#Trivia and Minutia

[tinyozlion]

Gundam Wing: Minutia and Trivia

On my long and winding way down research rabbit holes, I often stumble on bits and pieces of trivia that I find quite interesting, but don't really fit anywhere in my usual commentary on Gundam canon and are far too niche and inconsequential to merit a post of their own. HOWEVER. Since I know in my heart that you, dear reader, are also the sort of person for whom background details of the absolute least consequential variety are a source of delight and inspiration, I am compiling some of my discoveries here, and perhaps if I find more, there will be follow up posts. This one happens to be, in a very loose sense, mostly about Romefeller, OZ, and its Special Eyebrow People, because that is where my brain worms are currently converging. Here is my collection of useless trivia. I lay them at your feet like weird pebbles. Look at them. They're neat.

1. The Daily Kingdom Newspaper

It's quite likely that this has already been done, but in the grand spirit of this blog, I have decided to take the path of highest effort for the stupidest reason, and transcribed this paper. This page of After Colony news, ostensibly from July 14th, A.C. 195, appears to be reporting on events that happened towards the end of World War II. It's apparently been a slow news day for the Sanc Kingdom press for several centuries. I found myself getting kind of wrapped up in the stories and was disappointed I couldn't turn the page and find out what happened next. (I mean, I know what happened next, broadly speaking.) Of particular interest were Henri and Camille Dreyfus, Swiss chemists who made a lot of innovations during both world wars. ...They were also apparently noted OZ supporters? Well, what can you expect from a big industrial supplier of*checks notes* acetyl intermediates.

2. The OZ doggy

Pictured below: Treize's well-heeled hunting pet

and a dog is there too *BA-DUM tsch!*

This spotty and behaved hound is a real breed of hunting dog, the German Short-haired Pointer, or GSP! Did you know this, dear reader? I did not know this. This is new Dog Lore to me.

from the wiki: "It is a pointer and retriever, an upland bird dog, and water dog. The GSP can be used for hunting larger and more dangerous game. It is an excellent swimmer but also works well in rough terrain. It is tenacious, tireless, hardy, and reliable. German Shorthaired Pointers are proficient with many different types of game and sport, including trailing, retrieving, and pointing pheasant, quail, grouse, waterfowl, raccoons, opossum, and even deer."

Seems like a perfect bird-hunting companion for Mr. Treize. She'll probably go retrieve the beautiful red phoenix he murdered. I've decided she's named Oscar (after the Rose of Versailles) and she is a very good girl. Braver Oscar! Braver Hund!

3. Luxembourg Castle

This is Treize's abandoned Disney castle in Luxembourg. I owe the background artists of this scene an apology, for in my heart I assumed this was a random assemblage of spare castle-parts they found at Ludwig II's rummage sale. Reader, I was wrong:

THIS is Schloss Viandin, a restored castle in Luxembourg. Look at this place, it's gorgeous! You can hardly tell there's a secret mobile suit bunker in the basement. Frankly, I'm jealous I'm not being confined there, Treize! Stop sulking in the catacombs and go relax in the pretty princess bed until you feel better. Gaze upon the signed picture of Patrick Swayze; let him inspire you.

4. Romefeller's Secret

This one comes to us from the Battlefield of Pacifists manga, which, I've learned, is pretty good actually. (I mean it's not GOOD good, but it contains some interesting stuff). Now, come: I am taking you with me on this journey:

I feel extremely vindicated knowing that there's semi-canonical support for my theory that the Romefeller aristobrats are Austrian. I knew it. I KNEW IT. According to this manga, Romefeller was officially founded in Vienna-- the wording is a little ambiguous in this translation, but if Romefeller had members joining it in 1862, then it had to have existed in some form since then-- which means that the "Glorious Year" of 1956 is something other than its founding date. So what exactly happened in 1956? As I am a hack and fraud, and have been one all my life, I have looked to wikipedia for guidance. Mostly what was happening was the Cold War, colonialism, uprisings, Elvis, research and debate over artificial intelligence, both the hard drive disk and the snooze-button alarm clock being invented, Japan joining the UN, and wait what's this--

COMPUTER, ENHANCE:

...My god...

It's all coming together.

Eurovision is a plot by Romefeller.

The evidence is all here. There is simply no other conclusion we can come to.

--For this, and many other reasons that are well beyond the scope of a fandom blog, you should probably boycott them.

I rest my case.

5. The Romefeller Coat of Arms

I'm no vexillologist, and my heraldic experience is limited to adoptable pixel dragons, but what I am is an insane person with too much time on their hands. And so, to the best of my ability, I have blazoned the Romefeller coat of arms:

Supporters: Two Unicorns Rampant 

Crown: Purpur Crown of Peerage or Lord of Parliament  

Escutcheon: Heater with Two Engrailed Wedge Top - party per pale (halved vertically)

Blazon: Sinister (Right): Argent, Bend Sinister Sanguine; Dexter (Left): Bleu Celeste, Charged with a Ringed (or Celtic) Cross Argent 

Motto Scroll: UPRTUN or UPRTVN

--I don't know what UPRTVN is meant to stand for, but there are truly SO many ways you could play Latin Mad Libs and get a reasonable-sounding answer. At a stab, knowing Romefeller's priorities and values, I would guess it probably contains a, you know, "Unity/Peace/Rule/Tradition/Victory/Necessity", "Unity Through The Rule of Tradition Is Our Victory", or some such deeply worrying thing. Take your pick really.

