#Heartocalypse

[penig]

Bonus Song: My Baby Sister, by Silver Beech Hart My baby sister puts on makeup My baby sister's bound to dance My baby sister is too good for you mister And you're lucky that she's giving you a chance! My baby sister is an artist, her heart as precious and as fragile as spun glass. My baby sister has four big brothers And we'll all hold her stuff if she needs to kick your ass.

My baby sister gets all dressed up My baby sister's hot tonight My baby sister's in charge of who can kiss her If you want to make the cut you'll treat her right. My baby sister is a lady, Refined as sugar, brandy, or cold steel. My baby sister has four big brothers And we taught her how to drive, so don't try to take the wheel!

[penig]

I posted 4,522 times in 2022

That's 2,470 more posts than 2021!

210 posts created (5%)

4,312 posts reblogged (95%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@penig

@widespot

@asimplevampire

@natteryaktoad

@madman-of-amargosa

I tagged 4,516 of my posts in 2022

#the conquering nose - 1,395 posts

#widespot at large - 1,213 posts

#heartocalypse - 697 posts

#self-reblog - 439 posts

#asimplevampire reblog - 276 posts

#land grant university - 208 posts

#non-sims - 199 posts

#natteryaktoad reblog - 192 posts

#madman of amargosa reblog - 165 posts

#land grant university graduates - 152 posts

Longest Tag: 136 characters

#i think one problem people have with victorian literature is that we lack the visceral sense of constriction women took for granted then

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

I’m impressed that the Cratchitts can pay rent on a house, however small. Four rooms, yard, and wash house is an impressive property in a city where larger families are living in single rooms and sharing one pump and one outhouse with the entire building, or even multiple buildings.

Of course the Cratchitts are a bit idealized here. Dickens was a journalist and a social reformer as well as a novelist, and moreover had some personal experience of poverty. He knew a lot about the struggles of people living and raising children on 15 shillings a week. But he also knows his audience and his craft. The Cratchitts must be the antithesis of Scrooge and they must be attractive and squeaky clean, physically and morally, and the forces threatening them must not even hint at vice. A sickly and disabled child is a threat to their happiness not the most rigid middle class moralist can hold against them.If Martha is ever desperate enough to be tempted by sex work, or subject to the sexual predation of her employer’s husband; if Peter’s friends are pressuring him to shoplift; if Bob or his wife ever drink gin out of the context of a family holiday party - we’ll, now is not the time to explore that.

No, what is necessary now is a demonstration of the very important fact that Bob and his family, despite everything Scrooge has done to make them miserable, are happier than he is. They get much better value for the money they spend than he ever gets for the money he hoards. They don’t have enough money for new clothes, but they can make a good show for sixpence by adding ribbons to a twice-turned gown, and Bob can keep warm with exercise instead of a greatcoat to keep the kids clad, and even loan clothes to his offspring to make them feel dressed up. And they can eat their fill and have a proper holiday dinner, even the dessert, and pretend that the feast is more lavish than it is, to maximize their pleasure.

A twice-turned gown, by the way, is a labor-intensive bit of frugality. Victorian women’s clothing took acres of fabric, all of which had to be sewn by hand by the household or someone paid by them. A good dress had to be made to last! But everything fades with time and exposure, no matter how carefully laundered and protected. So once the original color faded, you took the dress apart, turned the unfaded side out, and put it back together again, probably with variations to accommodate changes in fashion or figure, or even, in a house with growing girls, of wearer. And if the fabric was good enough, when that side faded, too, you could turn it inside out again and re-remake it, if you were clever enough.

157 notes - Posted December 15, 2022

#4

I have just finished reading Jane Eyre for the umpty-umpth time since I imprinted on it at 14.

