#METAPHORS

[myfandomrealitea]

Honestly you people need to start thinking about fanfiction like a restaurant.

You do not have to order the salmon if you don't like salmon.

If I order the salmon, I am not forcing you to eat the salmon. Nor are you obligated to order it just because I am.

If we are going with the intention of sharing food, that's okay! I happen to like steak too. I don't need to order the salmon. I'm capable of going to the restaurant and not ordering the salmon. We can order the steak.

There is a whole menu of things you can have. The salmon is just an option. We can even find a restaurant that doesn't serve salmon at all.

Yes, I know some people are allergic to salmon. But I'm not going up to them and force-feeding it to them. The only way my salmon can hurt them is if they come to our table and take the salmon.

The only way you'll expose yourself to my salmon and the unpleasantness of eating it is if I tell you my dish has salmon in it and you insist on having a bite anyway.

You're midway through your meal and realize it has salmon in it? Okay. Lets send it back and order something else. Maybe you didn't see it in the ingredients list. Or maybe the chef didn't put it down.

Its really that simple.

[grison-in-space]

from the number of asinine complaints about how "voting is NOT a form of harm reduction" because harm reduction is for ADDICTS! ONLY! I'm seeing around... all coming from OP blogs I don't recognize and which otherwise don't have much presence... well, that coordination alongside the timing of US politics sure feels like the Russian troll bots agitating again. (Yes, they absolutely infested Tumblr; I think @ms-demeanor had a great post about what the bots looked and felt like somewhere that I will have to try and track down tomorrow.)

The thing is, if you actually do know harm reduction well, the complaint makes no sense. It's not as if the origin of harm reduction is a secret or especially hard to find out more about. I am not exactly an expert in the field: I have a educated layperson's interest in public health and infectious disease, I'm a queer feminist of a certain age and therefore have a certain degree of familiarity with AIDS-driven safer sex campaigns, and I'm interested in disability history and self advocacy (and I would in fact clarify harm reduction as a philosophy under this umbrella). So I have about twenty years of experience with harm reduction as a philosophy basically by existing in communities whose history is intertwined with harm reduction, which means I know it well from many different angles, and I know how the story of the philosophy is generally taught.

See, this is a story that starts, as so many stories do, in the 1980s with something monstrous President Reagan was doing. In this case, it was the AIDS epidemic, and Reagan refusing to devote any money or time to what eventually became called AIDS (rather than the original GRIDS, which came with its own baked in homophobia). Knowing themselves abandoned by society in this as in all things, and watching as friends and loved ones died in droves, queers and addicts are two communities who see that they are the only resources that they collectively have to save each other's lives. Queers know that sex, even casual sex, is an important part of people's lives and culture... and people aren't going to stop doing it even if there's a disease, so how can it happen safely? Condoms. Condoms every time, freely available, easy and shameless, shower them on people in the street if you have to. (And other things: this is the origin of the concept of "fluid bonding", for example... both of which were concepts that were immediately adopted in response to COVID, like outdoor socially distsnced greetings and masks and "bubbles." That wasn't an accident. Normalizing sexual health tests and seeing hard results on paper before sex was a thing, too.)

Addicts, too, knew that using was going to happen no matter how earnestly people tried to stop. If it was that easy, addiction wouldn't exist. So: how do you make using safer for longer? If you could stop someone getting HIV before they could bring themselves to get clean, that's a whole life right there. If you could stop someone overdosing once, twice, a dozen times, that's more time you're buying them to claw themselves out of addiction and into a better place. Addicts see, right, needle sharing is getting the diseases spread, so cut down on needle sharing. Well, needles aren't easy to get hold of. Their supply is controlled because people who aren't prescribed needles are theoretically junkies, so taking the needles away makes it harder to use, right— and no one is complicit, and also you see fewer discarded needles lying around where they're unsanitary and unsafe, right? Except that people want to do a buddy a good turn, so they share if there's no other option, and they'll keep a needle going until it's literally too blunt to keep using if need be. So fighting needle sharing means making it easier to get needles to shoot up with: finding a place to discard used ones and get as many fresh ones as you need to use safely!

Making free needles available to junkies and free condoms for the bathhouses was not a popular solution with politicians, for perhaps obvious reasons. Nor was routine testing of the blood supply, because that cost money too. But these things work to stop the spread of disease. Thus the principle of harm reduction: policy interventions in response to communities that frequently engage in risky behavior should focus on whatever reduces aggregate harm by reducing the risk rather than by trying to reduce the behavior. The homos and junkies say look, all your societal judgement in the world hasn't stopped us being homos and junkies yet. You ain't going to look after us? We'll look after our own. And this is the form that takes. Not increasing the pressure to act like people who aren't is, but making it safer to be the people we are while we try to be the happiest versions of ourselves. Even if that means being morally complicit in a whole lot of casual sex and drug abuse.

