#footnote 72

[mythserene]

Call him “Epstein” – How far is Mark Lewisohn willing to go to force a false narrative?

 “I don’t care what you think of Klein, call Klein something else. Call him ‘Epstein’ for now, and just consider the fact that three of us chose ‘Epstein.’”

John Lennon to Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone, May 14, 1970 

I keep asking “Why do you want me to believe John —(or George or Paul or or or)—said this?” And I keep asking because that is the question that keeps coming out of my mind, my mouth, and my keyboard.

It's the obvious question. (Spoiler: audio below of Lewisohn answering it for this quote.)

When you’re going to so much trouble to quote shop and quote twist, you have a purpose that you are torturing all these words to back up. You are trying to prove a point and there’s no real quote to support your position, so instead of changing your position, you act like Beatles’ words are appetizers in a buffet.

THREE OF US CHOSE EPSTEIN.

This premeditated and purposeful OBSCENITY has been sitting there for ten years. Two ladies with a podcast found it.

However, John remembered Paul’s attitude to Brian being very different. John was always emphatic that Paul didn’t want Brian as the Beatles’ manager and presented obstacles to destabilize him, to make his job difficult … like turning up late for meetings. “Three of us chose Epstein. Paul used to sulk and God knows what … [Paul] wasn’t that keen [on Brian]—he’s more conservative, the way he approaches things. He even says that: it’s nothing he denies.”(72)

I will never—NEVER— get over this one. There may be more shocking things to come, but it was this revelation that made me look at every one of Mark Lewisohn’s “author interviews” differently.

This is when I realized that there is nothing I would put past him.

Listening to that part of Episode 7 is so funny to me now. Daphne and Phoebe kept trying to stick to the outline and ask “Does this quote back up Lewisohn’s thesis?” but it was very difficult because they were in such total disbelief at Mark Lewisohn’s deception. (My label, although it’s a pretty inarguable one.) It is genuinely almost unbelievably dishonest. AKOM had a whole show filled with whoppers to get through, and they kept trying, but it took them awhile to move on because air-quotes-Epstein was like a magnet that kept pulling them back. So yesterday, to get out of editing some of my own mess, I put together a few of the times that the shock sucked them back in.

“I find that kind of shocking, really.” Tiny compilation of Phoebe and Daphne in disbelief over Mark Lewisohn’s purposeful misrepresentation of a quote of John Lennon talking about Allen Klein to attempt to show that John thought Paul was trying to thwart Brian Epstein. (Episode 7)

And most of us strongly suspect where Mark Lewisohn is going with this. He wants to rehabilitate Allen Klein because John can literally never be wrong—or perhaps an even stronger motive—he wants Paul to be very, very wrong. But whatever his motives, we can see what he’s doing. And we don’t have to just suspect, because he has already told us that he is going to use some of his most unforgivable lies to shape that narrative.

And there’s only one reason to do that: because there are no real quotes to back up the narrative he wants to push.

It tells us, in no uncertain terms, that the narrative he wants to push is quite literally unsupportable.

To make it work, Lewisohn has to lie about what John Lennon actually said.

*This post was first going to be about both the “quotes” that Mark Lewisohn references here, but in the end I couldn’t not give “call him ‘Epstein'” its own post. Which means I have actually shortened a post. (Please clap.)

Every ‘quote’ in the “spanner in the works” section is bullshit. Every. Single. One. I’m not going to the thesaurus for a fancier word. They are bullshit. Complete and utter, doctored, twisted, bullshit. The man is lying. And what really chaps my ass is that he is flat out telling us that he is going to use those same lies to push his bullshit narrative of the breakup. Like damn, that takes a lot of nerve.

Here is Mark Lewisohn telling us, straight out, that it’s these same bullshit quotes that he plans on using again to fool us. And he should be a laughingstock when he does. Not in some quarters. In all.

He must think we are such dupes. Although he’s gotten away with it so far, so up until now he hasn’t been wrong.

(There’s a bit more to this part of the Q & A and it’s all bad, but for this post I decided to leave it at Mark Lewisohn telling us that he is going to use the exact same sources he used for the “spanner” section to push this lie in the upcoming books.)

