valentine dagger
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valentinedagger.bsky.social
valentine dagger
@valentinedagger.bsky.social
120 followers 31 following 140 posts
she/it | author | eroticizer of the obscene and romanticizer of the verboten | cannot write alt text due to an image processing disorder, happy to add alt text others write | check out my webnovel at readstardust.com | https://linktr.ee/valentinedagger
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valentinedagger.bsky.social
readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
August 31, 2025 at 5:12 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
i think "bong threat" is the best band name i have ever come up with readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
August 24, 2025 at 10:52 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
i think "bong threat" is the best band name i have ever come up with readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
August 24, 2025 at 10:52 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
August 10, 2025 at 4:18 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
she star on my dust or whatever. idk, just read my novel, or don't readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
August 3, 2025 at 10:37 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
this week, the fool speaks readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
STARDATE! 7/20/29 STARDUST 2.9 readstardust.com
July 20, 2025 at 3:15 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
July 13, 2025 at 4:00 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
i continue to release chapters readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
STARDATE! 7/6/25: STARDUST 2.7 readstardust.com
July 6, 2025 at 5:14 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
hey if you like this excerpt you should read my webnovel readstardust.com
mind the content warnings and sign up for my mailing list if you want emails when i update
a stylized collage graphic of a blue black hole over a pitch-black ocean. over it is superimposed an excerpt from Stardust: Salt-wind sang brilliantly over your skin as you stood on the shore of the sea—the sea! The Sea!—the pitch-black foaming rush that rose and fell in verses of rhythmic sea-song, lapping gaily at your feet and pooling in inky jettisons on the silver-glowing sand. You tilted your face back, your sweet, sharp, brand-new face, and in the blue-black sky overhead you saw more stars than you’d ever seen in your tiny, insignificant life. They spilled across the sky like God had spilled a glass, sent the galaxies tumbling through space in an overwhelming, dizzying rush. And the sea sang to you, songs of how it cradled you, held you when you were nothing more than a frenetic, burning molecule, hot and lonely in the vast emptiness of the universe. It sang to you of salt-life, water-life, the deep and black abyss where slow-growing things came to be, and you did not understand. You did not understand, so you took your hands—soft, brown, so very new—and fell to your knees, plunged your palms into cool sand that felt like moonlight against your skin. There, you wept.
July 1, 2025 at 5:23 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
this week, to their dismay, caspian trehan learns what a "sister complex" is readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
6/29/2025: STARDUST 2.6 readstardust.com
June 29, 2025 at 2:51 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
might have to clear your cache to see the latest site update, sorry about that
readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
STARDATE! 6/22/2025: STARDUST 2.5 readstardust.com
June 22, 2025 at 5:53 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
good tumblr post i saw today which articulates why i don't think the disney lawsuit is a "bite each other's dicks off" situation. if what happened to the musical remix/sampling scene legally happens to visual art, that will be devastating on a cultural level.
a tumblr post by @swordandscytheandpen: You really, really don't need to be cheerleading Disney and Universal here. It honestly doesn't matter how much you dislike AI art — if the court rules in favor of the corporations, the implicit expansion of copyright law will do a million times more harm to the arts than fucking Midjourney ever could. Like. There is no definition of copyright that does not permit AI training, but does permit fanworks. The latter is much more clearly derivative than the former. You do fanart? Fanfic? Disney's pointing a gun squarely at your head and you're cheering because it might hit the AI artists behind you too. And beyond that, do you know what happens to AI generation if Disney/Universal win this? They aren't opposed to the technology in principle! They'll be able to use their exclusive rights to a vast corpus of art to make their own AI, for their own purposes. Who does this help? Companies who want to reduce employment costs and disenfranchise the working artist. Who does this hurt? Well, it hurts independent AI users. Congrats, your anxiety over commission prices is gone now, not that it was well-founded to begin with. It also hurts anyone who wants to make use of fair use doctrine forever, so I hope none of what you were selling was fanart of copyrighted characters. I've never made a secret of being rather more open to generative AI as a technology than most people in these online spheres. But for fuck's sake, you really don't need to like AI to realize that this lawsuit's success would be a terrible thing to happen to art! If you've found yourself on the same side as Disney, that should be a clue that you might wanna review your thinking!
June 13, 2025 at 4:02 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
read my webnovel maybe readstardust.com
"STARDUST" June caresses July's chin lovingly; July is blindfolded and holding two dueling sabers. June strokes the tip of one sword sensually. In a near-future, post-alien-invasion United States, July—a psychotic bisexual soldier—and Cas—a sardonic, pretentious tactician—have spent their youth underground, raised by a conservative paramilitary group in the barricaded ruins of NYC’s subway tunnels. When a spaceship crashes in Jersey, they cross paths with Aston and Sage—key players in the Dusty invasion—and join forces in a doomed attempt to assassinate President Remus Taner. Once the assassination fails, all four are plunged into a hellish nightmare where the line between reality and dreaming blurs to the point of no return, politics intertwine with what can only be described as magic, and the stardust that chokes their atmosphere seems to have more significance than they knew. At the center of it all is June—July’s twin sister, presumed dead, now reappearing under the guardianship of the Secretary of State. She wants her sister back. By any means necessary.
June 10, 2025 at 6:54 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
June 8, 2025 at 4:09 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
we're back readstardust.com/stardust%20l...