Certain books I have read too often for too big a chunk of my life for me to ever alter my visual image of the locations and characters while reading, and Jane Eyre is one of them. However, this one out of all of them is gradually accumulating an Ideal but Impossible Cast List of actors who have never, and now never can, play certain characters, but should. Chief of these, of course, are Jane and Rochester. Rochester should be played by Jeremy Brett at slightly older than he played Sherlock Holmes, and Jane should be played by Gillian Anderson at 19, who could totally do the “drab little governess till she suddenly flares up” bit, with a few subtle shifts of eyebrow and half a lip. Today, a new one got added: John Hamm as St. John Rivers.

Because this is the first time since I saw the video adaptation of Good Omens that I’ve read the sequence in which St. John tries his damnedest to gaslight, browbeat, coerce, and lure Jane into marrying him in order to go to India with him as a missionary.

If you have seen John Hamm as Archangel Gabriel in Good Omens, and have read my Good Omens fanfic (which contains, I am told by a reader, the nastiest version of Gabriel in the entire fandom; no small feat for a character whom people have written as a rapist and serial killer), you will understand exactly how much I loathe St. John Rivers. He matches Gabriel’s presentation point-by-point, the self-righteous egotist who tramples all before him and thinks that being Great and Good excuses every bit of cruelty he indulges himself in; thinks, even, that because he never stoops to violence he isn’t cruel at all. When I was 14 it bothered me that he gets the last paragraphs of the book; now that I’m 61 it makes me almost physically ill. I want to shake Jane for all the excuses she makes for him. I hope he dies alone and is in Hell for half an hour before he realizes that’s where he wound up. I wish he’d met Rochester once, because even blind Rochester would’ve seen straight through him and stood a chance, if he could keep his temper, of cutting him off at the knees and shocking Jane into losing the scales on her eyes.

My opinion of Rochester has mutated a bit down the years - the implications of the age difference is much more real and meaningful to me now than it was at the time, for instance; probably more meaningful to me than it ever had a chance of being to Brontë, since she died so young herself. And the mad wife in the attic business is - really complicated and impossible to discuss without discussing historical methods of handling mental illness. But Jane made the right choices about him, right down the line. Of course she had to leave him after he’d lied to her and tried to trick her; of course she took him back after that tremendous ego of his finally broke down enough to let him change. Rochester and Jane have compatible faults, which are much more important, in marriage, than virtues, He in fact has many of the same faults as Rivers does, which explains how close Rivers came to winning. But he can love Jane the way she needs to be love, and no one will ever know if Rivers could, because he scorns to.

166 notes - Posted August 29, 2022

#3

Scrooge’s nephew Fred is crucial to the story, one of the two people (the other being Bob Cratchitt) whose relationship with Scrooge is used to mark Scrooge’s relationship with the world, but he tends to fade out of adaptations. This is probably because he’s hard for most people to relate to.

Who among us has not had to be even tempered and docile while overworked and underpaid by a powerful asshole? We all feel you, Bob!

But who among us has gone out of our way to invite That Relative to our holiday party, knowing he would do his best to ruin it? Who has bearded That Relative in his lair, called down his ire upon our heads, deliberately opened ourselves to his nastiness, and returned a merry answer to each sneer? Why make nice to this awful man? It’s not to get into the will. Fred says here that he wants nothing and asks nothing, and we will see later that he’s not talking through his hat; Fred leads a perfectly comfortable life, with either a good job or a secure passive income from a source other than Scrooge. So why does he bother?

Does he just enjoy poking the bear, secure in the knowledge that his uncle’s rants can’t hurt him? Does he pity the old sour lonely man? Did he make a promise to his mother? Or is he an example of the flaw many critics of Dickens have charged him with, a character too good to be believable?

We’ll have more evidence later in the month and new readers may postpone judgment till then.

One thing that stands out here: we have now met the three most important characters in the book, and two of them have been neither introduced nor described. Scrooge has been described at length, physically and morally, before any action occurs; then Fred walks onstage, action begins, and all but incidental description stops. Bob is just hanging out doing clerky things in the background and shivering while Fred bursts in, flushed with exercise and breath smoking in the cold, and leaps into his verbal sparring match with Scrooge. And suddenly the cold grasping figure of Scrooge moves and speaks.

