nebulae-unravelling

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this one

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Still thinking about none houses left grief, and while I understand where people are coming from, "it took me out of the world" is just... Really not a relevant criticism here. Like, that line is SUPPOSED to be jarring. It is supposed to be kind of darkly funny, but the point isnt for you to laugh. Its not trying to be a punchline. The point of that line IS to "take you out of the world" because the point is that *this world isn't what you thought it was.*

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People who have never taken public transit before seem to be under the impression that everyone on a bus is ready to stab you meanwhile I have never had that problem and I get to read while I’m stuck in traffic and they don’t.

Also I don’t get stuck in traffic much anyways because the drivers keep going on the freeway even though it gets clogged up with traffic and it’s literally faster to drive on the surface streets where the busses go but whatever I don’t need to pay for a gym membership because I walk to the bus and meanwhile what are you spending your money on? Oil changes so you can keep getting stuck in traffic?

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I will be honest guys, the Red portrait of king Charles is gorgeous asdfghjkl

it's a bad portrait. Like. Objectively. It does the opposite of what's intended. It looks like the painter is insulting him. If it was in a contemporary gallery with no context you would see it immediately as the ambivalent criticism of Charles's reign, how he fades into the overwhelming red background as a tiny little figure, small and insignificant, insufficient for the clothes he's wearing. It reminds my of Goya's portraits, how they were so 'realistic' that they ended up making these great figures look pathetic to the viewer. So these are our rulers?

the sheer novelty. the surprise and shock, the kinda cunt it's serving for no reason. I. I love it. It's an incredible portrait by Jonathan Yeo. By the sheer fact that Charles, the man, is impossible to portray as greater than man because he's just such a nothingburger of a dude. So a portrait made to make him look huge and interesting made him be swallowed in red brushstrokes. The butterfly, that reminded me immediately of " we will all laugh at guilded butterflies", draws more attention than him. It looks like an omen. It looks like a warning in all this red. Something is not right here.

This is the best royal portrait ever 10/10

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Julien Baker covers No Children by the Mountain Goats + an introduction from John Darnielle

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Excerpt from “I Hope We Both Die: How The Mountain Goats Wrote The Ultimate Anthem To Dysfunction” an interview with John Darnielle

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unsung benefit i think a lot of ppl are sleeping on with using the public library is that i think its a great replacement for the dopamine hit some ppl get from online shopping. it kind of fills that niche of reserving something that you then get to anticipate the arrival of and enjoy when it arrives, but without like, the waste and the money.

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you ever get surprised by your own recurring issues. like come on man. I thought we were past this.

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Good morning, you have to be the thing that saves you

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“Mental Health Awareness Month” oh im aware of mine alright

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Leila Chatti, from "Postcard from Gone"

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ykno the thing about poetry is that 99% of it is bullshit and the other 1% will cut you like a material knife, and for every person that 1% is a different section of the whole. this is probably true about all art.

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In her essay Less TikTok, More Screaming, Persinette writes that these e-therapists have turned healing into “a religion, a lifestyle, and above all, a brand” while promoting a culture of isolation and individual optimization. In this ecosystem, “...therapy has become a litmus test for social belonging and inherent goodness, a sign that one is aware of and has adapted to the newest standards of how to behave.”  The social standard this culture offers is one of controlled, placated solitude. Its narrative often insists that you’re surrounded by toxic people who are trying to hurt you, and the only way to ever become the person you’re meant to be is to cut them all off, retreat into a high-gloss cocoon of talk therapy and Notion templates, and emerge a non-emotive butterfly who will surely attract the relationships you’ve always deserved — relationships with other “healed” people, who don’t hurt you or depend on you or force you to feel difficult, taxing emotions. And finally, your life will be as frictionless and shiny as you, alone, have always deserved for it to be.

Rayne Fisher-Quann, no good alone

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My god my girlies

MY GIRLIES. I am still crying, I am still crying about this. Every day I cry about this.

You bitched so hard about being forced to read 1984 in school when it’s so problematic (tm)

Maybe you should have actually paid attention when you read it

Because all these AI fics

You are LITERALLY MAKING THE GARBAGE NOVELS FROM 1984 that are written by machines

You have literally recreated the worthless soulless machine-made books

Literally,

Literally. Every once in a while it hits me in a fresh wave of disbelief and anger. You have literally created the dystopian book from the dystopian story about why dystopia is bad, and you are passing it around like it’s this amazing thing. I’m crying, I’m crying.

