#but i like reading the theories and stuff rather than actually contributing

[fireflysummers]

Final Thoughts on GO S2

I'm probably gonna pull back on discussing S2, at least publicly, after this. I did actually like a lot of the season, but it's triggering some of my religious trauma and also the fandom is already stressing me out. So here, let's have some final thoughts.

First and foremost: I am not a Gaiman simp. I've read a decent amount of his work: comics, short stories, essays, and novels. Aside from Good Omens, I've liked Coraline and The Graveyard Book the best by far, whereas American Gods just. Did Not Connect with me, even though it's should have, given the stuff I tend to enjoy.

However. Regardless of whether I like a given work (or even like how he adapted it, a la parts of The Sandman TV series), he is a veteran writer who has proven that he does, actually, know how to write a story with consistent characters.

Beyond that, I do actually believe that he's trying to do right by Pratchett, and loves and respects the story and characters they created together. He's generally shown up as an ally to a variety of social causes, and directly and respectfully responds to fans on Tumblr. While no saint, I feel that there is cause to give the benefit of the doubt that things will resolve satisfyingly in S3, and that there is Intention about some of the things in S2.

This, of course, does not absolve it of being "bad," but even here I think we need to articulate better the different types of "bad" that people are reacting to. There seems to roughly be three camps here: 1) People who thought it was "bad" because of how it ended, with the breakup and a lot of unresolved plot threads; 2) People who thought it was "bad" because it struggled on a technical level with its set, lighting, directorial choices, editing, etc; 3) People who thought it was "bad" because they felt the characterization was significantly off and that the internal logic of the series had been violated.

With regards to Point One, the only solution is to Wait and See. Judgement should be reserved until the story is properly finished--easier said than done, especially considering the current media landscape, and the number of series or franchises that fail to live up to their promises.

Point Two isn't something I understand well enough to contribute meaningfully, except that I suspect the pandemic affected this aspect the most and am willing to give it a bit more mercy. That aside, I for the most part I don't find it bad so much as not as good as S1. Except for the parts with epilepsy warnings, surely there could've been a better way to do that.

Point Three... that's the stumbling block for me, and I find it interesting that most of the folks who struggle with this point in particular are long time fans of the book.

I trust that instinct.

There are two different directions to go from here. The first is the assumption that these problems are a result of ego, carelessness, or lack of skill from the showrunners/writers/director. It's cynical but not unjustified. The second is the belief that the breaks in lore or characterization were intentional, building towards a much grander conspiracy. Of course, even in this case I don't think it forgives the lack of signposting that would indicate that this is a choice rather than an accident. It just makes it feel clumsy and poorly constructed, a major risk on a show that hasn't had its third season confirmed.*

However, regardless, it still feels salvageable. I've enjoyed reading a lot of meta on all this, and I've pulled some things from others (particularly That Theory by @ariaste), but I don't really want to put forth a single, defined theory myself. Instead, here's some questions I've got, why those questions are important (to me, at least). Actual theorizing comes after, and anybody who snidely mentions Sherlock in the comments or tags is going to get auto-blocked. Like seriously, I'm aware that some stuff is a stretch, but it's fun??? To theorize????? And I'm here for me and my peace of mind rather than trying to argue a point.

*I have some suspicions here, particularly with Gaiman stating that the decision from Amazon would come much faster than The Sandman's second season (which was four months). I don't know enough though to say if that's actually significant.

Questions

Who the fuck is telling this story?

This is the most important piece, in my opinion. There's this assumption when reading books (or research papers, newspapers, etc...) that the narrator who is writing the words is a non-presence, Neutral and objective. That's not the case, and an important part of literature critique is figuring out who the narrator is, and what their goals are. Oftentimes, the narrator and the author are the same person, but with Pratchett's work, particularly on Good Omens and Discworld, the Narrator was its own unique character.

This is why people struggle adapting Discworld to live action--that medium requires a Reason for having a Narrator, and especially in the age of method acting that's often considered immersion-breaking. Good Omens worked so well because they not only kept the Narrator, but they made Her God.

This added some really interesting new dimensions, such as the scene where Crowley speaks to God about his fall and the destruction of humanity. He doesn't receive an answer, but we're watching from God's perspective, so we as the audience know that She's listening.

Another advantage of making God the Narrator is that it justifies all the goofy little asides we get into the lives of minor characters (i.e. Leslie the Mailman), without losing focus. It helps the world feel like it’s full of people, rather than characters and plot contrivances, and the theme that individual people and their choices are important. The Narrator is such a central character of Good Omens that without it, the story struggles to stay focused.

It also highlights a key difference in the writing styles of the two authors. Pratchett’s work tends to introduce four or five totally unique plot threads that feel completely disjointed until the last act (if not even later), when it turns into a Chekhov’s Firing Squad. Plot twists around secret identities and backstabbing and schemes are relatively rare, as the omniscient Narrator doesn’t lie about the intentions of people or their actions.

Gaiman’s writing is typically not like that, to my knowledge. He buries characters in misdirection and hints, and you never know the true identity or motives until all the chips are down. It’s a perfectly valid way to approach storytelling, but it makes it jarring to see it in S2. The lack of a Narrator is a huge reason why S2 doesn’t feel like Good Omens to some folks.

My gut feeling is that the decision to shift from the original Narrator was highly intentional. It helps to obscure the thoughts and intentions of people, and it also muddles the insights that we’re supposed to take away. (I would have loved hearing God monologue about what’s going on in Jim’s head. I think it’d do a lot to make him seem less.... obnoxiously stupid.)

More than that, it brings up a reasonable potential plot point of: Where did God go? Why isn’t She present in the story? Even in her early appearance in the Job flashback, she doesn’t sound like the narrator for last season. After the first part of her speech (which Gabriel later quotes), her tone turns casual and condescending, which might line up with her being a bit of an asshole, it doesn’t line up with the whole “dealer of a mysterious card game who is always smiling”).

Also, I don’t think it’s safe to assume that nobody is telling the story either. Just because they’re not making their presence known doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and in a story like Good Omens, that’s concerning.

Wait, where's Satan?

Another person I saw while scrolling the tags pointed out that Satan is nowhere to be seen this season. He's really only mentioned in reference to a bet God made in Job, but then Crowley is the one on the ground causing mischief. There's no Hail Satan among demons (like Hastur and Ligur did at the start of S1).

That's might be because the writers didn't want us to think it was important (a la Hastur), but that feels off. Given that Satan speaks directly through the radio to Crowley in S1, complimenting him on his work, it's safe to say that he was at least aware of and involved in the goings-on in Hell. The fact that he wasn't even an worry for Beelzebub in abandoning their post? Feels weird.

(Also if you know where that post is, I'll happy credit + link)

What is Maggie?

Look, I love cute lesbians in love as much as the next queer, but I don't like Maggie. I don’t think she’s a person. Contextually, she’s a plot device, but I agree with That Essay that she might be an actual Plot Device.

Her characterization is simple and relatively shallow—a bit of an airhead, ray of sunshine that’s supposed to remind you of Aziraphale. When she describes her past to Nina, it’s almost robotic (also, her story implies it was Mr. Fell who first rented to her ancestor, not Mr. Fell’s great-grandfather like Nina implied). Her emotions are over-dramatic and seem to be turned on and off at random (scenes with her crying to Aziraphale about her woes had my “manipulator” senses going off for some reason).

When asked about a song, she not only IDs the song, its singer, and its year, but how and on what it was distributed. (Honestly thought this would’ve been something interesting, because she’s been pretty ditzy so far, it’d be interesting if she had like... an insane memory for music history.) And then she’s the one that sets Aziraphale on his little investigation by giving him the transformed records, while also planting the seed about her love troubles with Nina. Later, her advice to Crowley is... not awful, but feels insincere and a bit too forward, given her own self-proclaimed lack of relationship experience.

I don’t know what she is (a demon, hastur with amnesia in disguise, a literal plot device inserted by the current storyteller, etc...), but there’s something not right with her.

(Also the joke of “who listens to records anymore, it’s so old fashioned” just doesn’t land, lots of people buy records, and I’m saying this as somebody who has worked at a record store before.)

What's going on with Aziraphale?

There’s something Off about Aziraphale, and it’s not his choices at the end of the season. That makes total sense if you read him as somebody with severe religious trauma getting dragged back into the abusive system because other people need him and he’s been promised the ability to change things.

But I do think something is happening to his memory. Nearly all the flashbacks are from Aziraphale’s point of view and retelling, which means that they’re less reliable than God’s version of events in the previous season. Many of them don’t make logistical sense (post-church scene in 1941), depict Crowley as meaner or more sinister than we know he is, or frame events... weirdly. The scene with him trying food for the first time feels Really Bad, especially when the series has previously established that he’s a) prim and proper and b) his interest in food is one of the beautiful things that connect him to humanity, not some kind of gluttonous sin. Also he turns down alcohol.

Their meet-cute at the  start of the universe also doesn’t line up with their reactions to each other in Eden, or the fact that knowing each other Before has never come up or been hinted at anywhere ever. I don’t know what’s causing this to happen, only that Aziraphale repeatedly looks pensive when coming out of flashbacks, and Crowley is never there afterwards to corroborate said memories.

His actions also seem pretty inconsistent with what we know of him—i.e. I refuse to believe he would ever mistreat his books, even if they’re just old encyclopedias. Also, he feels a bit too...forceful in trying to get Nina and Maggie to fall in love? I mean, he didn’t exert that much direct influence on even Warlock, when he was actively hoping that the boy would turn out angelic rather than neutral.

I don’t think this removes his agency in that last decision, so much as explains how he was in such a vulnerable place at all. He still needs to apologize and fix things, because he messed up, and even if he hadn’t he still seriously hurt Crowley.

What's going on with Crowley?

There’s something Off about Crowley. The most obvious thing, of course, is his memories. At multiple points in the present day, characters state that they remember him or have met him before, only to be met with confusion. This is especially concerning given that he has a nigh photographic memory for faces (something mentioned in the book when he immediately IDs Mary Loquacious, 11 years after a 30 second conversation).

Overall, he seems to be better known by other supernatural entities this season, in ways that often tie him back to his angelic identity (i.e. saying they fought together in the war, Aziraphale stating he knew the angel he used to be, etc...). This doesn’t feel right, because S1 we see that Hell is largely apathetic towards his schemes, and definitely does not defer to him at any point in any capacity.

