#Up Here Magazine

[corviiids]

ok hear me out about this vaguely Your Name inspired lawlight au told via notes they leave each other while bodyswapped

[kvothes]

richard siken in poetry magazine—on perplexity and stroke recovery (part of hard feelings, a series of essays by poets writing about difficult emotions)

[kaythefloppa]

New Episodes of Wild Kratts

Three new episodes of Wild Kratts will be airing in November of 2024. Salamander Streaming, Bumblezzz, and Chimpanzee and Me.

The synopsis for Bumblezz is yet to come, however we have plots for Salamander Streaming and Chimpanzee and Me.

Salamander Streaming - Airing Monday November 4th, 2024.

Mysteriously, the Tortuga shorts and powers down while the gang is streaming a movie. Koki says it won't be back today. What are they going to do? Chris and Martin announce they can still do streaming - salamander streaming! The rest of the gang wonders, what in the world is salamander streaming? The bros explain that salamander streaming is getting miniaturized and floating down a stream in tiny little boats looking for salamanders, of course! It's a race to find as many salamanders as they can while Koki tries to fix the Tortuga.

Pre-Episode Thoughts:

This was one of the episodes that the brothers announced at their live shows. I think that they will be focusing on tiger salamanders. Either way, I think it's gonna be cool that we might have a Salamander Power Suit.

WK's pop-culture references in the modern seasons are really hit and miss, but this is actually some good fucken wordplay with streaming.

If the Tortuga really is powered down, then will we actually see Salamander Power? Or is it gonna be like Mystery of the Squirmy Wormy where the brothers don't use any Power Suits? Either way, I'm looking forward to it.

Chimpanzee and Me - Airing - Airing Wednesday, November 6th, 2024

The gang travels deep into Uganda's tropical forests to uncover the true nature of the chimpanzee, but Chris sprains his ankle at the most inopportune time and can't participate. He is sad and upset. It's the climbing adventure that he's always looked forward to most. He tries to hide his disappointment and gets support from his friends, but it is a young chimp who shows him how to truly make the best of a bad situation.

Pre-Episode Thoughts:

This was another episode that Martin had hinted at the live shows. What's funny is that 2D Martin also expressed the idea of heading into the African rainforests in Rattlesnake Crystal (an episode that IRL Martin wrote). Again, not sure why it took them almost a decade and a half to get to this, but I digress.

Goddamn we are getting a LOT of angst in S7. Between this, No Name Dream, and the most recent episode, A Fish Out of Water, we're getting more character-driven plots, (especially if you count Paisley's redemption in the special). And while this does seem to be similar to Flight of the Draco, this does seem to have an intereting twist. Chimpanzees have many abilities apart from climbing, such as intellect, empathy, craftiness, and communciation. Maybe Chris will discover that and eventually use those skills to rescue the chimpanzees and/or the gang from a bad situation later.

Also, baby chimps are really fucking cute. I so hope that Chris gets to name it in the episode.

I've debated with my friends on this, and I do hope that we see a Chimpanzee Suit.. but knowing how anatomically similar chimps are to humans, and given how uncanny the Power Suits in the modern seasons have been.... I very much wonder.

That being said, if there is gonna be a Chimp Suit, I wonder if Chris will be the one to invent it? Assuming that he's staying behind at the Tortuga throughout this episode and makes the observations, then it would make sense that he'd invent the suit. Martin invented the Ermine Power Disc back in Season 5, so maybe Chris could invent a Chimpanzee Suit. Part of me thinks it'll backfire just as horribly, but after the bullshit that was the Indri-Conda Suit, I'm willing to accept anything 😭����

[kindahoping4forever]

This pic, obviously

[letters-to-rosie]

The Silco Essay

Long post ahead, TDLR included.

Let's do a little thought experiment. We're trying to institute socialism, worker control and ownership of the means of production. This is currently far from our reality, so we have a lot of work to do. We get together and talk and strategize, but it's difficult with all the surveillance we're under as we work. Not only would seizing the means of production be met with a harsh backlash but even unionization, which doesn't automatically lead to worker control or ownership, is suppressed even though that suppression is illegal in certain countries like the US.

How does that suppression happen? There are a lot more workers than owners. If we worked together, we could take them, right? Well, the owners have the law and access to call upon the state to enact violence on us. We can't exactly own the means of production if we get killed. Even if we overcome other hierarchies keeping us from solidarity, such as miners in West Virginia did by organizing across racial divisions, we can still be beaten. Those miner had bombs dropped on them.