6/1/2025: Stardust 2.2 readstardust.com
June 1, 2025 at 5:08 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
reasons i can't collaborate with other people #1,347
valentine dagger: also trying REALLY hard not to make this intermission chapter 12k but it's going badly so far sorry in advance lol
May 29, 2025 at 9:35 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
i guess i may as well toss this on here, as well. i'm bad at being concise but tl;dr: my art crew is considering an online artists' collective for people who share specific values, contact me if this sounds interesting/you vibe with it
i've been chatting with some artist friends lately and, long story short, we're consider starting an online artist's collective themed around our general wheelhouse. basically, something that functions as a loosely-vetted social space for artists who share our interests and values to connect, collaborate, and socialize, in a non-career-centered context. a non-exhaustive list of our shared artistic values and interests could include: anti-censorship, valuing porn as art, transgression and taboo, remix culture, copyright abolition, abstraction and layers of meaning, gender anarchy, critique of the family, eroticization of the taboo, pro-kink, an open creative commons, anticapitalism. this would be a multimedia collective open to artists from every medium -- visual, written, musical, textiles, sculpture, interactive webpages, whatever. it would also be a collective where, while we're free to plug our for-profit projects on our own time, all art boosted or collaborated on by the collective as a whole would be free to access; the point is to generate community and collaboration in a small, siloed space removed from market pressures. if this sounds like the kind of thing you'd be interested in, hit me up! i'm basically doing an interest check around my art circles at the moment. even if we haven't spoken before, feel free to shoot me a message or an ask about this -- i'm specifically looking to facilitate building new artistic community and collaboration here. (because this is an interest check, i don't have firm plans for platforms at the moment -- i'm considering a discord and a group tumblr to start, and i have the inklings of a neocities webpage in the back of my mind, although making that one collaborative might be a bit of a logistically difficult project.)
May 19, 2025 at 8:35 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
#WIPSnips
Heart banging in the hollow of your throat, you dragged yourself upright against the door's wooden slats, grappled helplessly at the cool metal doorknob—and it turned under your sweat-slick palms, not under your own power. Your palms slid against it, wet and useless, and as it cracked open, birdsong spilled through.
May 16, 2025 at 2:47 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
i have a very convoluted and singular sense of humor, so most of the things i think are funny are very context-dependent and probably only funny to me. i thought this scene was a fucking riot when i wrote it, though.
It was taking Lake a while to answer. Aston cracked open his can of lemonade and took a long, harsh sip while he waited for a response, grimacing slightly at the sour flavor. He wasn't sure why he kept drinking the stuff—masochism, perhaps. Lake put the zines down and shrugged fluidly. “Sure.” His casual tone was entirely at odds with how long he'd thought about the offer; before Aston could prod him about this, he followed up with “How's the math going?” Aston choked on his lemonade. Sticky, sour liquid bubbled over his chin and ran down his shirt as he sputtered; suddenly feeling hot and itchy, he bustled around the kitchen grabbing napkins and sopping up his mess before recollecting himself. “It's going!” he said brightly, dabbing at his shirt with a paper towel. It was one of his favorites, too—a neon-pink short-sleeved Hawaiian button-down with bright yellow flowers. Luckily, the long-sleeved button-down he was wearing underneath it was mostly spared. Lake squinted at him. Aston suspected he was being perceived, and he resented it.
April 1, 2025 at 5:01 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
#WIPSnips
She hadn’t experienced a hallucination that vivid since the day Lake held her while imaginary smoke choked her lungs. June’s hands had felt so real on her skin, so warm and urgent and lifelike—July gripped the edges of the counter, knuckles white and shaking. It was a bad sign. July observed—feeling rather detached from it all—that her reflection looked awful. Her hair was a tangled wreck and she had the manic expression of a woman on the verge of complete and total meltdown. She didn’t want to go back into the room. It smelled like vomit and the bedsheets were soaked with sweat.
March 12, 2025 at 5:46 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
#WIPSnips
than the previous one). Feigning vanity, you looked into the mirror closest to you, combing your fingers through your hair conscientiously; you snuck looks at Sage's face in the mirror as you did. She looked on edge—lips turned slightly downward, shadows under her eyes—but there was a manic glint in her eye you'd never seen before.
February 24, 2025 at 1:59 AM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
#WIPSnips
That night, someone did throw themself through the sliding glass door out to the back deck, which put a damper on the show before the second act even set up. It was particularly irritating because the Station left the back door open during shows to avoid this exact problem, but as the shards of glass littering the back deck that night proved, the whims of drunken idiots were not to be trifled with. They didn't have another show for nearly two
February 21, 2025 at 4:11 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
#WIPSnips
The snakes took up residence in Cas’s guts once again, squirming with righteous vengeance at being denied for so long. Heart pounding in their throat, they blindly grasped behind themself, searching for the door handle—”You’re my heart,” June said, and July laughed, a broken, sobbing noise—they grabbed the handle and turned it, slid out of the room and slammed the door behind them.
February 16, 2025 at 2:24 AM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
#WIPSnips "interior"
A similar arch on the opposite side of the room showed off the pilot’s cockpit; a massive windshield dominated the scene, sunlight streaming through it onto the neon-yellow vinyl dashboard peppered with various buttons and knobs and dials. Sage stretched out in the comfortable, full-backed chair, languidly flipping switches and turning knobs, sunbeams playing over the curves of her face and catching her hair aflame; as you gawked at the ship’s interior, she threw you a cheerful grin. “You might want to sit down for takeoff,” she said.
February 11, 2025 at 6:11 PM
valentinedagger.bsky.social
#WIPSnips "super"
He jerked his thumb in the direction of the device, which was perched back on the dashboard, earbuds neatly wrapped around its blocky form. “Sage made that before she got… taken. She was trying to trace the residue your dimensional folding leaves behind—got really fixated on all that after you left, I couldn’t get her to talk about anything else. She thought it’d be useful to get our hands on anyone else the Dusties experimented on, try to figure out why they’re giving people superpowers—doesn’t seem like a great plan on the surface, give the population you’re colonizing the tech you’re using to suppress them, eh?”
February 10, 2025 at 3:16 PM