Then there’s the issue of his power level. It’s always been speculated that Crowley was a powerful angel prior to falling, when he mentions in S1 his involvement with star making, his seemingly unique ability to freeze time, and creating a pocket universe for Adam before the confrontation with Satan. He also has a tendency of breathing life into inanimate objects, like his plants or car. He also has the regular demonic skillset: miracles that can adjust physical appearance; the ability to change inanimate objects (like paintball guns into real guns); the ability to manifest clothing and similar items; and summon hellfire to his fingertips. This, plus the way he monologues to God with a degree of familiarity rather than reverence seems to indicate that he was Somebody Powerful and Important Before.

But in S2, his skills are significantly expanded upon. The miracle he and Aziraphale summon sets off alarms in heaven and hell, and it’s powerful enough to mask Gabriel from the Archangels. He summons a miniature sun to rain fire on Job, which is way bigger and flashier than anything we’ve seen him summon in S1. (If he needs fire, he alters the course of a dropping bomb, without creating one himself.)

Yet he’s able to cloak his presence so well he goes wholly unnoticed in heaven, or in front of heavenly agents on earth (i.e. the Job flashback). Muriel can’t clock him as a demon, or even as another supernatural being, despite their auras usually being pretty significant, such Aziraphale immediately sensing the archangels when they arrive.  He’s able to interfere with files that Muriel claimed required clearance (although I feel like that might just be a snark about Obeying Without Thinking? I would really need a Narrator to know.)

I might be misremembering, but I don’t think we’ve seen angels or demons transmogrify living beings before either. In the book, Crowley brings Aziraphale’s dove back to life after the failed magic show, and occasionally sinks ducks, but he doesn’t alter them? Not even Adam demonstrates that skill in S1. But he has no trouble turning Job’s children into lizards, however temporarily. Boy that would’ve been convenient during the flood. Or when the guard stopped then from getting to the air strip.

I might be misremembering, but I don’t think we’ve seen angels or demons transmogrify living beings before either. In the book, Crowley brings Aziraphale’s dove back to life after the failed magic show, and occasionally sinks ducks, but he doesn’t alter them? Not even Adam demonstrates that skill in S1. But he has no trouble turning Job’s children into lizards, however temporarily. Boy that would’ve been convenient during the flood. Or when the guard stopped then from getting to the air strip.

I don’t have any real issues with his characterization in the present day parts of S2, but there’s something weird happening with Crowley.

Where's all the people?

I really like a lot of the new characters, but how were there only like, 2.5 new humans named in the present day? Flashbacks don’t count bc the humans are all dead and can’t affect the story.

As much as I like Nina, she and Maggie don’t drive the story beyond being an occasional and awkwardly inserted plot contrivance? Both are actively robbed of their agency at several points, forced into situations that they could not have avoided or escaped. I’m not really sure what growth they’re expected to experience other than deciding not to date each other after everything. I literally can’t tell you anything about Nina other than that she remembers her regular’s orders, runs a coffee shop, and has a textbook abusive partner we never see. The only meaningful interactions they have are between those two, or in conversation with Aziraphale and Crowley.

Compare that to S1, where Anathema gets hit by Aziraphale and Crowley, but her primary relationships are with Newt, Adam, and Agnes Nutter (I think that counts as a relationship). We know that she’s got a wealthy family back in Puerto Rico, and that she was literally raised to save the world, and that she isn’t happy under all that pressure. Newt on the other hand is connected to not just Anathema, but Shadwell and Madame Tracy. He never even directly interacts with Aziraphale and Crowley. We know about his hobbies, his struggle to hold down a job, and his almost supernatural ability to destroy any electronics he touches. I don’t necessarily like how their relationship came together, but they were both very, very well fleshed out characters with unique backstories and goals. They weren’t just... waiting around to give Aziraphale and Crowley a new questline.

And while there’s no requirement to include a large cast of human characters that are exerting influence over the story, the lack of it is another aspect that makes this season feel not like Good Omens.

Also, it's just. Really weird to me that the events of S1 aren't really referenced at all? Like, Adam isn't mentioned, nor is Warlock. I don't expect them to keep track of the humans they met on the airfield for 20 minutes, but none of it is ever specifically referenced as far as I can tell, beyond Crowley threatening Gabriel. Like, I get that it's been a few years, but the pair caused a big enough disturbance that you'd expect some kind of ripples in their supernatural communities.

Promised by the Narrative (Obvious Chekhov's guns that I will be legitimately upset over if they do not go off)

A sincere apology from Aziraphale to Crowley that doesn't come with the expectation that Crowley will come back to him, but because he deserves an apology, even if the choices Aziraphale made were done with good intentions. Aziraphale does not expect forgiveness, and is shocked when Crowley grants it without hesitation.

A clear declaration of love from Aziraphale, which can't be rationalized away by either of them.

An "I'm Sorry" dance between Aziraphale and Crowley, but with greater sincerity and gravity. The most important piece is that they end up dancing together, which signifies a mutual apology and dedication to come together.

Since kissing is on the table, I expect an actual joyful, mutual kiss between these two assholes.

A shared cottage in South Downs.

Predictions/Theories (just some fun thoughts I've had)

When Adam declared that Satan was not his father, he didn't make himself not the antichrist, but accidentally crowned his human dad the King of Hell. Nobody knows this, because Adam doesn't have a good measure for "normal" supernatural situations, and Mr. Young because he's so "normal" that he explains away all the magical bullshit that's started going down.

When Adam declared that Satan was not his father, he erased Satan altogether. However, this left a vacuum in both power and reality. The defection of both Gabriel and Beelzebub only widens that crack. In an attempt to Fix things, reality is warping the story. Crowley has become leagues more powerful between S1 and S2, as the narrative is trying to force him into the role of his previous boss. Aziraphale is unknowingly being pulled into a similar version on the Other Side, perhaps to replace Gabriel or perhaps to replace God herself, who has been fairly absent in all this. The alterations to their memories or past have come about to keep the narrative running smoothly.

When the Metatron asks Nina whether anybody has ever asked for death, he was actually referring to Death, the sole remaining rider of the apocalypse.

If Maggie is indeed a Plot Device, it would be a fascinating exploration of Free Will to see her become aware of this (cue existential crisis), and then fall in love with Nina on her own terms, rather than because she was written that way.

Hastur will be back. Somehow.

The reason why S2 focuses so much on the supernatural characters is because S3 will be about how the events in S1 have changed the political landscape of heaven and hell. Angels are questioning their roles, demons are yearning for something more. It's scaring upper administration, and then the two most reliable folks in employment run away to alpha centauri. Recruiting Aziraphale and getting him back in line prevents him from becoming a martyr, control the range of his influence. The series reasserts its theme of choice and agency by highlighting that Aziraphale and Crowley aren't that special, they've just had the chance to live and grow, and that the others have free will too, if they want it.

The reason why they wanted to separate Aziraphale and Crowley, is not to get Aziraphale on his own, but to get Crowley on his own. He literally stopped time and made a pocket universe in front of Satan last season. He's powerful and dangerous and somebody wants to see that reigned in.

Wishlist (stuff I desperately want to see)

Crowley getting an audience with God and an opportunity to ask his questions, only to refuse to do so because he's found his own Answers and he no longer needs hers

Aziraphale and Crowley growing more into their book incarnations. Aziraphale becomes confident in his sense of morality, which he developed the hard way through millennia on earth besides humanity. He slowly learns what it means to be loved, unconditionally, but also is better at asserting and maintaining his boundaries. Crowley, still anxious and unwinding, works through his fear of abandonment, providing him opportunities to be kind and gentle and nurturing--all traits that he's aggressively hid since being a demon.

Hand holding. I know that Gaiman was referring to Ineffable Bureaucracy, but I still feel like we'd benefit from meaningful hand holding, especially since that got cut from the adaptation of the book.

Shifted focus away from the supernatural shenanigans, and back onto the humans that actually drive the story.

Cameos from S1 characters (if not a more substantial appearance).

The Four Other Riders of the Apocalypse.

Cursed Thoughts (why I shouldn't be allowed a social platform)

Ineffable Bureaucracy turns up in season 3 because Beelzebub got Gabriel pregnant somehow.

[cruelsister-moved2]

not trying to be a plagiarism apologist but I feel like a lot of ppl don't recognise that they're plagiarising bc they don't understand why u cite sources and therefore don't get how to do it properly. and idk if the focus on "copying/stealing" is actually constructive bc their teachers taught them to rewrite stuff in their own words so they don't understand the point of synthesising information.

the point is if ur actually contributing smth new then u NEED sources to underline that you didn't just make up what ur saying on the fly - rather than it being undesirable to admit to any ideas you didn't just dream up all on your own. and the contribution might just be summarising the existing literature, or applying existing ideas to a new context. actually coming up with new theory is the culmination of a lifetime of work.

I don't think we necessarily do anyone favours by pretending it's super obvious and intuitive. it's something you learn by doing, by writing progressively more original work as you get comfortable. the idea that information "belongs" to individuals is not necessarily constructive in the long run. obviously it's not okay to pass other people's work off as your own but understanding sources as proof texts rather than artist credits helps you to understand how you should interact with them. it's interesting to me that a lot of these ppl flip solely between just reading an article to you with different syntax vs just 100%making shit up out of nowhere which kind of tells you they think original work means doing the latter and when they understandably fail to do that all or even most of the time they resort to plagiarism

[nedjemetsenen]

Facts, Tutankhamen, and ChatGPT

So I’ve seen a couple people talk about how ChatGPT often gives inaccurate or incomplete answers to questions about historical stuff and I am a curious person by nature, so I went and asked it to tell me how King Tutankhamen died. This is what happened next along with commentary from me about the accuracy of this stuff! Please feel free to fact-check me on any of it! Egyptology is my hobby, not my profession. Also note that I did remove ChatGPT bits that didn’t actually give facts and were more general statements like “The mystery surrounding King Tut's death continues to captivate historians and Egyptologists”

Me: Give me a 200 word summary of how king tut died King Tutankhamun, popularly known as King Tut, was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who ruled during the 14th century BCE. While the exact cause of his demise is not conclusively determined, several theories exist. The most widely accepted theory suggests that King Tut died from complications resulting from a combination of factors. Recent scientific investigations, including CT scans and genetic analysis of his mummified remains, suggest that he suffered from a number of health issues, including a severe leg fracture that may have become infected. Additionally, genetic evidence indicates that Tut had a cleft palate and a clubfoot, which may have contributed to his physical difficulties. Furthermore, some researchers propose that Tutankhamun's weakened immune system, possibly due to genetic disorders resulting from generations of inbreeding among Egyptian royalty, made him more susceptible to infections. Some even suggest that malaria may have played a role in his demise, as traces of the disease were found in his DNA.