Fool me twice…

Would John and George have seen the parallel between Epstein and Klein in 1969?  LEWISOHN: ❝Yes. I’m sure the answer to that is yes, because John mentioned it in interviews, probably in Wenner’s, maybe the one with McCabe and Sconfeld— Schonfeld. Yes.❞ (📍Nothing is Real)

Transcript:

Q. In Hornsey Road you were talking about the three-to-one Allen Klein split, and I was saying to you that it seemed to me that it paralleled what is mentioned in Tune In about, uh, the appointment of Brian Epstein. That- that Paul was sort of holding back or was not keen to move forward with Brian Epstein. And I suppose my question was, is there a direct parallel there? And would, in 1969, John and George in particular have been conscious of that parallel?

LEWISOHN: Yes. I’m sure the answer to that is yes, because John mentioned it in interviews, probably in Wenner’s, maybe the one with McCabe and Sconfeld– Schonfeld. Yes. John recognized that.

Nothing is Real Podcast • October 16, 2019, Episode 15 • Mark Lewisohn, Part II

---

And just remember that this is only one half of a hellacious Frankenquote.

(But I kept it short. 🎊 )

----

Even though I have given you zero reason to go there, it's also on my blog.

[celebduwen]

TWI volume 10 spoilers ahead (minor, non-main story/side chapter, not major plot point or anything at all)

Ok so it was a couple chapters ago now, but can I just mention how well the Hedault thing was tackled (at least in my opinion)

He practically comes out as aroace, or well, at least aro and like ahxownfowbfowb

He says that his lack of romance and that pesky sexual attraction doesn’t take anything from his life, but enriches it, lets him truly focus on what he burns for.

Pirateaba did this scene wonderfully. Especially when another conclusion some people would have made, him being gay, is explicitly denied. They literally say (I don’t remember whom) “it’s okay to like men” (not verbatim) and he says that it’s not it.

This is the kind of representation that we (at least I) want, it says what it is, doesn’t feel the need to use terminology, which frankly wouldn’t exist for an identity that even our world, lesser and younger it may be, only was thought of to exist quite recently in the grand scheme of things.

It denies the “oh, not straight, let’s ship them gay then”

It says “putting this character in a relationship is the same as putting a canonically solely gay character in a straight relationship” in my mind. Even though that might not be the actual meaning of it I want to feel that way, for however much it may be worth.

A lot of our rep, (the stuff that is explicitly stated or implied and everything and whatever) is often just glanced over and people say “oh yeah, they’re gay now.” Yes you’re entitled to your ships, yes ships often just explore character dynamics (perhaps), but when you have so little, even in queer media, you start grasping at the little straws, even as they’re taken out of your hands by your bigger more well known and accomplished sibling.

[maeve-is-annoying-about-books]

House of Leaves, Chapter 5

Why is there the most effectual, heartfelt literary analyses of Echo in my spooky house book? I know why its here, I'll get to that in a bit, but can I just talk about how empowering Zampanò's view¹ of Echo is? Painting her as an insurgent, working against her curse of repetition as best she can, to give those words her own life and sorrow. I don't care if it's the point of the book or not, being able to read this bit was kind of a treat. Like I was reading a proper dissertation on the mythical nymph. The various call and answers given are also fun bits or literature and curiosity.

Echo as something comforting, as something human and whole and most especially, emotive, is a really strong point for the horror inherent to the house. What's scarier than a well that takes a long time to hear the echo from? One where you can't, of course. Vastness, once again, reigns over the story. And it makes sense so much time was spent here since Zampano is blind. Echo is his sight, no wonder he has such an opinion on this line² purportedly penned by Miguel de Cervantes and echoed by Pierre Menard. There is something there only he can see so feelingly.

Or... is there? I wonder if I might be following in Johnny's steps a bit too much, taking this fake story about a fake movie with fake references too much at face value. Trying to untangle it and becoming tangled in it. It might be a good perspective to keep going forward.