Dickens had to spend all those words describing Scrooge; because, left to himself, Scrooge does nothing. Nothing but convert the people around him into cash. Fred does’t need describing, because he moves and speaks and acts in the world. We are what we do, and Scrooge is a negative presence.

463 notes - Posted December 2, 2022

#2

@todaysbird

478 notes - Posted November 18, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Let’s hear it for Sims.

Let’s hear it for meticulously crafted, efficient lots built with love and perfectly designed and decorated for the family that lives there.

Let’s hear it for huge barns with with three pinball machines, two arcade games, a billiard table, and four bowling alleys, but no stove.

Let’s hear it for gorgeous, gigantic, replicas of real palaces that crash 90% of games when loaded.

Let’s hear it for neighborhoods played in strict rotation; for neighborhoods where one family is played for three generations before another household is ever loaded; for neighborhoods still being used after 15 years of doing every Very Bad Thing under the sun; for neighborhoods that vanish inexplicably after being played once.

Let’s hear it for Maxis Match, for vanilla only, for palettes that are used exclusively for six months and then scrubbed in favor of a new one, for players who don’t know what any Maxis items, hairs, or clothing actually look like anymore.

Let’s hear it for unmodded games and for games modded into unrecognizability.

Let’s hear it for games in which each neighborhood has its own separate folder so it can have its own specific set of downloads and the player has to sit down and think about whether they want to play medieval, regency, fantasy, the 70s game, the BACC, the Test of Time,or the zombie apocalypse; and games in which the technology and fashion of all eras cohabit unselfconsiously in the same household.

Let’s hear it for non-supernatural heteronormative nuclear sim families; for  werewolf/vampire/plantsim polycules; for queer utopias; for dictatorships that Big Brother would think too restrictive; for rigidly “realistic” games; for unabashed nonsense.

Let’s hear it for perfect worlds with no injury or sickness or fire or death and for hellholes of unending drama and danger.

Let’s hear it for defaults that make even aliens, plantsims, and robots conform to the range of current real-world skintones; and for those in which all colors of the rainbow are available except for those seen in the real world.

Let’s hear it for players who create neighborhood after neighborhood, setting them up perfectly, and never ever have a household open and unpaused long enough to see a welcome wagon.

Let’s hear it for players who build and build and build and never take the game out of build/buy except to playtest their build.

Let’s hear it for players who create CC for games they never play anymore.

Let’s hear it for players who have never made a thing, but toss in families, houses, clothes, objects, and businesses made by Maxis or other players, and play the stuffing out of them.

Let’s hear it for storytellers who never turn on free will and set everything up with poseboxes.

Let’s hear it for storytellers who never turn free will off and are continually surprised.

Let’s hear it for those who document their games and share them, and those who keep their games to themselves.

Let’s hear it for players who rush on to the next new thing.

Let’s hear it for players who doggedly maintain the tech to play their favorite iteration in the face of all difficulties.

Let’s hear it for no-cheat games, and all-cheat games, and every game in between.

Let’s hear it for the sandbox, and all the players therein, playing exactly the way they like to play.

Let’s hear it for sims.

557 notes - Posted September 2, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[penig]

Reblogging The Conquering Nose is one thing, but reblogging Heartocalypse: Silver’s College Diary is a trip. I had forgotten how much sheer fun it was, playing and writing as Silver, who is probably the character most unlike me (and that includes villains I’ve felt obliged to write through and whose POVs I ditched the first moment I could) I’ve ever written.