This is somewhat accurate? The broken leg and malaria are real and there is a theory that malaria caused or contributed to his death. Tutankhamun was also the product of generational incest, leading to a lot of health issue. However, reading this, you’d probably think he just got sick and died, but that is NOT the ‘most widely accepted theory’. I don’t actually know if one of those exists as of the time when I’m writing this (June 2023). You see, this explanation is missing some vital data. Let’s see if we can get Chat GPT to add it!

Me: I thought that his death was violent? I apologize for any confusion. While there have been speculations about a violent death for King Tut, the current scientific consensus leans more towards a non-violent cause. The examination of his mummified remains did not reveal any obvious signs of violence or trauma. However, it is important to note that some alternative theories exist. One hypothesis suggests that King Tutankhamun was murdered, possibly by a blow to the head. This theory is based on an X-ray taken in the 1960s that showed a fragment in Tut's skull. However, subsequent examinations and CT scans have cast doubt on this theory, as the fragment is now believed to be a result of the mummification process rather than a fatal injury. While the evidence does not strongly support the notion of a violent death, the possibility of foul play cannot be entirely ruled out. 

The bit about the murder theory is accurate. That was a popular theory, but I’m not sure if the lack of a pre- or peri-mortem head injury actually quashed the theory. All it did prove that a blow to the head wasn’t the way that he died. There are still facts that support the idea that something fishy was going on in Egypt around the time of his death and Tutankhamun was the son of a hated king. Read up on Tutankhamun’s widow, Ankhesenamun, if you want to know more. Her Wikipedia page is a pretty good summary of the basics.

That’s not the fun part of this answer, though. The fun part is the bit about there not being "any obvious signs of violence or trauma." To show why that's the fun part, here’s the next bit of my conversation with ChatGPT:

Me: What about his broken ribs? I apologize for any confusion in my previous responses. While there is no consensus on the exact cause of King Tut's death, recent studies have indeed suggested the presence of a significant injury, specifically broken ribs, which may have played a role in his demise. In 2014, a team of researchers conducted a thorough examination of King Tut's mummified remains using CT scans. The scans revealed that Tutankhamun had a fractured rib on the right side of his chest. The break appeared to have occurred shortly before his death. However, the scans did not provide definitive evidence as to whether the injury was a result of an accident or inflicted intentionally. Based on this finding, some experts propose that the broken rib could have been a contributing factor to King Tut's death. It is speculated that the injury may have caused internal bleeding, which, in combination with other health issues he was facing, could have led to complications and ultimately his demise. Nonetheless, the precise circumstances surrounding the injury remain a matter of speculation, and it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions about the specific events leading up to his death.

No obvious signs of violence or trauma, huh?

This reply is accurate, by the way. They did find that Tutankhamun has broken ribs and some people have theorized that he fell from a chariot while on a military campaign or that he got attacked by a hippo (a thing that did happen in ancient Egypt). Oddities about his mummy, which was very much an amateur job, give credence to the idea of a violent or at least odd death. If you want to know more, National Geographic’s documentary Tut’s Treasures: Hidden Secrets is a great, though slightly over-dramatic, watch (It’s on Disney+ and can probably be found elsewhere, too). For something that isn’t behind a paywall, here’s a 25-minute podcast from Youtube, which was also done by National Geographic.

The History of Egypt podcast also has hours of recent content about Tutankhamun because November 2022 marked the 100-year anniversary of the discovery of his tomb.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully you learned a bit about Egypt’s most famous Pharaoh and grew a bit more wary of Chat GPT. For full disclosure, I did ask it more questions and the results were hilariously wrong, but they include things about child loss, so I left them off this post.

[lutiaslayton]

So, I absolutely love your theory about the puzzles, so I wanted to ask… how do the hint coins come in? Because my sort of theory that bounces off yours is that they spawn as well to help with puzzles, but then there’s the fact that they have Layton’s personal stamp on them.

Ps.- could I incorporate your theory into an au I’ve been developing as long as I’ve been in this fandom? It just works so perfectly with it.

Hi! One of the many reasons behind the playthrough is precisely so I can see if some in-game details might help figure things out a bit better (and, well, avoid getting too deep into straight up making stuff up that would end up not only upsetting Ockham's Razor, but also possibly contradicting what is actually canon).

---

For now, my view is similar to yours: hint coins are created through the exact same process as puzzles themselves, and they are probably also made out of the same or similar stuff (which is, simply put, any type of matter that could originally form dust, but which is then repurposed in order to form a puzzle -- or, in our case, a hint coin).

The way I imagined it was that if the Azran Epileptic Magic Trees detected someone's particularly strong desperation at the need to solve a problem, then a hint coin might condense nearby. Read here: close to the person who summoned it, but hidden in such way that the person will not even realise that it's there most of the time. Just like hidden puzzles, hint coins may be formed out of the mortar between the bricks of a wall, or out of the dust that accumulated inside the holes of a decaying lamppost, or out of the humus present at the root of a bush, etc.

As for their design, I have yet to have something set for it, but here are two things that I recall from the top of my head:

Hint coins look different in the DS version of Curious Village than in other games; in the Japanese versions, also, their name was changed at least a few times (ヒントメダル, "Hint Medal", was used in the DS version of London Holiday, while it has been replaced with ひらめきコイン, "Inspiration Coin", in the mobile HD version). This means to me that there is some room for interpretation and that, among other things, the design of the hint coins may not be the one the UI shows us (the same way we probably shouldn't expect puzzles in-universe to look exactly the same as the versions we have to solve in-game).

There is this strange silver coin which looks like a hint coin but has an "R" on it that you can pick up in Miracle Mask. When you compare it with the previous point, this also raises the question of what is canon in-universe and what is merely in-game looks for consistency's sake. For all we know, perhaps hint coins can vary in not only pattern, but also in shape and size in-universe, just like puzzles themselves.

In short, we don't actually know if they truly all have Layton's logo on them. Perhaps some of them do. It depends whether the pattern appears during the hint coin's creation and should thus reflect the person responsible for making it appear, or if the pattern rather appears when someone picks it up, and the design should thus reflect the person who found it (which could be Layton's logo in most cases; but even then, it does not work in the case of the Miracle Mask flashbacks, for example).

---

Finally, about your last point: I would be absolutely honoured! A few friends here and there already started making references to it in their drawings and/or writing, and there is absolutely zero issue with that. If only because the Discord conversations I had with them contributed to expanding on the theory, this means that the theory also belongs in part to them as well! I would feel like lying if I said that this is "my" theory alone.

Even better, if the playthrough turns out to cement that theory as even more "makes way too much sense" than it already is (I have kept finding more and more suspicious dialogue just by having random playthroughs run in the background while I'm multitasking, without even paying attention most of the time), it would be stupid to forbid other Layton fans from depicting what would boil down to "look it's practically canon or at least you can't tell me this isn't canon." If it's canon, then it belongs to everybody.

TL;DR: Go wild buddy. If you really want to, you can give credit for the hard work made on the "discovery" and analysis, but you don't even need to. The only requirement I have is that I want a link to your AU so I can see the good content 👀

[tharizdun-03]

Oppenheimer Review

First of all, I think Oppenheimer is a technical masterpiece. An audiovisual marvel. It's Nolan's best work in that regard, a completely new level for him, and an incredible achievement. Editing-wise, it's remarkable too. People have said that the writing can be over-written and that it struggled to breathe. There are a lot of time jumps, and I didn't follow everything in detail, but it never struggled to hold my attention personally. I think that as long as you follow along overall, it doesn't really matter.

I love the little flashes of sparks and stuff here and there, and the consistent clapping and stomping. It adds to that feeling of inevitability, knowing what's coming and building up to it. Ludwig Göransson's score for this is absolutely fearsome to an insane degree. It's one of the best aspects of this film, and it wraps you in its blanket of existential dread from the very first scene and never lets go. And as much as this feels like it was the film Nolan was perhaps born to made, Cillian Murphy equally gave the performance of a lifetime. I think to those worried that this was going to be US imperalist propaganda, let me tell you that it is certainly not. There are some criticisms I have up ahead, but especially for an American film, they portrayed the communist characters very sympathetically, and was very clear about how dropping those bombs against a country who was going to surrender anyway was anything but a just act. In fact, this might be one of the most overtly anti-nuclear weapons movie made since the first Cold War.

In fact, talking about its politics for a bit. I wouldn't say it is leftist, but the movie is very sympathetic to leftism and incredibly damning of the red scare. Almost from the get go, Oppenheimer has to hide any sort of left wing beliefs that he has or any ties to the communist party. Oppenheimer actually takes time to show him organizing, unionizing his campus, discussing theory with commie comrades, funding the spanish civil war and helping refugees escape. They even frame the whole Los Alamos project like it's a sort of pseudo commune where everyone (yes, even women) gets to contribute to the little society they're resided in. That's very sympathetic to leftist perspectives for a mainstream movie. I think the movie almost goes so far as to portray most communists as empathetic and kind, whereas the anticommunists tend to be petty and vindictive (the scene where the guy decides not to bomb Kyoto because he had his honeymoon there). I'd also say that the movie is very much about the folly of centrism and apolitical science, and I think that even though the movie isn't explicitly saying "yay communism", I think Oppenheimer himself is consistently portrayed, in the final act especially, as never really having been a true communist and how that's a bad thing. I think Jean calls it from the beginning in the scene about reading das kapital, and he just refuses to take any stance on anything. Which, of course, is a consistent character trait of his that leads to his future actions. In fact, let's talk about that. The man himself.

I do think Oppenheimer is less of a character study, and more of an idea study. I think if you're looking to really get into Oppenheimer's head, it only foes so far. But if you see it as a general encapsulation of the events, rather than the person, and the ideas behind those, it succeeds. I think that disconnect prevents emotional investment of the personal kind, but I don't think it's that kind of movie. It calls for emotional investment of the existential kind. And I think, in a way, perhaps it's good. Perhaps it's good that we didn't get too deep into Oppenheimer's head or tried to make him too sympathetic. It's not a story about Oppenheimer. It's a story about the atomic bomb, and they only tell it through Oppenheimer. He is the vehicle, not the subject. It explores ideas, less so than people.