6. "Herbst" / "Autumn"

The Rilke poem Treize quotes in "Frozen Teardrop" is not terribly difficult to find online, but if you're not sure what you're looking for it can be difficult because he has multiple poems about Autumn, and Autumn Day is perhaps better known; also the internet is absolutely filthy riddled with despicable bots and farmed content that has lost its attributions, so you do have to dig to find where different translations have come from (bless this very Web 1.0 page for carrying on the lord's work in basic html). Here is the original in German, and two complimenting translations:

Herbst -Rainer Maria Rilke Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten; sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde. Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt. Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

This translation by Horst A. Scholz (linked here so I don't get into trouble) is the most spare and one-to-one translation into English I've found-- I always appreciate having a comparison between the very literal meanings and a more creative reconstruction when I'm reading translated poetry.

Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum, this translation by Robert Bly is very freeform and agnostic; for my own purposes, I think the use of "Space" instead of "Heaven" happens to fit nicely with the themes of Gundam:

Autumn -translation by Robert Bly The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up, as if orchards were dying high in space. Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no." And tonight the heavy earth is falling away from all other stars in the loneliness. We're all falling. This hand here is falling. And look at the other one. It's in them all. And yet there is Someone, whose hands infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

[a-flux-uchiha]

I am asking about the aus. I saw dinosaur printed coins........

Excellent. Okay so I was thinking like okay, I need some sort of currency so I can actually have the class system I want to. But I don't want to just use standard dollars and coins and such, that definitely wouldn't make sense with the situation.

And well, there are dinosaurs, so......

Thus the dinosaur printed coins were born. They're one of the few signs that this is actually a post post apocalypse. There was an old world, but its been so long it's mostly forgotten. These coins are one of the only remnants of that old world. They're currently the only one I have added actually, although I'll probably add at least one more.

Currently I only have one super decided, namely Tyrnos, which are the highest valued coins, printed with a t-rex on it! I'm still working on other types of coins, but it'll probably be size ordered, and then carnivore vs herbivore. Carnivore coins are gold, herbivores are silver. Highest silver value is probably a variety of sauropod, lowest carnivore value coin is probably going to be some variety of microraptor, compy, or other small carnivore. I'll look through dinosaurs and make some more solid decisions in a bit.

[wifelinkmtg]

TUMBLR POST EDITOR WON'T LET ME TITLE THIS POST ANYMORE SO I GUESS THIS IS THE TITLE NOW. WEBBED SITE INNIT

So let's say you grew up in the nineties and that The Lion King was an important movie to you. Let's say that the character of Scar - snarling, ambitious, condescending, effeminate Scar - stirred feelings in you which you had no words for as a child. And then let's say, many years later, you're talking about it with a college friend, and you say something like, "oh man, I think Scar was some sort of gay awakening for me," and she fixes you with this level stare and says, "Scar was a fascist. What's the matter with you?"

The immediate feeling is not unlike missing a step: hang on, what's happening, what did I miss? You knew there were goose-stepping hyenas in "Be Prepared," but you didn't think it mattered that much. He's the bad guy, after all, and the movie's just pointing it out. Your friend says it's more than that: the visuals of the song are directly referencing the Nuremberg rallies. They're practically an homage to Riefenstahl. This was your sexual awakening? Is this why you're so into peaked caps and leather, then? Subliminal nazi kink, perhaps?

And then one of your other friends cuts in. "Hold up," he says, "let's think about what Scar actually did in the movie. He organized a group of racialized outcasts and led them against a predatory monarchy. Why are you so keen to defend their hereditary rule? Scar's the good guy here." The conversation immediately descends into a verbal slap fight about who the real bad guy is, whether Scar's regime was actually responsible for the ecological devastation of the Pride Lands, whether the hyenas actually count as "racialized" because James Earl Jones voiced Mufasa after all. Your Catholic friend starts saying some strange and frankly concerning shit about Natural Law. Someone brings The Lion King 2 into it. You leave the conversation feeling a little bit lost and a little bit anxious. What were we even talking about?

INTRODUCING: THE DITCH

There is a way of reading texts which I'm afraid is pervasive, which has as its most classical expression the smug obsession with trivia and minutiae you find in a certain vein of comic book fan. "Who was the first Green Lantern? What was his weakness? Do you even know the Green Lantern Oath?" It eschews the subjective in favor of definitively knowable fact. You can't argue with this guy that, say, Alan Scott shouldn't really count as the first Green Lantern because his whole deal is so radically different from the Hal Jordan/John Stewart/Guy Gardner Corps-era Lanterns, because this guy will simply say "but he's called Green Lantern. Says so right on the cover. Checkmate." This approach to reading a text is fundamentally 1) emotionally detached (there's a reason the joke goes, oh you like X band? name three of their songs - and not, which of their songs means the most to you? which of them came into your life at exactly the right moment to tell you exactly what you needed to hear just then?) and 2) defensive. It's a stance that is designed not to lose arguments. It says so right on the cover. Checkmate.

And then you get the guys who are like "well obviously Bruce Wayne could do far more as a billionaire to solve societal problems by using his tremendous wealth to address systemic issues instead of dressing up as a bat and punching mental patients in the head," and these guys have half a point but they're basically in the same ditch butting heads with the "well, actually" guys, and can we not simply extricate ourselves from the ditch entirely?