You will be familiar with the truism that, in order to create a character, a writer (or, presumably, actor) must put some of themself into it. This is inevitable and necessary. Our experiences, our fears, our hopes, our ways of thinking give us a basis for understanding other human beings and their actions in real life, and for portraying them in our creative work. But the necessary correlate that is generally undiscussed and appears to go unnoticed is, that in order to create any range of characters (as opposed to a series of alternate versions of ourselves), with three dimensions, voice, and agency, we must also use elements that are very much not us. 

I have seen people who do not go around engaging in creative character work appear genuinely puzzled by even such superficial differences as, for instance, my writing a character who likes olives when I consider them to have one of the vilest tastes I have ever had to expel precipitately from my mouth, which has got to be one of the lowest levels of empathy there can be. All I have to do is imagine that someone who likes olives reacts to them as I do to, say, a cherry, the gush of flavor and the texture between the teeth and on the tongue and the lingering aftertaste pressing against the membranes of my mouth urging me to have another. Heck, if the olive and the character’s enjoyment of it are not part of something I’m developing in the scene, I don’t even have to imagine all that; I can just say: “Maryjohn made a beeline for the olive dish and divided her attention between Johnmary’s exposition and popping them into her mouth,” and use the business incidental to consuming olives to break up Johnmary’s exposition into consumable databursts. 

This is easy, and so is a good opening wedge for developing Maryjohn into someone distinct from me, to her getting her own voice and agency and being capable of responding to the events of the story effectively so that the story happens and resolves in a satisfying way and she has an essential role in it. And maybe Johnmary reacts to Maryjohn’s olive business in a way that begins developing him and whatever relationship lies between them, too - reaching for an olive himself, frowning at her for eating so many, rolling his eyes and passing her a fresh lemonade when the brine makes her thirsty. Maybe Johnmary is a secret villain and feels the same way I do about olives, giving me an in to understanding and developing him. Get the ball rolling and there’s no telling how big the snowball will get or where it will end up.

I have always written most effectively by character immersion: by placing myself behind their imaginary eyes and temporarily becoming them enough to know what they will do or think or say next, retaining only enough of my conscious self to put down their experience in writing. So much of this goes on my backbrain that it’s difficult to talk about, but I rely on it absolutely and no matter what else is going on I can trust it to happen, whether I’m writing or playing a tabletop RPG or simming. 

Simming, for the most part, is the least immersive of these processes because I am observing and interpreting behavior before I am vicariously experiencing it. This is one of the reasons i like simming so much. It gives me easy access to characters it would normally be a strain to write because I have so little in common with them. Extroverts weird me out and I can’t be with them for long at a time, but extroverted sims delight me. I am monogamous, but Romance sims who, even if I don’t allow them polyamoury, are programmed for roving eyes add a lot of interest to my games by creating drama I prefer to avoid in real life. They can be stupid without me having to work out in what way this person is stupid, and they can be smart without input from me. They create their own storylines without my going to the effort of digging into their heads,  even before I know them well enough to hear their voices.

So when I started documenting the challenge in first person, writing as Rhett was an interesting change from my normal writing process, but I still had rules to follow and a plot to shape. it was work as well as play and that was all good fun, but then Silver went to college and I decided on the diary conceit and - wow!

It was straight-up ordinary college play - no plot, a few simple rules, LTWs and want panels, the game mechanics, my understanding of the characters involved - but instead of me I was Silver, trauma-free but not issue-free, goal-oriented, confident to the point of hubris, constitutionally incapable of minding his own business, with no responsibilities except those he imposed upon himself, guided both by his impulses and by the weirdass Hart moral code that developed over the course of play and which neither he nor any other Hart could articulate effectively, intelligent in a completely different way than I am but wise and unwise in ways I vibe with effortlessly. Rhett wrote simple songs that I could hear and transcribe to a certain extent; Silver, somewhere in the depths of the limitations of the game’s sound files and my absolutely unmusical brain, was thinking in music in ways that I couldn’t, nor could I convey more than the barest echoes of it. And something is going on with his olfactory senses - the moment he spotted Mikki in his first hour on campus, I could smell those sunlit tomato vines, and he had some kind of direct connection between his purely theoretical nose and whatever pixelated organs male sims woohoo with, because all his potential partners became associated with smells.