Speaking of that asshole³ there is one hell of a footnote by him⁴ with another of his rambling run-ons. I had to read it three times and it gives me a headache trying to make sense of it. Because of its proximity to the line "flung down hallways long past midnight", I'd almost dare to say it was noise for noise's sake.

But then we get to this... Yeah it's an echo. No, it's the absence of one. Johnny's fling with Thumper⁵ ends in silence. It's marked by the absence of things. By that same token, Karen and Will's relationship devolves into quiet as well. An absence of speaking, of the children yelling and playing, of what it already did to Karen at 15⁶. We were introduced to this concept with Echo and now we're bereft of her and I feel it so sharply.

And now the book's format begins to deteriorate. It's slight, it's in these purposeful blanks⁷ and then this impossible clusterfuck of names⁸. And of course it's in time with Will being lost in the Hallway. An excess of useless, nonsensical information my brain wants to make sense or find a patter in. But instead it's just here, obfuscating the flow of the story. I want to call it the impenetrable darkness itself but even I wonder if I'm reading into the formatting too much.

What I do know though, is that Johnny's final interlude about his panic attack⁹ sure echoes his first. It keeps happening, and never when he's near the book. It's always when he's... "not at home".

Sorry, this was a long one but it feels like such a dense chapter. I expect these will get harder as the formatting breaks down.

[reasonsforhope]

"People across the world, and the political spectrum, underestimate levels of support for climate action.

This “perception gap” matters. Governments will change policy if they think they have strong public backing. Companies need to know that consumers want to see low-carbon products and changes in business practices. We’re all more likely to make changes if we think others will do the same.

If governments, companies, innovators, and our neighbors know that most people are worried about the climate and want to see change, they’ll be more willing to drive it.

On the flip side, if we systematically underestimate widespread support, we’ll keep quiet for fear of “rocking the boat”.

This matters not only within each country but also in how we cooperate internationally. No country can solve climate change on its own. If we think that people in other countries don’t care and won’t act, we’re more likely to sit back as we consider our efforts hopeless.

Support for climate action is high across the world

The majority of people in every country in the world worry about climate change and support policies to tackle it. We can see this in the survey data shown on the map.

Surveys can produce unreliable — even conflicting — results depending on the population sample, what questions are asked, and the framing, so I’ve looked at several reputable sources to see how they compare. While the figures vary a bit depending on the specific question asked, the results are pretty consistent.

In a recent paper published in Science Advances, Madalina Vlasceanu and colleagues surveyed 59,000 people across 63 countries.1 “Belief” in climate change was 86%. Here, “belief” was measured based on answers to questions about whether action was necessary to avoid a global catastrophe, whether humans were causing climate change, whether it was a serious threat to humanity, and whether it was a global emergency.

People think climate change is a serious threat, and humans are the cause. Concern was high across countries: even in the country with the lowest agreement, 73% agreed...

The majority also supported climate policies, with an average global score of 72%. “Policy support” was measured as the average across nine interventions, including carbon taxes on fossil fuels, expanding public transport, more renewable energy, more electric car chargers, taxes on airlines, and protecting forests. In the country with the lowest support, there was still a majority (59%) who supported these policies.

These scores are high considering the wide range of policies suggested.

Another recent paper published in Nature Climate Change found similarly high support for political change. Peter Andre et al. (2024) surveyed almost 130,000 individuals across 125 countries.2

89% wanted to see more political action. 86% think people in their country “should try to fight global warming” (explore the data). And 69% said they would be willing to contribute at least 1% of their income to tackle climate change...

Support for political action was strong across the world, as shown on the map below.

To ensure these results weren’t outliers, I looked at several other studies in the United States and the United Kingdom.

70% to 83% of Americans answered “yes” to a range of surveys focused on whether humans were causing climate change, whether it was a concern, and a threat to humanity. In the UK, the share who agreed was between 73% and 90%. I’ve left details of these surveys in the footnote.3

The fact is that the majority of people “believe” in climate change and think it’s a problem is consistent across studies."