So, okay, let's return to our initial example. Scar is portrayed using Nazi iconography - the goose-stepping, the monumentality, the Nuremberg Lichtdom. He is also flamboyant and effete. He unifies and leads a group of downtrodden exiles to overthrow an absolute monarch. He's also a self-serving despot on whose rule Heaven Itself turns its back. You can't reconcile these things from within the ditch - or if you can, the attempt is likely to be ad-hoc supposition and duct tape.

Instead, let's ask ourselves what perspective The Lion King is coming from. What does it say is true about the world? What are its precepts, its axioms?

There is a natural hierarchical order to the world. This is just and righteous and the way of things, and attempts to overthrow this order will be punished severely by the world itself.

Fascism is what happens when evil men attempt to usurp this natural order with the aid of a group or groups of people who refuse to accept their place in the order.

There exists an alternative to defending and adhering to one's place in the natural order - it consists only of selfish spineless apathy.

Manliness is an essential quality of a just ruler. Unmanliness renders a person unfit for rule, and often resentful and dangerous as well.

And isn't that interesting, laid out like that? It renders the entire argument about the movie irrelevant (except for whatever your Catholic friend was on about, since his understanding of the world seems to line up with the above precepts weirdly well.) It's meaningless to argue about whether Scar was a secret hero or a fascist, when the movie doesn't understand fascism and has a damn-near alien view of what good and evil are.

There's always gonna be someone who, having read this far, wants to reply, "so, what? The Lion King is a bad movie and the people who made it were homophobes and also American monarchists, somehow? And anyone who likes it is also some sort of gay-bashing crypto-authoritarian?" To which I have to reply, man, c'mon, get out of the ditch. You're no good to anyone in there. Take my hand. I'm going to pull on three. One... two...

SO PHYREXIA [PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE, GROANS]

We're talking about everyone's favorite ichor-drooling surgery monsters again because there was a bit in my ~*~seminal~*~ essay Transformation, Horror, Eros, Phyrexia which seemed to give a number of readers quite a bit of trouble: namely, the idea that while Phyrexia is textually fascist, their aesthetic is incompatible with real-world fascism, and further, that this aesthetic incompatibility in some way outweighs the ways in which they act like a fascist nation in terms of how we think of them. I'll take responsibility here: I don't think that point is at all clear or well-argued in that essay. What I was trying to articulate was that the text of Magic: the Gathering very much wants Phyrexia to be supremely evil and dangerous fascists, because that makes for effective antagonists, but in the process of constructing that, it's accidentally encoded a whole bunch of fascinating presuppositions that end up working at cross-purposes with its apparent aim. That's... not that much clearer, is it? Hmm. Why don't I just show you what I mean?

Atraxa, Grand Unifier (art by Marta Nael)

In "Beneath Eyes Unblinking," one of the March of the Machine stories by K. Arsenault Rivera, there's a fascinating and I think revealing passage in which Atraxa (big-deal Phyrexianized angel and Elesh Norn's lieutenant) has a run-in with an art museum in New Capenna. The first thing I want to talk about is that, in this passage, Atraxa has no understanding of the concept of "beauty". A great deal of space in such a rushed storyline is devoted to her trying to puzzle out what beauty means and interrogating the minds of her recently-compleated Capennan aesthetes to try and understand it. In the end, she is unable to conceive of beauty except as "wrongness," as anathema.

So my first question is, why doesn't Atraxa have any idea of beauty? This is nonsense, right? We could point to a previous story, "A Garden of Flesh," by Lora Gray, in which Elesh Norn explicitly thinks in terms of beauty, but that's a little bit ditchbound, isn't it? The better argument is to simply look at Phyrexian bodies, at the Phyrexian landscape, all of which looks the way it does on purpose, all of which has been shaped in accordance with the very real aesthetic preferences of Phyrexians. How you could look at the Fair Basilica and not understand that Phyrexians most definitely have an idea of beauty, even if you personally disagree with it, is baffling. This is a lot like the canonical assertion that Phyrexians lack souls, which is both contradicted elsewhere in canon and essentially meaningless, given Magic's unwillingness or inability to articulate what a soul is in its setting, and as with this, it seems the goal is simply to dehumanize Phyrexians, to render them alien, even at the cost of incoherence or internal contradiction.

Atraxa's progress through the museum is fascinating. It evokes the 1937 Nazi exhibit on "degenerate art" in Munich, but not at all cleanly. The first exhibit, which is of representational art, she angrily destroys for being too individualistic (a point of dissonance with the European fascist movements of the 20th century, which formed in direct antagonism to communism.) The second exhibit, filled with abstract paintings and sculptures, she destroys even more angrily for having no conceivable use (this is much more in line with the Nazi idea of "degenerate art", so well done there.) The third exhibit is filled with war trophies and reconstructions from a failed Phyrexian invasion of Capenna many years prior, which she is angriest of all with (and fair enough, I suppose.) But then, after she's done completely trashing the place, she spots a number of angel statues on the cathedral across the plaza, and she goes apeshit. In a fugue of white-hot rage, she pulverizes the angel heads, and here is where I have to ask my second question:

Why angels? If you are trying to invoke fascist attitudes toward art, big statues of angels are precisely the wrong thing for your fascist analogues to hate. Fascists love monumental, heroic representations of superhuman perfection. It's practically their whole aesthetic deal. I understand that we're foreshadowing the imminent defeat of Phyrexia at the hands of legions of angels and a multiversal proliferation of angel juice, but that just leads to the exact same question: why angels? To the best of my knowledge, the Phyrexian weakness to New Capennan angel juice is something invented for this storyline. They have, after all, been happily compleating angels since 1997. We could talk about the in-universe justification for why Halo specifically is so potent, but I don't remember what that justification is, and also don't care. Let's not jump back in the ditch, please. The point is, someone decided that this time, Phyrexia would be defeated by an angelic host, and what does that mean? What is the text trying to say? What are its precepts and axioms?

