Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭

@lotuscarp

魚藻藻 Yu Zaozao (they/she/他) is a disabled TME ungendered lesbian. LotusCarp is where their stories live. Autistic. 30ish. 🪷 Read a lesbian Buddhist fantasy:

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Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Jul 1

Your engagement bait posts will not trick me into posting any photos of my human form today. Nice try

Calico oranda goldfish. Belly full and head empty, as we should all strive to be.

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Jun 26

Full version of new header

Bodhisattva telling you "If I were not a holy woman, I would beat you senseless."

Li Zanghong is a trans lesbian character from my webnovel 1000 Lotuses. She has long, dark reddish brown hair with a loopy bun over each ear, secured with red ribbon. She is wearing clothes based on Tang Dynasty women's fashion: a peach/coral jacket with a long green skirt. She is sitting on a giant pink lotus that she manifested with her bodhisattva powers. The design is by me and the art is by my friend paintbrushDjinn.

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Jun 19

Soon Chengyuan's portrait on the 1000 Lotuses Part 2 page will be in color :) I think I'm keeping the preview snippet the same :) lotuscarp.itch.io/1000-lotuses...

“You’re not afraid of me?”
Li Zanghong shook her head. She wasn’t afraid of anything.
But Xia Chengyuan liked it when people were a little afraid of her, and she would not be satisfied until this foolish, innocent girl understood exactly who she was dealing with.
“May I look closer?”
Li Zanghong only smiled.
“Open your mouth.”
To Xia Chengyuan’s astonishment, she promptly obeyed. Xia Chengyuan then took Li Zanghong’s chin in her hand once more, and she kissed her.
Li Zanghong remained still, hardly daring to even breathe. She let Xia Chengyuan’s tongue caress every part of her mouth it could reach.
All I wanted was an idea of her powers and how she uses them—how did we end up like this?
Once Xia Chengyuan felt that she learned all she needed to, she withdrew. Li Zanghong could have believed that several years had just passed. She quietly stared at Xia Chengyuan, who was stroking Li Zanghong’s hair again.
“It’s so funny. Now that I know you’re just a doll, why shouldn’t I treat you like—”

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Jun 1

How does one acquire a bunch of gay things to read all at once in this economy? You can start with Pride Book Fair Bundle #3, which gets you 38 books (including 1000 Lotuses Part 1) for $40--a 71% discount! itch.io/b/3677/pride...

Pride Book Fair 2026 Bundle #3: Live Free or Pride Hard
1000 Lotuses Yu Zaozao; Black Hole Guns for Hire Friday Strout; Blade Broken Niranjan; Blood Desi Hart; Blood Dhampir H S Kallinger; Blood of the Gods Wren L Rivers; Bloody Spade Brittany M Willows; Cat Mouse Eliza Mares; Cheerleaders From Planet X Lyssa Chiavari; Duckett and Dyer Dicks for Hire; Firewing Jennifer R Povey; Fractures Between Beatrice McKinsey; Ghost of a Life Ruth Miranda; Guitar Concerto S Morgan Burbank; In Good Company Nicola Kapron; In Spite of the Inevitable Morgan Biscup; Lambent T D Cloud; My Lord L B Shimaira; No Love in LA Katta Kis; Off the Beaten Path Sienna Eggler; Rebecca and the Grinning Worm Gareth Barsby; Reins of Magic R Dawnraven; Riyati Rebirth Kai Zeal; Shadows Dark and Deadly Andrea Marie Johnson; Songs of Broken Bells Lilly Lockwood; Stars of Destiny Melissa Stone; STAWBAISTDIFMRRD Eskay; Stray Dogs Freya Faust; Structural Integrity Tabitha OConnell; The Clockwork Empire Lucas JW Johnson; The Dragon Next Door Vanessa Ricci Thode; The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle Steve Hugh Westenra; The Lucky Machine Aimee Cozza; The Nightstalkers Mark Joachim Heijndermans; The Silence of Storms Nico Silver; Well of Souls Harmonia Grey; Wolfsbane Franklyn S Newton

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· May 12

Uhm...no!!!

Email from Stripe with subject line "New AI-powered Smart Disputes will be enabled in June 2026" received at 1:12pm local time today

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· May 10

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· May 10

Here come the green beans

Green bean plant with little purple flowers

Close-up of a little bean pod forming on the plant

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 24

I love these two.