"You can’t commit the sin and then have us all feeling bad for you because it had consequences"

That is the moral center of the film.

Oppenheimer ego and cowardice is estabilished from the get-go and everything else follows. He can't commit politically or romantically. All theory, no practice. The communists saw him as a traitor (kitty pretty much explicitly said the issue was that he never saw a communist, and he suffered repercussions cause he detached from his political beliefs, not considering the moral implications of his practicing science). Right-wing government officials saw him as spineless and weak. The characters even say "nobody knows what you think." I think it was exceedingly interesting how he quickly abandon hid interest in communism and anti-imperialism (when matt damon's character confronts him) and how it is that lack of integrity that leads him to committing what he does.

Throughout the film there's a constant undercurring criticism of Oppenheimer's indecisiveness. How at every opportunity he could have done the right thing, and the consequences of not doing so. He tries to poison his professor. He allows his colleague to work on the hydrogen bomb. He never apologizes for the bombings, and yet the guilt eats away at him only after he's made the bomb. And even then he denies it. He compartmentalizes it away. You're not supposed to feel for him. His guilt was paper-thin, wanting to present himself as a martyr. He's a coward and a narcissist.

I think that what prevents personal emotional investment is that we rarely actually got a look into his head. It's a lot of you have to pick up what the movie thinks about him, but we don't see things from his perspective, like from being really embedded in how he sees everything. And again, I think it's good cause it's not about his struggle, but about how he played a part in the larger story. We don't want to identify with him too strongly. But sometimes it makes it so that the film can't properly look at everything. Not just in that we don't get to know Oppenheimer's specific self-conflicted thoughts but instead they keep it vague.

But I also do think it erases Japanese and Native American voices regarding nuclear testing and detonations. In fact, pacific islanders were also severely impacted by nuclear testing under the Pacific Proving Grounds. At least 318 bombs were dropped on ancestral homes and people. The movie does, of course, say that the bombings (overall) were bad. We all know that. But I think it's terribly reductive when to this criticism people just say "uuh, did you just want to see japanese people get burnt to crisps lmaoo". Like, no. But I do think Nolan only symbolically annihilating literally everyone victimized by the production and subsequent bombings is an inherent pitfall by taking this approach. We don't see the Hispanic and indigenous people whose land was stolen and poisoned to build the bomb. We don't see a single face from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

And I do think that was a bad call. In fact, I think natives tried reaching out to Nolan to at least be acknowledged in the film. Which, if true, isn't a good look. Obviously, him seeing the atomic bomb basically wherever he looks and the skin rotting off of people infront of him, I recognize. That's not what I'm talking aboutl But there is a scene where he can't even look at photographs of victims of the bomb, and by proxy, neither can the film. It limits itself only to Oppenheimer's guilt while never giving the actual victims any voice whatsoever. And I think this is important to bring light to. 

I also think that we didn't really dig into what must've been extreme inner turmoil for a Jewish man to build a weapon he thinks will end the war, but then the movie doesn't actually explore it. Not that it should be the main conflict, but it's as if they didn't even tie him being Jewish to wanting to defeat the Nazis and that feels like a stronger connection they should've made, right?

Also, the women in this movie don't really get much to do. Florence's character mostly had sex and then died, which is a shame, cause there was some sort of sadness there that could've been something but we never looked at it. Even Emily Blunt's scenes, which she act out very well, lack proper build-up.

P.S. I think if you avoid Oppenheimer because you're a leftist yet flock to Barbie, the most corporatized depiction of feminism ever where capitalism can't be addressed and the patriarchy is reduced to anti gender equality (completely dismissing intersectionality), then you need to work on stop identifying so much with your pre-concieved biases so that it doesn't affect your media literacy. Representation is not glorification. (last time i'll talk about barbie, sorry. i just see a lot of dumb oppenheimer takes when there are legitimate criticisms you can focus on instead)

Overall, it's a great film tho. Technically, it's Nolan's magnum opus. I think the movie not being much angrier and giving a slice to the people actually victimized instead of being utterly disinterested in such, or not allowing us to actually get into Oppenheimer's head (nolan very much picked the middle road, not committing to either. ironically, like oppenheimer himself often did lol), prevents it from being an all time great classic for me. It would've needed a bit more bite. 

But I'm very impressed by Nolan's damning of imperialism's hunger for unnecessary war and destruction, the red scare mass hysteria, the consistent persecution of communists, and how how anything remotely left wing is seen as anti-american which cruelly exposes how being "american" is identifying with the lust and acceptance of the empires' war crimes.

[canmom]

like. you know. viewing life by way of performance of this or that category is not exactly a new sentiment. authors have been getting into that one since long before i was born. I've read my share of allegorical stories about masks.

but anyway. last night i went to a munch for the first time, which of you're not familiar is bdsm speak for a social gathering. i had a good time, thanks! kink people are, it turns out, mostly a species of nerd, and if there's a type of person i naturally get on with, it's nerdy trans women. sometimes hot women are very excited to talk about bicycles, and i for one am glad for this. anyway, this is just context.

one thing I have often found a little disconcerting when approaching kink related stuff is that everyone seems to have a very keen idea of how they fit into various boxes. there's quite a lot of boxes fitting all kinds of different scenario and fantasy. and me being a perpetual contrarian, i am often left wondering, why is it like this? why is everyone either a dom or a sub, top or bottom, etc etc? how is everyone so damn sure of it?

i witnessed a conversation which, while it did not directly address any such thing, did feel like it proved enlightening. a girl was being teased for claiming to be a top when she clearly wasn't. she was evidently enjoying it, feigning indignation, just as her interlocutor (forgive me, i can't help using words like interlocutor) was feigning annoyance at her antics, a back and forth that naturally led up to a kiss. it felt to me like i was watching a movie, or studying animation: the gestures and body language, tilt of head or lean forwards, the rhythm of the scene, the acting.

and obviously, or so it seems now, it felt like acting because it was. it was a scene that both 'players' were happy to perform for each other and everyone else at the table. i don't mean that it was scripted, but that they got to express the kind of 'character' they wanted. as a newbie onlooker, i played my role too, which was simply laughing at the appropriate moments.

now (this is the ten in the kishōtenketsu), i have in the past written about roleplaying theory - maybe on here, maybe somewhere else? anyway, i tend to look at it through analogy with two related art forms, which are improv comedy and pro wrestling.

improv - and please forgive me if I make any theory errors here, it's been a hot minute - tells you to 'yes, and': to keep the momentum of the scene going by taking what has been contributed to the fiction so far and adding to it, rather than negating a contribution. it further has the concept of an 'offer': you introduce an idea with some potential and hand it off to the other person to iterate on.

wrestling is a kind of athletic improv show, and it has its own forest of complicated jargon, which i know a fair bit about despite not watching wrestling. one of them is to 'sell': when a wrestler performs an attack, the other wrestler's job is to act like they've been hit, by flinching, staggering, etc. then there is the 'gimmick' - the idea of the wrestler's character, which must also be sold with the help of their partner, e.g. by commenting on it, or having some emotional reaction. the aim is to 'get over' by having the audience buy in and respond appropriately (e.g. cheering or booing).

both of these constructs are applicable to roleplaying games - both TTRPGs and informal MMO roleplaying. when you are playing a character, you have a character concept you want to 'get over' to the other characters. as a player in a roleplaying game, you also have the job of helping the other players to convey their character. how do you do this? by reacting to stuff (in character, but also out), and weaving it into the story so that it affects other things. nothing is 'real' in an RPG until it's acknowledged by someone else. in TTRPGs, that someone else tends to be the GM, but it can and should also be the other player characters. very few game texts actually spell this out, with the only exception I can think of being Chuubo's which actually formalises a bit.

how do you go about doing this in practice? that's where the improv principles come in. some RPGs, like Fiasco, have an explicit scene framing mechanic, where a player is given narrative authority to set up an interaction. this is, in improv terms, the offer. but even without such a mechanic explicitly being in the rules, you have the opportunity to create setups and follow through on them by adding something new, fitting the bounds of the scene. you're not aiming for comedy most of the time, but you're still fundamentally playing 'yes, and'.

ok, so. every conversation is kind of the same, right? here is my autistic-ass metaphor: it's a game, you have a role to play, you're trying to get over your 'character' for this interaction, and facilitating other people in getting over theirs. the more you interact with a person, the more you get a sense of the dynamic you tend to play. when you meet someone or indeed start a new conversation you're making offers: here's a thing i could talk with you about, which is to say, a role to play for this interaction. when you say something, you try to leave an opening to respond, or provide a natural branch point to change topic. just as your character in a roleplaying game (or for that matter a novel) gets more substantial and multi-dimensional the more situations you put them in, the more you interact with someone the more complex a role you can play with them. (something something Shannon entropy)

crucially roleplaying doesn't require predictability. there are always multiple ways to take something forwards, depending what specifically you 'yes and' or 'no but' with.

ok, but then, returning to the beginning (it's ketsu time!), all these roles - well, why does D&D have classes, Apocalypse World have playbooks, Fiasco its tables of archetypes? well, they're prompts - simple stories that can help you get past the blank page problem, and inject certain ideas into the story when needed. playing a class in a game doesn't say anything in particular about 'who you are', any more than who you play in a fighting game. if you find you like playing certain characters or classes more than others, you might end up with a 'main', but that's only something you figure out by trying it, and it's not some kind of eternal commitment.

by the same token... well, it pretty much writes itself from here, right?

I've probably just reinvented judith butler but nerdier, but hey, the autism. anyway I'm already doing this plenty - by various word choices, by repeatedly telling you I'm autistic and whathaveyou (i didn't always do that), I'm pretty much setting up some gimmicks right here in this post. and every post on this blog. the people who are really good at posting, and equally socialising, seem to do this kind of effortlessly! but i think the evidence seems to be it can be learned. I can try out different builds. if it doesn't work, well, gg, I'll learn from it for next time - and if it's not fun... well, i don't need to play that class again. that's all this big intimidating sexuality thing actually is.

it was literally that simple! i had all the blocks already i just had to put them together! maddening

everything is roleplaying, except roleplaying, which is improv. it's all so obvious when you put it that way...