Okay, thought experiment over. What does this have to do with Silco? It's taken me ages to think about how to explain it, but my beef with him is that he has what are essentially perfect conditions for creating a mass movement and does not use them. He is uniquely in a position to protect any burgeoning mass revolt until it would be too late for Piltover to stop it. This is why his comments to Sevika that they can buy another police chief ring hollow. They both know how good they had it.

This is not to say that I think Silco is poorly written or a "bad character." Silco being the way he is all comes down to the entire conceit of the show: two cities against each other, with a sister on each side. However, this does lead me to want to critique some things about the show's premise that lead to my critiques about Silco.

For the cities to be meaningfully opposed, Zaun can't just be oppressed. It has to be "bad" to counter Piltover's bad. This, I think, causes the majority of things that make me sad about the show overall. While I still enjoy it, much of what I enjoyed was a fantasy setting that dealt with real-world issues in its own way. However, for all the realism in the setting, there are some distinctly "not real" parts that seem to blunt discussions of the depth of the oppression Zaunites are suffering. There's only fleeting mentions of labor oppression, even though it must have been key to organizing their society. The way Piltovans like Heimerdinger and great house members like the Kirammans must've had an active hand in organizing and benefiting from this oppression is mostly skipped over. Much of Piltover's evil is shown to us in the form of police brutality, but under any system of police brutality is one of hierarchy that is actively maintained and serves more of a purpose than just violence for its own sake. Even so, the police brutality we're shown is more than enough to have us sympathize with Zaunite characters if they were to have a massive rebellion and change the shape of Piltover forever. But Piltover's shape can only change so much. That's the conceit of the show. We can't completely root for Zaun and have them be entirely sympathetic because it would break the world. This is why I think Silco has to be the face of Zaun instead of Ekko and the Firelights, why Ekko has to befriend Heimerdinger to soften that antagonism, and why the Firelights never gain enough power to challenge Piltover at a systemic level. Even when Ekko wants to, he's thwarted and unable to cross the bridge.

We have a lot more fantasy imagination than political imagination. Silco is very realistic. Authoritarians do tend to rise up and stop movements that are closer in practice to socialism. If there were a mass movement in Zaun, as there seems to be potential for around episode 3, Silco would want to redirect that energy so he can control it, and I wouldn't be surprised if that is, in some form or fashion, what he did while consolidating power in the wake of Vander's death. While I appreciate the realism, it does make me sad that many times we put so much more energy into imagining magic systems and mystical creatures than we do imagining ways people could live freely with each other. It's like we have to keep capitalist realism alive even if we have hoverboards (also, if it wasn't already clear, I think the greatest potential for socialism/other lefty schools of thought is seen in the Firelights; so we could totally have political imagination AND hoverboards if Riot weren't cowards).

Silco's strong individualism works well for his relationship with Jinx and allows him to serve and Vi's primary antagonist. Even as Vi goes on a path that leads her to become more and more morally questionable as the plot goes on (like her sister lol), the sheer horror of what Silco inflicted on her makes Vi's story easy to digest. For Silco and Jinx, Silco's individualist outlook allows him to see her separated from the conditions that he is exacerbating outside. There are probably at least a hundred kids who could be as smart if given the right conditions (which makes Jinx and Ekko foils, for instance), but Silco doesn't care because he doesn't have a personal connection with them. He sees Jinx not as a child among many but as the child. I think this is part of why it's so hard for him to even think of giving her up and why he really never would have. However, I think it would be wrong to suggest that we'd have to sacrifice a great storyline for Silco to be more class conscious. It's possible to hold the tension between seeing greatness in individuals you love and knowing there is similar greatness in every individual that is being stomped on by the various oppressions we face, including the ones we share.

