#I also looked for the wikipedia article just to see what interesting stuff i could see

[polygondotcomvideoproducer]

i dont know if you know this but i didnt know trebuchet so i looked it up and the first sentence of the wikipedia article says its used in the half life logo. gamer alert!

FUCK now everyone thinks im a gamer. cant believe u would say this what if a girl sees it

[cadmusfly]

Analysing the Quality of Napoleon's Marshals With Silly Data Science

Let's talk numbers and laugh at funny graphs with missing data!

Other people in this fandom do really lovely detailed information posts, I do weird fanfic, dragon shitposting, body pillow design shitposting and run a stupid Lannes ask rp blog. But! I'm also a programmer with an interest in Numbers, and today we're going to Analyse These Dead Frenchmen with a bunch of screenshots of graphs.

Ethan Arsht published a really interesting article called Napoleon was the Best General Ever, and the Math Proves it., where using data scraped off Wikipedia articles, he creates a statistical model drawing from multiple variables per battle to calculate How Good A General Is At Winning.

Give the article a read, it's great stuff, but if you don't feel like it, he basically applies WAR - "Wins Above Replacement" - which is a value from baseball that measures how many wins a player is worth when compared to a replacement.

So the general's WAR would be how well they compare to a completely average general who replaced them. Yes, as Arsht says, "in other words, I would find the generals’ WAR, in war."

But as he says, this is not a stringent historical analysis and is more of a fun thought experiment. Wikipedia is probably the most comprehensive dataset on this topic that he had access to, but it is Wikipedia the crowdsourced online encyclopedia, so it is going to have holes and inaccuracies. And this was written seven years ago, and the data was collected then, so any updates to these articles since then wouldn't be reflected.

And it's not a perfect model that takes into account everything - it's an approximation, a whole bunch of number crunching. I haven't looked too deeply into how the numbers work exactly, even though I could.

I think that 0 would be "completely and utterly average"? A positive WAR is good, a negative WAR is not. Napoleon is the best general ever at 16.679 WAR, the next highest is Caesar at 7.445 WAR.

(Link, you can hover over each battle and look at each datapoint!)

But I'm interested in Napoleon's marshals. The 26 men he raised up to military nobility! The dramatic assholes who kept arguing with each other. I'll post links for all of them at the end of this, but I won't be screenshotting each of their WAR graphs, just a few.

I'm not entirely sure how the scraper collected the information about what battles a commander is considered in "charge" of - I tried looking at the provided code repository but I am reminded that data science people bless them are not really good at structuring or publishing code and why are all the html pages just straight up saved in the root folder why are the jupyter notebook outputs just uncleared aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Oh yeah this was scraped from seven years ago so current wikipedia pages won't be reflective of what's on the graphs - so we can assume that this is just grabbing stuff from the "Commanders and leaders" part from each individual battle page and collating them into numbers

Anyway let's look at the iron man himself, Davout, considered to be the best of Napoleon's marshals.

(Link)

Heh, here we see the first hole in the dataset - Jena-Auerstedt is considered to be one battle, and Napoleon would like you to think that's the case.

Anyway, pretty good! Let's look at Jean Lannes, the lively Gascon

(Link)

Oooooh, even better than Davout! Helps he didn't go to Russia. Wait, why is Aspern-Essling dated to before Ratisbon, especially when Lannes died in the former?

Let's look at André Masséna, also known as being pretty cool:

(Link)

Damn, neat, though I think there's a lot of omissions here.

Here's Murat:

(Link)

Lol Tolentino, I do like how Murat Peaked there a little bit

But we're forgetting a certain redhead, aren't we?

(Link)

Ouch. But also Waterloo not appearing there, hmmm.

Anyway let's finish off the screenshots with Napoleon's greatest strategist, Jean-de-Dieu Soult, the man that Wellington called a master of the defensive!

(Link)

honestly this is the entire reason why i wanted to write this post

in soult's defense - as a soult defender - he had a pretty shitty army full of conscripts, was isolated, was occasionally pretty bad at adapting tactically to new surprises and had to deal with the english being stubborn fuckers, but he was brilliant in setting things up strategically and forcing the english to catch up through a fighting retreat with a demoralised army, stopping them from closing in on france too

but also the way this graph bullies soult so hard makes me laugh a lot

Anyway, yeah, these graphs are definitely inaccurate and I'm also posting these to see the Napoleonic community on tumblr's reaction to them, but they are a fun way to engage with history!

Just don't take them seriously, and feel free to argue in the tags/comments/reblogs

I could theoretically use this guy's code to rerun this just for the Marshals now - I know my way around some data science code - but I do have a lot on my plate, but it would be a fun experiment!

Marshal WAR Graph Links

Note: So these are under the Wikipedia article names at the time that the web scraper was run seven years ago so some of these names turned out to be different from what they are now and I had to do a bit of digging to fix some

you can definitely tell that the information is incomplete on a lot of these, again i repeat the information was scraped off wikipedia seven years ago

Louis-Nicolas Davout

Jean Lannes

Joachim Murat

Michel Ney

André Masséna

Jean-de-Dieu Soult

Bon-Adrien Jeannot de Moncey (one battle lol)

Jean-Baptiste Jourdan

Charles-Pierre Augereau

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte aka Charles XIV John of Sweden (Two battles and only Swedish ones I think)

Guillaume Brune

Édouard Mortier (two battles)

Jean-Baptiste Bessières (two battles)

François Christophe de Kellermann (one battle, Valmy)

François Joseph Lefebvre (two battles)

Charles-Victor Perrin (ouch)

Étienne Macdonald

Nicolas Oudinot (lol)

Auguste de Marmont (loll)

Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr

Józef Poniatowski (three battles but hmm. pretty bad but feel like there's too much missing info here)

Emmanuel de Grouchy (two battles, can't make a Where's Grouchy joke)

Marshals Without Graphs Not because they didn't command anything but I couldn't find their graphs on the website or in the code repo

Catherine-Dominique de Pérignon

Jean-Mathieu-Philibert Sérurier

Louis-Gabriel Suchet (wtf? maybe seven years ago the documentation on him was sad)

EDIT: wait i was looking at the notebook (the uh place where the code was being run, to see if i could run the code myself)

soult is one of the lowest ranked generals overall on this initial list pfftHAHAHhahahahahahahaha

[wrongcaitlyn]

for the ask game !!! 4, 6 and 22 for tyt / dear reader in general !!!

4. If the fic required it, what did you research in order to write it?

oh SO much😭 there was definitely a lot of research into dates, at first, just because i wanted to make sure i was lining up all the award shows with the actual dates and choosing which award shows to write (also coming across the fact that grammys 2018 was on jan 28...) also, the categories that were in award shows, i had to research what exactly all of those categories were for - which ones nico would be nominated for, who they were awarded to (just the singer, also the producer?). the amount of time that i spent on the grammys' wikipedia page was much longer than i'll ever admitslkjfd

also billboard charts! i did a ton of research into records, how they're counted, because i wanted to make sure that when i was mentioning nico's milestones, they were at least somewhat realistic. i read through a bunch of billboard album reviews and articles with producers and whatnot to try and figure out the basics of music journalism.

there was research into transitioning, as well, even though i was much more hesitant to trust *google* for that sort of stuff, but i wanted to know just how easy it would be for nico to actually get top surgery and whatnot, and also the effects of binders when singing/having a performance and stuff

SO MUCH OLYMPICS RESEARCH. LIKE. god i think i complained about this at some point but seriously, the archery world championships and olympics qualification is still confusing asf to me. but i wanted to make sure that, despite kayla being a relatively minor character, i was figuring out all the right dates, how she would get qualified, records for youngest world champions, etc etc.

weather accounts. ik that it's very unnecessary but i genuinely looked up dates for concerts and what the weather was, or when i wanted it to rain i actually looked up whether it was raining, how i could twist it to when it *did* rain, and whatnot. i may be insane when it comes to details like that

and in general, i watched a lot of interviews (though that was in my free time, and tbf i've always been interested in it, even before i started writing the series) about artists and singer-songwriters and how they wrote, how they worked, and just the entire creating-an-album process

there's probably a lot more that i'm forgetting, bc i genuinely was always researching something. fun fact! there hasn't been an italian artist to reach #1 on the billboard hot 100 since 1958 (he was also the first european artist to reach #1 on the billboard hot 100).

