#credentials: a literal degree in poetry

[punkrockscully]

I dare anyone to send me their favorite last shadow puppets moments and I'll write a fuckin poem about it I'm not playing around I yearn for audience participation

[smallblueandloud]

YOU SHOULD VOTE FOR THE LITS AND HERE'S WHY

the librarians (2014) is a tv show about The Library, a magical tardis-like space intended to safely store magical objects + their history. The Librarians are the group of people responsible for protecting the library and discovering new magical artifacts that tend to pop up and make trouble. it's a delightful show full of found family, tropey goodness, and hijinks! if you're a fan of leverage, this show was ALSO made by john rogers and dean devlin, and christian kane is in the main cast :D

the LITs (librarians-in-training) are three of our main characters and they're wonderful and perfect and prime OT3 material and you should vote for them!

CASSANDRA is a burned-out former gifted kid whose specialty is math and science. her parents pushed her math skills until her terminal illness and resulting/comorbid neurodivergence made her realize she had to put herself first. she's a subversion of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope (she's manic-pixie-dream'ing herself), happy flaps when she's excited... oh, and did i mention she's canonically bisexual? in the episode where they turn into fairy tale archetypes, she's prince charming ;) cassandra is a great librarian because she seeks to understand what they are archiving and she is always questioning whether they should actually be hiding magic away or if their job is to spread knowledge and awareness!

JAKE is an internationally-acclaimed art expert who, before the show's first episode, had never left the county he was born in. feeling obligated to his dickhead dad and understanding his responsibility of inheriting the family business, he got all his degrees online and kept his passions secret. one of his most pivotal episodes involves facing down a clone of his father literally made out of lies and telling the truth about who he is. (along with being played by christian kane, his backstory's compatibility with eliot's led to the popular headcanon that they're twin brothers.) jake has defeated multiple enemies via translating classical poetry and once infiltrated a college by literally just pretending to be an expert architecture professor (and it WORKED).

EZEKIEL is the team's tech expert and world-class thief. although he claims not to be a team player, he's actually the best at having everyone's backs. the fandom's favorite episode of the show is the one where he gets stuck in a time loop of protecting his team and is finally forced to admit to himself that he cares about them :') and his team sees this! and they finally understand! in terms of librarian-related bona fides, he's the librarian who knows their collection best -- he's put a lot of effort into figuring out how to use the library's existing artifacts in conjunction with technology to make them even more useful!

for those of you who've watched leverage, i know we're spoiled with the leverage ot3 but these three are also a very strong subtextually-polyamorous relationship! the show literally shows us, time and time again, that these three do NOT function as good librarians without the other two together -- and that the literal world suffers when they're not working together.

also this show should advance even past the first bracket because it's a show called THE LIBRARIANS based off the movie series THE LIBRARIAN and the show's favorite running gag is someone getting suspicious of the team asking for access to the bank's vault or classified government secrets or whatever and asking for their credentials, the team saying "oh, we're the librarians" and the person going "oh yeah okay makes sense" with absolutely zero follow-up questions. vote for the librarians-in-training!!!!!!

[phanagoria]

about to write something that will be incomprehensible to 99.9% percent of you but.

I think Veda Slovena is to a large degree authentic. I know the ~accepted~ position is that it's a mystification (a.k.a a fake) but I have grown so mistrustful of mainstream conventional academia I can totally believe it and its author/collector got smeared, even if I don't know exactly why. fact is the smear campaign against it started before it was even published, with ridiculous amounts of vitriol being spewed by people who'd never read it, based entirely on hearsay, which is not only childish but extremely unprofessional as well. they were all supposed to be authorities on the matter of folklore and literature and are still regarded as such today, which is why everyone keeps repeating what they said over a century later without thinking much of it. but it's entirely possible Shishmanov, Vazov and company were wrong because they were clearly biased, and their hatred for the Veda is so palpable and bizarre reading their critiques makes me uncomfortable. Jireček literally bragged about how he prevented Verković from securing funding for the second volume, so it wouldn't be published in Bulgaria! what the hell and fuck

add to this the frankly unsubstantiated criticism that's been leveled against it. with the rhythmic inconsistencies in the poetic meter and the use of certain words being taken as absolute proof of it being fake, when the literal exact same things are also present in poetry/song collections whose authenticity has never been called into question. like???

I am glad that there seems to be a recent effort to rehabilitate the Veda in the eyes of the public, mostly by independent researchers who don't suffer from credentialism, but so much more needs to be done. I would really like to read a full, genuine unbiased analysis of it for a change.

[expfcultragreen]

ahem.

Demiro

Now wait, before you say...

