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understatesmen.bsky.social
Author of The Dawnhounds and The Sunforge (Saga Press). Kāi Tahu/Kāti Huirapa. Rep: @arleysorg.bsky.social. She/her/ia. Header by @layahimalaya.bsky.social Sign up for my newsletter at: https://the-trying-times.ghost.io/
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Posts 28 Comments 22

Cis authors: "I can't write unless I have my perfect cup of tea, steeped to perfection, my favorite playlist, the special pen I bought for making notes, my leather bound notebook, and a lucky feather!" Trans authors: "I wrote this book while the entire government was literally trying to kill me."

submitted 18 hours ago • 10 comments

ABO would be so confusing in New Zealand, like "you, you there, you are my mate now!" "yeah nah sick mate, wanna a beer?"

submitted 10 hours ago • 1 comment

my deep forbidden lore is that zarya from overwatch helped crack my egg

submitted 11 hours ago • 0 comments

had a goblin outlaw riding a sheep specifically to have him say he was "on the lamb" and I learned the hard way if there is a sheep the players will drop everything to pat that sheep

submitted 12 hours ago • 3 comments

obsessed with whoever is behind the Severance Wiki

submitted 13 hours ago • 0 comments

This thread is one year old today, and, unfortunately, it is even more important to be reading and preserving trans stories than when it started. I truly thank everyone who has contributed to it, everyone who has kept sharing it, and everyone who has made a point to buy books from these authors. 🧵

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

it comes up in the strange horizons essay but I feel the need to shout it generally: to ANZ readers Gideon Nav doesn't come off like a funny himbo, she comes off deeply traumatised and using humour as deflection. Her personality 'change' in NtN is entirely consistent with her personality in book 1.

submitted 21 hours ago • 4 comments

an underappreciated part of Pathfinder 2's revisions to get it away from the OGL license stuff is that gnolls become kholo, which are *really fuckin cute* omg omg omg

submitted 22 hours ago • 1 comment

more Lancer????? MORE LANCER????????

submitted 22 hours ago • 2 comments

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

haha just normal and happy dw about it

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

I genuinely don't believe they framed him, because who the fuck went "yeah the guy who's already a folk hero? let's stitch up some guy who looks like a pre-Raphaelite angel, who's the most regal and noble looking motherfucker we got?"

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

it's such a weirdly specific overlap that one of New Zealand's most vitriolic TERFs had this exact conversation with a friend of mine, like threatened to violently murder her for riding a bike. I wonder if there's a connection, a certain sort of person who sees any different approach as a threat

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

I love Warframe, how it started out with "you're a cyborg ninja and you fight" and over a decade it has Ship of Theseus'd into "you're a teenager in a coma psychically projecting into a viral meatsuit mini-mech and you need to go into space to fight NSYNC because they got Cronenberg'd"

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

don't know why THIS song has been stuck in my head for weeks youtu.be/QWmnBcNijvo?...

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Elon's Mars obsession makes a lot more sense when you realise that life there is going to be incredibly fragile, and anybody living there would be totally reliant on whoever controls food, water, air. He wants to be the one in control, he wants to choose whether you get to breathe or not.

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

there is a sensible part of my brain going "you have already taken on too many projects immediately after returning from burnout recovery, slow down" and there's another part of me going "okay but what about weird transbian filth with a mech pilot and her spotter and they hate each other"

submitted 2 days ago • 4 comments

Elon Musk and his DOGE team have just saved $500tn by cutting ketracel white from the woke Jem'Hadar, promising this will make the Dominion much more efficient.

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

D&D stories: one time one of my players kept bothering a crab so I had it pinch him for 1 damage. Later in the session he took a massive amount of fall damage and THAT EXACT 1 POINT turned 'unconscious' into 'dead'

submitted 2 days ago • 20 comments

our barbarian fell in a big hole and only has climbing speed while he's raging, so I'm encouraging him by shouting PIT CHAD STAY MAD

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

a bigname New Zealand author said of my very first published story that I had potential if only I could get over my childish speculative trappings, and I've basically spent the rest of my life writing wizardbooks out of spite

submitted 2 days ago • 7 comments

WE DID IT GANG, WORM GANG RISE UP www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

submitted 2 days ago • 7 comments

still in awe of the historical bag fumble that was Overwatch, how did you go from the most important and popular game in the world to a complete nonentity that quickly

submitted 2 days ago • 9 comments

every so often that Chloe Gong editorial re-enters my head, where she says she worries about minority writers being trendy, because trends end – that our lives are not trends and publishers treating them like it was going to cause harm down the road

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

there is NOTHING dark or secretive about the worm, I knew it was a nasty little freak who liked to spray goo on things, that's half the appeal www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

my girlfriend just called me a 'buglicist', is this my fate, am i the bug girl now

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

WE DID IT www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...

submitted 2 days ago • 4 comments