6. How did you decide what tense and POV(s) to use?

i had just written a fic (my hunger games au) in past tense, and when writing it, i felt like i kept slipping into present. so when i started writing talk your talk, i decided to just test out present tense and see whether i liked that better (back when i thought it would be a relatively short oneshot, maybe a oneshot series)

the funny thing about that is that i thought i didn't like it, and so THEN when i wrote another fic - my marauders jegulus fame au - i decided to write that one in past tense. a warning for any writers: NEVER. write two wip's that are in different tenses. it's a horrible kind of torture. since then, i've had to write all of my other fics in present tense because i didn't want to mess up my brain while writing talk your talk - it's so confusing to switch it up, because then i'd also have to monitor what i was reading, and if i read something present tense, i wasn't able to write starry eyes; if i read something past tense, i wasn't able to write talk your talk. i couldn't write one and then switch over to the other, i had to like program my brain to think in the correct tense - ANYWAY it was very very hard and i highly recommend to never do that and just stick with one tense, at least until you want to fully switch over😭

as for the pov, in talk your talk, it was always going to be nico! the whole fic was very centered around him, and i knew that i wanted to add all these details on how he felt about his rise to fame - i really wanted that internal dialogue during shows, and school, and producing music, and also how songs would come to be and whatnot. also, i had just written my hunger games au in nico's pov, and i just really liked it😭

when it came to greatest of luxuries, i knew that i wanted to expand on the universe. that did horrendous things to my wordcount, but i think it was for the best!! i got to add more character development to will, which was *really* important to me, seeing as he and nico are pretty separate stories while nico is on tour and will is in college, and it also let me introduce a bunch of new characters!! i added a few other interludes too, with a bunch of different pov's, but the most interesting, i think, was apollo

apollo's pov/memoir (and i'm so sorry, i know you haven't gotten to that yet but i just had to include it when talking about pov's!!) is one of my FAVORITE things to write. i knew that i wanted to add more of apollo's lore and his story to the au, but for a while, i didn't know how to do it - it didn't feel right to just add an apollo pov where all he does is reflect on the past and so i got SO excited when i thought of creating a memoir. usually i'm heavily against writing in first person, but it just felt so natural with apollo - how else could you have a pov that just focuses on the past (pretty much an entirely different timeline) but still with the huge ego of apollo? while he still shows maturity and how he's grown as a person?? i'm already such a fan of including mixed media in my fics, but the memoir has to be my favoritekjldsf

22. What is something you learned about yourself as a writer from the experience?

i love causing pain. i think i already knew that, seeing as one of my first fics when starting to write again last year was a hunger games au in which i killed off like a good majority of the main cast. but there was something cool in writing angst as a theme in talk your talk, when fame au's largely focus more on the reputation of a person, conflicts between relationship, etc. not that i have a problem with those, seeing as im a sucker for literally any kind of fame au, but i sort of put them in the background for this series!

overall, i feel like i've grown such a huge amount with this fic. i started it around the same age as nico and will, only slightly younger, and now they're nearly 20 and im still 16. both in the writing sense and just in general, i really got over my fear of starting/committing to longer fics, because i really just fell in love with the universe. i learned that i *love* adding different forms of media to fics, and that one of my favorite things about writing is exploring how different universes would impact the characters differently - it would shape their personalities, give them some different characteristics and different outlooks on life, and that's prob why i love au's so muchdjfs

but the main main thing is that this is the first time that i feel like i really wrote the fic and got a huge community out of it - i've always had a few mutuals in fandoms and whatnot (both when editing and writing), but with talk your talk, i started getting repeat commenters, and eventually started my tumblr, and i realized how incredibly motivating it is to be able to share my obsession with the au with so many other people!! it's been an absolutely incredible experience <33

well i definitely rambled a lot thereDLKFJS thank you for the asks!!

[realcatalina]

hey!! what do you think of that?

If I am interpretting this post correctly, it implies that because of the monkey it is more likely to be Catherine of Aragon or somebody around her...because Catherine is depicted with a monkey.

Well, I don't know what consist of research in Dr Emma Cahill Marrón's dictionary, however here is what I know about monkeys as pets in those days. They were quite popular among wealthy in 15th and 16th century and there are some interesting stories about them.

For example Henry VII's pet monkey has destroyed a large amount of official documents! (and it is one of reasons why we have gaps in records from that time. No fire, nor flood or anything like that...a monkey.)

So I believe it is completely faulty theory, and I cannot believe one could have looked up monkeys as pets in those days and do even tiny bit of research into it...and still come to such odd conclusion, that ONLY somebody around Catherine had a monkey.

Or is it because it is marmoset monkey and according to wikipedia those are native to America? ...like is the logic that since she was princess from Iberian peninsula that she'd have some monopoly on goods from countries her relatives tried to conquer?

I don't see the logic behind this.

...

Sadly even proffesionals now can get away with claiming to do solid research and do very biased or unsufficient research. Or none at all!

The best/worst example I talk about all the time is 'scallops being evidence against Catherine of Aragon'...which was total bull...and yet professional institutions and experts still went with reidentification of that portrait despite such big nonsense being written in that article!

...So don't believe those people who just say my research says this...want full explanation, details, and then scrutinize those details to no end. (Hell scrutinize even my own work. Do you know how many times I found I made big typo in my past posts and nobody corrected me?!)

Also...if you come with theory certain depiction is not somebody...you better damn know your stuff and have solid, convincing evidence for it. And not just bit. Mountain of it. Especially if it is royal.

...If I just said 'according to my research all but one portraits of Richard III are actually Henry VII...you'd all call me nuts!!! ...But since I explained, how I came to conclusion that the portraits got misidentified(imo)...I have not yet heard somebody say my theory is completely wrong,

In this case monkey aside, what makes this woman believe the sitter has anything to do with Catherine or her circle?

Well, i of course know of some similiarity in the pendant to those worn by Catherine and later Mary...but not enough to say it is same, also there weren't that many jewelers royalty bought from-so actually one jeweller could supply half of European royals and they could have similiar jewelry due to that.

That gown is not English, nor Netherlandish, it most resembles French fashion.

We don't have many surviving depictions of scottish fashion in general(or they are not recognized as scottish fashion) from that time.

But French fashion is what I'd expect to see in Scottish court, given close ties between French and Scottish court. Scottish royal art collection also had many portraits of french royalty for same reason.

And if you wished to push theory it is not Margaret...then still this portrait was part of Scottish royal collection(it'd just be misidentified). So it could be another french or scottish royalty. Or both. You could theorize that it is one of James V's wives- Madelaine of Valois or Mary de Guise. (And fashion and dating would point to them.)

I'd say it seems like wishful thinking.

[rollercoasterwords]

I’m so genuinely intrigued and curious abt that post you made abt reaching out to the authors when you find a paper you want to read bc.. how are you finding these papers in the first place?? Do they show up on your tiktok fyp?? Do you just search up whatever topic you wanna read about on google scholar? I think that that’s really cool that you do that and I also would like to read about research that like actually interests me and not just papers assigned in class but I dunno where I would start looking for them. Sorry this ask is probably so random but do you have any tips?? lmao 😭

WHAT a fun question!!! of course i have tips!!!

first of all....free urself from the tiktok fyp i am begging u <3 like. ok i am sure there are people on there who are sharing academic articles and such but....more often with tiktok at least in my experience u just end up getting stuck in an endless scroll rather than actually following up on any interesting reading/research suggestions. also i think it is just like. a valuable and enriching skill to be able to think of things on ur own that u want to learn about and then go and find resources urself! like. approach tiktok w caution perhaps it could be helpful for some but i worry a bit that we are all becoming a little too reliant on algorithms to feed us Content, y'know?

anyway! as for how i find papers 2 read that interest me! most often it is a matter of finding something that sparks my interest + then going down a rabbit hole. and there are soooooo many ways to do this!! the internet is an amazing resource!!!! here is a list of some ways that i find interesting articles:

tumblr <3 lol i follow various blogs that post interesting stuff abt theory + academia every so often, and if i see a quote that interests me i'll go and try to find the article it came from! (you could also use tiktok this way if you've found some good people to follow! my main hesitation w tiktok is just that. it's an endless scroll + an algorithm which are both 2 things that i find distracting, and why i prefer tumblr)

substack - same kinda deal as tumblr; i subscribe to bloggers who write about topics that interest me and if they cite research in their posts i'll go try to find that research to read it myself

news articles/blog posts/essays that i come across online - again, if there's some interesting research cited, i'll go and try to find it

search by writer - if you keep hearing about an academic or someone suggests "oh read some so-and-so," go and look up so-and-so and see what they've written + what u can find online for free! most really famous/influential academics will have some free pdfs of their more influential work floating around online, and for smaller/niche academics--email them!

along the same lines - if u find an article or essay or speech by an academic and u like it, go find their biography page on the website of whatever school they teach at! schools will usually list professors' work, or at least a few examples, and you can find more stuff to read from that same person whose article you enjoyed. this is especially helpful if ur researching something kinda niche

wikipedia! people shit on wikipedia all the time as if it's not a "real source" but that's simply false! wikipedia is a great jumping-off point if you're interested in a broad topic but don't know where to start. go scroll through the wikipedia article about said topic and see what's cited there to get an idea of where you might be able to find some interesting articles/research to narrow ur focus!

look through the bibliography/citations on other research! if ur reading a book or article on an interesting topic + want to learn more, actually take a minute to scan through the citations and see if any titles catch ur eye!

ask people for recommendations! if u have an old/current professor or a friend or something who u know is interested in the same topic as u, ask if they have any reading recommendations!