Let me ask you a question: how many physically disabled angels are there in Magic: the Gathering? How about transsexual angels? How many angels are there, on all of the cards that have ever been printed for Magic: the Gathering, that are even just a bit ugly? Do you get it yet? Or do you need me to spell it out for you?

SPELLING IT OUT FOR YOU

There is a kind of body which is bad. It is bad because it has been significantly altered from its natural state, and it is bad because it is repellent to our aesthetic sensibilities.

The bad kind of body is contagious. It spreads through contact. Sometimes people we love are infected, and then they become the bad kind of body too.

There is a kind of body which is good. It is good because it is pleasing to our aesthetic sensibilities, and it is good because it is unaltered from its (super)natural state.

A happy ending is when all the good bodies destroy or drive into hiding all of the bad bodies. A happy ending is when the bad bodies of the people we love are forcibly returned to being the good kind of body.

Do you get it now?

ENDNOTES

It's worth noting that the ditch is very similar to the white American Evangelical hermeneutics of "the Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it," the defensive chapter-and-verse-or-it-didn't-happen approach to reading a text, what Fred Clark of slacktivist calls "concordance-ism". I don't think that's accidental. We stand underneath centuries of people reading the Bible very poorly - how could that not affect how we read things today? We are participants in history whether we like it or not.

I sincerely hope I haven't come across as condescending in this essay. Close reading is legitimately difficult! They teach college courses on this stuff! And while it is frustrating to have my close readings interrogated by people who... aren't doing that, like. I do get it. I find myself back in the ditch all the time. This stuff is hard. It is also, sorry, crucial if you intend to say something about a text that's worth saying.

I also hope I've communicated clearly here. Magic story is sufficiently incoherent that trying to develop a thesis about it often feels like trying to nail jello to the wall. If anyone has questions, please ask them! And thank you for reading. Next time, we'll probably do the new Eldraine set.

[carlyraejepsans]

UTY!Flowey, "lore" and how to criticize a fan prequel without being an insufferable pedantic, a guide by Biscia.

(for my muskless fellows, here's a transcript of my thread on Undertale Yellow that I posted on Twitter. enjoy!)

There's this really frustrating attitude in fan spaces i like to call "lorepilling" where people are substantially more concerned with encyclopedic knowledge of details & minutiae (so called "lore") in place of full-text thematic/narrative analysis as if the two are mutually interchangeable.

It's especially common in large franchises and story heavy videogames, and it's like... Are You Treating This Piece Of Art Like A Trivia Battle Or Are You Treating It Like A Story

This is coming from a person who is also deeply autistic about UTDR trivia btw, I'm just saying that when it comes to transformative *stories*, depending on the impact it has on character, themes, and narrative structure... lore is expendable.

Ultimately this is why most of the UTY criticism i see (on twitter specifically) falls flat. What does it matter if "lore" means Flowey couldn't chronologically be there when the justice human fell, as long as the game narratively justified his presence in the story in a compelling way?

The real criticism, in the end, is that it didn't.

He's a plot central, main cast character from the canon returning in a cast of mostly OCs and what does he have to show for it? An admittedly sick boss battle in 1/3 endings, sure but... not much else. He has no significant "presence" in the story, no tie, interaction, or even just... an opinion on the rest of the cast. Which is a huge miss when Flowey's meta role is to be Thee completionist player mirror. He's the OG lorepilled UT fan! He's an opinionated little shit!

This isn't to say that UTY *didn't* engage w/ his metanarrative. When me and @a-town-called-hometown first started playing the game (we were both skeptical of Flowey's inclusion), he immediately said "It would be really cool if they made it so this has been going on for a while and Clover has no idea". Which is precisely what the game did in the neutral ending, and what I will openly say was the most well written & well executed part of this game's story...

...a part we almost didn't see, because the pacifist ending disappointed us so much we lost all will to replay.

To put it in the words of my friend Mel @clowwwnbytes, there's a deafening hollowness to UTY Flowey's motivations & core principles where his guilt towards Chara—and resulting black and white thinking—should be. You're telling me Mr Kill-or-be-killed, "sacrificing yourself to do the right thing is stupid", would stand there after 1000s of failed attempts to make Clover survive, look on as they make the same mistake Asriel he did, and fondly call them friend? Cue the guitar, roll the credits?

He would lose it. Oh my god he would lose his goddamn mind, he would throw the nastiest temper tantrum in the world. Are you serious? How dare you. How DARE you. All this effort, all my patience, and you just let yourself DIE for a few worthless idiots? I should've let you ROT!

*clears throat* sorry got a bit too into character. as i was saying.

I can understand a UT prequel wanting to distance itself from the canon Chara storyline in order to form its own identity, but then turning around and choosing Insane About Chara The Character™ for a sidekick is... far from optimal. In the end, Flowey comes across as underutilized and inconsistent, with a whole lot of wasted potential.

This is an issue I have with UTY's character writing (original AND returning) and story structure as a whole. Lots of inconsistent character arcs, tonal dissonance, overuse of situational sadness... it's an amateurish work, after all, and you can feel it. There's no shame in that.