The thing is, harm reduction is a philosophy rooted in the defiance of people who knew that their society thought they deserved to die painfully, young, invisible and alone. This is not the kind of thing that people come up with and get mad if you adapt it and share it, especially if you tell the story of where it came from. And importantly, harm reduction is not purely the child of addiction: that philosophy, from the get go, was cooked up to apply both to substance abuse and casual sex. It didn't just spread from addiction care; it was born straddling addiction care and queer & feminist health care.

So it doesn't make sense to see actual activists who know harm reduction well complaining that this is a term exhibiting semantic drift when we talk about voting as harm reduction. It's actually a good metaphor: you're reducing the overall risk of the worst case scenario metaphors by voting Democrat, at least until future votes can install a system where multiple parties can flourish on the political scheme. (Democrats and Republicans are essentially coalitions of a pack of arguing factions anyway, and those factions are essentially what would be classed elsewhere as a party in its own right; the US essentially just lumps political granularity rather than splitting it in our political system.) And anyone who understands harm reduction itself knows that.

So it's this wildly inorganic complaint being voiced repeatedly by different sources. Sounds like a pretty good flag for a potential psyop to me.

If you want to learn more about harm reduction and its history, especially from an addiction perspective, I cannot recommend Maia Szalavitz's Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction (2022) highly enough. Szalavitz has a history of addiction of her own as well as being a clear and accessible writer with an excellent grasp of neuroscience and history. I have a lot of respect for her work.

[todays-xkcd]

IMO the thymus is one of the coolest organs and we should really use it in metaphors more.

Organ Meanings [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[A graph is shown with X and Y-axis without arrow or ticks. To the left of the Y-axis and below the X-axis there are labels with an arrow pointing up from the top of the Y-axis label and an arrow pointing right above the X-axis label, just beneath the x-axis.] Y-axis: How well I understand what it means when used in metaphors X-axis: How well I understand its actual biological function

[On the graph is a scatter plot with 13 labels. Each label is written inside a line that goes just around the words. There are most in the top right corner, but they are spread all over the graph. Here in approximate reading order from top left with indicating of where on the graph the words are located:] [Top left:] Appendix [Top middle:] Nerves Spine [Top right:] Heart Bones Stomach [Center left:] Liver Spleen [Center right:] Lungs [Bottom left:] Thymus Pineal gland [Bottom middle:] Kidneys [Bottom right:] Tongue

[feelingthedisaster]

The King's Men's plot structure is genius.

TKM has been critized a lot for not following the conventional plot structure, because it doesnt end inmediatly at the resolution of the climax, like they taught us in class. But it actually has a reason behind it and it think that is what makes AFTG unique and Nora Sakavic an amazing writer. I'll explain.

So, we all know AFTG has a lot of chess metaphors, however i think it doesnt contain the metaphors, it is the metaphor. Each character represents a piece of the board (Riko king, Kevin queen, Neil pawn, Andrew knight, etc) and exy is the chess, but but but, a chess game not only involves the pieces, the game cannot exist without someone playing, the chess masters (which would be Kengo, Ichiriu, Nathan and all the mafia stuff).

So, AFTG is divided into two plots happening at the same time: what happens on the chess board (exy season) and what happens outside it (the mafia mess).

Of couse, the climax has to be about the outside out, because who cares which one of pieces move in which way if the players are pointing guns at eachother under the board? The guns are more more important. So who cares? The pieces on the board care, the ones that are being played with. And who is the narrator? The character that represents the pawn, the less important figure of the entire room.

Yeah, the 'outside of the board' plot is over half way into the book, but it doesnt matter because that happens outside the board, the chess game has not ended yet. The pawn cannot go back to rest in the box until the game is over, until the king dies. The book cannot be over until the chess game our protagonist is a piece of ends. The books have to end with the king's (Riko) death and that is exactly what happens.

If this isnt excellent writing and one of the best examples of know the rules so you can break them, i dont what is.

[darkpoetryshop]

Cannibalism is a metaphor for love

[macaulaytwins]

of course you eat people and have pronouns 🙄

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

Boy, Tolkien really knew how to write water metaphors to capture large movements of people. The Dike at Helm's Deep is boiling with swarming companies of orcs who advance like the tide, flowing forward, being pushed back, and flowing forward again to reach a higher point each time. The riders of Rohan pour slowly but surely onto the Pelennor Fields like rising waters from a breached dam. The leading edge of Éomer's charging cavalry line roars like a breaker foaming toward the shore. It’s all so great.