-via Our World in Data, March 25, 2024

[nondelphic]

You think your thesis is solid? Please. I've read more primary sources before breakfast than you've skimmed in your entire undergrad career. I’ve defended more obscure literary theories in 3-hour seminars than you’ve had coherent thoughts. You don’t even know the pain of a peer-review rejection email, do you? Don’t talk to me about methodology until you’ve stayed up for 72 hours formatting footnotes in Chicago style. I’ve got enough citations to bury you. Next time, come prepared with an argument that actually holds water, junior.

[us3rn4m3n0tf0und1170]

An identity reveal in the worst way possible…

A FAN FICTION FT DELTAPOOL/WADE WINSTON AND ARACHNID/JAMES PARKER (both part of my Marvel au)

TW: Mention of guns, someone gets shot, violence, vomiting, and terrible writing :3

MORE DETAILS AND THE FANFIC ITSELF UNDER THE BOARDER

random thing on how Arachnid gets his identity revealed, might make art on it later, I’m terrible at writing so bare with me 😭🙏

Footnote: this mainly takes place from Deltapool’s pov, his pov is in purple. Arachnid’s pov is in blue(though he doesn’t have the ability to break the fourth wall like Delta does) any other white text is just from me, the main narrator :) think of it like the breaks in SpiderMan Ultimate :D

An identity reveal in the worst way possible…

Honestly Delta had no idea what was going on. Once second he and his vigilante buddy, Arachnid, are beating up bad guys (without killing them because Webs said that was a no no) and the next someone’s getting shot to death and people are running and screaming. For the people who just got here, you may be wondering: “Why is the city’s friendly neighborhood Arachnid standing over a mangled corpse?” Well the explanation is simple, turns out the goody two shoes isn’t as angelic as he seems. Actually- scratch that, let’s start from the beginning;

A normal day of patrol, a normal, exhausting day according to Arachnid. And to make it worse he’d been stuck with Deltapool the whole day, the annoying jabbering prick who also somehow became his best friend. Hey! Not nice, I am not annoying! Just well spoken! Either way it was exhausting. They were both about to head home and turn in for the night when some supervillain attacked. How infuriating, and to make matters worse, they were making a huge mess of the city, as per usual. And speaking of as per usual, reporters were already rushing to the scene. Mostly because they never have any common sense, insert dramatic sigh here. So naturally Arachnid and Deltapool head over to the scene to fight this troublesome villain, with a stupid name that I can’t even remember. It was quick, and easy. Zip, zop, zoom, villain’s tied up in webs, job well done. Until it wasn’t.

“That was weirdly easy.” Arachnid muttered, looking at the villain. He was standing next to Deltapool, over the villain. The villain wore a gas mask, one with a neon yellow detailing around the eyes and mouth hole things. A dark black trench coat with neon yellow buttons shielded their body. “You’re telling me,” Deltapool, or Delta for short as Webs likes to call me, hehe, replied, glancing over at Arachnid, who was now crouched over the villain. “You fool…” The villain muttered, getting cut off by Arachnid. “I’d save your words for court buddy, you did kinda destroy half the city.” The tension was palpable in the air. “Let me finish you idiots-“ The villain began again, this time to be cut off by Delta. “Ah, ah, evil villain, no need to get too excited. You heard the man.” Arachnid chimed in with; “No it’s fine, if he wants to embarrass himself on live television then so be it.” Oh god another boring villain monologue. The villain stared up at the two of them. “You see, I am but a simple messenger.” Playing the victim, a classic among the villains of the hour, probably just another lie. “And I’m here to deliver a message to you.” The villain said, gesturing to Arachnid. “James Parker, you have 72 hours to restore what has been broken or everything you have fought hard to protect will be destroyed. Under the bridge is where I am found.” The villain said. Everyone went quiet, except for a few murmurs of people asking who James Parker was. Delta looked over at Arachnid, whose eyes were wide as he stared at the villain. Arachnid held out his hand to Delta, his eyes not straying from the villain. “Gun.” Was all he said. “Webs, no-“ Delta began. “I said, give me the gun Delta.” Arachnid replied firmly, with a dark tone Delta had never heard him use before. Arachnid shot a web over the reporter’s cameras. Delta doesn’t even remember handing him the gun, but he does remember the sound of the gun being cocked, and the look in his friend’s eyes when he pulls the trigger. Three shots. BLAM BLAM BLAM. Someone screams. The audio is being broadcasted live, the camera shot over by Arachnid- James’s webs. James fleas the scene, leaving Delta there standing in shock for a moment. Sirens in the distance, time to go. Delta gets out of there as well. Arachnid, the one who told Delta to never kill anyone again, had just shot a man down. Dead. After he did something as silly has say his real name. Delta didn’t understand it. Nor would he until the next time he saw James.