Obviously this was all going on inside my brain somehow, but a lot of it was stuff all my experience indicates that my brain can’t do, so - it was wild. It was a vacation from being me. I don’t expect to ever have such an experience again, but I am glad to have had it, and to be able to re-experience it, in however limited a fashion, by reading back through the archive.

Also, I don’t listen to live music often, but when I do, I hear it differently now. The instrumental solos that used to lose me, don’t. I don’t think I experience them the way Silver would, or the way the music lovers and regular concert-goers around me do, but I am accessing something that I never could before channeling Silver. So. You never know, when you start a project, what it’s going to do to you, down the road.

Isn’t it marvelous?

[penig]

Hi ya Peni, i wanted to ask, a while back I was reading your Conquering Nose challenge/story can you re-link the beginning to me? I'm trying to catch back up on all the stories, and I'd like to re-read to freshen my memory, but I can't find it. I tried to search for it, but having no luck. Thank you!

The first post is here, and the way I found it myself was I went to my sideblog, The Conquering Nose (And Other Stories?) and used the Archive to go back to the first post. The entire sideblog is just entries to story posts. You can do the same thing for the college diaries of Rhett’s kids with Heartocalypse. 

[penig]

I like to go around bragging that the Revolution started at a Heartocalypse concert. 

Technically, of course, it was the Belladonna Cove Music Festival, held on the day the Chief Executive proposed his plan to beat the "promiscuity epidemic" with computer-arranged marriages for everybody and automatic institutionalization for any kids conceived outside of them. Also the day that the news outlets were flooded with those pics of bigwigs on trips to other countries, going in and out of birth control clinics. So the crowd was in A Mood. 

Heartocalypse rocked them, and kept throwing in songs that weren't on their approved playlist - "My Rubber Dealer Got Arrested," "If Daddy'd had a Rubber Then," all of those - and when the management tried to yank them offstage the fans swarmed it. They did four encores, till Sil's voice gave out, and then for the fifth one Third stood up in his rainbow lambda t-shirt and sang "Best Families." 

Similar things were going down on the other stages, and the crowd lost it. All the stages got rushed and the whole festival, bands and roadies and all, picked up and swarmed through the streets to the government buildings and took them over. The troops providing security at the Festival refused a direct order to fire on them, and instead started taking every Sedition Squad that tried to use deadly force on them prisoner. Somebody somewhere hijacked drone camera footage and broadcast it on all the TVs in all the bars, bullet stations, and other public places in the Uberhood, and suddenly the whole country was on the move.

As revolutions go, it was pretty peaceful. The Sedition Squad's arsenals had been sabotaged so that most of their guns jammed, and the army units that protected the civilians from them didn't even bring ammunition, using their guns and things mostly for clubs to disarm the SS. The biggest aggressive move the incumbents took was to shut down the bullets, and of course that was their death knell - every single "apolitical" person who'd been planning to hunker down and ride it out was relying on those trains - to do business, to connect with their families, for everything!  A lot of folks got stranded and people turned their houses into ad hoc refugee centers. A few fistfights between politicians and disgruntled constituents, a few days of siege, and the government officials called for new elections and resigned wholesale.

Which is all part of why that third album debuted platinum, and "Revolution Suite," the live recording from the Festival, isn't doing badly either. My boys are bona fide rock gods these days, which is pretty sweet, and the Censor's Office seems to be a thing of the past, which is even sweeter.

But that's all history stuff, you know as much about that as I do.

[penig]

Adele had started school and she was as near perfect as was good for any child. She still wasn't old enough to explain our exact relationship to, but she didn't care. I was a grownup who paid more attention to her than to Boo-boo and she was into that.

