iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

Fell victim to the Fallout Day frenzy in the wake of my PS3 finally dying and taking 16 years of FNV with it. Hate to say it, but I get why everyone froth at the mouth about PC gaming now...this is infinitely better in a computer Excuse me while I spend all my free time jingle jangling yet again

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Reposted by Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns)

Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

the society of authors can take a flying leap into the abyss they have chosen

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Reposted by Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns)

Denice (Dee), the Red Witch @deetheredwitch.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Good Morning, World.

A picture of Rod Serling with three glowing eyes standing in front of a giant blurred spiral optical illusion with the words "you are now immune to the propaganda" blended into it.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Why would anyone want this? I want organic chaos in my group chats!

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Often my gender is “man, if we must” but sometimes my gender is “BIG STOMPY BOOTS” ...guess which one I am today

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I love when my wife dresses masc because I deeply, deeply enjoy having my brain kicked down a flight of stairs by the sight of their ass in my pants

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Why does every CVS feel like you arrived there ten minutes late regardless of what time you get there??

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

People love saying “wow, she’s so well behaved” and I’m like thank you, you should see her when she’s off the clock and throwing back garbage like she’s sitting at a bar during the end of the world

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Vest on: respected medical professional Vest off: an absolute fuckin goblin

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

There is no stronger bond than two strangers watching somebody do something stupid in public and briefly making eye contact

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I love that my medical support system occasionally gets zoomies at 7 in the morning

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

It's dark but fascinating for having jumpstarted an entirely new genre. The content is too psychologically demanding for me but I do genuinely see why other people like it.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I have never once written a normal relationship dynamic and at this point I don’t think I have it in me

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

...I think I may have followed too many people in my effort to maximize the amount of cool content in my feed.

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A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

For everyone who spent #MeToo fretting “what if this goes too far?”—be of good cheer! It turns out we didn’t go too far at all! It turns out we didn’t nearly far enough! Good job guys!

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Why sleep in one dog bed when you can sleep between *two* dog beds?

A sable-and-white Shetland sheepdog lies on the floor beside a large white dog bed patterned with dark blue flowers, resting her head sleepily on the raised edge. A smaller plush-lined pet bed sits in the foreground, and part of a couch or chair is visible to the right.

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ADHD Memes @adhdforreal.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

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♠️ghøst🤍 - VGen OPEN @i-am-your-ghost.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

it is time!

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

All this is to say: read fucked-up books. Hate fucked-up books. Critique them viciously. DNF them. Write better ones. Write worse ones. Write stranger ones. Just stop treating "this is not for me" as evidence that nobody else should take joy in it. And for fuck’s sake, let people be kinky.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And I do not have to personally adore every published work in that genre to recognize the value of somebody making a work evocative and specific enough that other queer people went, “Holy shit. I did not know I was into THAT.” Hell, that is one of the things art is for.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I think that is part of why this niche grabbed my attention even when the books themselves aren't clicking with me. People found something worthwhile here. Enough people found something in it that an entirely new genre grew around it. That says there's value in it, even if it's not for me.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Queer people are allowed to make ugly art. Trans people are allowed to make horny art. Kinky people are allowed to write fantasies that would be a hasty prison sentence if carried out in the real world. Art does not have to double as a moral grandstand to justify existing.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And sexually explicit queer work gets this treatment constantly. Add hard kink or explicitly trans characters and suddenly the art has to prove it's educational, politically sanitized, psychologically healthy, and sufficiently condemnatory of every fucked-up thing it depicts.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Criticism asks what a work is doing, how it is doing it, whether it succeeds, what assumptions it makes, what it romanticizes, what it interrogates, and what it leaves unresolved. Purity discourse asks whether liking it makes you a Bad Person. I'm openly begging for media literacy here.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

What you do not need to do is turn your disgust response into a moral diagnosis of everyone who enjoyed it. "This upset me" is information about your experience. "Anyone who enjoys this should be on some kind of list" is bargain-bin moral panic and I'm fucking tired of it.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And yes, you are allowed to hate it! You are allowed to be disgusted. You are allowed to DNF it. You are allowed to say the execution sucked, the themes did not land, the sexual politics bothered you, or you simply never want to read anything like it again. That's good! That's healthy!