James currently was on a rooftop, pacing back and forth, his hands clutching his head, his mask in one of his hands. Yes, he just shot someone. Yes, he’s guilty about it. Yes, the whole world knows his identity and his life is ruined. He could feel the bile rise in his throat, a familiar feeling, but still terrible, he felt the burning pain as he projected the venom onto the concrete. Bleh. What was he going to do now? Arachnid, and James-, had officially became the menace the news always painted him to be. He couldn’t go home, his apartment was under his name. His friends probably hated him now. And Delta was also probably pissed at him. “Stupid, stupid, stupid-“ he growled at himself, plopping down on the building, his legs hanging over the edge. He stared at the city below. At the mess he made. He just wanted to sleep his problems away. But for now, he just stared at the city below, and hoped that things would get better, as they probably won’t.

Notes: JEEZ THIS TOOK SO LONG TO WRITE 😭💔 half of it was improvised as I went along 😔 I don’t think I’ve dedicated this hard to any kind of writing. Anyways, should I make an Ao3 account??? Let me know what you thought of this :D

(This was written in two hours I think, either that or an hour and forty five minutes)

[adarkrainbow]

Queering kinship in "The Maiden who Seeks her Brothers" (B)

Continuation of the previous post! I will point out that I am not copying everything there (for example I won't include all the footnotes). If you are interested in more then you'll have to buy the book (or its PDF) :p

The manner in which the king discovers the heroine is also questionable in ATU 451. In “The Twelve Brothers,” a king comes upon the heroine while out hunting and fetches her down from the tree in which she sits; in “The Six Swans,” the king’s huntsmen carry her down from a tree after she throws down all of her clothing except for a shift, after which she is taken to the king. The implication that the heroine is actually the king’s quarry subtly exposes the workings of courtship as a hunt or chase with clearly prescribed gender roles. In both cases, the king weds her for her beauty, and the heroine silently acquiesces. The heroine is slandered in her own home, and, tellingly, her marriage is not stable until her brothers are returned to human form. As Holbek notes, “There is an intriguing connection between the brothers and the king: the heroine only wins him for good when she has disenchanted her brothers” (1987, 551). This suggests that issues with the natal family must be worked out before a new family can be successfully formed.

Anthropological methods also help to illuminate the kinship dynamics of this tale. In particular, the culture reflector theory is useful, but only to a degree, as ethnographic information about nineteenth-century German family structure is limited. More generally, European families in the nineteenth century were undergoing changes reflecting larger societal changes, which in turn influenced narrative themes at the time. Marilyn Pemberton writes, “Family structure and its internal functioning were the keys to en[1]couraging the values and behavior needed to support a modern world which was emerging at this time” (2010, 10). The family in nineteenth-century Germany faced upheavals due to industrialization, wars, and politics, as the German states were not yet unified. Jack Zipes situates the Grimms in this historical context: “The Napoleonic Wars and French rule had been upsetting to both Jacob and Wilhelm, who were dedicated to the notion of German unification” (2002b, xxvi). And yet the contributors to a book titled The German Family suggest that the socialization of children remained a central function of the family structure (Evans and Lee 1981). The German family was the main site of the education of children, with the exception of noble or bourgeois males who could be sent to school, until the late nineteenth century (Hausen 1981, 66–72). Thus we may expect to see in the tales some reflection of the family as an educational institution, even if the particular kinship dynamics of the Grimms’ historical era are still being illuminated.