WIP snippet

Li Zanghong sat at the same balcony table at Yinliu Teahouse where she met with Shiyue twice before. Earlier that day she’d gone to Chang’an and purchased a large basket of longyan. The bulk of it would be going to the manor with her, but she placed a handful in front of her on the table, next to her calligraphy manual. Then she took one of the longyan and peeled away its tough, brown skin. She stabbed it an incense stick from her personal stash and made it stay upright with the help of a full teacup—that, too, was an offering. Finally, she blew a puff of air at the stick. The tip flared orange, releasing a ribbon of smoke fragrant with sandalwood.

She heard a noise and looked up. Shiyue had plopped on the seat across from her as if he’d just fallen out of the sky. He stared glumly at the items arranged on the table.

“Are you displeased?” she asked.

“You’re acting like you’re visiting a grave, so I’ve assumed—” He limply gestured at his face. “—the appropriate demeanor.”

“What? No! This is my Shiyue summoning ritual!”

He scrunched his brow. “Your what?”

Li Zanghong pointed at the manual. “I put out a book because you’re a civil official. I poured a cup of tea because you seem to like tea. We’re always drinking it together. And the longyan…well, these had just arrived from Lingnan, and I was told there wouldn’t be more until next spring, and they look good. And the incense is for…well…incense should be a part of any ritual, shouldn’t it? It smells nice.”

Shiyue pinched the glowing tip of the incense stick. “Burning incense in a place like this is rather conspicuous, don’t you think?”

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 24

I added that excerpt from the March newsletter to the 1000 Lotuses Part 3 project page lotuscarp.itch.io/1000-lotuses...

“Nice work, nice work!” Zhang Chenghua waved her arms. “Daozhang is as talented as she is beautiful!”

If Zhang Suming was surprised to see her sister out of bed, it was well hidden by her scowl of disapproval for the cheeky comment.

If the disciples were surprised to see their shizun’s patient there, they quickly forgot it because of the lunch bell or because they were distracted by Zhang Chenghua’s words. Who had ever dared to compliment Shizun so boldly before? Yet none of them could find fault in the statement, for Shizun was indeed very pretty and skilled in many things.

If Ouyang Chakou was surprised, she made it impossible to tell as she marched to the window. Zhang Chenghua’s grin very nearly faltered before her cutting glare.

“No one told you it was safe to leave your bed.”

“Daozhang, I’m a physician, and I know my body.”

“Go back to bed,” Ouyang Chakou calmly ordered.

“Daozhang, I—”

“Bed. Now.”

“Daozhang…” Zhang Chenghua dropped her voice to a near whisper. She knew her sister could still hear, but she didn’t care. And for good measure, she let a wicked smirk peek from the corner of her mouth, with a matching sparkle in her eyes. “When a pretty girl insists that I go to bed, it usually means she’ll follow me there in short order.”

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 22

WHOEVER YOU ARE #69 UR MY GOAT

The Lesbian Visibility Week Mega Bundle has raised $2900.69 from 69 contributors with an average contribution of $42.03. This is funny to me because I am 12 years old and desperate for any sliver of joy I can eke out of The Worst Timeline

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 20

Correction! It was Dragonwings, from 1975!

Excerpt from Dragonwings by Laurence Yep

Chapter 1

The Land of the Demons
(February-March, 1903)

Ever since I can remember, I had wanted to know about the Land of the Golden Mountain, but my mother had never wanted to talk about it. All I knew was that a few months before I was born, my father had left our home in the Middle Kingdom, or China, as the white demons call it, and traveled over the sea to work in the demon land. There was plenty of money to be made among the demons, but it was also dangerous. My own grandfather had been lynched about thirty years before by a mob of white demons almost the moment he had set foot on their shores.

Mother usually said she was too busy to answer my questions. It was a fact that she was overworked, for Grandmother was too old to help with the heavy work, and she had to try to do both her own work and

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 20

94 sapphic and lesbian books for $40! There's truly something for everyone here, including the first three parts of 1000 Lotuses for your lesbian c-drama cravings! itch.io/b/3635/lesbi...

Lesbian pride flag themed banner. Transcription is as follows:

Lesbian Visibility Week Bundle
94 sapphic & lesbian books for $40 USD
4/20-4/26
Exclusively on Itch.io

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 19

15 minute writing sprint in the park

The date 4/18/26 written on dot grid paper with sky blue ink. A steel fountain pen nib stained with the same ink hovers over the paper. Please note the perfect coordination of the ink and the color of the pen's grip.