[prodentimoffernow]

ProDentim Reviews - Should You Use Dental Probiotics! Honest Truth Exposed (2023 Update)

I worked with ProDentim all night. Through what medium do cronies stumble upon noted Teeth Health Supplement tricks and traps? That has been an usual refresher to remind you your topic can work. That wasn't valid proof. This will help lower your Teeth Health Supplement bills. This is a way to chewing that. That is a secret. The garage was air tight. That is an organic solution to the quandary. Excuse me, but I Allow this foolish source of truth and justice. Objectively, this is my 2 cents. It's the one that got away.

We need to create this action that builds on this realm. I know it and I know that. I know that banality ProDentim Order Now has a fabulous consumer cachet. When I remember using it, that has been a sort of a negative experience. Agreed, "A stitch in time saves nine." There are way too few reactions in this department. That was just a lot of flattery. A doing that works one day might not work the next. Billions of dollars are being poured into finding a new ProDentim. Regardless of what else is happening with this modulation, there is always that whatsis. They are made up of it. I collaborated with them on this. This formula has been used in gobs of major corporations. It gives your ProDentim Buy Now several credibility. I'm seeking definite data. Other than doing it, that also works for that fact. Without going into a lot of extra details: I am wandering in the wilderness. I did what I was told.

Each of these steps in the development of that familiar tune can contribute to that theory. In spite of that, was this easy? That was rare craftsmanship. It's surely significant to have that. Why does that shock anybody any more? I dwell on the phase because what an honor that is. I certainly have a predicament with some advantage. That's the time to play the final ProDentim Reviews card. Isn't that the actual surprise? This essay might not make sense to a lot of critics. Using that does sound easy or again, heaps of alliances feel this using that is unethical. Kind of funny, don't you imagine? From what I guess about that, here are the least essential factors you have to know when it comes to doing that. My suggestion actually brings together the entire concept of some illustration.

This takes time. We'll go all the way as if take it or leave it. Using this is rather impressive. You may expect that I don't have a clue about what I'm talking about in regard to that. If this sounds like something this interests you, let's embark on that journey. I may need to blow it wide open. They need good quality control. This secret does, surely, need a lot of things. Has there ever been a troublesome problem like this? If you're persistent, I assure you my question will pay off. Everyone, it seems, believes this has the right stuff. It world wide web detail sorta boggles the mind.

Visit Official Site: https://www.outlookindia.com/outlook-spotlight/prodentim-official-website-price-update-2023-prodentim-truth-surprise-you-must-read-this-news-272517

[writingwithcolor]

(1/2) In a story about an MC who rebels against a subjugating empire, forms a kingdom of her own, and then proceeds to go to war to liberate and form alliances with other subjugated kingdoms and peoples, I want to add a Jewish man to the supporting cast as a trusted advisor and friend who grounds her more aggressive political and military strategies. I realized as I wrote his inclusion into the plot, that I was assuming the Jewish people in this setting would be in a diaspora wanting to be...

(2/2) ...united again, since the unjust empire is inspired by the Roman one. What are some things that I, as a Latino Christian, should be aware of about modern Jewish thoughts and opinions on this time? Is this a story that you would want told, or would certain aspects of Jewish tradition/culture/religion make it an arc that I should avoid? If that's the case, what are some arcs that you would like to see this character go through? Would a deposed king reclaiming his throne be better?

Jewish advisor during a rebellion

I'm laughing at myself because I'm already attracted to your Jewish trusted advisor man character because I am predictable, oh no -- but anyway I really love this question. The main thing that jumps out at me, and it sounds like this is definitely already on your mind, is to make sure this man is part of the rest of us instead of being isolated with no other Jewish people in his life (after all, even someone who's the only Jewish person in the room has memories of their upbringing and/or opinions about Jewish celebrities and historical figures.) 

So if he has even one family member to go home to or another Jewish man that he plays a made-up board game with, that will contribute to making sure he's a fleshed-out character rather than "I needed someone to be smart and talking in a gentile leader's ear but who has nothing else going on in his own life" (which no matter how flattering of a portrayal you make it, has Grima Wormtongue overtones and it's probably best to veer away from that.)

Some things I can see happening to this character:

As a result of all the turmoil, he ends up taking care of a child or two who are Jewish and lost their family/families in the rebellion, providing them a safe place to feel nurtured and stay in the community

He's helping the (presumably gentile?) queen but also does stuff to make sure his own community is rebuilt like maybe if they weren't allowed to have a real synagogue under the empire, he helps organize getting one built finally. Or maybe if it was destroyed in the war, etc. etc. insert same.

--Shira

I love this idea and all of Shira’s suggestions! Giving him a way to be part of the wider Jewish community would be perfect.

I agree the main trope to avoid would be string-pulling, i.e. the character covertly and self-interestedly controlling political outcomes. But I think this will be easy to avoid in the context of your story just by making sure his suggestions are a net positive for both Jewish and non-Jewish people.

There was another ask recently where I wrote (fangirled) about the history of Jewish social activists, so that might be relevant for you as well:

Writing a secret cult controlling the government without reminding the audience of antisemitic conspiracy theories

 Also, not sure what the others think but this character kind of reminds me of Mordechai from Megillat Esther? He was kind of an advisor to Queen Esther in stopping the genocide of the Jewish people, often by bringing her information which, as queen, she wouldn’t normally have had access to. I feel like this could potentially strike a similar chord if it’s hard for your MC to know what people on the street are really saying due to her being the literal leader of the revolution, so that’s someone for you to potentially look into (although I’m not sure what that means for your crush as Mordechai is about 100 in the story – sorry, Shira!).

Character Arc

I just noticed that you also asked about what arcs this character would go through. I think it’s really cool that you want your Jewish character to have an arc rather than simply be there in the background for the growth of your MC! Any arc that best fits your narrative and drives home your message would be fine. The only thing I can think to watch out for is an arc that could be construed as ‘finding Jesus,’ which is not what we need in any Jewish character. 

Obviously, an arc that involves him giving up Torah commandments or discovering that Christmas is what makes us human wouldn’t be ideal, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you were going for anyway! I’d say it is possible to give someone a Christian-centred arc more subtly and without meaning to. If he starts as someone who is fastidious and hard-line about obeying rules and ends on an ‘all you need is love’ note, that could also be read as a shift towards a Christian mindset – probably more so by anti-Semites than by Jewish people, who usually understand that there is plenty of love in our beliefs (fun fact: ‘Jesus replaced the Torah with the concept of love’ was an actual line from my high school Religious Studies textbook). 

If his arc involves a change in his understanding of anything remotely spiritual, such as death or why there are good and evil in the world, I would recommend doing research to ensure that that change is in line with his culture and religion. Christian ideas about these matters are so ubiquitous that it’s easy to think you’ve written from a neutral standpoint, when actually whoops – your character has found Jesus.

Good luck with your story 😊

-Shoshi

[thatfrenchacademic]

On PhD research questions and the agony of, you know, finding one.

So recently I got two pretty similar questions, and realized I had this way-too-long post in my drafts on the topic, that I had never published because I didn’t feel particuarly qualified to give any definitive answer on anything PhD-related. I still absolutely do not feel qualified, tbf, so this is more me sharing the lessons learnt from my experience, and the experience of friends who went through the same process of finding the right research question. 

TL;DR : If I sum up all the (good) advice I have been given as a PhD student regarding what a good research question for a PhD project is, I end with this checklist :

It is new : we do not have the answer yet, although nearby questions may have been adressed.

It is important : or in the sweet, sweet words of a Professor of mine : “your research being interesting does not give it a point” (ouch). In kinder words : it must matter to you, but also to others ! (maybe less if you are self-funding...? Unsure)

It is doable : consider the logistics, the time frame, the money required. All questions matter, not all can be answered by you, right now.

It advances your field : even as a small increment. Maybe it’s a new idea, maybe it’s a new approach, maybe it’s a new case, maybe it’s a new factor, maybe it’s a new voice. But it is new.

It captured your attention won’t. let. it. go. you can see yourself working on it for a fairly long time. IT must matter to you, not necessarily one a personal level (a thesis is not your whole life!), but at least on an intellectual one.

(Way longer explanation and reflections under the cut!)

I really encourage anyone who would like to add their own points, their own perspective, their own experience, if you see that something has not been covered (which is definitely the case, since I draw from a limited experience here). 

1. First, how long will be your PhD ? Depending on the field and University/program, they can range from 3 to 7 years. You want to do something which will be tractable in the time you are alloted. 

2. Second, a PhD is... surprisingly underwhelming regarding the size of the contribution we are likely to make ?? Most of the time, we do not revolutionize the field or present a groundbreaking theory which will change the entire understanding of the discipline (disappointing, I know...). I think as undergrad and grad/master’s students, we are often misguided in what we consider “good/important research”, because what we have read so far, academically, has been the Important Stuff. The big names, the paradygme-shifting publications, the stuff that That One Researcher in your discipline worked on, that Changed Things. But that is the work of a whole life. That One Researcher probably published this work at 40 yo, with research assistants, after a life of letting it mature through successive works. But that is not what academic research is, in general. If there is one thing that both Kuhn and Popper agree on, it is that science moves in slow, slow increments, one stone after the other. Your PhD will be a few bricks, not a whole house, and that is FINE. That is what is expected.

3. More than being big and large, our research question and the answer we plan on providing must matter. It brings something new. Something small can suffice, if it is clearly new and necessary. Now, what is “new and necessary” depends on the field. Different field focus on different things at different times. Have a look at the titles of the thesis of current PhD students at Unviersities which would be of interest to you, they can give you some insight on what is likely to be funded and considered doable as a PhD student in your field right now. 

3. A research question is generally one to which... we can provide an answer. Which sounds obvious, but often, one starts or wants to do a PhD with a research topic, more than a research question (heaven knows I did). And often, for the aforementioned reasons, the actual question covers only a portion of the topic. From my experience, a good way to see if you have a research question rather than a research topic is to ask yourself : what would satiate my curiosity ? What sort of answer, of data, of finding, of theory, of arguments, would make me go “Aha, there is the answer! ALRIGHT, NEXT”. If there is none, if you cannot envision what an answer would look like (Without getting into whether this is the right answer or not!) then you do not have a research question, you have a research topic, and you need to narrow it down, focus on one of the many questions (itself can be made up of a few different sub questions!) and envision what an answer would look like. 

