jackiefour

[jackiefour]

[jackiefour]

Four years ago, I was recording and releasing narrations of short material that I pulled from the public domain. I did my best to release one a week, as an experiment. I wondered if I could, one day, so something like this that actually paid some bills.

The audience wasn't huge, but the people who listened to it *really* liked it. At some point, I even got a few requests, including this one.

This is Umberto Ecco's essential essay, Ur Fascism, originally written in 1995. It was shockingly relevant in in 2020, after four years of attempted tyranny, and it remains terrifyingly relevant after one week of successful tyranny.

I humbly submit this and ask for your time; I believe it's an important essay.

[jackiefour]

Do you think authors sometimes don't realize how their, uh, interests creep into their writing? I'm talking about stuff like Robert Jordan's obvious femdom kink, or Anne Rice's preoccupation with inc*st and p*dophilia. Did their editors ever gently ask them if they've ever actually read what they've written?

Firstly, a reminder: This is not tiktok and we just say the words incest and pedophilia here.

Secondly, I don't know if I would call them 'interests' so much as fixations or even concerns. There are monstrous things that people think about, and I think writing is a place to engage with those monstrous things. It doesn't bother me that people engage with those things. I exist somewhere within the whump scale, and I would hope no one would think less of me just because sooner or later I like to rough a good character up a bit, you know? It's fun to torture characters, as a treat!

But, anyway, assuming this question isn't, "Do writers know they're gross when I think they are gross" which I'm going to take the kind road and assume it isn't, but is instead, "Do you think authors are aware of the things they constantly come back to?"

Sometimes. It can be jarring to read your own writing and realize that there are things you CLEARLY are preoccupied with. (mm, I like that word more than concerns). There are things you think about over and over, your run your mind over them and they keep working their way back in. I think this is true of most authors, when you read enough of them. Where you almost want to ask, "So...what's up with that?" or sometimes I read enough of someone's work that I have a PRETTY good idea what's up with that.

I've never read Robert Jordan and I don't intend to start (I think it would bore me this is not a moral stance) and I've really never read Rice's erotica. In erotica especially I think you have all the right in the world to get fucking weird about it! But so, when I was young I read the whole Vampire Chronicles series. I don't remember it perfectly, but there's plenty in it to reveal VERY plainly that Anne Rice has issues with God but deeply believes in God, and Anne Rice has a preoccupation with the idea of what should stay dead, and what it means to become. So, when i found out her daughter died at the age of six, before Rice wrote all of this, and she grew up very very Catholic' I said, 'yeah, that fucking checks out'.

Was Rice herself aware of how those things formed her writing? I think at a certain point probably yes. The character of Claudia is in every way too on the nose for her not to have SOME idea unless she was REAL REAL dense about her own inner workings. But, sometimes I know where something I write about comes from, that doesn't mean I'm interested in sharing it with the class. I would never ever fucking say, 'The reasons I seem to write so much of x as y is that z happened to me years ago' ahaha FUCK THAT NOISE. NYET. RIDE ON, COWBOY.

But I've known some people in fandom works who clearly have something going on and don't seem to realize it. Or they're very good at hiding it. Based on the people I'm talking about I would say it's more a lack of self-knowledge, and I don't even mean that unkindly. I have, in many ways, taken myself down to the studs and rebuilt it all, so I unfortunately am very aware of why I do and write the things I do most of the time. It's extremely annoying not to be able to blame something. I imagine it must be very freeing. But it ain't me, babe.

Anyway, a lot of words to say: Maybe! But that might not stop them from writing it, it might be a useful thing for them to engage with, and you can always just not read it.

Also, we don't censor words here.

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u ever have on mutuals whos so deep in another fandom that u know absolutely zero about and they make posts that look like they speaking another language or some shit

[jackiefour]

I want you to remember:

The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.

[jackiefour]

this is a lie. this is a stupid lie that stupid people believe. this is not how anything works.

I mean, fine. Go ahead and declare victory if that's what it takes for you to go back to pretending California doesn't exist, because it's honestly better for all of us if you just fucking disappear forever.

[jackiefour]

Calling all Brits on this hellsite.

We all saw Elon Musk do the nazi salute at the Trump inauguration. We know that he is influencing and fanning the flames of right wing political parties.

And that very well may include ours.

Because Elon Musk has pledged to donate $100 million to the Reform party. He has since mentioned that it might be hard to give such a large sum now.

But I don’t think we should take our chances. And I think we can agree that letting billionaires influence our countries politics is a terrible idea.

If you also agree here’s a link to a Parliament petition.

It calls for the government to remove loopholes that allow wealthy foreign individuals to make donations into UK political parties (e.g. by funnelling through UK registered companies).

As it is a parliament petition the government are required to debate it in parliament. But for that to happen it needs to reach 100,000 signatures.

Non British folk I’m afraid you guys can’t sign but I encourage you guys to reblog so that more people can see this.

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The pills meme but it's things i wish i had

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The Good Place 3x11

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New reaction image

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Surprise! Tumblr just got turned into an epic fantasy RPG, just like [your favorite appropriate media franchise]. And the Tumblr RPG's plot needs to have all of its characters covered, in roles both large and small.

That means that you are assigned to a stereotypical RPG role inside our new fantasy world. Spin this wheel to find out what you are now doing for a living.

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[jackiefour]

To anyone wondering if it's worth it to tear down fascist posters or whatever. I spent a few months last year engaged in silent battle with another student at my school who was putting anti trans stickers up everywhere. I had it down to a system where every night I would walk the five block radius they went up in, and tear down all the ones I could reach, and use a stick to put duct tape over the others. Like, within hours of the stickers going up, I would have already purged the whole zone. I knew the basic schedule of whoever put them up based on when and where the stickers appeared. I probably could have found them in person if I'd wanted to. And I told all my classmates and friends what the stickers looked like and got them to rip them down too. And after a few months of this, the stickers slowed, and then stopped forever.

My point is, a lot of this fashy or right wing stuff is one local weirdo. And if you pay attention, and do a little light organizing with your friends, you can basically make their efforts into a giant sisyphisean exercise in misery. You control your streets!

[jackiefour]

🌊

[jackiefour]

I heard there's a TB outbreak in Kansas right now?? Do you know if there's anything we can do to help?

There is ongoing spread of TB in Kansas--so far, 67 cases of active disease.

I want to be clear this is a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall global burden of tuberculosis: 10,000,000 people get sick with TB every year, and 1,250,000 die (almost all of whom die unnecessarily--TB is curable).

It's also a small fraction of the U.S. burden of TB--we have about 10,000 cases of TB annually in the U.S. It's an airborne disease, so we shouldn't be surprised that people are getting sick. We should be horrified that we're allowing so many people to get sick even though TB is both curable and preventable. (We can stop chains of infection by offering preventative antibiotics to close contacts of the sick.)

We should absolutely be worried about TB in the United States. An airborne disease that's allowed to infect and sicken ten million people each year is an ongoing threat to all humans. But we should also remember that while we worry about a hypothetical TB pandemic, much of the world has never emerged from the TB pandemic that has lasted for thousands of years and killed many billions of people.

Should you be worried about contracting TB? Yes. But you should mostly be worried that the U.S. government has paused all TB funding, which will increase antibiotic resistance, needless death, and the risk that untreatable versions of the disease will emerge and spread.

[jackiefour]