Two Grimm-specific studies support this. August Nitschke (1988) uses historical documents such as autobiographies and novels to demonstrate that nineteenth-century German mothers utilized folk narratives from oral tradition to interact with their children, both as play and instruction. Ruth Bottigheimer’s (1986) historical research on the social contexts of the Grimms’ tales shows how by the nineteenth century, women’s silence had come to be a prized trait, praised in various media from children’s manuals to marriage advice. This message was in turn echoed in the Grimms’ tales, with their predominantly speechless heroines, a stark example of a social value reflected in the tales. Additionally, Bottigheimer notes that it “was generally held in Wilhelm’s time that social stability rested on a stable family structure, which the various censorship offices of the German states wished to be presented respectfully, as examples put before impressionable minds might be perceived as exerting a formative influence” (1987, 20). Thus, rigid gender roles and stable families came to be foregrounded in the Grimms’ tales.

Moving from the general reflection of social values to kinship structures in folktales, I would like to draw a parallel between German culture and Arab cultures based on how many of the tales in the Grimms’ collection feature a close brother-sister bond. The folktales Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana collected from Palestinian Arab women almost all feature close and loving brother-sister relationships. Muhawi and Kanaana read these relationships in light of their hypothesis that the tales present a portrait of the Arab culture, sometimes artistically distorted, but still related. Based on anthropological research, they note that the relationship between the brother and the sister is warm and harmonious in life, and it is one of the most idealized relationships in the folktale. Clearly I am not trying to imply in a reductionist fashion that German and Palestinian Arab cultures are the same, though a number of their folktale plots overlap; rather, I am stating that if we have evidence that the tales reflect kinship arrangements in one culture, then perhaps something similar is true in a culture with similar tales. Perhaps the Grimms’ tales, collected and revised in a society where families still provided an educational and nurturing setting permeated by storytelling traditions and values, contain information about how families can and should work. Sisters and brothers may have needed to cooperate to survive childhood and the natal home, and behavior that the narrative initially constructs as self-destructive might guarantee survival later on.

Hasan El-Shamy’s work on the brother-sister syndrome in Arab culture provides a second perspective on siblings in Arab folktales. In his monograph on a related tale type, ATU 872* (“Brother and Sister”), El-Shamy summarizes a number of texts and analyzes them in the context of an Arab worldview.8 What these texts have in common with “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” is that the sister-brother dyadic relationship is idealized and provides the motivation for the plot.9 However, since the brother-sister relationship is so strong emotionally as to border on the potentially incestuous, the desire of the brother and sister to be together must be worked out narratively through a plot that makes sense to its tellers and the audience so that “the tale reaches a conclusion which is emotionally comfortable for both the narrator and the listener” (1979, 76). Thus in Arab cultures, this tale type makes meaningful statements about the proper relationships between brothers and sisters, both reflecting and enforcing the cultural mandate that brothers and sisters care for one another

The brother-sister relationship in the same tale or related tales in different cultures can take on various meanings according to context; as discussed previously, Holbek interprets ATU 451 as a tale motivated by sibling rivalry, while El-Shamy interprets related tales as expressing a deep sibling love. Both scholars interpret the tales drawing on information from their respective cultures and yet reach different conclusions about the psychology underlying the tales. The importance of cultural context is thus paramount, and in the case of the Grimms’ inclusion of three versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” in their collection, the life contexts of the collectors also feature prominently

The life histories of the Grimm brothers themselves influenced the shaping of this tale in very specific ways. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm came from a family that was once affluent but become impoverished when their father died, and for much of their lives, Jacob and Wilhelm struggled to provide an adequate income on which to support their aging mother, their sister, and their four surviving brothers. Jacob never married but rather lived with Wilhelm and his wife and children (Zipes 2002b, xxiii–xxviii; see also Tatar 1987).10 The correspondence between Jacob and Wilhelm “reflects their great concern for the welfare of their family,” as did their choices in obtaining work that would allow them to care for family members who were unable to work (Zipes 2002b, xxv). Hence one reason “The Brothers Who Were Turned into Birds” appears in their collection three times could be that its message, the importance of sibling fidelity, appealed to the Grimms. Zipes comments on the brothers’ revisions of the text of “The Twelve Brothers” in particular, noting that they emphasize two factors: “the dedication of the sister and brothers to one another, and the establishment of a common, orderly household . . . where they lived together” (1988b, 216). Overall, the numerous sibling tales that the Grimms collected and revised stressed ideals “based on a sense of loss and what they felt should be retained if their own family and Germany were to be united” (218).