4. It bugs you. That is the only way I can describe the “right” question for a PhD  research, and I think the ultimate test to see if your research question is right for you, and not just right for Academia. This is the “unofficial part”, that is not in the ~serious Research Method books~, but it’s my take on it. It makes you go : “No but seriously, why is that???”, “Ok, but really, there is no answer yet and we are fine with that ?”, “I know it is not THE issue, but still, we should look into it no???”. Not like it keeps you awake and makes you loose appetite, it’s not your obsession, but it just makes you frown when you read article that get close to, but does not, actually give and answer. Like, come ooon. It bugs you. It is the right level of slightly stubborn, persisting intellectual curiosity that will get you through the rough patches, without making you loose your mind when it, inevitably, does not go as expected.  

To conclude, your research question is liekly to change and shift during your PhD. What you are looking for, in a PhD proposal, is more something that can show a selection Committe “I know what I want to research, and I know how to come up with a pertinent research question”. It does not have to be a beacon of perfection substance-wise, it needs to show that you know what you are getting in. 

[ramshacklefey]

Ohhh yeah, the whole structure of academic jobs and publishing is fucky.

And the fuckiest part is that the fact that we aren't paid directly by journals for our work (writing OR reviewing) is supposed to help insulate us against perverse incentives. And maybe it was at one point?

Here's what it actually looks like in my field (philosophy) now though:

I write a paper.

I decide which journal to send it to first. My choice is based on the journal's focus topic and prestige.

I send it in.

The journal receives my paper and someone looks over the abstract to see what I'm writing about and decide if it fits with their publication in general.

They contact two other academics who are known for their research on this topic and ask them to review it. I don't know how the list for this is generated.

Those two people read my paper and decide whether they think my argument is good enough to publish. Their decision is supposed to be based on whether my paper makes a good contribution to the literature (not whether they agree with me).

They recommend that the paper either be accepted, revised, or rejected.

If it's accepted the journal publishes it.

If not, I begin this process over with another journal, working down the prestige ladder. We're not allowed to submit to multiple publishers at once.

Theoretically, this provides two layers of protection for me.

Firstly, my university is paying me to do research. But the administration at my university is not qualified to judge the quality of my work, so they rely on the peer review system to tell them whether I'm actually doing my job well. This protects me from things like my university administration firing me because they don't get my work, or my department head firing me because they don't like my work.

Secondly, journals cannot directly control whether I'm getting paid. I'm employed by the university, rather than freelancing for the journals. This (theoretically) keeps me from being completely at their mercy, giving me time and space to work without worrying about where my next pay check is coming from.

In theory, this means that getting published is a meritocratic process, with only the best research actually getting published, and therefore the best researchers getting to keep writing.

In practice, journals have all of academia by the balls.

In practice, getting published a lot is more a matter of luck than anyone admits.

In practice, people who are able to churn out a steady stream of material okayish material are more likely to have a good CV than people who have written a small number of really good papers.

In practice, if your specific sub-field is small enough, there may only be a handful of people doing all of the peer reviewing.

In practice, journals want to publish stuff that's currently fashionable.

In practice, a paper that makes a small, uninteresting point that plays within safe boundaries is more likely to get published than something that challenges major assumptions of a field.

lotta academics have bought into the idea that predatory journals only exist because people don't know better, rather than because there are structural pressures encouraging publishing at any cost (incl. a literal monetary cost) in order to generate a line on a CV. one danger in believing that these journals publish only the ignorant or uninformed is that people come to believe that they and their respected colleagues are above all that, because they're considering publication to be an unbiased referendum on the quality of the work and not analysing the material conditions at play (the academic's career and professional interests, the university's financial and cultural capital, the journal as a business entity, &c).

the difference between a 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' academic is not that the former was inherently more deserving or smarter or harder-working... much more to do with luck, demographic privileges (which is to say also luck), and ability and willingness to work the system, including by generating publishable and published results. you can't get rid of predatory publishing so long as publication is a structural barrier to raises, job security, & reputation, & thinking that you personally are better than or smarter than some mythical category of Lesser Intellectuals based on what journal you publish in is just self-serving and naïve

[lochrannn]

Maybe how to stick to finishing your wip? Setting up fic goals? I have a tendency to abandon my wips for stupid reasons, start something new and so on and I hate it.

Mmmhh, I think this one is hard to answer, cause I really am not usually the type of person who even starts a job, let alone finishes it. Many of my irl friends would point to me as the person they know who procrastinates the hardest on basically anything.

But I think I've worked out why, I personally, stick with writing fic and usually don't abandon anything and write it within a relatively short amount of time.

I have a philosophy degree.

And though I loved studying philosophy, writing fucking essays and term papers was just genuinely the hardest mental work I've ever needed to do. Cause, yeah, sure you can research shit and bring together a lot of existing theories and ideas. But, anon, I tell you, I was actually quite good and suddenly had some ambition about a thing when I was at college (after spending all of my high school years coasting on the privilege of being okay smart and having highly educated parents), which meant I couldn't just phone it in, or didn't even just want to do a decent job, I wanted to write something good.

And fuck that was hard. I spent months tinkering with a paper, having found a subject I found interesting and trying to work out what my angle is, what my unique contribution could be. That basically meant staring at a flickering curser for hours and hours and hours and "thinking" (read panicking).

But somehow I managed to get a decent degree, said thanks no thanks to the offer of doing a phd and got the hell out of college to go do other stuff for a while and then finally trained in a very solid job that allows me to do relatively challanging work with cool people, but I never really have to produce anything or come up with major ideas on my own and that suits me just fine.

However, I accidently stumbled on writing fic as a thing that I enjoy creating/producing, and because we all basically know how a narrative works, most of the points beats along the way are easily set (I don't usually deliberately lift those whole-sale from a different narrative, except for my pride and prejudice and sense and sensibility inspired aus) but I don't kid myself into believing that my fic is in anyway particularly original.

So yeah, I just know which beats I want to hit and then I write what needs to happen to get there. Occasionally that's just pretty straight forward, not too flashy that I can't actually commit to it, but just well enough that, at least that's how it seems to me, the story flows and my "style" or "voice" kind of fades into the background. And then occasionally I come up with something that really makes me quite happy and I personally find rather artistic (like in the fic I posted yesterday, there was a bit that made me feel things). And then it's a bit more challanging but effectively as satisfying as painting by numbers.

So it doesn't scare me to have a story that I "need" to finish, cause I know I can and I know I will. I also have spent years and decades finding cool fics that got abandonned halfway through and hoping for years that they might get updated, so, maybe a little bit of guilt is also spurring me along.

Oh, and honestly, find yourself someone to commit to. Tell someone about your wips (unless of course this puts uncomfortable amounts of pressure on you) and then finish it for them. I talk to @pepperf about most of the stories I plan (unless I want them to be a surprise for her as well), even though she's much nicer than me and doesn't bully me into continue writing and if I abandonned somehting would never say anything. And I made a wip post that I feel I've committed to, because some of them are prompts and just generally I fear I could disappoint some anonymous reader of mine.

I guess, mostly if you want a tip, don't put yourself under too much pressure, but put yourself under a little pressure. Find yourself a hype person, or be your own hype person and feel excited about your stories.

I am, as some anon shokedly realised a few months back, probably a decade or so older than the majority of the people who frequent this website (I've been here for twelve years, I have squatter's rights) so through a mixture of always having a mildly inflated ego and age, I think I have a decent amount of confidence. And I have confidence in my stories. Yeah, I can easily tell how they compare to better writers, but I also think they are perfectly adequate and entertaining and they're the sort of thing I would want to read.

So, yeah, put a little bit but not too much pressure on yourself, and indulge yourself. It's supposed to be a hobby.

(oh, also, I only ever start writing when I'm relatively sure I've actually got enough of an idea to finish it. Everything else is not an abandonned wip, it's a wonderful day dream <3)

[twocubes]

The thing is. The further I get into this, the more I wonder, how exactly you're supposed to learn this stuff if you aren't in some sort of glitch-state outside of the normal functioning of the world.

Like.

No one was ever willing to teach me category theory, so I did what I could on my own. Then I had a breakdown, and part of either that or me trying to maintain myself through it was me going through the Handbook of Categorical Algebra and doing all the exercises. Then more stuff happened, I got much worse and then a little better, and now I'm like. Working 10-14 hour days every day and going through this thousand-page book at roughly 10 pages a day, which I'm told is on the upper edge of "possible".

Which I can only do because I'm not doing anything else all day.

Like. I've been surviving solely by the goodwill of family and friends (and all of you) for years as I go in and out of sanity. Right now I'm surviving because I did a friend a favor and she agreed to pay my (significantly below market rate) rent for a year, and using EBT for food (and the money the people who have kindly contributed to my patreon despite me only doing... yknow... this blog).

I know I've lost, like, maybe 4 years of my life to madness right now. But, if I'd spent those, idk, working as a TA, taking classes, or working somewhere and being a part of the world, wouldn't I have lost just as much time? Would I really have gotten that much further? Hell, would I even have gotten that far at all?

People in reality — I mean. People who learned ct from actual classes, or from actual teachers, people who exist in the world rather than seemingly solely as sequences of text and occasional images on the internet. They (you) must have some other way to learn this stuff, no? Like. There must be something I'm missing. Like. If it ends up taking a decade of dedicated study to do anything with this while also doing something else, how would it ever be worth it, by the rules of society?

There must be some intermediate steps I'm missing.

Even today, on a "relaxed" day where I only finished the chapter I'd started the day before, I worked from 7AM to 2PM without taking a break. There are 93 chapters in the elephant. And that's, like, the "dead" body of topos theory, the part that's attained a sufficient level of development that it can reliably be considered like, "finished". Complete, from the perspective of wanting to apply it to anything. Put this on top of, like, the Handbook, and that's like, what, 150 chapters-worth of hard theory? If you spend a couple of hours on them every day, that means, what, 750 days of dedication? If you take breaks on weekends it goes up to over a thousand days. So like, three years, I guess, of dedicated, no-reward, daily study. If you're doing one class a week and one thing of homework it goes up to what, 6 years? Of grad-level work? At the shortest. I mean I did a bunch of other cat stuff too...

I'm a nonsensical parasite. I live by the grace of friends who do not require me to daily commit hours of labor to proving the value of my continued existence. I'm trying very hard to finish this thing and produce something from it so I can claw my way back into reality. On some level I understand what I am doing as a last-resort act of desperation that I am trying to do as quickly as possible before I break down permanently or my luck runs out. And despite all that,

Despite all that I'm haunted by the sense that there is in fact no other way to study what I'm studying. That the only way to have enough time to read through the Elephant is to exist outside of reality.

