hypokeimena

[hypokeimena]

following another person who follows all the people i follow so i get to see every post 13 times

[hypokeimena]

Hello I read the dreamer trilogy last week and got thrown right back into big feelings about those guys and found your (excellent) fics scrolling around AO3 and then gasped because. I think I drew your profile pic back in like 2013 ahshdhdhdhhd wow small world. The blog I would have posted that art on is long defunct but I've been posting some raven cycle stuff on @try-set-me-on-fire recently. Anyway just wanted to wave hello! Thanks for the good work!

WOW long time no see! yeah you did a ton of trc commissions for me back in the day and that one art piece (from this batch) has been my icon both here + on ao3 for probably close to 10 years? & thank you i'm glad you enjoyed my fic :)

[hypokeimena]

[hypokeimena]

The mind palace had seemed like such a good idea, but I hadn't realized how high the taxes on that kind of place are. Mentally taxing, you might say.

[hypokeimena]

New women and femmes just dropped!

[hypokeimena]

“The addicts [in Vancouver] started to insist on being at every meeting where drug policy was discussed. They took a slogan from the movement of psychiatric patients who were fighting to be treated decently: ‘Nothing about us, without us.’ Their message was: We’re here. We’re human. We’re alive. Don’t talk about us as if we are nothing. They began, haltingly, to find a new language to talk about themselves as addicts. We have certain unalienable rights: to stay alive, to stay healthy, to be treated as people. You are taking those rights away from us. We will claim them back.”

“Since Henry Smith Williams was broken, anybody opposing the drug war had entered the debate in a defensive crouch. They had preemptively pleaded—no, no, we are not in favor of drug use, no, no, we are not bad people, no, no, we are not like those dirty junkies. VANDU [Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users] was different. For the first time, they were putting prohibitionists on the defensive. They were saying: You are the people waging a war. Here are the people you are killing. What are they dying for? Tell us.”

–Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Bloomsbury, 2015)

[hypokeimena]

#my sultanate of Connecticut (via @zenobiaseptimia)

always struck when the uk government says "there is no place for knife crime in our society" because then I start trying to think of a society fully oriented around knife crime

[hypokeimena]

please help me- i used to be pretty smart but i’m having so much trouble grasping the concept of diegetic vs non-diegetic bdsm!

gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.

SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:

diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.

non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.

the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.

now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.

if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.

if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.

this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.

it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.

but yeah, spontaneous writer plug aside, that's what I mean.

[hypokeimena]

dear usamerican high schoolers looking for a way to resist fascism: sit through the pledge of allegiance.

no getting up. no looking at the flag.

everyone will be looking at you. you'll be sweating like a fucking hippopotamus. your teacher will sternly tell you to get up. you'll feel stupid and that maybe its not worth it because you're just a kid in a classroom. but I'm here to remind you that there are no real life consequences to detention. there are however real life consequences to resisting a thoughtless performance of nationalism.

[hypokeimena]

#it would be a much shorter musical and book. but. i feel obligated to suggest it anytime i remember javert-surviving fics #i love javert but what if the book was made of pudding

a lot of ppl write fics about like, what if instead of killing himself, javert simply :) took the message to heart and learned to live with himself in this new world that's opened up for him :)

i want to posit another one

what if valjean, upon being pardoned by the bishop, just kills himself

[hypokeimena]

Speaking of tradwife influencers, I think Alyssa Grenfell is probably right in this. It's been noticed by many journalists how a disproportionately large amount of popular stay-at-home-wife/stay-at-home-mom influencers are Mormon and/or from Utah.

Alyssa has looked through the data that Google Ads makes public. It shows how much money a content creator is paid depending on what their content is about (or, rather, what the algorithm recognises their content to be about or related to). Two videos with the same length and the same amount of views will generate a different amount of ad revenue depending on what they're about and how much advertisers are paying to be advertised in that specific content. And this data shows how absurdly high the pay is for anyone making content that is related to Mormonism (that doesn't mean openly preaching the religion, it can mean having mentioned that you're Mormon in the past or the location recognising you live in Utah, where Mormonism is most prevalent). As a result, Mormons will get more money more easily, and thus be more encouraged to continue creating and growing their platforms. To sum up, a Mormon can make a living off social media much more comfortably than others because of how much money their Church is dedicating to advertising.

So I think that when we consider all the reasons why the tradwife movement is growing and how many girls are being fed this propaganda on social media, it would be correct to take into consideration that one of the many elements coming together is the way that the Mormon Church is financing (a significant part of) the stay-at-home-women to use it as their own propaganda. Mormonism believes women are spiritually inferior to men and that women's role in God's plan (both on Earth and in the after-life) is to obey a husband and have as many babies as possible. This is the underlying idea behind the stay-at-home girlfriend trend.

[hypokeimena]

Sitting here watching Tumblr's definition of the word "fruity" slowly converge on what the word "metrosexual" meant in 1998.

[hypokeimena]

do you think they literally forgot to add hatchlings to the dressing room?? i imagine its a little tedious to add each one but surely they have the exact same mechanics as the ancient species (no apparel, only skins). so i dont rly understand why it take so long

[hypokeimena]

obsessed with the Helena and Irving parallel and what it says about the aspects of our identity we think are fundamental (but aren't)...

Like Outie Irving assumes his Innie is just as radically anti-Lumon as he is. He assumes his hatred of Lumon is something ingrained in his personality! That's why he stays up at night drinking coffee and making paintings, because he hopes that when his innie dreams about the testing floor, he'll say "okay bet" and start exploring. That's what Outie Irving would do, after all. But he miscalculated! His hatred of Lumon isn't inherent--- his desire for meaning and art and spirituality is inherent. That's what his hatred for Lumon is built on. But in a world where there's no meaning outside of Lumon propaganda, of COURSE his innie would become ridiculously devoted to the company.

And Helena!! She is the corporation, that's her whole identity. She presumably assumed that Helly would be just as pro-Lumon as she is. But she miscalculated too! Her devotion to the company isn't inherent, her headstrong and entitled nature is what's inherent! And in a world where she's denied any agency whatsoever, that manifests as rebellion.

It's the same dynamic flipped on its head. They both sent their innies in there with opposite intentions--- one to take down the company, one feed the company's expansion--- only to realize that rebellion and devotion aren't inherent characteristics. Their innies have become the exact opposite of their outie selves, while still being exactly the same!! Because even though your personality is inherent, the values you hold are determined circumstantially. OUGH IT'S SO GOOD.

[hypokeimena]

nothing sadder to me than when an online artist posts a side by side of the same picture from 5 years ago / redrawn this year, and the first one is fluid and energetic and full of character, and the second one is flat and static and clean to the point of sterility

[hypokeimena]

it feels like the 63rd of janaury

[hypokeimena]

“beautiful images but with no real substance” are images not substance? what is a “movie,” quickly