Though the love between (opposite-gendered) siblings is emphasized in the Grimms’ collection as a whole, as well as in their three versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers,” there is also ambivalence. As fundamentally human emotions, love and hate are sometimes transformations of each other, as misplaced projection or intensified identification.11 Thus Holbek’s and El-Shamy’s seemingly opposing interpretations of brother-sister tales can be reconciled, since each set of tales, in their cultural context, grapples with the question of how brother-sister relations should be. The Grimms’ tales veer more toward sibling fidelity, but there is a marked ambivalence in “The Twelve Brothers” in particular. When the sister sets out to find her twelve brothers, she encounters the youngest one first, who is overjoyed to see her. However, he tells her that the brothers vowed “that any maiden who came our way would have to die, for we had to leave our kingdom on account of a girl” (Zipes 2002b, 33). The youngest brother tricks the older brothers into agreeing not to kill the next girl they meet, after which the older brothers warmly welcome their sister into their midst. The initial hostility of the brothers toward their sister, though narratively constructed and transformed, could also represent the Grimms’ ambivalent feelings about their family: as a family that frequently suffered hardship and poverty, there must have been some strain in supporting all of their siblings. As eldest, Jacob in particular bore many of the responsibilities. Zipes notes, “It was never easy for Jacob to be both brother and father to his siblings—especially after the death of their mother, when they barely had enough money to clothe and feed themselves” (9). Including and revising brother-sister tales may thus have been a way for the Grimms to navigate their own complicated feelings toward their many siblings by achieving a narrative resolution for an initial situation fraught with resentment.

The message of sibling fidelity also upholds social norms in a patriarchal, patrilocal society, for brothers and sisters would not be competing for the same resources. In contrast, many of the Grimms’ tales (and fairy tales in general) feature competition between women for resources, a struggle that ultimately disempowers women. Maria Tatar comments on the heroines in the Grimms’ collection who, lowly by day, beautify themselves at night in dresses “that arouse the admiration of a prince and that drive rival princesses into jealous rages” (1987, 118). Classical texts of ATU 510A (“Cinderella”) in particular tend to present women competing for eligible men, portrayals that have drawn attention from feminist critics (Haase 2004a, 16, 20). Kay Stone’s reception-based research on gender roles in fairy tales reveals that readers are aware of the competition between women featured in the tales, “a competition our society seems to accept as natural” (1986, 137).

Inasmuch as “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” depicts a woman leaving her birthplace and getting married, it upholds the patriarchal mandate that anthropologist Gayle Rubin (1975) identified as “the traffic in women.” According to Rubin’s theory, men cement their homosocial bonds by exchanging women as wives, essentially as commodities. Yet in each of the versions of this tale type in the Grimms, the sister continues to live with her brothers at the tale’s conclusion. The brothers do not necessarily take wives of their own, which in two versions leads to an odd arrangement where the brothers live with their sister and her husband. The nuclear family is replicated, but with the addition of the bachelor brothers, thus altering the original family that was present at the opening of the tale. This familial constellation, which may have been recognizable to the extended family structures of nineteenth-century Germany, nonetheless does not conform to heteronormative ideas of the ideal nuclear family.12 Instead, it parallels the extraordinary image of the littlest brother in the third tale left with a wing instead of an arm because his disenchantment was incomplete—a compelling icon of fantasy penetrating reality, demanding to be made livable. The brothers form a queer appendage when added to the family unit of the heterosexual couple plus their children, and the visibly liminal status of the winged littlest brother highlights the oddness of the brothers’ inclusion