...hear me out. Im not even serious when i say this, but im like a huge joke to myself so its actually just self revelation in the guise of outrage-baiting the identity police (the anti-identitarian police? Theyre always just mad at specific identities; they dont hold some philosophical stance against identification, just how to identity/what its acceptable to identify as/what acceptable discourse around identity is) with snowflakery. My first thought after lol demiro, is, what does demiromantic even mean, i have an attachment disorder? Ok im killing the shrink in my head, its a reasonable signifier of an adaptive trait amounting to one facet of someone's identity. I mean we are out here labelling our degrees of romantic engagement. It's completely legitimate information for a dating profile, and because of facebook culture we are all, cross-platform, expected to inventory ourselves to some extent so that people can easily prejudge their level of interest in our content. (The different conventions followed are themselves biographical--does your twitter bio read like a business card, a webadmin sig, is it a bunch of emojis, a string of credentials, a microarray of party affiliations? Minority status report, fandom bingo sheet, quoted poetry? Larper resume? Astrology chart? No matter which one it is, the other details fill themselves in from there, dont they watson.

I got off topic)

I do wonder how useful that information is tho, demiro, like im back to my question of what does that even mean--to anyone? It could really only be relevant to someone who's trying to date me, its not particularly relevant to me because its not really something im heavily invested in as a question, how willing or able i am to engage in romantic attachment. It's an errant thought "what if for a giggle i identified as demiro like thats an immediately comprehensible term--and even if it is immediately taken for its intended meaning, doesnt that level of context only serve to beg some perplexity or mystification as to why?" Doesnt it beg the questions ive asked? Like even if you immediately get that its of an ilk to aro, as demi is to ace...i imagine youre still saying fuck is this shit

....unless youre someone who uses the demiromantic tag? Jesus it autosuggested it, theyre out here. Im not tagging it. I bet theyre serious.

I literally do not know how i would go about inventorying whether im fully romantic or not. I feel like im way more romantic than most real world examples i see but i also fall short of my own sense of being one hundo non-aro. Being poly i have this tendency to split attention and even when i have a primary partner im not like fully or exclusively attuned to them and that interferes with my ability to attune to them as needed, to the extent or at the times necessary. And i let it...because im more concerned about the repercussions of having all my emotions invested in one person it might not work out with, than i am uncomfortable with the distance that creates for people who sense that if i was fully romantically engaged in them individually, i would be more attuned to their needs, preferences etc. I think ive been in a successive withdrawing away from "codependency" over the course of my primary romantic partnerships and attachments, that its a learned response that probably even produced neuroanatomical changes that would have been minutely perceptible if finely measured over time. Of course it would be so impossible to parse those trimmings, junctions and formations from all the other shit i do thats producing changes. I heard drinking kills brains cells. And ive smokened a bowl or twain...

[motherboxing]

I feel like I should say something about this for the record, and I’m not like, calling anyone out or anything, I am not mad, I just want this stated: I’m an artist. Like, I’m a professional artist. Art and writing is a large part - the main part - of how I make my living. I’ve published books, I’ve won grants, I have a lot of weird feelings about what “makes” someone a “real artist” but without getting into that I am a professional at making art in the most literal, technical sense of the term. 

For this reason I am absolutely, 100% not okay EVER with my work being used without attribution AND PERMISSION. I understand that sometimes it’s daunting to reach out to someone and ask them if you can use something they made, but it is in fact a necessity. Asking my permission before repurposing a piece of mine communicates to me that you respect my work and also me. Not asking communicates that you don’t consider my artistic labour to be real labour worth treating as such. If you don’t respect my work or me as a creative professional, I don’t want you using my work at all. 

If this sounds harsh it is because I have had people act entitled to my work in really shitty and invasive ways in the past! I’ve had people sell my shit without my permission while publicly supporting people who were abusive to me; I’ve seen my illustrations show up in zines that I did not sign off on; I’ve had people read my writing at poetry nights without my permission. I have watched this shit happen to other women I respect. This relates, I think, to the ways that people feel entitled to the writing and art and etc of a certain type of, idk, Sad Tumblr Girl (”it’s not REAL art, it’s not REAL writing, it’s just about, like, her trauma”), which I have seen manifest in some truly egregious ways by people who would say things about it when challenged like “I don’t believe in consent”. But it also relates to the ways that people treat womens’ art in a more general sense. I don’t have an art degree, I don’t have a lot of the credentials that other Real Artists(tm) have, but I have worked very hard for the career path that I have. I’ve made a lot of sacrifices, and I put a lot of thought and effort into the things that those sacrifices have allowed me to make. I am not some anonymous Sad Tumblr Girl (there is no such thing) whose creations you can just appropriate whenever. I am not saying this to be a bitch, and for the ways that I have not made this clear in the past I am very sorry. I just want people to respect my boundaries about this going forward, and respect my work generally.

If you want to use something I’ve made - a drawing, a piece of writing, jewelry I designed/made, even something that I made that you purchased the physical copy of - in your own work (a show, a zine, whatever), PLEASE just ask. Please. I promise I will be very nice about it and as long as you’re not a dick and I hold all the necessary rights to the thing the chances that I will say no are pretty low. You can even just DM me via tumblr about it. Just ask first. Thanks.