So … today I got woken up at about 9 AM by a police officer shining a flashlight in my face. In my bedroom.

That was not how I expected to start my day. I have a housemate who works for Spectrum. Spectrum has changed its sales policy recently & my housemate’s supervisor has been demanding they lie to customers in the sales calls & automatically sign them up for things

When they refuse, they’re called into meetings

Everything on here is terrible, so let’s get lost in a haunted house 👻

As a #Halloween2022 🎃 treat, allow me to introduce you to #LonelyHouse - a new game of collaborative fiction

Which path will you choose? #TTRPG #HorrorGame #NaNoWriMo #RPG

itch.io/s/80315/lonely… This is available only as a digital release for now

Because #LonelyHouse is an indie release, I could really use your help in getting word out

Any reposts or retweets would be most appreciated - doubly so if you are a writer, game designer/publisher - but every boost helps

The Dancening. It is happening

Leather Daddy Goth - teaser #Goth #OldSchoolGoth #DancingWithMyself (music by me & @NoxArcana) I even put on makeup for this (Toreador represent! #Vamily)

What if training young salesmen to “never take NO for an answer” has a direct impact on their respect of boundaries in other aspects of their lives?

For example, when someone they want to have sex with says NO

Sales & upselling train people that trampling consent is “winning” Moreover, many folks who get deeply ingrained in sales culture begin to model their identity around their ability to convince people to say yes to things they obviously don’t want or need

The ability to trample consent is perceived as power, superiority: a skill to be rewarded

Tried to get a picture of Ozzie with my @ElyriaRose to give some sense of scale for this enormous cat. Still not sure this does him justice (also he really, really wanted to be put back down) When I endeavored to take these photos I did not fully appreciate the difficulty I would face in getting both the cat and the wife to hold still at the same time as the two are nearly always perpetually in motion 🤣

So, it’s #BiAwarenessWeek?

Which raises, for me, some existential questions

When I, sheltered in the Midwest within a white, performatively Catholic family, first learned attraction between people could actually be more than vanilla heterosexed, bisexual seemed to fit

But - Back in the day when I was reading Dykes to Watch Out For & Hothead Paisan, I encountered the term “Stone Butch” which seemed to better encapsulate how I experienced love & affection for people but rarely any desire for them to get sexy with me (asexual wasn’t widely used)

I did a bunch of my undergrad work on the portrayal of women & witches in Shakespeare, the witchcraft beliefs of the time & the period in European history often called the “witchcraze”

Just never expected to experience a renewed wave of violent mass delusion in my lifetime To be clear, the delusion is not the practice of witchcraft

The violent mass delusion in this case comes from Christian sects sublimating their fears of contagion, destructive weather & economic insecurity into beliefs of a widespread Satanic conspiracy working to harm them

Made a viral post about the emotional state of Gen X right now & the best one of the trolls could come up with was asking me if I was sad because my mixtape broke

TBH, song lyrics are never far from my mind (you’ll see them often hidden in my tweets), so that gave me an idea… My 2022 Mix Tape: GenX Rage

Genesis: Land of Confusion
Nine Inch Nails: Head Like a Hole
Nirvana: In Bloom
REM: Losing My Religion
Rage Against the Machine: Killing in the Name
Tori Amos: Me and a Gun

Bonus track: Childish Gambino: This is America

I realize I have inhabited fringe subcultures for the past 30+ years, but I remain baffled when folks repeat that ridiculous bit of gender-panick disinfo about furries demanding litterboxes at schools … and they seem genuinely surprised to learn furries exist DID NO ONE WATCH CSI?!?

seriously, if something is woven deeply enough into the fabric of pop-culture that it became a plot point on CSI, how do you miss that?

Your Gen X friends are not OK, especially if they were part of a counterculture, queer/queer adjacent, or otherwise marginalized by dominant white Christian society

Everything we fought against & everything stacked against us in our youth has returned with a vengeance & it hurts This is not the world we were promised

But we’re Gen X, so we know promises are made to be broken. Catastrophizing comes as naturally to us as breathing

Despite that, we held onto hope, sought solace in art & music & stories; tried to make the world better

And we saw change

Me, promising that part of my activism will be a post a day

Also me, revealing to the world that some part of my brain regularly short circuits over dates 😕 People trying to schedule things with me: What’s your calendar look like?