(Though, there ARE some issues that i take more seriously with its writing, especially when it comes to its two main female characters—Ceroba's lack of narrative agency and depth borders on misogynistic writing imo. But that's a topic for another day)

Over all, UTY was an incredible piece of collaborative transformative work, with gorgeous art and a genuinely incredible OST, which... would have benefited from more experienced writers. But hey, you can only ever learn by trying!

For all it could've been a better story, it certainly did not fail to entertain: both when my friend was playing it, and after in our many discussions of its writing, its faults and how it could've been improved (royal scientist!ceroba character fix you will always be famous. to ME!)

I'm sure this project served as an incredible source of experience for the developers: as individual creators AND as a team. I look forward to their future projects!

but also if i have to see another person say UTY is better than Undertale i might turn into The Jonker.

end of the essay! really couldn't stand any of the pedantic ""criticism"" I'd seen of this fangame so far, so i had to say my piece as someone more versed in analysis. happy to elaborate on anything in the replies or in my inbox!

[wingsoverlagos]

Today, I’d like to share one of Mark Lewisohn’s most entertaining fucked-up citations. This citation, Tune In 13-23, contains a rare example of Lewisohn almost saying something correct/insightful about Paul McCartney before hopelessly fumbling, as well as a far-less-rare example of Lewisohn correcting Paul on a bit of trivia while simultaneously mangling the source material. Here’s the text of the endnote itself:

In pink, Lewisohn lets us know that Paul, reflecting in the ‘90s on the events of 1960, did not correctly remember the name of the host. This is fine—I don’t take issue with Lewisohn correcting things the Beatles misremembered—but it’s very funny to see him correcting a bit of minutiae in the citation for two quotes he altered or misrepresented.

In yellow, we have what seems, on the surface, to be an actual insight about Paul: “Paul sometimes says ‘we’ in interviews when he means ‘I.’” This isn’t a paradigm-bending revelation—I’m sure my mutuals are all very aware of this habit of Paul’s—but it’s an insight nonetheless.

Or it would be, if this wasn’t said in relation to a quote where Paul clearly means himself and another person. So close, Mark! From Tune In:

Teenage Paul, out of his depth at a college party, pretends to be a singing Frenchman, creating ‘Michelle’ in the process. The first quote, the one where Lewisohn asserts Paul is using “we” in the singular sense, is from the Anthology (2000, p.198):

Do y’all see the problem here? “It was very sophisticated for me and George, so we were trying to hang in there and pretend we knew what was going on.” Emphasis added by me, just in case Mr. Lewisohn is reading and needs a little help.

This is not Paul saying “we” but meaning “I.” This is Paul explicitly stating how he and George felt. And like?????? The “clarification” Lewisohn provides in the endnote is completely unnecessary to begin with. There’s no reason to say Paul means just-him in this quote, unless Lewisohn is worried John will get lumped in with Paul’s loser teenager behavior. In that case, instead of lying and saying Paul actually meant just-Paul here, why not mention that George was at the party and out of his depth as well? Why do this??????

Onto Many Years From Now (1997):

The quote itself isn’t too altered. Lewisohn fails to mark the omission after “It was” with an ellipsis, but that’s small potatoes for him. The Irritating thing here was brought to my attention be @mythserene: even though Paul mentions three specific influences on his wannabe French style (Sacha Distel, Juliette Greco, and Maurice Chevalier), Lewisohn invokes an entirely different Frenchman, Jacques Brel.

With Lewisohn’s phrasing, he’s not incorrect. If Paul said “Joey Fatone and Justin Timberlake were huge influences on my choice to get frosted tips in 2001,” it wouldn’t be wrong to describe his appearance as “Lance Bass-esque.” But if you’re writing a musician’s biography, and that musician has named specific influences on their music or presentation, why would you not invoke those influences when the opportunity arises? Isn’t it more work—and less informative—to dig up some fourth French guy to slot in here instead?

Lewisohn thinks it’s worth the readers time to know that Paul forgot who hosted a party he attended as a teenager, at the same time putting in effort to avoid mentioning Paul’s stated influences.

[y-rhywbeth2]

Ye Olde Publishers were like 'People play D&D for adventuring and killing shit, they don't care about random minutia like the textiles industry. And they want the gods' avatars statted so they can fight them and cool powers for their clerics, they don't need the finer points of the life of a priest also we fear angry Christian mothers from the 80s will murder us in our beds if we don't toe the line very carefully'

And then there's me, like I do! I do! I want the random roleplaying trivia!

Only this morning, staring at my embroidery hoop I was remembering Astarion's hobby and wondering if Toril had different names for the stitches or unique fantastical methods, and whether Astarion favoured human or elven patterns/techniques.

And I need to know what obligations and restrictions Shadowheart, Durge, Jaheira, Orin and Gortash (and etc etc) have aside from the colour stuff and the insane Banite dress codes. What are some standard hymns and prayers? Does anybody have religous dietary restrictions? Do Bhaalists drink human blood as part of a pre-dinner ritual?

I love random trivia that serves no purpose except for absolutely random roleplaying things. I could've had that instead of blowing up the setting every few years and then rearranging the furniture again and again so that I can never keep the timeline straight. Where's my evil Bane-worshipping secret society that will aid me in taking over WotC and using my tyranny to this effect?