if ur a university student--take advantage of that shit!!! look thru the papers on ur syllabus and scan the citations of the most interesting ones for further reading or go look up the writers u like best from the course to find more stuff they've written! look at the class listings for classes u aren't taking and if ur interested, ask those professors if they'd be willing to share their reading lists with you! keep an eye out for free lectures or events on new topics that interest you as a jumping-off point for finding new things to learn about! ask ur friends in other majors what they're learning about and go look it up if it interests you!

go to the library and look through the nonfiction section for topics ur interested in; check out books with cool titles! if they're boring, u can just return them

go to thrift stores or used bookstores and do the same thing! look for nonfiction books with interesting titles! i loooooooooove love love love looking through gender studies sections of bookstores for nonfiction--and then if i find a book i like, guess what that book's gonna cite?? more articles + books!!!!!! there is so much research + knowledge in the world just waiting to be shared!!!!

anyway. these are just some ways that i have found interesting new things to learn about! it sounds like u are currently a student--and like, trust me, i get that when ur constantly being assigned readings for classes it can just become a drag. but college is an AMAZING resource; i still go back and reference old notes from school to find research that i'm interested in, and some of my classes introduced me to articles that i still return to + cite today. research can be so so so fun + rewarding when ur just doing it for the joy of learning; the key really is to treat it like a little spiderweb. maybe most of ur assignments are boring, but this one article for class was really interesting and u actually find urself wanting to learn more--look at the research that article cited! google the names of the writers to see what else they've written! ask ur prof if they have any more suggestions similar to that article! the possibilities are endless!!

+ if ur a student, ur institution probably has access to a whole bunch of research databases where u can find articles + books for free, which is amaaaaaaaazing take advantage of that shit. but i am not currently a student, so my process for finding articles usually goes:

google + see if a free pdf magically pops up (happens more often than you'd think honestly)

failing that -- if it's a book, i check the online collection at my library + also on openlibrary and project gutenberg and zlibrary; for articles i usually check library genesis (sometimes i look for books here too) or sci-hub (usually works best if you search by doi)

failing that -- if it's an article, i go hunt down the email address of whoever wrote it and email them to ask for access! for books, if you really really want to read it you can usually put in a request at your local library for them to get it, but sometimes i do just have to give up if i can't find a book for free online anywhere :(

hopefully some of this was helpful !! and if ur looking for nonfiction book recs i have a post here with some stuff i've read over the past year or two and i also have a post here with like...some suggestions for intro gender studies/queer theory reading (mostly articles)!

[meliohy]

I've been thinking. I'm on tumblr way too much and want to make better use of my time but I do want to look at art and fandom stuff and queer discussions and things like that when I have time to kill. And unfortunately I really can't think of a better alternative than tumblr for all that.

I downloaded a rss feed reader but I don't have enough ideas of what to put in there and it feels more like something made to not miss an update or article rather than to have something to look at to kill time. It's technically not a bad thing since the goal is also to look at my phone less, and I could also kill time by reading random Wikipedia articles for exemple. But I think I'd still miss out on fandom. A forum like in the old days could be a good replacement but the downside is that it'd be fandom specific and I switch fandoms often.

Tumblr tagging system and the ability to add on posts with reblogs are just so good for community! I can't think of anything else having something like that.

The thing I'd add would be more customization of the dashboard. I saw some people suggest the creation of tabs with only posts with a specific tag from people I follow.

That'd be perfect for me to focus on what I really want to see and not just scroll for scrolling! Unfortunately that's exactly the kind of thing that social media has no interest in adding since it might go toward less time on the app. Unless they paywall it.

Still, I'd rather find an open source website so that there's no fear of losing it someday because some stockholders finally decided the site loses too much money.

[thespacesay]

i am experiencing a fascinating glitch right now. on Firefox, specifically, there appears to be a character encoding error.

when i type or see some webpages with "fl", it's instead visually becoming ffi, and overlapping the next character. It's hard to see in the word "fluid" as below, but the "i" overlaps the "u".

however, it gets a little more interesting. this is appearing in Wikipedia articles, so enjoy random cystic fibrosis stuff. in fact, that's where I noticed the problem, and started experimenting to see what on earth was happening. now, my immediate question is how my laptop or Firefox is processing the encoding of "fl", which I assume must have a singular unicode character of some sort. except. then i noticed an earlier section of the article had a different problem:

so, in this case, ff" is glitched out in a different way - encoded as a single "fi", which has some spacing after it visually.

i also noticed "difficulty" getting shown with the "fi" as "fl".

so, problem identified: something is wrong with the way that firefox is interpreting characters with f+something. next step, I tried looking up the unicode encoding for those characters.

after some difficulty, I located that these are all right in a row, and glitching to the next one. "ff" -> "fi", "fi" -> "fl", and "fl" -> "ffi".

honestly, no clue how that's happening or where to go from there. i'm sure some tech person could take it a step further, but this is where my knowledge fails to provide a next step. I assume it's being interpreted via HTML, but it's all just... adding one to the base, whatever the HTML tag happens to be.

realistically, I'm fairly certain I can just restart my instance of Firefox, or possibly my computer, or reinstall the latest Firefox update, and it'll go away. but hey, this journey was interesting!

[lifenconcepts]

Excuse me sir may I ask about your past life in the USSR? I find that very interesting

YES ABSOLUTELY! I’m currently figuring all the specifics out but I’ve always had a deep pull towards it without any proper reasoning, I.e. going mad (in a good way) whenever I see things referencing it, craving the life there, and watching/listening/reading media from that time with such a high pleasure that never materialises anywhere. For specifics, I’ll say what comes to mind first: Mosfilms/lenfilms group on YouTube and their soviet films, soviet cartoons, soviet music clips that are available on YouTube (love Альянс), soviet music in general, soviet history (I’ll have you know I was sickened to death in school by how much I despised and hated history, and wouldn’t you know - of all the countries, I actively sought out books in libraries and Wikipedia articles on its past! Not really the political stuff more so the culture), loving food products that were popular at the time (like plombir. But not all. Tbf I despise Халва), and also being the number one fan of listening to my parents talk about their childhoods (which my friends say they find strange for some reason? What do you mean you don’t feel excited and overjoyed to know about their time??! It’s actually so lovely, even the ‘boring’ stories. Stuff as simple as the shopping experience or tradition of visiting one another was so different and to be fair I absolutely adore it. I ADORE COMMUNITY! But yeah)..

Ah, I’m unsure if you found that interesting but I just had to give you the evidence to back up my claim of at having a past life in the USSR, most of all just being overjoyed and resonating when seeing media or items from the past. One time I blindly just saw a soviet symbol and went “yeah I’m buying that” (for my ushanka, one from faux fur the other from raccoon which can’t really hold that star thing aah forgot what it’s called) but nowadays I’m able to withhold myself from just blindly throwing money at anything that says it was made in the Soviet Union. I’m actually surprised that it happens since usually I’m very strict with not purchasing anything that I don’t really need. Ah. RIGHT! Why haven’t I gotten to the actual past life yet? Well because I have very little concrete knowledge on the sort of life I led, but can vaguely remember how I looked like, acted, and felt. Brown hair, that classic haircut most guys (especially my dad) had in the Soviet Union, wearing cool jackets like something akin to a black leather jacket or aviator one, had a good stride, wasn’t afraid to just carry myself through the streets, could crack up a convo with most strangers I’d say and was a free guy. I know I liked to go on walks, sometimes I have this distinct feeling of being in Russia whenever I go to the wilderness at night as especially snowy conditions (despite never being in the country yet, it’s on my bucket list), I know I had some busted up car I was utterly proud of (unsure of the branding but it’s shape is similar to the 1970s Ford car), also I am convinced my main centre of interest is in the 70s/80s, that’s the period of music which I feel most connected to and have truly cried over despite hearing some of them for the first time. Again, more so speculation but I believe that I had a walkman or vinyl record player, went to concerts, went to pubs, and just maybe been drafted for war? Have a strange lingering love for the soviet army for no real reason. Also have cried to the soviet anthem as a child. Take what you will from that I have no clue how it affected me that much. I rarely cry from music. But also have always wanted to be a cosmonaut in the Soviet Union (also since 5/6/7 years old) AND I STILL WANT TO BE but like.. the damn country fell apart :,( sad. ALSO deep fascination with soviet folklore of leshii, Baba Yaga, Кащей бессмертный, Водиной, and domovoy - and you’ll say I’m making something up but I have seen that one before and it was crazy. Peaceful encounter but my brain collapsed on itself and all the beliefs I had prior.

Could more or less point to certain soviet things or guys and say if I knew it back then or if it’s just something I like in this life. There’s a concrete distinction in my heart/soul.

[useless-englandfacts]

I don’t know if you’ll be able to help out, but I support BLM and want to learn more about black people in the UK but most of the stuff out there is about America. Do you have any recommendations about British black people? Books or documentaries or resources?

I'd be happy to help out! I agree the US tends to dominate conversations about race, but happily there are quite a few British books out there too! Disclaimer that these are just off the top of my head so if anyone wants to add more then please go ahead!

Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga! He's a prominent Black historian and has also done multiple documentaries which aim to expand traditional narratives of British history to include people of colour who are so often written out. You can find a full list on his Wikipedia page of course, though I'm unsure as to how many are on iPlayer and such! There's a child-friendly version of Black and British here too for any parents/teachers who are interested!

Brit(ish) by Afua Hirsch is a more autobiographical book about Hirsch's experiences growing up as a mixed race woman in Britain. Hirsch attended Oxford University and works at the BBC, so it’s offers a good insight into what it's like for POC to exist in spaces that have traditionally been saved for rich white people. She's a journalist too so there are various articles of hers floating about covering a range of issues, some of which relate to race. She's also done a few documentaries that are worth checking out, including The Battle for Britain's Heroes which questions whether some of our 'heroes' (e.g. Churchill, Nelson) should really be honoured, and (not British but) African Renaissance which looks at Black culture in Ethiopia, Senegal and Kenya - maybe the first time I've seen African culture shown on its own terms.

Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala is another half autobiographical work, covering stuff like the far right in Britain, policing and education. It does a great job of cutting through the squeamishness I think Brits often have when talking about race.

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge has become a sort of classic of its genre but I think it's totally worthy of all the praise it's received! It looks at how lots of white people in Britain (and more generally) equate racism with full-on hate crimes, meaning they don't consider themselves racist despite regularly committing micro-aggressions/other unintentional acts. Also an absolutely stellar insight into intersectionality throughout the book! Cannot recommend enough!

Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power by Lola Olufemi is a must-read for feminists! It discusses modern-day feminism and how it needs to remove itself from that girlboss capitalist yuckiness, and should instead focus on marginalised issues within feminism such as transmisogyny, sex work, and - of course - racism. Has been praised by Angela Davis so that's a huge plus!

The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla is a collection of essays by POC from across Britain sharing experiences of racism and immigration, and what it feels like to be constantly regarded as an 'other' or as an ambassador for your race.

Literally anything by Paul Gilroy! His work is slightly older and some of it is very ~academic~ but I don't want to suggest that it's therefore totally inaccessible. He talks a lot more about British national identity and our role in the world and how that has affected views on race and immigration. He's written lots (I recommend Googling him and having a better look yourself!) but There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack and After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture are both fab.

If you're feeling brave then you could look at anything by Marxist darling Stuart Hall? Some of his writing is very difficult to penetrate imo, but it's worth it if you can. He's written a lot so I would recommend browsing his Wikipedia page first and seeing if there's anything that grabs you. Even if you don't feel up to reading his stuff cover to cover, he's still someone who every antiracist in Britain should know!

Honourary mention to Thinking Black: Britain, 1964-1985 by Rob Waters just because he taught me at university hehe! Obviously more of an academic history book, but again pretty accessible and a good insight into more radical Black politics in Britain in the era.

I haven't read it myself as I believe it's only just come out but David Harewood has a book called Maybe I Don't Belong Here: A Memoir of Race, Identity, Breakdown and Recovery which looks worth checking out! Foreword by our beloved David Olusoga too!

If you're still looking for more then a good tip with any of the academic books listed here is that you can browse the footnotes and/or bibliography to find further reading there!

If you're looking for documentaries then on the BBC you can browse for Black History Month stuff, (fictional) shows that centre Black British characters and narratives, and documentaries that do the same. There has been quite a lot done in the past year about all sorts of stuff - from Black people in the NHS, what it's like being Black in the church, more specific stuff on Stephen Lawrence, Windrush, the Newcross Fire, and even specials on Black celebrities such as Lenny Henry. There's also a Black and Proud section on Channel 4's website that does something similar (side note: cannot believe they've put Hollyoaks on there that's so funny).

I don't read much fiction myself, but it is important not just to see Black Britons as victims of racism, but also as… you know… complicated and fully rounded human beings who are able to experience the full spectrum of human emotion like everyone else. Like black people just… existing. Looking to others who do read fiction to help flesh out this section in particular but a couple again off the top of my head:

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

Love in Colour by Bolu Babalola (I know this isn’t about Britain per se, but she's a Black British writer so I think it counts).

This is probably more than you asked for and you can likely tell that my academic background is in history so it is skewed towards that but I hope this helps! And again, if anyone wants to add anything then feel free!

- Dominique

[headspace-hotel]

You may have already answered this question but how do you go about piecing together your Wikipedia poems?

Okay, so, yeah I've been meaning to post something talking about the process for a while. It's an interesting journey to talk about in itself.

My first Wikipedia poem was Black Hole. I made that poem last December, and unfortunately I do not remember anything of the process of making it, where the ideas came from, or why I decided to start. December 2020 was a shitty time for me (I barely left the house for 10 months starting in march, so, yeah) and my memory of the winter of 2020 is just straight up blank.

I do know that earlier, that semester in fact, I'd done a lot of stuff with found language poetry. Basically it's a type of poetry where you use fragments of language from a pre-existing source and re-assemble them into a poem.

All of my Wikipedia poems have been in a style where they seek to "define" and describe a specific "topic"—you know, like a Wikipedia page. The first line is always the very beginning of the Wikipedia article for the thing that forms the central symbol/motif for the poem. As in, "An asteroid is..."

Most of the process is just working through and exploring what an asteroid is, because an asteroid is not an asteroid, an asteroid is the protagonist of a tragedy—they all are extended metaphors, the central term is of course representing something else.

And this is why the "found" aspect is so powerful—it becomes a complex, interweaving series of connections instead of a single rigid metaphor.

I have an album on my phone with hundreds of screenshots from Wikipedia, from entire paragraphs to single words. Some of them I just took screenshots of because they looked interesting or thoughtful or poetic, and some were the result of a more purposeful attempt to find fragments for a specific poem. But in any case you need to have a "pool" of pieces to choose from.

I knew where I was going in some way with most of the poems, but it's hard to state exactly what I think the "theme" of each poem is. "Black Hole" is about mortality. "Legend" is about how history is remembered. "Stranger" and "Abyssal Plain" are both about self-knowledge and the process of healing from trauma, but they're very different in their approach. "Hotel" is about liminality.

But then again, not quite.

The process of developing the metaphor is a lot like the process of browsing wikipedia—you just see where the connections lead. All of the poems have material from at least a couple dozen different pages.

"Asteroid" sampled from a lot of pages adjacent to "asteroid:" pages about orbits and celestial bodies, pages about asteroid impacts, and so on. The literal part and the metaphor part of the central idea give you a couple "prongs" for the search to move from. The other prong of the "asteroid" search was tragedy: I looked at a lot of Shakespeare-related pages, literally anything I could find related to Icarus, The Epic of Gilgamesh and its characters, and so on. Like a Wikipedia rabbit hole, you can follow threads farther and farther away. I looked at lots of pages related to theater and folklore. Then I tried to start a new thread with "soulmates," and spent a while trying to collect anything I could that had to do with duality or antithesis.

And you'll probably find a point where your searches converge on each other! There was actually an asteroid named Icarus a while back, and if you've read the Epic of Gilgamesh you know that Enkidu appears in Gilgamesh's dream as an asteroid.

But it's also really important to tie in total non sequiturs, which is really where you get the multi-layered and far-reaching feel. This is why you need a pool of just random stuff to pick from. Which is why you need to spend a fuck ton of time just exploring and screenshotting anything that looks shiny.

"Asteroid" includes a paragraph from the Wikipedia page for pareidolia, which was really an instinctive choice on my part, because it seemed totally unrelated.

BUT now that i've finished the whole thing, I see why it fit: the reference to 9/11 and the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, and the concept of pareidolia itself—its most common manifestation is people seeing faces, which is a literally "seeing yourself in something unlike you." And then there's the contrast between "the face of Satan/Jesus in the flames," and just the effect of ending on "flames..." GAH. There are so many LAYERS.

It all grows around these little moments of insight where pieces fit together and create syntax or two seemingly unrelated things come together. This:

is one of my FAVORITE things, because the cut from talking about the Odyssey to talking about the Twilight Zone is so jarring but still flows so well.

"Abyssal Plain" had some of my favorite moments like this, because it never would have occurred to me to just. write a poem comparing a story of a mining accident to Plato's allegory of the cave, or comparing the exploration of Challenger Deep to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, or...any of those things with each other. Ever.

I absolutely could have written a poem comparing trauma to a harpoon lodged in the body of a whale for 200 years, but in "Abyssal Plain" I didn't have to SAY that this was the metaphor, or even that there was a metaphor there. (Maybe there isn't.) It's the repeatedly returning to two unrelated things that forces the reader to understand that they mean something together.

There is really something about the "found language" format that does what ordinary poetry can't. The knowledge that every fragment is a thing decontextualized, and that there's an entire article behind each one, changes the reading experience completely. You're not creating a new piece of text in which things are connected, you're putting pieces of text side by side and all of the work of actually making the connection is the reader's.

It's that tiny bit of dissonance between pieces that makes you have to think, "How are these related?"