Me: I’d tell you if I could conceivably hold the mere -concept- of a calendar in my very strangely wired brain for more than a few seconds 🤷🏻

Tips on being angry from someone frequently outraged about the state of the world:

You can’t rage all the time

That level of emotion is exhausting. It erodes mental & physical health

It’s a big reason why folks move on after a few days. Constant rage is unsustainable

So … Knowing how hard it is to be outraged 24/7 how do we hold onto enough of that fire to actually do something to change what makes us angry in the world?

Treat your anger like a job

No, really

I am cynical & suspicious by nature, but I also know optics

There’s a reason why they waited until Biden‘s presidency to accelerate the removal of our rights

Most folks simply aren’t savvy enough to recognize this as Trump’s GOP legacy A lot of you are not old enough to remember the Iran hostages that Carter negotiated to have released

And how a certain Republican head of the CIA maneuvered things so that the release would not occur during Carter’s presidency but be delayed until Reagan took office

Rough, but I had to write the Ballad of Snake Island:

Thirteen souls to guard Snake Island
Thirteen souls to stand their ground.
Then the Russians come a-knocking
With their warship bearing down. “Lay your arms down
And surrender!”
Comes the message from the comms.
“This is it!” They said together.
For Ukraine they won’t stand down.

Some of you (particularly in the US) may find yourselves in a fairly chilly situation today & tomorrow thanks to a harsh winter storm.

Here are some cheap hacks to keep your space as warm as possible if the grid crashes:

Spoiler: you’ll need cloth. Sheets, old towels, etc., Drapery: tack up a sheet, curtain, or long cloth across every doorway & entrance to a room. if you’ve got a tensor rod you can put in the frame and a way to hook the cloth over that, great. Otherwise, thumbtacks, nails, even a staplegun will get the job done. (cont’d)

JFC … what fucking panic-inducing drivel is this? Travel Channel has my goddamn number and *this* is the show on vampires they greenlight?!? 🤬 If you never again see me on another episode of any show on any channel connected to these folks you will know this was the last goddamn straw.

We can all agree the #Briarwoods are hot, right? (Catch #TheLegendofVoxMachina to see what I mean)

Who doesn’t enjoy a good story of #VampireSexyTimes?

On February 14th, indulge yourself as I lean into every steamy trope of vampire romance in my solo RPG, Midnight’s Kiss. The best part about writing this solo journaling RPG was making it something you tailor completely.

Queer-positive. Trans-positive. Kink-positive. Polyamorous, steamy, ace, whatever body type you please - there’s room for every story in Midnight’s Kiss.

Vampy, romantic fun 💋

For those intrigued by tales of my youthful adventures with Ouija boards, haunted cabins, & strange spirits in the woods, I am pleased to announce my collection HAUNTING EXPERIENCES is back in print. Order on Amazon or buy signed copies directly from me: michellebelanger.com/signedbooks/ha… 2022 will be the year of the -Second Edition, Revised- for me.

We have successfully gotten the rights back to a number of my earliest publications, including PSYCHIC DREAMWALKING, the PSYCHIC ENERGY CODEX & the PSYCHIC VAMPIRE CODEX.

Expect slick, updated editions 🔥

So, today is #IntersexAwarenessDay.

Intersex people like me are born outside of binary gender. There is a wide range of how that presents, but we are neither male nor female by traditional definitions - down to our very biology.

This is me. Every day of the year. 🏳️‍🌈 A side bonus of how I am #intersex involves my voice. It gives me a range a little like Farinelli. I don’t normally brag about that, but a few years ago, together with @NoxArcana, we co-wrote a song designed specifically to show off my four octave range:

A very curious thing just happened:

Roomie is rearranging their altar. As they go upstairs, I hear them say, “Oh, hello Bliss,” & talk as if the cat is following them upstairs.

However, that specific cat is & has been in the office with me. I have eyes on her … When roommie comes back downstairs, I ask if they I actually saw Bliss on the stairs. They describe the cat walking upstairs with them.

Bliss is the smallest of our three cats & unmistakable.

We both had eyes on her at the same time in two different parts of the house. 🤷🏻

I have a (former) friend who is law enforcement (OH State Trooper, last I checked).

He was Nat’l Guard, but only because his wife did not want him to go full military.

He often expressed regret at missing his opportunity to freely kill people in “the sandbox.”

THREAD His primary reason for becoming law enforcement, stated openly multiple times, was to carry a gun & have the chance to use it.

He joked often about being a sociopath.

Our friendship deteriorated the more he leaned into this (I used to think folks could be reasoned with)