Because of these factors (Piltover being written to be the oppressor but Zaun needing to be equally bad so the show can "both sides" the conflict; a general lack of political imagination, which is also hemmed in by the source material and keeps us from fun fictional socialism except in small doses; and the general individualism baked into Silco's character that leads him to not even consider that a mass movement is the best way to achieve his aim of independence), I find Silco's politics very boring, lol. If we're to think about what his revolution might bring about, I'd find it much easier to compare to a bourgeois revolution (such as the US one) than to a socialist revolution that devolved into state capitalism (such as the USSR). One thing that characterized the US revolution was its unwillingness to include all the potential actors who might've fought in the war, particularly enslaved people. More enslaved people actually fought on the British side, as they were promised independence (even though Britain had not abolished slavery, so this was probably a scam). By desiring to maintain the system of chattel slavery and the hierarchies it created, the US revolutionaries missed out on the possibility to create a mass movement and jeopardized the success of their movement in the process.

This all reminds me of the distinction Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) draws between the Black Revolutionary and the Black Militant:

Now, there are a number of groups functioning in the black liberation movement in this country. I will not give the philosophy of those groups. I will not speak for them because I wouldn’t want their representatives to speak for us. There are, of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress for Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Black Panther Party. Most of these groups have basically been fighting for a share of the American pie, at least until recently. That is to say, they were kept out of the American dream, and many of them thought that if they were to adopt the manners, the mode, the culture of the oppressor, they would be accepted and they too could enjoy the fruits of American imperialism. But today, among the young generation of blacks in this country, an ideology is developing that says we cannot, in fact, accept the system. This differentiates the black militant from the black revolutionary. The black militant is one who yells and screams about the evils of the American system, himself trying to become a part of that system. The black revolutionary’s cry is not that he is excluded, but that he wants to destroy, overturn, and completely demolish the American system and start with a new one that allows humanity to flow. I stand, then, on the side of the black revolutionary and not on the side of the black militant. (From Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism)

Silco's demands to Jayce, along with his exclusion of most of the people from Zaun in the process of transforming society and his exploitation of them via shimmer, place him firmly on the side of the militant in this equation. Silco wants access to the fruits of Piltover's progress while only upsetting the structure where it negatively affects him. Again, while there's a lot I can enjoy in his character, I get frustrated with his insistence at being counter-revolutionary at every turn. I have a long reading list for him, and since he's in the afterlife now, he'll have time to get to it.

TLDR: Silco says he doesn't have to beat Piltover, just scare them. You know what's really scary, Silco? The masses of the people standing up and demanding that their oppression end, for fuck's sake.

[ind1c0lite]

Woe pearly be upon yee

[emily-mooon]

To make up for the fact that I didn’t do anything for them for Christmas, here’s another fake shoujo magazine chapter cover :]

pose ref ↓

HAHA ITS FROM ITAKISS!!!! Naoki and kotoko are nothing like the blorbs but I thought this pose worked for that scene (it’s apart of a much large page split into two images, but I decided to crop it cause the rest of it doesn’t matter tbh)

[xxplastic-cubexx]

oh im sorry can i help you im trying Not to think of my wife thanks

[ginalover]

Covers For Pride

[ectonurites]

seeing ur hometown mentioned out in the wild on this website is truly soooo scary... like wdym people on my dash are familiar enough with the town to rb a jokey post about it...

[langfield]

max getting three poc love interests ( yes, safi counts in my mind ) is SO good and a nice change of pace to the constant streak of white love interests in lis when you don’t have someone crying about how ‘max would never!’ in your ear

[amethystsoda]

I hope Susan and Rosemary from May 1996 are still happy 🥺

[thestarsarecool]

“When Linda first came over from America I was on the front cover of the Observer, I think it was, and someone sent it round to me and I was quite chuffed to be on there. I had it pinned on the wall or somethin’, and she said, ‘GOD,’ and she couldn’t believe I’d actually noticed I was on the cover. She said ‘You don’t seriously get into all that, do you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m sorry but I do. I’m not great like you thought I was. I’m just like…Christ, I’m so frigging ordinary, it’s terrifying.’”

— Paul McCartney, Melody Maker, April 1st, 1978

[mycological-mariner]

Whenever I talk about my family having an odd relationship with Catholicism I don’t mean how generations of religion affects individual members or whatever I’m talking about my great aunt who was a nun for years and quit to go be a Playboy bunny and pinup model in Chicago and told her 12 year old niece the best way to prevent face and neck wrinkles was to suck as many dicks as possible

[erotetica]

Hiii Lewie

Special thanks to @transarmand for making these great GIFs, which were a godsend when drafting that plaid. My other refs r below the cut in case anyone finds them useful:)

[chancheols]

I am normal and sane and okay and fine and normal and indifferent and neutral and cool and aloof and