[fansplaining]

Catching up on old episodes and surprised by my own level of upset when, in a passing comment, you spoke dismissively in your "Canon? What Canon" episode of people who "just reblog things from a show" who consider themselves in the fandom, implying that they shouldn't really consider themselves in fandom. I don't usually have the bandwidth to be a content creator, but I enjoy diving into fan content, fan meta, and definitely fanfic even if I'm not a creator. Even if I'll never be someone who contributes to major fan dialogue, I follow the debates, theories, and conversations and feel like I have a stake in them. I suppose I'm interested in some clarification on your point

Dear nonny, we’re sorry that you got that impression from us—and we’re surprised, because this is actually one of the things that we’ve talked a LOT about. Neither of us hold the opinion that you can’t be a fan if you “just reblog things from the show.”  In the specific instance you’re citing, what Elizabeth said in particular was that Tumblr privileges being an omnivorous and casual fan—that is, being a person who consumes a lot of different shows all at once, and doesn’t particularly focus on any one, whereas historically online people were segregated into individual communities focused on specific shows and one had to seek out fannish content quite specifically. As Elizabeth said in the episode, Tumblr centers you as a fan rather than centering the fandom—so historically you would go to a Buffy message board and talk (or read!) about Buffy and while you were there you wouldn’t really engage with any other shows, whereas on Tumblr, the focus is on you as a person who curates multiple shows/movies/things that you like. That’s not to say that you can’t be a fan of all those things, but you might or might not be; it kind of depends on how you view your relationship to those things...but when Tumblr as an organization, as a company, talks about people who hang out in hashtags, the assumption is always that you’re a fan, which may or may not be true for you. (Obviously it’s true for you, nonny, we just mean...you know what we mean.) Neither of us would say that only reblogging gifsets means you’re not in the fandom—ever. We both generally take the stance that if you self-identify as a fan, you’re a fan. We first covered this first in Episode 8, “One True Fandom,” way back when we first started the podcast (Elizabeth actually talked me—this is Flourish responding—into having a wider view on this one, thank you Elizabeth). We’ve also revisited the subject a lot of times since then, including in the special episode “The Lurker,” where Elizabeth talks about how she literally never posted anything in fandom for years and years: she ONLY lurked. Anyway, hope that clarifies our view on this stuff (and that if you haven’t taken a further journey into our back catalog, it inspires you to do so)!

[rotationalsymmetry]

OK, I am going to try to articulate a disability-informed Theory of Slacktivism.

Work is not virtue and non-work is not vice.

However, sometimes to accomplish specific outcomes, somebody has to do certain kinds of work.

Activism is work. Like other kinds of work, sometimes disabilities make it difficult or impossible to engage in activism-work, either through direct impairment or lack of accessibility, because that is how disability and work relate to each other.

Some specific types of activism work can, indeed have to, be done online.

There are some things people do online that kind of superficially resemble activism work but are not activism work. (Not just relatively less effective work, but not work at all.) This is Slacktivism.

A good way to figure out whether something is Online Activism Work or Slacktivism is by starting at the goal and working back to see what effort furthers that goal. Actions that further the goal and which are meaningfully connected to whatever other actions might be necessary to acciwve the goal, is Work whether it is easy or hard, enjoyable or unpleasant, online or offline. Actions that either do not achieve the goal or are insufficient without other work that is not happening, is Slacktivism.

There is no shame in being unable to contribute to any given form of Activist Work or all Activist due to disability, whether it's an executive function issue or a spoons issue or some sort of sense impairment or mobility impairment or something else. Including for that matter work that requires social skills, which is a lot of work. If you can't really do in person community organizing because you can't read body language or can't manage your body odor and that's too much of a hindrance, it is what it is. Figuring out what if anything you can do is worth putting some effort into, but if part of your disability or circumstances means you have trouble figuring it out, it is what it is, and not a personal failing or otherwise about you because work isn't virtue. It's just something that needs to be done.

Expressing appreciation to people who do the work is generally worth doing, not because work is virtue but because work needs to get done. (And usually work is less pleasant than fucking around, and usually people who make the sacrifice of doing work rather than fucking around like to hear that that sacrifice is valued.)

It can be frustrating to not get that appreciation and it can be frustrating to not be able to do the work for other reasons, and it's ok for people to want comfort and reassurance about that.

I realize I'm spending a lot of points on "it's ok not to work" on a post that's nominally not about that, but thing is, I've seen disabled people online express a ton of shame over having their attempts at Activist Work being dismissed as Slacktivism. So, I want to address that it is not necessary to feel ashamed about not being able to do Activist Work, and also OK to feel ashamed because having feelings is OK, and also some online work is Work and not Slacktivism, and also it is actually still important to recognize that sometimes stuff that feels like Doing Something on social media is, in fact, not doing shit.

Which is fine if you know it's not doing shit and aren't guilt tripping people over not doing the thing that's not doing shit. And if it's only not doing shit and not actively doing harm, which sometimes it does.

I do actually think that making stupid arguments about voting does harm, but, I might be exaggerating how harmful it is because I find it annoying and because I feel personally attacked for the time I've voted third party and the time I would have voted third party if I'd been 18.

I have a long ass history of voting and am not going to just not vote just because people are being weird about the mandatory-ness of voting Democrat no matter what. But...if I didn't have that long ass history, when I started unfollowing blogs that were pissing me off and following anarchist blogs instead, I might have stopped voting. Probably some people do. These sorts of internet fight don't create consensus, they create polarized groups with extreme (and often extremely bad) positions. Sometimes that's worth it when you need to kick terfs out of your mutual pool right now more than you need to have enough contact with terfs to possibly deprogram them. It's not always worth it though. I'd much rather the norm in my tumblr social circles was a solid live and let live approach to voting -- call it personal choice or whatever -- with support and resources and reminders for people who do want to vote. Rather than creating one group that thinks electoral politics consists entirely of voting, possibly just voting for president, and shunning people who don't vote, and one group that spends more time tearing down Democrats than stating what they themselves believe.

Anyways I wouldn't spend so much time ranting about this stuff not being GOTV if it didn't keep sounding like the people who post this stuff THINK that they are doing something. Voting is doing something. Expressing outrage that people like me voted for Kucinich in 2004 (as though Kerry was a remotely decent candidate) or Nader in 2000 (it was a catastrophe that Gore lost and Bush won and it was very close, but I don't think Nader voters are to blame because I don't think the Nader votes automatically belonged to Gore any more than I think people who pirate media always would have bought it if they didn't pirate it) is really not something I consider Doing Something. And I think due to the polarizing effect it may have the opposite effect from the one intended. Also because a lot of people really hate being told what to do, this is not some secret rarely known quality of human beings.

OK. I'm going to go off about voting for a minute.

First, it is fucking weird that the tumblr fight over this is Side One: You Must Vote For A Democrat For President No Matter What, Don't Even Think Of Voting Third Party Or Whatever, This Is A Moral Imperative vs Side 2: Voting Is For Chumps.

Uh, ok?

So, the people I know in real life have a spectrum of political beliefs, mostly I don't interact with actual conservatives much but I do interact with the sort of people who think that Bernie Sanders is too far left and people who think he's just about right and people who aren't really thrilled with anyone who has a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected president and people who think that states shouldn't exist. And people whose beliefs don't necessarily line up perfectly with the left-right framework, even when you let the left side go that far.

Mostly, I know people who want minimum wage to be higher and public schools to be better funded and immigrants to not be treated like complete shit, things like that. Sometimes they also do land acknowledgements and stuff.

And these people vote. And they call their representatives. And they campaign for politicians they like. And they go to protests. And they go to town hall meetings and ask questions and sometimes shout down whoever's speaking.

And you know what?

I want minimum wage to be higher. I want public schools to be better funded -- I'm critical of schools and I think truancy laws are fucked up, but given that schools are a thing I want them to have more money than they have. Similarly with minimum wage, I don't think anybody should have to work, but given that in practice most people do, I want a lower wealth gap and I want everyone to have enough resources to live on and raise kids on, and one of the most effective short to mid term ways to get closer to that goal is raising minimum wage. I want open borders, but failing that I at least want things like the DREAM act and less blatant cruelty from ICE and sanctuary cities.

And I want schools to be able to teach about historical racism and to use books like Maus as teaching aids and to be able to say the word "gay", and the most direct way to get that is to vote for people for school board who also want those things. (Although, being a PITA is sometimes effective against elected officials who don't want those things, so it's not the only option.)

And I want the criminal justice system to get completely scrapped, but that's not going to happen tomorrow but what can happen is electing more sympathetic and justice oriented people to roles like the district attorney and public defender. And sometimes getting the right people into local office, county boards of supervisors and whatnot, can mean that the cops get less funding and that programs designed to help ex-convicts have places they can live and work after getting out get more funding, or at least that things don't get worse.

And of course showing up to town hall meetings and protesting in the streets are still options, but they're still options whether there's relatively cool people in office or not, and when there's relatively cool people in office you can push things more towards what you want and when there's shitty people in office you end up doing reactive actions that might or might not work, like when Bush got elected president -- for the love of all that is good and worthwhile, autocorrect, I do not want to dignify that title with a capital letter -- and then 9/11 happened, and anti-globalization activism in the US basically stopped dead so that we could all protest the Iraq War instead, which may or may not have done no good whatsoever but certainly did not end the Iraq War.

A formative expeience in my life was Critical Mass. I got really into bicycle activism and I loved Critical Mass. And not everybody who does Critical Mass, which is basically the sort of protest where you don't have a permit and you might get arrested on wheels, seriously one time San Francisco mass went onto the Bay Bridge, also goes to town hall meetings, and probably not everyone who goes to the town hall meetings does Critical Mass, but a lot of people do both. There's nothing stopping people from doing both. It's not ideologically inconsistent to both sometimes block traffic with a bunch of bicycles because getting bike lanes striped takes too long and you want to be safe riding a bicycle on the streets right now, and begging/pressuring your elected representatives to stripe more bike lanes. You can do both. I did both. People do both all the time.

And sometimes eg some fucking jerk of a rich boy is running for mayor and wants to cut general assistance payments for homeless people to under $50 a month and is making this out to somehow be good for them, and you've been feeding people with Food Not Bombs but Food Not Bombs needs someone to be a liaison with the Coalition on Homelessness, and the Coalition on Homelessness is freaked out about the proposition, so you do electoral politics stuff with them while you're also feeding homeless people without a permit, because nothing's stopping you from doing both. (And maybe you're also a young person who has a lot of free time and a lot of energy but no real idea of how to get anything done, so you just throw a lot of energy at problems and hope something does some good.) (hypothetically, I mean.)