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 17

Yes good

It's that Hark a Vagrant (Kate Beaton) comic about the pirate who sleeps with a picture of his nemesis, except the pirate is Zhou Yu/Gongjin and his nemesis is Zhuge Liang/Kongming. The screenshots are their actors in the 2010 Three Kingdoms cdrama, which has a lot of fun stuff but also it made every female character worse and exaggerated the existing hetero content

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 14

Leaving some Soviet-PRC yaoi here before I have to leave the house

Vintage poster promoting peaceful relations between the Soviets and the PRC. The guys in the middle are embracing. It looks gay. And I love it

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 12

*dusts this off*

Packaged cheese labeled "LOL WHITE AMERICAN"

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 12

Tonight's 1000 Lotuses fact is that Zanghong irl would try to change fascists' minds online and her wife would have to take her phone away

You really think someone would do that?
[Illustration of the perfect sweetie who is asking these questions]
Just go on the Internet and tell lies?

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 10

When you realize that your strategist can't write

WIP excerpt: Zhang Suming turned it over, and she was stunned by what she saw. Li Zanghong once mentioned that her handwriting was so bad that even she couldn’t read it. That statement failed to convey the true magnitude of the tragedy she enacted upon this paper. Not one character was redeemable; their strokes melted and drifted in all directions as they searched for their proper places. This woman was employed as a clerk. Didn’t she have to write reports all day? Weren’t reports meant to be read?

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 5

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Apr 3

Chronically ill babygirls without autism can still get dating advice from my girls here (do not follow their advice unless you are an unhinged romantic with a reincarnating love interest) lotuscarp.itch.io/1000-lotuses...

On the left side Ouyang Chakou (a Daoist exorcist) and Li Zanghong (a woman in Chinese scholar-official garb) are labeled "chronically ill babygirls". On the right side Zhang Suming (tall strong woman with tiger ears) and Zhang Chenghua (tall drunken boxer) are labeled "the bad bitches they pulled by being autistic". They're all lesbians, WOW!

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Mar 31

Good historical fiction is grounded in a thorough understanding of its setting and populates it with characters that feel like genuine products of their circumstances. If you like delving into archives and piecing together mysteries, you'll have a rollicking good time with these folks.

Narrator: The public are more familiar with the various pastiches of him in the 1940s and 50s, ones that whittle him down to a deranged surgeon or a serial amputator - a Negro causing problems by stepping out of line.

Pastor Bean: There is precedent for fire being used as a cleansing tool in the Bible. Luke 9, 1 Corinthians 3. They do usually refer to divine fire, however, imbued with the power of God to destroy evil. Mortal fire lacks that quality, and therefore may be bound to mortal corruption and be misused….

This is all to say that, as a rule, I am going to say that setting people’s houses on fire is generally a bad thing…. In this specific scenario, however, I will say it is warranted.

—Pastor Lamentations Bean

Narrator: Neither interpretation is accurate nor fair. Our academies are more than willing to acknowledge wizardry, divine intervention, or inhuman engineering, but we turn to frightened superstition when something fantastic comes from a non-European origin.

And there are connections that have been neglected by earlier historians. No one was willing to consider his connections to The Protean Experiments, or an earlier tragedy in the same town, or the unusual feats ascribed to his parents.

Geraldine: More Notes: He does have a certain appeal to him. Maybe if I ask him nicely, he’ll let me cut him open. Just a peek. For curiosity. For science.
Log concluded,
Geraldine Macy

Narrator: This website is a collection of materials of primary sources. Letters. Journals. Newspapers. Assembled into an order to provide a proper narrative.

Someone has to remember what happened properly.

Read now!
freestoneletters.com

About the author
We are not man or woman. We are not god nor devil. We are not jester or tyrant, monk or libertine. We are the storm over the horizon. We are angry. We are tired. We are not dead just yet ☿

Contact
@FreestoneLetters on Tumblr

The Trials & Tribulations of One Victor Freestone © 2022-2025 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Promotional booklet created by LotusCarp Studio in partnership with the author.

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Mar 31

Happy #tdov! Did #transreadathon leave you wishing that you discovered more writers of color? Let's fix that. The Freestone Letters by @infimace.bsky.social is an epistolary webnovel about a Black doctor in Reconstruction Missouri with some unconventional methods 🧵 freestoneletters.com/about/

The Freestone Letters, or: The Trials and Tribulations of One Victor Freestone
freestoneletters.com
The Trials & Tribulations of One Victor Freestone © 2022-2025 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Victor: Took the jaw off first - had to make sure that he wouldn’t stop breathing halfway through the disassembly - and then worked my way down. Stripped the muscles from the bone, stretched them out on the rack - that’s always the scary part. You nick a tendon and you have to hope you can make a replacement out of boiled horsebone.

Then all I had to do was pick out the worms with tweezers. Not sure if you ever worked on lockjaw, but the worms are purple and wiggly - easy to see, tricky to catch. Got them all in a jar downstairs, might make them into jam after church this Sunday. Then I just put everything back, which would have been easy if I wasn’t rushing and forgot to number all of those red ribbons.