[penig]

Our backyard ran into Heartocalypse's, so we did a lot of running back and forth. They had a big music festival coming up and were finalizing the third album, so I could help 'em out in a lot of little ways. Sometimes Sandy'd be there. I think she justified it to Ham and them as "informal coordination" with Tibby on various political/social gatherings or some damn thing. I tried to take my cue from her.

[penig]

"Hi, Cathy!" "Trent! I didn't know you were coming!" "I didn't either, but the bullets are being diverted all over the place - something about a raid or something - and when I saw where I was I figured I'd better come check in."

"Hey, Trent. Let me guess - you were dousing for dinner and your hazel twigs led you here." "Naw, I was dousing for egos and it drew me to the biggest concentration of 'em in the uberhood.”

"So Aiken's still wearing the Manager Hat, but boy, was he relieved to turn the Front Man Hat back over to me." "Why was he wearing it anyway? Bud or Third either one could've done it." "Third thinks a gay front man is nothing to taunt the censors with right now and Bud's just lazy." "Yeah, because fronting for the band and blowing stuff up underwater are both such easy jobs." "So quit with the underwater BS! We don't need the extra cash right now." "The publicity from it's good, though." "It'd be better if you were the front man. But it doesn't matter anymore, 'cause I'm 100% back." 

"Well, I'm off - why is there a blank picture on Dad's bedside table?" "It's the Joanie picture. The movers ruined it and a lot of paintings. But he won't throw it out for some reason, like the picture could come back or something." "Oh. That's - I could give him my -?" "He knows how much her memory means to you. I doubt he'd take it." "You're probably right."

[penig]

I was glad when Heartocalypse's new house was finished and they all got moved in. Unfortunately they moved in the same day Silver and I had shared studio time scheduled, so we missed Tibby's housewarming party. Which was a damn shame, because we both missed seeing my second grandson, Tybalt, being born! I understand it was a humdinger of a party and a good start in life for him. He was blonde with blue eyes, which it must've been hard for Sandy to keep herself from running over there to see. I hadn't run into Sandy yet. We hadn't talked about it, but we were both working hard to keep it so.

[penig]

"Ha!" "What's the damage?" "Nothing to speak of. I am back! Not allowed to perform that particular song, though."

"S'okay. Harding sang it at the last demonstration - everybody knows it now."

[penig]

Adele might not've known who I was in detail, but she knew she could wrap me around her finger and that was enough for her.

[penig]

"There you are! Are you out here sulking in the rain?" "It's not raining that hard, I never sulk, and I'm trying to alienate your dog's affections."

"Okay, as long as you're not still mad at me about Trent's wedding." "Who, me? I figure we're even since I used my dictatorial powers to make the government censor you." "Oh, that was you? I guess it's all right then! Seriously, though, are we good or do I need to jump through some hoops?" "We're good. And it does suck about the charges."

[penig]

We all trooped downtown a few times to cheer Silver up over being banned from performing.

[penig]

The Paternity Police were in complete confusion, the courts were swamped, and every incumbent in the Uberhood was rushing to cover his ass; but some government departments kept ticking right along when everyone would rather they wouldn't. Silver got slapped with a court order and obscenity charges, just as the third album was shaping up! He'd been trying out a new song on an audience in Viper Canyon where the local Idealistic Conservative Senator was eating dinner, and the senator chose to get offended. 

There wasn't a single obscenity in that song, by a long shot. And he wasn't singing anything anybody didn't know.  I guess he was lucky the charge was obscenity and not sedition. 'Cause that would've been pretty close to true.

(I told that boy, harps.)

That left the other boys with gigs lined up, and without their front man! They did a quick rearrangement of a bunch of songs, to leave out one instrument or another, and rotated lead vocals. Miss Meadow could cover some instruments, sometimes, and they could also call in Harding if they had to. But no way could they finish up the album without Silver. He was the linchpin and they all knew it.