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Fiction can depict coercion without endorsing coercion. It can eroticize something depeaved without recommending it. It can explore obsession, degradation, violence, cruelty, kink, exploitation, or terrible choices without turning intona green light in the real world.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

A book should not need to stop every other page and say, “REMINDER: THIS WOULD BE BAD AND ILLEGAL IN REAL LIFE.” If the only way you can encounter difficult subject matter is with the creator standing beside you holding your hand the entire time, that is not a failure of the work.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I am especially tired of "real literature" being shorthand for “art that doesn't offend anyone.” Nothing too filthy. Nothing too transgressive. Nothing that might arouse you and horrify you at the same time. Nothing that makes the reader responsible for interpreting what they just read.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Which to some apparently means we have to dust off one of society’s oldest hobbies - asking whether sexually explicit, ethically difficult queer art is morally safe enough to be allowed outside its creator's harddrive. We have been doing this to queer literature for generations. I'm fucking bored.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And holy hell, it feels familiar. Because WARHOUND and the work inspired by it are very queer, very trans, very sexual, very kinky, and often deliberately and shamelessly exploring power exchange, degradation, violence, body horror, exploitation, and desire getting hopelessly tangled together.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Yet the discourse around this stuff keeps running headlong into those distinctions. People go from "I found this upsetting" to "this is harmful" to "why would anyone enjoy this" to "what kind of person would even want to WRITE this?" at absolutely breathtaking speed.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Because a work not being for me does not mean it should not exist. A work making me uncomfortable does not mean it has done something morally wrong. And my personal threshold for sexual or violent content is not a universal ethical standard for all media ever made publicly available.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I will openly admit WARHOUND has not grabbed me the way my shameless M/M vampire smut does. I am reading around the genre because I find it fascinating, but I do not think I have suddenly found My New Thing™️. And somehow I have survived this realization without demanding its destruction.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

(reposted to fix typos) Okay, here is my boiling hot take after accidentally stumbling into WARHOUND, mechsploitation, and all the exhausting fucking discourse orbiting this deeply weird little corner of queer fiction: Some of you desperately need to learn the phrase "this is not for me."

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

17/17 All this is to say: read fucked-up books. Hate fucked-up books. Critique them viciously. DNF them. Write better ones. Write worse ones. Write stranger ones. Just stop treating "this is not for me" as evidence that nobody else should take joy in it. And for fuck’s sake, let people be kinky.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

16/17 And I do not have to personally adore every published work in that genre to recognize the value of somebody making a work evocative and specific enough that other queer people went, “Holy shit. I did not know I was into THAT.” Hell, that is one of the things art is for.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

15/17 I think that is part of why this niche grabbed my attention even when the books themselves aren't clicking with me. People found something worthwhile here. Enough people found something in it that an entirely new genre grew around it. That says there's value in it, even if it's not for me.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

14/17 Queer people are allowed to make ugly art. Trans people are allowed to make horny art. Kinky people are allowed to write fantasies that would be a hasty prison sentence if carried out in the real world. Art does not have to double as a moral grandstand to justify existing.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

13/17 And sexually explicit queer work gets this treatment constantly. Add hard kink or explicitly trans characters and suddenly the art has to prove it's educational, politically sanitized, psychologically healthy, and sufficiently condemnatory of every fucked-up thing it depicts.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

12/17 Criticism asks what a work is doing, how it is doing it, whether it succeeds, what assumptions it makes, what it romanticizes, what it interrogates, and what it leaves unresolved. Purity discourse asks whether liking it makes you a Bad Person. I'm openly begging for media literacy here.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

11/17 What you do not need to do is turn your disgust response into a moral diagnosis of everyone who enjoyed it. "This upset me" is information about your experience. "Anyone who enjoys this should be on some kind of list" is bargain-bin moral panic and I'm fucking tired of it.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

10/17 And yes, you are allowed to hate it! You are allowed to be disgusted. You are allowed to DNF it. You are allowed to say the execution sucked, the themes did not land, the sexual politics bothered you, or you simply never want to read anything like it again. That's healthy!

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

9/17 Fiction can depict coercion without endorsing coercion. It can eroticize something depeaved without recommending it. It can explore obsession, degradation, violence, cruelty, kink, exploitation, or terrible choices without turning intona green light in the real world.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

8/17 A book should not need to stop every other page and say, “REMINDER: THIS WOULD BE BAD AND ILLEGAL IN REAL LIFE.” If the only way you can encounter difficult subject matter is with the creator standing beside you holding your hand the entire time, that is not a failure of the work.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

7/17 I am especially tired of "real literature" being shorthand for “art that doesn't offend anyone.” Nothing too filthy. Nothing too transgressive. Nothing that might arouse you and horrify you at the same time. Nothing that makes the reader responsible for interpreting what they just read.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

6/17 Which to some apparently means we have to dust off one of society’s oldest hobbies - asking whether sexually explicit, ethically difficult queer art is morally safe enough to be allowed outside its creator's harddrive. We have been doing this to queer literature for generations. I'm bored.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

4/17 Yet the discourse around this stuff keeps running headlong into those distinctions. People go from "I found this upsetting" to "this is harmful" to "why would anyone enjoy this" to "what kind of person would even want to WRITE this?" at absolutely breathtaking speed.

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Brayden Coldwater (any pronouns) @braydencoldwater.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Ever finish a chapter, look at the page number, then look at the word count and realize with growing dread that when you circle back, it's going to be an absolute beast to try and edit? Because chapter 6 of my current project is sitting at 39 pages and 8,374 words right now. Heaven help me...

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