I just absolutely love how little I have to state the connection, and yet how seamless it is. The grammar implies it: we cannot create new myths because we are still dreaming. It's. uh, GOOD,,,

Especially nice sentence constructions make you connect topics that you wouldn't have connected, grammar forces your hand a lot of the time. It all works out.

The "found-ness" also forces the reader to sift out the chaff so to speak. In most forms of writing everything the author included is very intentional, the writer has control over the content down to the word. With these poems, I have to take what I can get—and it takes the text a lot of directions, which is good.

With a poem that's sampling lots of different things you have to interpret, you have pick up a thread and follow it. In every poem some words are incidental; the reader decides what, if anything, each word included says about the central question of the poem. Just because Jean-Paul Sartre or Michelangelo get mentioned, doesn't mean *I* put them there—BUT they still can mean something!

Having more context lets you read in more meaning. It's pretty cool.

I also can't understate how much the navigational aids within Wikipedia are just fucking amazing to repurpose as devices to structure the poem.

"The Hero's Journey" redirects here.

I had several loose rules I followed in creating these: I wanted the fragments to all grammatically work together, I wanted to avoid selectively cutting out bits of text and let the natural line breaks in the articles do my decision making as much as possible, and I wanted to avoid re-using pieces in different poems—though I think I have accidentally re-used at least one piece. When there are hundreds, it...gets difficult.

And, yeah. I'm not sure you can create just one of these. The final cut of each poem I wrote left me with lots of "leftover" fragments, which were invaluable for later poems. At this point I have way more screenshots than I've had at any other point. It just keeps spreading.

Anyway, the wikipedia poems have totally killed my appetite for writing any poetry that's not "found" to some extent. It's immensely rewarding to my brain.

I will say that each of these poems probably took like 15-20 hours to compose, and with each one I had a point (multiple!) where my brain just felt like an overheating desktop computer with all the fans turning on, and I saw text crawling around when I closed my eyes, and it really wrung me out. But I cry when I reread them.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

I'm also not entirely sure of all this, but here's what I do know: Taylor Swift (Taylor Swift, as in the singer -- not the novelist or the other Taylor) came out publicly about her mental health struggles on her birthday in 2010, when she announced that she was in the process of ending her relationship with long-time partner and record producer Jack Antonoff. This was interpreted by many to mean that she was unhappy with his romantic attentions, and indeed this was part of the machinations of the conspiracy to murder Taylor Swift in her sleep. (Which, for what it's worth, was extremely dumb.)

The other part of this was that Taylor had been experiencing a depressive episode in the course of writing the album Red, which hit No. 1 in early 2010 and won the Grammy for Album of the Year. I think it was a combination of the stress of producing the album (which she has said she wanted to get done quickly and well, in a time when the typical album release cycle in the industry is nine months) and various problems (including unemployment and depression), which contributed to a period during which she was not talking to her mother (which her mother was very distraught about).

Anyway, after her "break-up" with Antonoff in 2010, she went into her room and didn't emerge for three months. Then she came out and said that she'd become "more unhinged than ever before." The media was very excited and reported that this seemed like a major break from her normal, nice, girl-next-door behavior. But it was really just her having been briefly unhinged and then coming back to normal: see Wikipedia's article on her media image and how it changed over time.

Anyway, since 2010 Taylor has had a much more positive media image, having gone public about her mental health, and she has also released more successful and enjoyable material, including 2012's Red (I liked it a lot), 2012's Speak Now (another album that I liked) and 2014's 1989, all of which received good reviews and achieved some success. (Note that a year or two ago I would have given you a different answer about 1989: "Taylor Swift: Album of the Year is a weird choice for a comeback, but it's been fun anyway.")

So I think what's happening here is pretty unambiguous -- Taylor Swift has become more popular, more successful, and less eccentric/unhinged. It's true that the media doesn't seem to report on her any more, and that she hasn't had "big news" as of 2014, because she has mostly stayed quiet, but this can't just be because she's less "interesting": she's more well-known, and that means that she's more covered by the media (because she does some things), and this does have the side-effect that people have more information about what she does and doesn't do in her personal life, and there are things you can make a story out of (such as her not dating Johnny Depp in 2013).

Maybe I'm looking for evidence of "Taylor Swift: still on Twitter" too much (or maybe this is evidence of "Taylor Swift: not on Twitter": the way that she seems to have mostly been able to let some weird stories happen in relative peace recently suggests to me that she's managed to stay on social media without being "on social media," as such), but I see "Taylor Swift tweets" and I'm like "whoa! This girl is hiding things from the public again?!?! And the things she's hiding are so insane they could make a fucking story!"

Now, I like Taylor Swift (and "Swifties"). This is partly because in addition to her "vibes" (which in many ways are very reminiscent of her public persona in 2009), and partly because of her actual talent. But a lot of Swifties don't seem to have been very into "weird," eccentric, not-mainstream, "offbeat" stuff until she started releasing her songs in 2012. So what I'm saying is: it turns out that Taylor Swift was that stuff all along.

taylor swift was known for classics such as "Fuck Like A Mountain Rat", "It's Okay To Leave A Dog In A Hot Car", and "Goblins Will Never Year Me Asunder". may all her individual limbs rest in whatever peace they can find being roasted or perhaps fashioned into daggers by goblin craftsmen

ALT

[maxwell-grant]

Excuse Me what is pulp and why is it importan?

Good question! And probably one I should have answered sooner. Time to put on the historian hat for this one.

"Pulp" is a term used mainly to describe forms of storytelling that sprang out or were dominant in 20th century cheap all-fiction American magazines from the 1900s to the 1950s. The pulp magazine began in 1896, when Frank Munsey's Argosy magazine, in order to cut costs, dropped the non-fiction articles and photographs and switched from glossy paper to the much less expensive wood pulp paper, hence the name. The pulp magazines would mainly take off as a distinct market and format in 1904, when Street & Smith learned that Popular Magazine, despite being marketed towards boys, was being consumed by men of all ages, so they increased page count and started putting popular authors on the issues.

It was specifically the 1905 reprint of H.Rider Haggard's Ayesha that not only put Street & Smith on the map as rivals to Argosy, but also inspired other companies to start publishing in the pulp format. Pulps encompassed literally everything that the authors felt like publishing. Westerns, romance, horror, sci-fi, railroad stories, war stories, war aviation stories. Zeppelins had a short-lived subgenre. Celebrities got their own magazines, it was really any genre or format they could pull off, anything they could get away with.

Nowadays, although they came quite late in it's history, the American pulps are most famous for it's "hero pulps", characters like The Shadow and Doc Savage that are viewed as a formative influence on comic book superheroes. The pulp magazines in America lasted until the 1950s, when cumulative factors such as paper shortages, diminishing audience returns and the closing of it's biggest publishers led to it dying off, although in the decades since there's always been publishers calling their magazines pulp. That's the American pulp history.

But pulps are a phenomenon that spans the entire world and has a much bigger history to it, because pulps have become synonymous with cheap fiction magazines and those have a much bigger history. In America, before the pulps, you had the dime novels, the direct predecessors of the pulps, as well as the novelettes. England had it's penny dreadfuls and story papers, and continued publishing pulp-format magazines past the American 1950s, and that's how we got Elric of Melniboné. France and Russia arguably got to it first with it's 1800s coulporters, chapbooks and particularly the feuilletons which lasted all the way to the 20th century and created characters such as Arsene Lupin, Fantomas and The Phantom of the Opera. The Germans published pulp under the name hefteromane. Japan also published pulp magazines both original as well as imported, and the current "light-novel" phenomenon started off as an equivalent of pulp magazines (it's even on the Wikipedia page). China has wuxia, Brazil has cordel, Italy has gialli. There were Indian, Persian, Ethiopian, Canadian, Australian pulps and much more. Look anywhere in the world and you'll find examples of "pulp" happening again and again, under different circumstances and time periods.

Even if we stick to American fiction, it's impossible to state that all pulp heroes must come from the 1900s-1950s pulp magazines, because that forces us to exclude some of the most popular pulp heroes like Indiana Jones, Green Hornet, Rocketeer and The Phantom. Pulp may have once been a term meant to refer to pulp magazines exclusively, but it's morphed and lost structure and it's become the closest thing we have to a general umbrella term that allows us to try and consolidate these under a shared history. It's a lot, as you can see, and it's why several pulp historians that broaden their scope outside of 1930s American fiction have adopted Roland Barthes's definition of pulp as "A Metaphor With No Brakes In It", which is still the closest thing to a true working definition we have.

Why is it important? You tell me. I don't like to stake claims about stuff being "important", everyone's got their own priorities in life. Surely a lot of people would scoff at the idea of old populist fiction published in what was functionally equivalent to toilet paper having any sort of "importance". On the other hand, some people definitely want to talk big about the pulps as a cultural bedrock of fiction, something that's baked into the lifeblood of all fiction as we currently know it. Which it is, mind you, but I don't like to talk about pulp fiction's value being derived mainly from merely the things it inspired.

