Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So I've been eating a “sloppy” vegan diet (sloppy in that I very occasionally eat meats or meat products rather that being totally strict) for the past probably three months or so. Since people tend to make assumptions as to others' motivations, here are the four reasons that I did this:

1. It was the easiest way to achieve a reduced calorie diet.
2. I want to eat in a way that I feel is both sustainable and equitable on a planetary level.
3. I have serious concerns about the health safety of eating the produce of large-scale farms.
4. I have serious concerns about the ethics of large-scale farms.

Anyway, yesterday I made the mistake of eating a panzerotto (a folded pizza) which had quite a bit of cheese in it. I've had quite unpleasant stomach pains now for the past twelve hours and expect I'll have to put up with them for some time longer still. Oh well, a lesson learned I suppose.

There have been a small handful of people angry at me for “playing god” because I deleted two people who chose to slag heavy mods (things like subincision) on their page, calling them “mutilation” and “butchery” and “sick shit” and things like that. If you don't like those mods, fine, they're not right for you personally. But attacking and ridiculing someone for their mods is not something that should ever happen on IAM. If you think that's appropriate, then you've come to the wrong place…

Plus that ignores the fact that it's the heavy mod and heavy play enthusiasts who by supporting BME/HARD and BME/extreme actually pay a significant percentage of the bills here, and allowing IAM to become a mod-unfriendly place would be extremely counterproductive… So… If you have a problem with subincision or other mods that make many people very happy, I would strongly encourage you to grow up and get over it.

Live and let live, remember!?

Of course, the response tends to be the immaturity confirming:

“I insults who I likes”

I think some of the problem is that people are coming to IAM now, not because they are readers of BME, but because they are being called to the site by people who have pages here. For example, I got this letter from someone who wrote a quite obviously fake navel experience (two paragraphs about what her friends looked like, then a whole paragraph about being strapped to the bed, and then one about getting involuntarily navel pierced), ignoring issues like spelling “key words” wrong.

All I wanted to do was see someone's page. she told me about the site and everything and as a matter of fact I am uninterested in becoming a member right now because of the bullshit people wrote about my story, it was harsher than harsh, so thankyou very much bme. another thing is, is that i know that my story was a fuck more exciting than those other fucking boring stories that only talk about the actual piercing, and the fucking aftercare-HOW LAME AND BORING. where my story, was a fucking story and a damn good experience as well. I wasn't even interested in becoming a member to this site, so i whipped up the most exciting navel piercing and because it wasn't profesionally done i'm gonna get some fucked up criticism, and because I spell one word wrong gage, that's just the biggest fucking deal in the world right? wow just kill me and kill your fucking site.

The “extremely harse” comments weren't actually harsh at all on this story. People basically said, either submit this as fiction, or write about the relevant parts. There was not a single out of line comment left. Anyway, the “all I wanted to do was see someone's page” line is getting quite common.

Of course, there's also the people who write fake experiences; that is, they get half way through, and then just write “la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la” to make up the wordcount. You'd think that after being rejected they'd realize, oh yeah, I guess there was no way that could be put on the site… But no! They all get supermad!

fuck you stupid cock suckers in your ears!! You are the dumb motherfuckers
that expect
people to write 800 words! Fuck that tribalectic is the best site you guys
blow monkeys
cocks all night

(Ah, the prototypical tribalectic reader!)

Finally, there was one last thing I wanted to talk about. Yesterday someone said in the Whatever Forum that they thought star tattoos were getting lame — becoming “the new Taz” or “the new tribal armband” — because they are so common. Since a few people took my “check your scene at the door” statements the wrong way, I wanted to make something very clear:

I think star tattoos are great. I think they look good, I think they're a solid simple design, they've very easy to integrate into followup work, and I think they will stand the test of time. In addition, what does it matter if a zillion people agree? One could argue that's a good thing!

Tattoos are for you.

If a tattoo makes a person happy, then it's a good tattoo. That's all there is to it. It doesn't matter if one person has the design or if a million people do — tattoos are personal, so that's irrelevant. I certainly hope people aren't getting tattoos so they can feel superior and that somehow others getting similar work takes away from that.

Anyway, I have work to do…