Not for nothing, but this is another place where PJ really captured something of Tolkien's words in his films through just the visual imagery. There is absolutely something distinctively liquid about the way that Éomer, Gandalf and crew pour over that ridge line and down into Helm’s Deep in Two Towers, and you can totally see the wave-like nature of the cavalry charge outside Minas Tirith later on. It's easy to directly replicate words like dialogue and basic physical characteristics and plot points in an adaptation, but to evoke the same metaphors and capture the implied imagery as well? That's next level.

[emeraldhazeart]

Y'know, the more I've written, the more I've come to realise:

Writing oneshots is a bit like running a race. You prepare, you set off, maybe it all goes smoothly or maybe you hit a bump or two, and then you cross the finish line.

Comments on oneshots are like people waiting at the finish line for you and congratulating you on having made it. They might point out something you did well in the race, or they might just cheer with you that you did it.

Writing multichapter fics is like running a marathon.

You still prepare, you still set off with the same excitement (and potentially trepidation), you still hit bumps and potholes as you go. But overall, it's a much longer, harder journey. Maybe you have to stop and take a break, maybe even multiple times. You definitely have to pace yourself, or you'll burn out and never finish.

Comments on a longfic are like people cheering you on as you go. They're the spectators watching from the sidelines as you hit each checkpoint (chapter). They're the ones cheering you on as you run the race, encouraging you to keep going all the way to the end.

As yes, they will eventually cheer and celebrate with you when you eventually cross the finish line. But they're the ones who've shared the journey with you, in spirit if not in body.

Maybe you recognise the same voices cheering you on at each checkpoint, maybe you only hear a voice once. Maybe you just see the same person in the crowd, encouraging you to keep going.

Every one of them can be the reason you keep pushing on to the end, even when running gets tough.

Thank you, commenters. Never underestimate how much your support helps us keep running.

[that1notetaker]

I love prophecies and the battle of Bond of Choice versus Bond of Obligation.

[nemfrog]

The Mirror of Life. 1847. Cover.

Internet Archive

[pratchettquotes]

The Igor looked up.

"Good morning, thur. And you are...?"

"Moist von Lipwig," said Moist. "And you would be Igor."

"Got it in one, thur. I have heard many good thingth about you."

"Down here?"

"I alwayth keep an ear to the ground, thur."

Moist resisted the impulse to look down. Igors and metaphors didn't go well together.

Terry Pratchett, Making Money

[thirdity]

Even the most ingenuous metaphors are made from the detritus of other metaphors — language speaking itself, then — and the line between first and last tropes is very thin, not so much a question of semantics as of the pragmatics of interpretation.

Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

[ast3ria-blue]

Tori is diet lemonade. Lucas buys her sprite, which Tori says is not lemonade or diet. Sprite is fake lemonade. Michael buys Tori her favourite brand of diet lemonade. It’s real diet lemonade.

Lucas was in love with the memory of her, Michael is in love with her. Lucas’ sprite is fake and his version of her is fake, but Michaels diet lemonade is real just as his version of her is real.

This is my mind after reading solitaire 10+ times

[agentrouka-blog]

I find it infinitely fascinating that Dany - even outside a purely Targaryen context - follows the footsteps of her female ancestors and is married far too young, is pregnant with a prophecy baby, and would have likely died giving birth to a deformed stillborn half-dragon fetus. A disposable vessel for a flawed incarnation of war and conquest, given no room for her own desires, her own inherent worth.

And a healer saves her from this fate. She helps her survive the traumatic birth even though she is in conflict with Dany and her people, has been victimized by Dany and her people. Dany is allowed to escape the cycle of birthing a conqueror. Is allowed to escape the cycle of dying for men's ambition.

And then she turns that healer into a vessel for her weapon of war, burns her alive to birth herself a conqueror. Mirri screams in agony to give life to Dany's ambitions. The maternal sacrifice to Dany patriarchical consummation of her body and life.

Dany could have chosen a painful lesson and freedom. She chose to uphold the oppressive cycle, with herself at the top now. The half-human dead child fully replaced by reptiles that will kill for her within a year.

Mother, she calls herself.

[srslylini]

the lanes are build upon loyalty, it's literally the vein that keeps the heart of the place standing, the way the council doesnt see it is insane.

from the very beginning they show that. Vanders first words we hear in the series are literally him showing loyalty and then, when threatened, the lanes showing him loyalty right back. betrayal always comes with loyalty, that doesnt stop it from existing though and thats what the council fails to see, always.

they see betrayal but they dont see the loyalty that has to come before that. they want to sit in their chairs up high and think they are better but they betray each other too. it's shown throughout the entire show. they just have DIFFERENT opportunities to betray and backstab.

marcus even said himself that "there is a crime behind every coin" in the undercity and the irony will for ever be that it was his crime that gave him a bloody coin.

the council is full of those coins they just have the water to wash the blood off.

ignorance at its finest truly.

[macaulaytwins]