There is definitely a historical importance to be had in cataloguing them. According to the US's foremost pulp researcher Jess Nevins, 38% of all American pulps no longer exist, and 14% of all American pulps survive in less than five copies. Many libraries have very scant, if any, records on them, many collectors are hard to locate and are uncooperative when it comes to sharing information and letting outsiders view their collections. A lot of them are bound up in legal complications that prevents them from taking off in the public domain, and a lot of them ARE public domain but are completely inacessible as research material. And that's the American pulps, foreign pulps have fared far worse in posterity, with records inaccessible to people unfamiliar with the language or locations, many existing merely in mentions on decades-old records, and hundreds if not thousands of them being completely gone beyond recovery or recall.

Gone, dead, wasted, destroyed. They can't be found in barbershops or warehouse or bookstores, not even in antique stores. Hundreds, thousands of characters, stories and creators, gone. Time and posterity have crushed them to dust, forgotten and ignored by their successors. Unfettered by pretenses of respectability that repressed their glossier counterparts, in packages meant to be destroyed after reading, proudly announcing itself as trash. Things that should have never even lasted as long as they did have died many times now. It's heroes peripherical shapeshifters, nearly all of whom seem dead, quite dead, as dead as fictional characters can possibly be.

But they do not die forever. Many of them have, maybe most of them have, but many of them linger on.

"The strange red flickering of 1930’s fiction seems distant now.  You hold in your hand the product of a time too remote to recall, and feel a slow stir of wonder.  The smell of pulp pages, an illustration, an advertisement, these fragile things mark the slow hammering of time and display what it has done.  About you are today’s machines, today’s shadows.

Outside the window, leaves hang against the sky, as did leaves during the 1930’s.  The sound of voices are no different then than now.  You hold the magazine and feel something quite delicate slipping past. These solid forms surrounding you are all insubstantial. Time’s hammer will also pass across them, leaving little enough behind." - Spider, by Robert Sampson

Many of the things people call dead are just things that have been sleeping for a while or haven't had the chance to be born. Pulp fiction is dead on the page, inert, unless your imagination breathes live to it, and every now and then, one way or another, these characters dig themselves out of dustbins. Maybe it's a brief revival, maybe it's a successful reboot. Maybe they find publishers, or maybe the public domain allows them to find new life. Maybe new creators do interesting things with them, and maybe, just maybe, they live again because some won't shut up about them online. Some curious impulse led you to me, did it not? 

We all have our Frankensteins to obsess over, and these are some of mine. As someone who's lived a life perpetually restless over pursuit of knowledge, pulp has lured me like a moth to flame, because I literally never run out of things to discover within it, I never run out of possibilities. As the years pass and the public domain starts being more and more open to the public, more and more narrative real state is brought forth for writers and artists and creators to play around.

Pulp is the dark matter of fiction, the uncatalogued depths of the ocean, the darkest recesses of space. It's the box of your grandfather's belongings, the treasure you find in an attic, a body part sticking out from an old playground. It's the things that don't work, don't succeed, the things that don't fit, that are out of place. That shouldn't live and succeed, and did so anyway. The things that slither in the cracks, the shadows behind the curtain.

Aren't you interested in peering on what's behind the curtain?

The exquisite workmanship of the head, of a pre-pyramidal age, and the hieroglyphics, symbols of a language that was forgotten when Rome was young–these, Kane sensed, were additions as modern to the antiquity of the staff itself as would be English words carved on the stone monoliths of Stonehenge.

As for the cat-head–looking at it sometimes Kane had a peculiar feeling of alteration; a faint sensing that once the pommel of the staff was carved with a different design. The dust-ancient Egyptian who had carved the head of Bast had merely altered the original figure, and what that figure had been, Kane had never tried to guess.

A close scrutiny of the staff always aroused a disquieting and almost dizzy suggestion of abysses of eons, unprovocative to further speculation. - The Footfalls Within, by Robert E Howard, quoted by Stuart Hopen’s The Mythic American Culture

[litlbean]

⚠️Contains Spoilers!!!⚠️

The Old Grist Mill

I'm just going to go ahead and link this song because in my opinion it is one of the best songs in the whole series period.

I love how the beginning of the series makes no sense to first-time watchers but after you have watched it at least once, everything at the beginning of the first episode makes sense. It gives off the same vibes as Jojo's Bizzare Adventure's openings... The Tome of the Unknown style is in every single title screen and it makes me so aesthetically happy. It intensifies the melancholy-autumn mood that this whole show embodies and of course, the art style is just amazing. I don't think any other art style would fit this series better than this one. Can we just pause for a second and talk about how f*cking cool it is that this entire show is just one big circle? The opening scene when the narrator starts talking is Wirt falling into the frozen pond... How do people come up with stuff like this!? I wish more series/movies did this kind of stuff. It just opens the door to so many more theories and expands the lore just that much deeper. Also before this episode gets any further in I just want to mention: grist;

grain that is ground to make flour.

malt crushed to make mash for brewing.

2.useful material, especially to back up an argument.

grist for the mill — useful experience, material, or knowledge.

I just found it interesting that the episode is named after it ヾ(＾∇＾)

Beatrice is one of my favorite characters in this show besides the Frog. The name Beatrice has many meanings but the one I think that makes sense in relation to the storyline is the one from the bible: deriving from the Latin word Beatrix meaning "One who blesses others". We'll talk about her more later because she is definitely a very important character in the series and the amount of lore is just *french kiss*. I'm ashamed to admit that I missed this the first time around but it's now so funny to me that while Wirt is wallowing in his sorrows and talking versing poetry about his life- Greg is just in the background swinging around objects to see which one he could knock out the woodsman with the best.

I love rock facts. 〔´∇｀〕

🍬 The candy trail that Greg has and produces out of his pants that ultimately "leads the beast' to them (Wirt and Greg) could be taken as a metaphor for no good deeds go unpunished- or that all good things lead to the bad. The 'beast', or the bad in OTGW is led to the mill by Greg's candy trail that was supposed to lead Wirt and Greg back out of the Unknown. One of my favorite lines from the show is when Greg sees the 'beast' and says "You have beautiful eyes". Greg always looks for the good throughout the series and that makes me happy （＾ｖ＾）

 🐢 The Black Turtles ~

These guys show up everywhere. I recommend you read the short article about them from the wiki that you can find here. I love these things. They're so mysterious, rare, and never explained. It never is even explained why Wirt says later in the series to Auntie Whispers that he "came to burgle her turts!". Does Wirt know something to do with the turtles that the watcher doesn't or is he just being observant and trying to make up an excuse on the fly? (More about that later in the series) It's such a good example of an uncanny valley~ they are turtles but they're black..? Black turtles don't exist in real life** and the ones in OTGW seem either to be just a singular turtle (although its never specified ).

** I kind of went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole and found out that "black" turtles do exist. Okay, so they're not entirely black but they are at least darker in color than your average sea turtle. Even farther down the rabbit hole, I started to find some things about Chinese Astrology and what certain constellations mean to them. The one that I found is the most 'relevant' (a.k.a I think it just matches the theme of OTGW the best). This is kind of complicated because of course, everything is disputed because legends and myths are always disputed so I'll try to explain this in the least confusing way possible: So the moon travels around the earth in a total of 27.32 days. Scientists track this progress by calculating the longitudes along the orbit (called an ecliptic) and then split it up into 28 different segments called Mansions or Stations (and sometimes even houses for some reason?). Anyways, ost often these were used by ancient cultures as part of their calendar systems. One of these cultures is ancient China. There's more... "The 28 Lunar Mansions are divided into four clusters, with each cluster made up of seven constellations"... There's a lot of math involved in all of this and I'm not an astronomer so I'm not sure how all of these connect but anyways I will put a pretty picture to kind of give you an idea of what I'm talking about here. Now... how does this connect to OTGW? Well, 2 things: 1. All of these Moon Stations make up "The Black Tortise of Winter" which according to this Wikipedia passage states that the Black Tortise corresponds to astrology and traveling to the underworld to guide people. 2. The 11th Moon Station of the "Black Tortoise of Winter" has a Chinese character meaning Emptiness. (pictured below)

I think that all of this concentrated around emptiness and the underworld largely reflects the ideas of the Unknown in OTGW. The Unknown is like a different world where people who are lost go to never be seen again. Kind of like Hell or the underworld. It's vast and has very few inhabitants. The turtles showing up in the movie could be almost like a guiding figure.