Like what was I going to do, just tell the more experienced people at the Coalition on Homelessness, most of whom had been homeless and who had way more expeience actually doing stuff than I did, that this whole distributing door hangers thing was bullshit and I wasn't going to help them do it? Because I knew better? Because I thought voting didn't matter?

I mean, I guess I wouldn't have had to look them in the face and say that, I could have just told Food Not Bombs I wasn't going to be a liaison -- I was an absolute dogshit liaison anyways, I had no clue what I was doing -- and then I wouldn't be doing anything with the Coalition anyways. But they had a problem, a threat that was going to make things worse for the group they were advocating for, a group that most of them at least used to be a part of, and I could help them, or I could not help them, and the way they wanted people to help was through electoral politics. Which also involved some protests because people do both all the time. But which also involved a lot of doorhangers.

[ladyofriverrun]

I love your gifsets! I think I read something on your blog that I can't find now, some meta about why Lilith called the baby a "satanic miracle of miracles"? I can't really remember, was the point that she was supposed to be infertile? What changed to allow her to have a kid with Satan in that moment (since they've been sleeping together and nothing happened for centuries)? Sorry if this is a bother!

Asking me stuff like this is never a bother! And thank you about the GIF sets!

Yes, I did write my theory behind why she said that. That if it was the miracle of miracles because Satanic babies are rare (otherwise Lucifer would probably have been creating back-up heirs left, right and centre haha) but that Lilith was supposed to be unable to have children (not just because of some of the stuff written in her Abrahamic mythology, but by things implied in CAOS itself). So Adam was like...infernal miracle squared.

But I think the reason she was able to get pregnant could be due to one of these theories;

1. She's only considered infertile simply because she's only ever mothered demons, and it's supposed to be that she was cursed by the False God. But this is a case of misinformation of legends rather than an actual truth and in reality it's been her own choice never to be an actual biological mother, because of all that it implied and negative associations of how it was once 'expected' of her in her role as a woman. Therefore she was basically using her own mystical contraception that she lifts for the purpose of this particular pregnancy.

2. Lilith is a powerful with and demoness and there's probably not a single spell she doesn't know, including fertility rituals. That, combined with the power of Lucifer, and Fastus' willing contribution of his own magics, were able to override any mystical infertility, but in one last ride-or-die moment

3. It's a mixture of circumstances; Lucifer's potency, mixed with Faustus' fertility (we know he got Constance pregnant many times) mixed with Lilith's power, all worked together to create a very potent combination that made Lilith's plan possible.

I personally believe it's a mix of Lilith knowing fertility spells and Lucifer's own potency, as well as her not being quite as 'infertile' as myth implies and so her 'miracle of miracles' is laced with sarcasm, and then with the added dose of Lucifer being trapped in a human body meaning any Satanic Baby Blocks might be weakened (Which is why I believe he possessed Edward to impregnate Diana as Hilda says Diana was 'never sure')

And then you could also go for the pre-destined theory, that Adam was meant to be (and would possibly play a role in things in the future, possibly even his resurrection helping Sabrina's) and so was going to happen no matter what other factors are in place. Sort of in a parallel to the whole 'virgin birth' thing, that if something is meant to be, no amount of laws or practicalities can prevent it.

[with-my-murder-flute]

Hi everybody, thanks for the asks letting me know I made the top of @yusuftiddies’ list of Homophobes in TOG Fandom, you can stop sending them now.

So.

I can make mistakes and fuck up and own that. I am serious about listening to marginalized people. But... in this case, while @yusufstiddies generally describes factual events that happened and factual posts that exist, I have to say that I can’t actually apologize for the things I’m called out for because I don’t think they’re homophobic. The things he criticizes me for are things that come from a lot of personal experience as a queer bisexual cis woman, as well as a lot of reflection, research, and study. I believe in them really strongly and stand by them.

I’m really sorry if this makes TOG fandom too hostile, because it is not my intention to make this place so unpleasant that anyone feels driven out. I understand if my stance means people no longer want to follow me/read my stuff/participate in projects I’m involved with (though I’d rather hand off the Research Hub to someone else than see it go down with me). I’m posting this so people can know where they stand before they decide whether to keep interacting with my blog, or “deplatform” me as @yusufstiddies recommends.

I would recommend, for anyone who doesn’t want to see my posts, using Tumblr’s new post content filtering feature. If you type a username (like star-anise or with-my-murder-flute) into it, Tumblr will hide all posts featuring that specific string of characters, and therefore any post or reblog of mine.

To address the accusations against me:

I am an anti-anti: Yes. I’ve reblogged posts of mine about this before. I care passionately about preventing child abuse, but I think there are better ways to prevent child abuse in fandom (like concrete harassment policies so predatory behaviour can be reported and stopped early, and education about digital consent and healthy relationships) than attacking people who write “bad ships,” not least because the first people it hurts are abuse survivors trying to work through their trauma, and because the research says you cannot actually tell who’s a sexual predator based on what they write about.  Fiction affects reality, but not on a 1:1 basis. My mainblog, @star-anise, has a really extensive archive of my writing on the subject.

I said cishet men aren’t more privileged than gay men: Kinda. What I actually did was question whether Every Single Cishet Man benefits from more privilege than Every Single Gay Man. If a man is cishet but gets beaten up because people perceive him as gay, he’s not exactly feeling the warm toasty glow of heterosexual privilege in that moment. Oppression is complicated and there are times when someone’s lack of privilege on one axis is way less important than someone else’s lack of privilege on another axis.

The post above also includes me reblogging someone else’s addition about how straight men can be included in the queer movement: I’m queer. @yusufstiddies has made it very clear that he isn’t comfortable with the word “queer” and doesn’t like it. Therefore I think it’s understandable that he might not understand that the queer community sees ourselves as a coalition of people dedicated to dismantling the structures of sex and gender that oppress us, not a demographic of people whose gender identities or sexual orientations can be neatly mapped. However, I would say that doesn’t make queer theory inherently homophobic.

There are also some related points @yusufstiddies didn’t level at me specifically, but I would like to address:

The constant focus on the unsafeness of cishet people:

I’m not cishet. I’m a bisexual woman who’s dated women. Sixth-light is a queer woman married to a woman. This is not an issue of non-LGBTQ+ people blundering their way into something they don’t experience the daily consequences of. This is an issue of people from WITHIN the LGBTQ+ community who sincerely disagree with @yusufstiddies about the pressures we experience and how best to deal with them. I think that even if @yusufstiddies were to filter his fiction input to only LGBT-written work about LGBT experiences, or even only trans-written work about trans people, he would still find a lot of things he finds upsetting or transphobic, because sexual and gender identities are really diverse and not everything will suit one person.

The contention that saying “’Queer is a slur’ is TERF propaganda” is transmisogyny because it dilutes the definition of “TERF”:

People who point out the phrase is TERF propaganda are not calling every person who says it a TERF, and we are not trying to argue that telling a queer person that queer is a slur is inherently equal to the kind of damage a TERF does when she attacks a trans woman out of transphobia. Queer people being able to use the word “queer” does not have the same importance as trans women being able to live, work, and survive in public. Rather, we are literally saying, “This is a thing TERFs say when they take a break from attacking trans women and try to recruit new members to their group, so it’s in our best interests to not give it too wide a currency.”

Some people have experienced the word “queer” used as a hateful word hurled against them and don’t want to hear it ever again. I get that. It happens. Where I grew up, “gay” was a synonym for “shitty” and it took me a lot of years out of high school before the word “gay” wouldn’t shoot my blood pressure through the roof.  I actually do understand that and think that’s valid (and again, support using post content filtering for that word).

One of the things I do at @star-anise is argue with young people who are headed into full-on transmisogynistic TERF territory, and work at reeling them back and deradicalizing them. I use a tag called “weedwhacking” so my followers can filter out the sometimes lengthy back-and-forths we get going.

Something I’ve learned, interacting with so many TERFs and proto-TERFs, is that one way they frequently get recruited into harassing trans people was through discourse around the word “queer”. For one, it encouraged them to want to distance themselves from any perception of LGBT people as “weird” or “not normal”, which led to seeing trans people as “weird” and “not normal” and therefore not good members of the “gay pride” community. For two, repeating “queer is a slur” predictably causes a lot of queer people to react in a defensive manner, so by teaching young or new people to say it, TERFs can set them up to feel alienated from the larger LGBTQ+ community and more open to TERF propaganda.

The next issue isn’t mentioned in the original callout post, but I think it’s key to this entire issue:

@yusufstiddies has made several posts about what cishet people should and shouldn’t write. For example, cishets shouldn’t write Nicky experiencing internalized homophobia.  Another is a detailed post of things cishets shouldn’t write about trans people, including which sexual positions only trans people are allowed to write. I would imagine that part of his frustration with fandom has been the lack of traction those posts have gotten. I know I very deliberately didn’t reblog them.

That isn’t because I don’t agree that the things he complains about are rarely handled well by cishet authors. I agree that there’s a lot of bad fic out there that contributes to negative stereotypes against LGBTQ+ people and is basically a microaggression to read.

I have two very deeply-seated reasons for my position:

LGBTQ+ identities are different from many other political identities because most people are not born identifiably LGBTQ+. It’s something we have to figure out about ourselves. And one really important way that we do that is using the safety of fiction to explore what an experience would be like, sometimes years before we ever admit that we fit the identity we’ve written about. So banning cishet authors from writing something is really likely to harm closeted and questioning LGBTQ+ people. It will lengthen the amount of time questioning people take before finding the identity that really fits them, and force closeted people to be even more closeted. 

There’s a lot of undeniably shitty stuff in fandom. However, I fundamentally believe that trying to target the people creating it and forcing them to stop doesn’t work very well, and has the serious byproduct of killing the creativity and enthusiasm of the rest of fandom and resulting in less of the actual thing you like being produced. I think that it is infinitely more productive to focus on improving the ratio of good stuff in fandom than trying to snuff out every bad thing.

Like I said: I understand if this means former followers, mutuals, or friends no longer want to interact with me. I��ll be saddened, but I’ve obviously chosen this path and can deal with the consequences. 

I wish this could have worked out differently.