary on that post (OH MY GOD STOP HAUNTING ME, POST), but this one I feel the need to talk about, because it was both really encouraging and really hard for me to read. Aaaand it got long, like everything I write, so it’s going under a cut i guess
Hi! I’m the person who wrote those tags justice-turtle is responding to. I noticed this in the recent notes while pressing the “like” button on our conversation about it.
I admit I flinched when I realised you’d seen us talking negatively about your post (conflict-avoidance ftw), but it went surprisingly well. I’m glad you agree with the main point, and I’m sorry you keep having to see people taking the OP the wrong way.
Have you considered a note-blocker extension? You sound like you could really use one. People will still be taking your post at face value, unfortunately, but at least you won’t have reminders of that constantly thrown in your face. I’ve never used one myself (never had a post go viral), so I can’t recommend any particular one from personal experience, but XKit has a NotificationBlock extension and I’m pretty sure there are independent note-blocker add-ons too. (They generally work on individual posts, so you’d still get notes from your other posts.)
“I admit I flinched when I realised you’d seen us talking negatively about your post” – I WATCH YOU ALL I KNOW ALL I SEE ALL NO-ONE IS SAFE
but seriously, worrying people like that is one of the reasons I rarely respond to commentary on this post, b/c I too have conflict issues (…proooobably another reason I struggle with commentary like this, to be honest) and sympathise a lot with that lurching “oh crap they saw the thing” feeling.
I’m not sure I’d say people are taking the OP the wrong way, exactly. What worries me is that the way people are taking it – presenting the scenario as romantic and A-OK – is what’s presented in the post. So I can’t really say it’s wrong to read it that way, although it may have been wrong of me not to clarify in the post itself. I just continue to curse the fact that it went… “viral” may be a strong word, but close enough. That it spread so much.
Anyway, thank you, and I do keep meaning to get onto that XKit extension. Sadly, I am a loser who keeps whining about things and then not fixing them. HOORAY FOR LETHARGY!
(I know OP said they didn’t want people reblogging and especially necroing this post, but I’m going to go ahead for two reasons. First, this is a version including the explanation of how it wasn’t intended to be, as they put it, “romantic and A-OK”; second, OP hasn’t posted anything to northcentralpositronics-blog in over two years†, so it looks like they aren’t being subjected to the notestream from this post anymore regardless of whether they ever ended up installing a noteblocker.)
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†If I understand their sidebar correctly, Tumblr fuckery locked them out of that account, and they had to get a new one.
Tags:
#(June 2015) #conversational aglets #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #storytime
Brinens and Things 
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