I appreciate the fact that the 'beast' in the beginning is Beatrice's dog. I just love dogs and that little extra added touch for the whole full-circle vibe of this show just makes me happy. "Aint that just the way" Burdens and burdens that are needed of bearing are mentioned in this episode and then never again but I still want to acknowledge that the Woodsman kind of predicts that Wirt will take on most of the problems in this show following this episode. Taking the blame, solving problems, etc., etc. which is most likely the reason why he gets turned into an adle wood tree first before ultimately Greg does. Kind of a statement piece on how difficult it is being an older child and looking after your younger siblings. This whole sentiment of "oh, your younger sibling is too young and doesn't understand, and therefore shouldn't get blamed" really can affect the elder sibling and like Wirt in the end, make them lose hope over time. Getting blamed for other people's problems is a tough situation and I think that way too many eldest children get put in the same boat. Especially at younger ages, this can cause severe problems later on down the line. I love the frog. I also love this drawing by @wabidrawbi 

keep drawing friends. you're doing amazing <3 XOXO

[crispy-ghee]

Hello! Firstly I just wanna say I love your work, both your own personal drawings and stories, as well as the collaboration pieces with Isei. I was just wondering what your process was for your building of your Yautja clans?? I wanted to try my hand at making my own, so I was wondering what pointers you may have.

Hi! Thanks so much for the kind words, it actually makes me really happy that anyone is enjoying the stuff I enjoy making. Worldbuilding can be a lot of fun, and awesome that you're gonna try your hand at it!

I have a lot of thoughts on worldbuilding, and to be honest my approach varies here and there depending on what I'm making or writing, but I'll see if I can't gather my general thoughts into something more succinct instead of going off on a long ramble haha

STARTING INFO

When you're worldbuilding for a pre-existing IP, it's good to keep in mind the stuff you already know about the race/species. This seems really obvious, and imo you can mess around in and out of canon if you want bc it's your clan and you should have fun first and foremost, but it's something to consider.

(But also keep in mind that this isn't something you necessarily have to think about right away, it can come later in your process, but I'm just mentioning it here.)

With Yautja, there's the physical aspects that make them distinct (mandibles, crest, reptilian/mammalian, tendrils, claws, tall on average, tend towards warmer climates, strong, etc) and what we've seen of them culturally (glory/trophy hunters, honor code, matriarchal, etc etc). The cool thing though is that when you're coming up with a hook for your clan, you can either choose to follow these rules, or you could find something interesting in subverting them.

What if it's a clan of smaller yautja? What if these live in the cold? What if their clan doesn't give a shit about hunting? etc etc

Speaking about Hooks...

The Hook is just sort of a jumping off point where you can start building your clan out of. It doesn't necessarily have to be a hook for the audience, and it might even change or be discarded as you go along writing, but it's always good to have a place to start.

Hooks can honestly be anything and inspired from anywhere. I'm going to be honest that most of the time I don't really go searching for hooks, they're moments of inspiration that kickstart stuff. They're usually what causes the worldbuilding.

A lot of that (and a lot of worldbuilding, actually) is actually input. Being curious and learning things, consuming things, etc etc. Expanding your visual/mental library. It's not something that i do purposefully, necessarily. It comes from stuff I've read about, movies and documentaries I've watched, some tweet I saw, a picture on my dashboard, a wikipedia article I stumbled into somehow, a story a friend told, so on and so forth.

That being said, you can totally find a hook if you just ask yourself the right questions.

But the things that can be hooks, like I said, can vary greatly. It could be an idea you had out of nowhere, a novel question, a theme you want to explore, a cool image you saw, a costume you wanna try out, anything! For example:

Maybe you already have a character that you designed that you want to build the clan around. The character can totally be the hook. What are things about the character that might hint at what society they grew up in? Do they have a specific attitude? Quirk? Is there something about their appearance? The clothes they wear, the way their tendrils look, their coloration?

Maybe you saw a location that was really neat! What if Yautja lived in a place like that?

This clan is stealthy!

This clan likes animals!

This clan makes art that looks like _______.

This clan engages in a lot of warfare.

I liked this idea touched upon in a predator comic I read, can i expand on that?

What if a Yautja did Basejumping?

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...

Brainstorming! Ask lots of Questions!

I ask a lot of "why" and "how" after I figure out my hook (or hookS). It's an easy way to get stuff kickstarted.

How do they do that? Why do they do that? Is it ritual? Is it something else? Is it based on their history? On their environment? On their Lore? On their social structure?

And then just keep asking why after you answer that question, and then you'll have a pretty good foundation that you can maybe mess with or discard or change completely or use for an even better idea.

Like...lemme use the "Yautja Basejumper" as an example.

Why would this Yautja base-jump? Is it for a practical reason, like it helps them hunt a specific animal? Is it for a ritual reason? Is it for the thrill? Is it to prove themselves?

How do they do it? Do they use high tech to do it, or is it low tech? If it's low tech, what materials do they make their parachutes or gliders out of? In human base-jumping, what tools do they use, and how can I translate that into Yautja maybe? Or is it a completely different approach?

Do they basejump off of mountains? Is it something they do because they live in the mountains? Or is it maybe something they have to travel to a specific place to go do? What is this place? Why do they go there? Is it for a spiritual reason? Coming of age? Is the place itself significant? Does this have something to do with their history, or a legend that they have?

If base jumping is important, how does this affect what they find attractive or cool? Do they like really tenacious yautja? Is being more aerodynamic a boon? Would the wear anything specific for the act, bits of decoration? Is there an animal they want to look like?

So let's say just going through those questions, and asking myself why and how and other questions from that intial hook and then the answers I gave. Here's a (very very very rough) potential initial thought:

This Yautja clan base-jumps as a coming-of-age ritual. They live at the foot of a tall mountain, and young hunters climb to the top to prove their courage and tenacity. Part of the ritual is making your own glider--and if your glider doesn't hold up because you rushed it, then you get really hurt or die, and that's your own fucking fault. They're doing it to mimic large flying animals that once-upon-a-time roosted on that mountain but don't exist anymore, which had cultural/mythical significance to them. Maybe their ancestors used to ride them. This clan are able to fight in flight, unlike many other Yautja.

And then you can build off of that or change it, do research and look stuff up related to it to see if you can add more stuff, keep asking more questions about the things you decided on, etc.

Forever and ever and ever.............

Anyway, that's my worldbuilding approach, haha. It's basically "learn a lot of stuff, ask a lot of questions."

I don't know if that was helpful at all, but there ya go!

[olderthannetfic]

I'm a Chinese, nationally and racially. Racial projection seems to be a common practice in western fandom, doesn't it? I find it a bit... weird to witness the drama ignited upon shipping individuals with different races, or the tendency to separate characters into different "colors" even though the world setting doesn't divide races like that. Such practice isn't a thing here. Mind explaining a bit on this phenomenon?

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Sure, I can try. But of course, fish aren’t very good at explaining the water they swim in.

Americans aren’t good at detecting our own Americanness, and a lot of what you’re seeing is very much culturally American rather than Western in general. (In much of Europe, “race” is a concept used by racists, or so I’m told, unlike in the US where it’s seen more neutrally.) Majority group members (i.e. me, a white girl) aren’t usually the savviest about minority issues, but I’ll give it a shot.

The big picture is that most US race stuff boils down to our attempts to justify and maintain slavery and that dynamic being applied, awkwardly, to everyone else too, even years after we abolished slavery.

There’s a concept called the “one drop rule” where a person is “black” if they have even one drop of black blood.

We used to outlaw “interracial” marriage until quite recently. (That meant marriage between black people and white people with Asians and Hispanic people and others wedged in awkwardly.) Here’s the Wikipedia article on this, which contains the following map showing when we legalized interracial marriage. The red states are 1967.

That’s within living memory for a ton of people! Yellow is 1948 to 1967. This is just not very long ago at all. (Hell, we only fully banned slavery in 1865, which is also just not that long ago when it comes to human culture.)

Why did we have this bananas-crazy set of laws and this idiotic notion that one remote ancestor defines who you are? It boils down to slavery requiring a constant reaffirming that black people are all the same (and subhuman) while white people are all this completely separate category. The minute you start intermarrying, all of that breaks down. This was particularly important in our history because our system of slavery involved the kids of slaves being slaves and nobody really buying their way out. Globally, historically, there are other systems of slavery where there was more mobility or where enslaved people were debtors with a similar background to owners, and thus the people in power were less threatened by ambiguity in identity.

Post-slavery, this shit hung around because it was in the interests of the people in power to maintain a similar status quo where black people are fundamentally Other.

A lot of our obsession with who counts as what is simply a legacy of our racist past that produced our racist present.

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The other big factor in American concepts of identity is that we see ourselves as a nation of immigrants (ignoring our indigenous peoples, as usual). A lot of people’s families arrived here relatively recently, and we often don’t have good records of exactly where they were from, even aside from enslaved people who obviously wouldn’t have those records. Plenty of people still identify with a general nationality (”Italian-American” and such), but the nuance the family might once have had (specific region of Italy, specific hometown) is often lost. Yeah, I know every place has immigrants, and lots of people don’t have good records, but the US is one of those countries where families have on average moved around a lot more and a lot more recently than some, and it affects our concepts of identity. I think some of the willingness to buy into the idea of “races” rather than “ethnicities” has to do with this flattening of identity.

New immigrant groups were often seen as Other and lesser, but over time, the ones who could manage it got added to our concept of “whiteness”, which gave them access to those same social and economic privileges.