Victor, continuing: Still, it all worked out fine. Charlie’s walking like new, the seams are barely noticeable, and the ether kept him asleep through the whole thing while the voltaic kept him living. It’s always so much worse when they wake up halfway through. Or die. Or both. (End quote)

Geraldine: Subject: Victor Freestone, new ‘doctor’, invited to family dinner after I convinced my father of the importance of having a viable doctor around, odd proclivities and ignoble breeding aside. (End quote)

Narrator: In the late 1870s, in the shadow of the Civil War, there was an incident in the small town of Henshaw, Missouri. A great tragedy occurred, and at the center of it all was the unexpected variable, the uncommon physician, one Victor Freestone.

Narrator, continuing: Scholarship has not been kind to him. Until the last twenty years, when renewed interest in the topic led to reassessment of older material, most historians covering him worked off of Howard Dixon’s distorted version of events from his 1902 book, Unnatural Phenomena in the Midwest, which paints the ordeal as a lurid revenge plot.

Victor: They’ll stop fighting me once it’s clear that I’m not leaving. And when they do, I’ll fix this place. Take it apart, put it back together. Maybe then I’ll find out why they shot you dead.

Love, Victor

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Mar 31

Still can't believe this is on Wikipedia's Nirvana in Fire character list. Forbes 30 under 30 for wuxia heroes

Lin Chen (蔺晨) (played by Jin Dong) is the master of Langya Hall, an omniscient business that answers all questions and doubt as well as list the most talented in the world, a list similar to Forbes.

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Mar 29

*invents a male character to absorb bad luck and cringe energy for the lesbians*

WIP snippet: The tip of her tongue darted out to wet her lips, and she sat across the fire from Fu Yanhui. He opened his mouth to warn her about the pile of discarded squirrel offal near her feet, only to watch her plunge her hand right into it and bring a large helping straight to her open mouth. He had to screw his eyes shut and turn his head away.

WIP snippet: Fu Yanhui looked up, saw the entrails hanging out of Zhang Suming’s mouth, and quickly averted his eyes again. “I’m sorry, but who are you?”

WIP snippet: Fu Yanhui cringed so hard that his face scrunched into a ball.

WIP snippet: Her flat voice and the way she vanished between the trees as if she were made of the same stuff as the shadows between them gave Fu Yanhui the unshakable impression that he just received a threat. He did not sleep well that night.

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Mar 27

My portraits of Chenghua and Chakou vs. my official artist's portraits lololol

Zhang Chenghua, a drunken boxer and healer in simple clothes for traveling, sits on her medicine cabinet, drinking wine out of her gourd. Ouyang Chakou, a Daoist exorcist, sweeps leaves on the ground with a dour expression. This version is by me.

Zhang Chenghua is standing, watching Ouyang Chakou with a mischievous look on her face. The stern Ouyang Chakou looks back at her. This version is by paintbrushDjinn.

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Mar 26

paintbrushDjinn finished Chakou's portrait!!! Here she is with Chenghua 🥹 These two characters are featured in the preview for 1000 Lotuses Part 3! lotuscarp.itch.io/1000-lotuses...

On the left is Zhang Chenghua, a drunken boxer and healer in simple clothes for traveling. On the right is Ouyang Chakou, a Daoist exorcist who looks back at the teasing Zhang Chenghua with a stern expression.

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Mar 25

NICE

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Mar 21

1000 Lotuses fact: the tiger is gay

Breathe, she commanded her body again. There is nothing to fight here.

She still couldn’t move, but the red haze began to lift. Her hands were hovering in front of her chest, and framed between her claws was the pink lotus sitting on the table.

Look at the lotus. This is not a place for fighting.

The flower came into focus. Her fingers relaxed slightly, though her claws didn’t retract.

There. That’s good. Can you smell it?

The voice directing her body was no longer her own. It was the pleasant, ringing chirp of the woman who had sent this lotus to her.

Isn’t that a nice scent? Let’s try to pick it up.

Her hands finally did as they were told. The claws receded as she reached to scoop up the lotus. She stroked the velvety petals and held it up to sniff. Her heart slowed; it no longer beat in anticipation of violence.

Zhang Suming wondered, Did I always like the scent of lotuses this much? Or is it because I smell that incense of hers, too? Some incenses are supposed to be calming…I’ll ask her if I can have some.

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Mar 13

Functioning website 👍

Bsky tells me my feed is empty even though I follow like hundreds of active accounts

Zaozao is a tired fish ☸️☭@lotuscarp· Mar 12

holy shit she's real