[reneelovesrobots]

Every time I accidentally learn something about Sports it gets deleted to make room for more trivia about fictional robots and/or various flavors of Robot Toy

I can't tell you anything about American football or whatever the other local teams are (Baseball, probably? I think hockey?) but boy howdy can I explain Mobile Suit design minutiae or deep timeline lore from Bionicle/Transformers/Gundam. And I will you cannot stop me the doors have all locked you're stuck in here with me, fuckers

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

i've started a new save file in pla for the purpose of compiling all the minor npc names and dialogue from the major settlements, and noting changes over time, because i have a normal amount of interest in pla trivia and minutia, and one thing that immediately jumped out to me that i didn't notice in previous go-rounds b/c i probably wasn't paying too much attention:

the protagonist's room has visibly been previously occupied.

even upon your first arrival, there are strings of veggies and two pairs of sandals hung up around the hearth. there's a survey tips notebook that looks to have been haphazardly thrown onto the end table. mismatched dishware and bottles stacked up on the shelves. a shirt hanging up on the wall you can't wear. most striking to me are those two glass jars full of pretty rocks that have been left on the windowsill. investigating them gets the comment that "someone" must have found them and collected them, "...but they're just plain old stones."

it's honestly always been sort of weird to me that in jubilife, this developing town where everyone's constantly commenting on how scarce resources are and how tough life is, there was just this entire spare lodging available complete with furniture and food and they were all fine with letting some random survey recruit use it as their solo personal quarters. but if that room was recently deserted, that might actually be a pretty good explanation. leaving just the one question,

whose was it, and what happened to them?

[fortressofserenity]

Something from YouTube

About how the Alt-Right infiltrated geek culture:

@SPDYellow

While I agree with all your comments about why Nerd/Geek culture is such a toxic stew, I do feel that there is one aspect key to the culture that you haven't pointed out.

The reason media analysis is so terrible in that subculture, despite their obsession with a product, is that for whatever reason for years, Geeks/Nerds prized minutiae over actual analysis. An example of this can be seen in the Star Wars fandom, where so many geeks pride themselves on being able to name every character that ever appears in a property, even if they just stood in the far corner for less than a minute, but when you try to explain how George Lucas intended Star Wars to be an allegory for the Vietnam War, with the Empire being the USA and the Rebels serving as the Viet Cong, either you get a lot of blank faces or they accuse you of injecting politics into the story. Never mind how all art is political to begin with.

This kind of obsession with minutiae and trivia is akin to bragging about knowing the exact number of leaves on a tree but being able to say nothing about the overall structure or health of the organism. Meanwhile, if someone does come along who can talk about these things, but does the unthinkable like, say, gets the number of leaves wrong, well, that proves they're clearly a fake fan of that tree.

If you can't meaningfully take apart and analyze the themes of a story, it becomes much harder to analyze and weigh out the real-world thoughts and opinions of others. Yeah, I've heard of the whole "The curtains are blue" meme, and it can be annoying when the English teacher insists that every aspect of the story is symbolic, but the truth is that every detail that winds up being mentioned is the product of authorial intent, and it's worth speculating on what is behind this intent. It could be as simple as "The writer thought it sounded really cool" with no deeper reason intended, but again, they chose to mention it for a reason, and it's worth speculating why.

[spngeorg]

Episode 141 - 7.15 Repo Man

Does this make Dean the dog again? Also, a very good reminder that antipossession symbol tattoos are a thing in this universe, and maybe it would've been a good thing for them to have shared with a heck of a lot more people than they did, you know?

Also, some very interesting parallels through the MotW, a guy who went to extraordinary measures to bring back the demon (angel?) because he was in love with him. Two episodes before Cas comes back...

LINKS!

The Superwiki page (including links to minutiae and trivia about the episode, transcripts, promo clips, etc. as usual… I stopped adding all those things separately a while back, so every once in a while I like to remind folks how much interesting info is on the Superwiki page for every episode!)

My tag

Lizbob’s Dean and Cas are In Love series

A life well-lived comes from the structured pursuit of meaningful happiness. (rewatch notes from January 2018)

My rewatch notes from May 2017

Listen now on Spotify, or wherever you enjoy podcasts!

[intrepid-fictioneer-7]

I didn't realize that trying to incorporate some of the Clock Tower's big shots would require so much obscure Nasuverse trivia. To anyone out there thinking that it might be a cool idea to feature other department heads in a scene, don't do that. Don't repeat my mistake.

Okay, so this budget meeting was the HARDEST part of this fic. I even made a note at the beginning, because it is ridiculous just how much the information about Clock Tower faculty is spread around various Nasuverse canons.

Not even Fate canons. I spent more than an hour just reading the obscure information about the department heads on Type Moon wiki.

Vice Director of Clock Tower? You won't know about her unless you read Tsukihime side materials. Or read wiki.

These are quotes from the Case Files oneshot Time Magic Is For All Intents And Purposes A Useless And Dangerous Magecraft, which you should absolutely read, and its companion author commentary.

I find these innocuous comments interesting. They aren’t wrong per se, I will be the first to admit as a Case Files fan that Clock Tower minutiae is not widespread knowledge. But I think they reveal a fascinating difference in fandom experience.

See, the author considers the  Vice Director of Clock Tower, Lorelei Barthomeloi, obscure, and she is, objectively. She appears in one short story for Tsukihime II, a game that never came out, has a profile in a side material encyclopedia, and is a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in Carnival Phantasm. By all accounts, she is an obscure character...or she should be.