Skin color is a big part of this. In a system that is founded on there being two categories, white owners and black slaves, skin color is obviously going to be about that rather than being more of a class marker like it is in a lot of the world.

But it’s not all about skin color since we have plenty of Europeans with somewhat darker skin who are seen as generically white here, while very pale Asians are not. I’m not super familiar with all of the history of anti-Asian racism in the US, but I think this persistent Otherness probably boils down to Western powers trying to justify colonial activities in Asia plus a bunch of religious bullshit about predominantly Christian nations vs. ones that are predominantly Buddhist or some other religion.

In fact, a lot of racist archetypes in English can be traced back to England’s earliest colonial efforts in Ireland. Justifying colonizing Those People because they’re subhuman and/or ignorant and in need of paternalistic rulers or religious conversion is at the bottom of a lot of racist notions. Ironic that we now see Irish people as clearly “white”.

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There are a lot of racist porn tropes and racist cultural baggage here around the idea of black people being animalistic. Racist white people think black men want to rape/steal white women from white men. Black women get seen as hypersexual and aggressive. If this sounds like white people projecting in order to justify murder and rape... well, it is.

Similar tropes get applied to a lot of groups, often including Hispanic and Middle Eastern people, though East Asians come in more for creepy fantasies about endlessly submissive and promiscuous women. This nonsense already existed, but it was certainly not helped by WWII servicemen from here and their experiences in Asia. Again, it’s a projection to justify shitty behavior as what the party with less power was “asking for”.

In porn and even romance novels, this tends to turn up as a white character the audience is supposed to identify with paired with an exotic, mysterious Other or an animalistic sexy rapist Other.

A lot of fandoms are based on US media, so all of our racist bullshit does apply to the casting and writing of those, whether or not the fic is by Americans or replicating our racist porn tropes.

(Obviously, things get pretty hilarious and infuriating once Americans get into c-dramas and try to apply the exact same ideas unchanged to mainstream media about the majority group made by a huge and powerful country.)

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Politically, within the US, white people have had most of the power most of the time. We also make up a big chunk of the population. (This is starting to change in some areas, which has assholes scared shitless.) This means that other groups tend to band together to accomplish shared political goals. They’re minorities here, so they get lumped together.

A lot of Americans become used to seeing the world in terms of “white people” who are powerful oppressors and “people of color” who are oppressed minorities. They’re trying to be progressive and help people with less power, and that’s good, but it obviously becomes awkward when it’s over-applied to looking at, say, China.

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Now... fandom...

I find that fandom, in general, has a bad habit of holding things to double standards: queer things must be Good Representation™ even when they’re not being produced for that purpose. Same for ethnic minorities or any other minority. US-influenced parts of fandom (which includes a lot of English-speaking fandom) tend to not be very good at accepting that things are just fantasy. This has gotten worse in recent years.

As fandom has gotten more mainstream here, general media criticism about better representation (both in terms of number of characters and in terms of how they’re portrayed) has turned into fanfic criticism (not enough fics about ship X, too many about ship Y, problematic tropes that should not be applied to ship X, etc.). I find this extremely misguided considering the smaller reach of fandom but, more importantly, the lack of barriers to entry. If you think my AO3 fic sucks, you can make an account and post other fic that will be just as findable. You don’t need money or industry connections or to pass any particular hurdle to get your work out there too.

People also (understandably) tend to be hypersensitive to anything that looks like a racist porn trope. My feeling is that many of these are general porn tropes and people are reaching. There are specific tropes where black guys are given a huge dick as part of showing that they’re animalistic and hypersexual, but big dicks are really common in porn in general. The latter doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing the former unless there are other elements present. A/B/O or dubcon doesn’t mean it’s this racist trope either, not unless certain cliched elements are present. OTOH, it’s not hard for a/b/o tropes to feel close to “animalistic guy is rapey”, so I can see why it often bothers people.

A huge, huge, huge proportion of wank is “all rape fantasies are bad” crap too, which muddies the waters. I think a lot of people use “it’s racist” as an easy way to force others to agree with their incorrect claims that dubcon, noncon, a/b/o, etc. are fundamentally bad. Many fans, especially white fans, feel like they don’t know enough to refute claims of racism, so they cave to such arguments even when they’re transparently disingenuous.

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Not everyone here thinks this way. I know plenty of people offline, particularly a lot of nonwhite people, who think fandom discourse is idiotic and that the people “protecting” people or characters of color are far more racist than the people writing “bad” fic or shipping the wrong thing.

But in general, I’d say that the stuff above is why a lot of us see the world as white people in power vs. everyone else as oppressed victims, interracial relationships as fraught, and porn about them as suspect. Basically, it’s people trying to be more progressive and aware but sometimes causing more harm than good when those attempts go awry.

[circlique]

How do you make a good OC hetalia nations?

1. Research Seems cliche, but a hetalia OC without research is just...an OC. You’re trying to represent a whole country with a person, so designing a character and then picking a country for them to represent is...not it. You need to actually look into the country’s history and understand how it got to where it is today, what factors influenced its history and current society. Understand why it gets along with some countries and doesn’t with others. And yet this can’t be the only thing you research. I think researching the history and relations is a good baseline but that ultimately does not result in a good character on its own. You need to also research what the people there look like, what people there tend to wear, any common stereotypes (positive or neutral, not negative/racist ones please), cultural norms, etc. I’ve seen plenty of profiles that had obviously had a lot of research put into them, but they read like a wikipedia article for the country. The character themselves just seemed bland, because the creator spent a lot of time on the history, relations, and facts, but not a lot on actually developing their character.

2. A Personality

So that’s really where the other stuff comes in. What are people there generally like? What cultural norms drive morality and society there? It is like Japan where there’s a heavy emphasis on honor, politeness, and working as a group? Is it like America where individuality, strength, and hard work are highly valued? Those are the kind of stereotypes playing into the personalities of Hetalia characters, and those should kind of be the baseline when figuring out what kind of person your OC should be.

And then--just make the character interesting. Stereotypes shouldn’t be the only thing making up their personality. All the Hetalia characters have their little quirks that make them unique, like Prussia keeping a diary or Canada being a fan of Naruto. Don’t be afraid to give them interests beyond stereotypical things people from their country would do. Don’t be afraid to give them relatable, human trait that make them unique and stand out as an individual. Look at their history and think what things might have left an impact on them, for better or worse. Incorporate that into their character!

That’s why the OCs that read like a wikipedia article are boring. You’re telling me what the country is like, not what the character is like. Your character should believably be able to represent someone from that country, but I should also be able to believe that they are an actual person! They should grow and develop and learn from their mistakes, have heartbreaks, have joys and things that are important to them, just like anyone else.

3. Design

I already talked a little bit about researching what people from the country look like and dress like. Even if your character is their own individual, they should still look like someone I would reasonably expect to find in the country. If there are cultural hairstyles that are common, consider giving one to your OC. If people in the country tend to dress modestly, perhaps the OC dresses in the same manner. Race and ethnicity can get complicated and there really is no one-size-fits-all method to determining what ethnic groups your character should represent or what features they should have, but I would highly recommend against making your OC half-(insert colonizer here) for “historical reasons.” (I am mostly talking about things like making Laos half French btw). I really have never seen that sort of thing done well. If anything it tends to make the focus the colonizer’s influence rather than the influence of the culture that existed before the colonizer’s arrival. Don’t fall into the trap, unless there is a very, very good reason, like total death of the civilization that came before and replacement by the colonizers/immigrants, or the intent of the OC to represent colonial populations ONLY (like intending America as “new world” settlers, and personifying Indigenous Nations as separate characters completely).

Another thing about physical design is to try and make it interesting. Traditional costumes and unique uniforms are always good. Plain colored shirts and flag design hoodies are...plain, predictable, boring. Look up some fashion from that country! Dress them as something someone from their country might be interested in! (Australia wearing khakis like Steve Irwin, or America wearing a bomber jacket because the image of a Top Gun pilot in a jacket and aviator glasses is just...very very American) But, also try and keep it realistic and don’t go overboard trying to make your character unique or representing too many things at once. Slapping 3 different curls on them and giving them heterochromia is overdoing it.

4. Relations

You should get a basic idea of how the country gets along with others by researching its history. Common allies are most likely friends, common enemies, at least a rivalry or possibly some disdain between the two (if not outright hatred).

One thing I want to emphasize is to let the OC be their own person though! Don’t define them by their relation to someone else. Isn’t it annoying when someone greets you with “oh, you’re ____’s kid!” instead of your name? I feel the same way when I see an OC described as ____’s child/sibling. Especially if there are plenty of history and culture and things that make that country unique, but the creator has chosen to focus on that time the country was colonized, or part of a union. That’s not to say your OC can’t be related to a canon character, but don’t force it just so you can have a certain family dynamic. Sometimes countries that are close are just friends or neighbors, not family. Let the country be their own character rather than make them an extension or an accessory to another!

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This is getting long, but I think those are things people should consider when making a Hetalia OC. Long story short, the character should be someone I would expect to find in that country, but who is also their own individual who I could really see existing!