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justice of toren collecting songs and one esk/breq constantly humming/singing them is such a good detail and ann leckie does so much with it. an incomplete list:

justice of toren's eager collection of songs is part and parcel of its violent destruction of cultures: these songs are cultural artifacts that it only learns because of its presence on those worlds during their conquest, and in many cases breq is the only one to remember them because their people have died out due to that violence. JoT preserves cultural artifacts for its own use at the same time it directly contributes to the need for that preservation in the first place.

the matter-of-fact way in which this is narrated to us gives us information about JoT's stance on respect and imperialism - that is, contrasted with other characters who look down on the conquered cultures, JoT does actually seem to appreciate their value. and yet it communicates to us no sense of remorse over its role in their genocide.

singing can be a communal activity. this allows us to feel the difference between one esk's multiple bodies singing together in harmony/in a round vs. breq singing alone. this has emotional weight, is an evocative image, and illustrates quite nicely some of the logistic considerations of having one vs. multiple bodies.

the constant humming/singing is extremely notable and idiosyncratic according to other characters, which is a dangerous combination for someone who's supposed to be undercover, so it adds a lil bit of fun suspense for us.

the fact that no one ever figures out breq's identity despite this giveaway tells us something about the other characters' attitudes towards artificial intelligences (though see below about seivarden).

the fact that it's so idiosyncratic also tells us something about the ability of individual AIs to have personalities that distinguish them from other AIs, and the fact that one esk sings constantly but two esk doesn't tells us something about the ability of different ancillary decades that are all part of the same AI to have distinguishing characteristics. this is very relevant to, and illustrative of, the series' thematic throughlines around identity, personality, continuity, etc.

the fact that breq personally has a bad voice also serves multiple purposes. because breq and seivarden both believe that the medic could have chosen a body with a good voice if she had wanted to, we can infer something about how ancillary bodies work, how much the AI (and, by extension, its medics) knows about the individual capabilities of those bodies while they're in suspension, and what kinds of things the AI can and can't control once it has unfrozen and taken over a body.

we can also draw conclusions about the medic that chose that body and about intracrew relations on that ship.

breq's bad voice creates moments of humor and irony in the narrative, such as when breq's constant singing - aka the most obvious clue that she is one esk - is precisely what makes seivarden so sure that breq can't be one esk, because no esk medic would use a body with a bad voice for an ancillary.

constant singing/humming imposes itself on the shared soundscape, meaning other people can't easily avoid it and it has the potential to annoy them, especially if the voice itself has annoying qualities. the reactions of other characters to the frequency and/or quality of this verbal tic tells us something about the level of affection those characters have for one esk or breq.

because singing involves words, the meaning of the lyrics being sung can be used to advance the plot, communicate things about specific characters, create irony in juxtaposition with what's happening on the page, etc.

i especially like what's done with the lyric "it all goes around". it's woven throughout the story in such a way as to manifest its own meaning (the repetition of "it all goes around" is, itself, an example of something going around). by repeating the lyric, breq is the one making it true, and i would argue that her repetition of this particular lyric about things orbiting other things contributes to, and/or is a sign of, her growing understanding of the necessity/reality of interdependence and her place in that framework/her role in constructing it, or in other words, the extent of her own agency and the rights and obligations it confers upon her.

because the singing/humming is a constant, background, automatic action, it only ceases when breq is experiencing a strong emotion. from this we are able to infer things about the emotional state of our famously-omits-details-about-her-emotional-state narrator based on other characters' comments about whether or not she is currently doing this thing.

we also aren't even aware that breq is doing it constantly until another character says so. on a narrative level, this serves the dual purpose of making sure we know about how much she hums AND of reminding us that she's not telling us everything.

the humming is not mentioned constantly even though it is happening constantly - this helps us forget in between mentions that it's going on while also simultaneously reinforcing just how constant it must be, so constant that to mention it every time it happens would be like narrating every time she breathes in or out. whenever someone brings it up, we are reminded anew that something has been happening all along that we forgot about. this means that ann leckie is able, by leaving information out, to hammer home to us how much we are not being told.

through this one character trait, ann leckie efficiently and elegantly communicates not just aspects of character but also of setting, plot, tone, theme, and narrative. there's no extraneous exposition just to tell us about the song collection or singing; everything that tells us about it is serving other functions in the narrative as well. the ways in which she manifests this one character trait in the universe and in the narrative contribute to and exemplify both the story itself and the method of its telling.

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heart - shaped scallion found In pho . reblog for good luck & yummy soup 500000 forwver