Because to me, and I’m certain many others in the fandom, Lorelei is basically Nasu fics’ equivalent of HP fanfics’ Daphne Greengrass: an obscure character in canon frequently used (and overused) in fanfics. Lorelei is not used the same way as Daphne (for one, I don’t think she is made the main character often), but she is often used in similar roles; notably, in Overpowered Shirou fics, she tends to be Shirou’s love interest or one of them as part of his harem. Usually, the scenario is that they meet while hunting Dead Apostles.

But you would only know this if you are familiar with how often Shirou is made overpowered, wanked, and turned into a Sue in fanfics, and the methods used. Especially if your exposure to Fate fanfics is on fanfiction.net, which is where they proliferate. However, if, as I suspect the author is, your sole and primary consumption of Fate fanfics is on Ao3, where the climate and culture tend to be completely different, you might have never read or heard of a Shirouwank fanfic, much less become familiar with its usual tropes. There are people in the fandom to whom “Incarnation of Sword” means nothing.

I don’t know, I just thought it was funny, after my initial surprised reaction:

“Clock Tower faculty is such obscure trivia...”

“Indeed, I don’t think the average fan would know about them since they are more prominent in Case Files, and...”

“...like the Vice Director!”

“...Lorelei? Obscure???”

It’s always refreshing to get humbled.

[ripeteeth]

five things you never get tired of writing

Thank you for the tag, @danpuff-ao3!

So, I have to confess that I've grown to hate talking about writing and my process, as I'm constantly afraid of coming off as ultra-pretentious or self-involved. But hey, as my therapist likes to point out, that's my trauma talking, baby! So it might actually be a helpful exercise to think about the parts I really do love.

Before I get started, I'm tagging @mia-ugly, @soft-october-night, @weatheredlaw, @racketghost, @iodhadh, @jaggededges123, @veganthranduil, and anyone else who wants to do it!

the body and everything with it

I'm a bit obsessed with everything visceral. I love imagery of the body - the bones, the tissues, the skin and sinew. I love the constant process of our growth and erosion of ourselves into death. I'm just fascinated with our constant war - we are always both our body and at odds with our body. We spin complex, intricate stories to escape the simple fact that we are animal - put on this earth to eat, drink, fuck, and die. I'm fascinated by the concept of holiness as a rejection of the body, like the Cathars taught. If earthliness is evil, and the body is earthly, then all things related to the body must be evil. We're told that the saints denied themselves - food, companionship, drink, touch. How can the one thing that we are freely given be evil? I can't stomach it. Look, even our language is somatic. I can't stomach it. Get a leg up. One foot on the ground. Head in the clouds. To be separated from the body is death, and I want to roll around in the visceral aspects of language and description.

2. trivia and scientific/historical minutiae

Writing is fun for me because I'm a bit of a magpie about trivia and love to drop in little details about parchment-making or historical polar expeditions or so on. I'm really thriving and enjoying writing my Frankenstein story as there's so much to include - details about anatomical plates, about Luigi Galvani, about historical dissection and surgery. Picture it as a nerd shoving a book under your nose going look, look, this is so cool! That's basically what I'm doing every time.

3. food

Okay, so this is sort of cheating, because all food is a body of some kind or another - plant or animal - and thus we're back to my fixation with the visceral. But I have a deep love of food and cooking, so I can spend ages on the line of cream that rises to the top of milk, the scent of garlic and onions in a cast-iron pan, the tender bruising of a plum at the bottom of a bag, the perfect scent of a sprig of rosemary. Food has always been a focus in my family, despite how completely poor we were, and my mom's treat to herself was to pick up a food magazine now and again - usually Gourmet or Saveur. I would spend ages with her carefully poring over each brightly lit page, admiring the way the light gleamed on olive-oil tossed pasta, and how it disappeared into the powdery dark cocoa of chocolate truffles. We couldn't afford it then but I learned a language of food I had not yet tasted. As we got a little more secure and comfortable, my mother would bring home treats - preserved lemons in a ball jar, duckfat in a quart container in the freezer. I eventually learned how to cook and attended culinary school, later working in restaurants, and it's been a revelation of pairing these things I have heard of - duck, sumac, creme fraiche - with the actual texture and taste. There's something incredibly magical to me about the language of food. The imagery of it. The brutal physicality of it. We make food beautiful because we love it. It feeds us, nourishes us - but I am also fascinated by the fact that food implies death. Everything that feeds us has once lived. We consume the bodies of others; we'll be consumed ourselves. There's something both sacred and profane about that, I think.

4. myth, religion, and monstrosity

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who reads my shit that I grew up in an incredibly religious area, soaked to the bone with Calvinist damage. I went to a Christian Reformed church and cut my teeth on coloring books with Christ's body dying on the Cross. I doubt I will ever have a wholly comfortable relationship with religion and that comes through. I love to write characters struggling with religion and the claustrophobic, oppressive feeling of an unairconditioned church in the height of summer, hundreds of voices repeating the same things, singing the same songs. This is also why I'm fixated on monstrosity. It's about abjection, right? The abject other? You are alone in the middle of a sea, different from the others. You are queer. Uneasy. Separate. An infection the body is searching for and seeking to eliminate. I can't separate the two. One and other, holiness and monstrosity. I want to write about them and mix the imagery - a holy monster, a monstrous saint. I am a child standing at the fountain soda machine and pushing all the buttons. I love myth for that, because you're given imagery and a language to evoke this. Is a chimera evil? Medusa had her head cut off for a bad hair day, but was it her fault? I always come back to this quote from Ocean Vuong in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous:

“What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

5. desire, sexuality, and erotism

Okay, so this is it. This is REALLY IT, which is - I KNOW - back to the body again. When I fixate, I fixate. But I want to be more specific. I'm fascinated with how we are creatures of desire. We're born needing. We need to be fed, to be cared for, to be held. We are a bundle of wants and that never changes, only the shape of our desires change. How do we introduce ourselves? "Hi, I am so and so and when I grow up I want to be -" So many things are about our desire. We struggle with it so much, with the wanting and the inability to have. With our shame for wanting. We want to eat and feel guilt for it. We want to sleep in and feel ashamed. We want, we want, we want. It is endless and consuming. I love characters tormented by desire, twisting their shame into spiraling rituals around it. Have you ever read Hunger by Knut Hamsun? It changed me. This is a man who wants very simple things but who damns himself in his rejection of his want. I love that. I'm fascinated. Desire is so endlessly bewitching because I want to understand why we desire the things we do. I remember reading Crash by J.G. Ballard and coming away floored by this erotic desire that was so strange to me, so completely and wholly not my own, yet somehow familiar in the viscerality of it. In truth, I frequently reverse-engineer my original characters. I begin with a kink and one wholly incorrect fact that they adamantly believe and then build them from there. Beginning with the kink is so fun for me, because I want to then ask how did you get here, what is your relationship to this eroticism and why, how do you feel about it, how do you share it? Whether or not I ever include the sexual life of the character or the kink itself doesn't matter, but it tends to prompt a lot of thought about who the character is and why. If we are the sum of our desires, then I figure it helps to take a good, long look at them.

[solsticefires]

hi hello! my name is anne and i'm a 35 y/o woman living in the upper midwestern us. i share a home with my fiancé, our housemate, two cats, and far too many books, rocks, plants, and jars.

this is a spot for me to explore and share my spiritual practices, as well as little bits of my daily life. i've been a polytheist and occultist of various stripes since i was a kid — over 20 years — and i have a lot to say. but i still have a lot to learn, too.

all the minutiae below the cut.

⋮► traditional witchcraft, whatever that means these days. magic, alchemy, herbalism, divination, astrology, etc etc etc — all informed to a greater or lesser degree by folklore and historical record.

what i practice:

⋮► a weird mishmash of interrelated polytheisms — mostly roman, with a some heaping scoops of gaulish and brittonic mixed in. also a couple of greek and kemetic deities. help me.

⋮► bioregional animism, expressed through closeness with the natural world. i try to live with the rhythm of the seasons and to be a good steward of the land, her creatures, and her spirits.

who i honor:

⋮► the aventine triad (ceres, liber, and libera), juno, mercury, trivia, rosmerta, and sirona. the holy family, as part of my ancestral practice.

⋮► the matres, lares, penates, and my ancestors. my teachers and guides, both living and dead. the witch mother and witch father.

[goneloot]

This seems like a fun thing to start

I’m making an RPG videogame. Yipee-doo!

And I wanna talk about it, because I wanna share with the world my thoughts while making it, so why not give this a try, seems fun and something I’ll definitely not get bored of in a month.

I just want to talk about it. I don’t wanna make videos trying to justify every decision trying to make it more grandiose than it really is. I don’t wanna have to type out a funny interaction to try and get traction and fail to an algorithm that will never give me a light of day. I don’t want to use Twitter. I just want to talk about my stuff and point out the little things I find neat on them and feel proud. Maybe there'll be a heart out there that vibes with my same excitement over the minutia that clocks have hands and eyes have apples. And if the person that gets excited by the idea of trivia is you, I’m glad this message found you.

If all this blabbering about interested you and want to play the game, you sure can. It’s free and I hope to keep it that way because opinions on art, copyright and more that maybe one day I’ll be motivated enough to share.

This game is quite a bit done, so hopefully I have enough stuff to talk about for a while. I don’t even know what I’ll talk about next, but if you’re reading this far, I hope you find out with me.

Thank you!

[blergeatkitty]

Working theory:

The couch is in the living room.

There are Distracting Things there.

There is TV there. Possibly Music. Maybe several Lights.

Books. Clutter. People. Dishes. Bills. Clothing.

Stuff.

Reminders. Attention sucking bits of trivia. Life’s minutiae.

It’s a sickly sweet supersaturated sugar solution with a string in it. Crystals form. And build. And messes happen. And attention is drawn into a hundred little threads in a dozen directions in the immediate, with some even heading off to vanishing points in both anxious futures and regretful past.

It’s all overstimulating. It tires. It wearies. It hangs there on your periphery, waiting to pounce.

God, it’s exhausting just to think about it.

The bed, on the other hand, is nice and safe. It’s dark. It’s quiet.

The pillow is fluffed. And cold. (Mmmm)

There is maybe a pet requesting attention and affection.

It is a good place to cuddle up with a good story.

Of course, the opposite can also happen and you can be in your bed and unable to fall asleep because it’s under stimulating and your thoughts are racing.

I jotted something down along those lines a few years back and a few of my friends found it a fun read.

I wonder if anyone out there can relate?

My one regret is never getting around to learning how to doodle visuals so I made do with random stuff that seemed to make sense at the time.

Never shared something on this site like this before but I figure if some random person halfway across the planet gets a giggle out of it then that’ll do nicely. 😊

[gangler]

Man, I love horror movies, but I know next to nothing about them.

I sometimes wish I was one of those cool horror nerds who knows all the horror trivia and minutia.