This third tale, “The Six Swans,” is more specifically woman centered and queer than the other two, as it begins with female desire (the witch ensnaring the father/king to be her daughter’s husband) and female inventiveness (the father/king’s new wife sewing and then enchanting shirts to turn the king’s sons into swans).13 The sister then defies the father/king’s authority by refusing to come with him, where the new wife is ostensibly waiting to dispose of the remainder of the unwelcome offspring. The sister wanders until she finds her brothers and undertakes to free them by remaining silent for six years while sewing them six shirts from asters. Her efforts are nearly thwarted by her new husband’s mother, who steals her children and attempts to frame her for murder. It is notable that the women in this tale who are the most active—the witch, the witch’s daughter who becomes stepmother to the siblings, and the old woman who is mother to the sister’s husband—are the most villainous. The sister, in contrast, turns her agency inward, acting on herself in order to remain silent and productive. Her agency, the most positively portrayed female agency in this tale, is thus queer in the sense that it resists and unsettles; it acts while negating action, it endures while refusing to respond to life-threatening conditions. That agency should be complex and contradictory makes sense, for, according to Butler, “If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility” (2004, 3). The sister’s agency, so quiet as to be almost unnoticeable, is nevertheless not congruent with being silenced.

The queerness of this tale also manifests in transbiology. Judith Halberstam discusses the transbiological as manifesting in “hybrid entities or in-between states of being that represent subtle or even glaring shifts in our understandings of the body and of bodily transformation” (2008, 266). More specifically, transbiological connections “question and shift the location, the terms and the meaning of the artificial boundaries between humans, animals, machines, states of life and death, animation and reanimation, living, evolving, becoming and transforming” (266). The transitions and affinities between humans and animals in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” interrogate the very notion of humanity as a discrete state. If the heroine’s brothers are birds, how can they still be her brothers? The tale seems to affirm a kinship between humans and animals, allowing for the possibility that family bonds transcend species divisions. The heroine herself is close to an animal state, especially during her silent time sewing in the forest. Viewing the heroine’s state from a transbiological perspective helps illuminate Bottigheimer’s statement linking muteness and sexual vulnerability, when she describes how, in “The Six Swans,” “against all contemporary logic the treed girl tries to drive off the king’s hunters by throwing her clothes down at them, piece by piece, until only her shift is left” (1987, 77). This scene does in fact make sense if the heroine is read to be in a semi-animalistic state, having renounced some of her humanity. Shedding human garments is akin to shedding social skins, layers of human identity, though her morphological stability betrays her when the king perceives her as a beautiful human female and decides to wed her

However, the fact that this remains a human-centered tale renders its subversiveness incomplete. We never learn what the brothers think and feel while they are enchanted; do they keep their sister company as she silently sews shirts for them? Do they retain any fragments of their human identities or memories while in swan or raven form? The fact that the brothers fly to where their sister is bound to a pyre, about to be immolated, suggests that they acknowledge some kind of tie to her. The brothers’ inability to use their bird beaks to form human speech parallels the sister’s silence, rendering both brothers and sister unintelligible in human terms. For the brothers to become human again, they must be framed as legibly human. Bear notes the importance of “publicly dressing the swans as human beings” in order to disenchant them in certain versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” (2009, 55). In “The Six Swans,” the heroine tosses the shirts she had sewn onto the swans as they fly near the pyre to which she is bound. In “The Twelve Brothers,” the brothers as ravens swoop into the yard where the sister is about to be burned at the stake, at which point the seven years of the sister’s silence elapse. Exactly at that moment, “just as they touched the ground, they turned into her twelve brothers whom she had saved” (Zipes 2002b, 35–36). In “The Seven Ravens,” the brothers assume human form after flying into their home as ravens, and when they go to their table to eat and drink, they notice signs of the sister’s presence and exclaim, “Who’s been eating from my plate? Who’s been drinking from my cup? It was a human mouth” (92). The sister’s presence is enough to disenchant the brothers, but it is significant that her humanness causes them to comment and initiates the transformation. Thus, in each of these three tales, the brothers must reengage with human activities—wearing clothing, acknowledging their relationship with gravity and the ground, and eating in human fashion—in order to become human once again.

To explore the issues presented by these tales further, I return to the comparative method, asking why three versions of this tale type really needed to be published in one collection, and what the differences between the versions can tell us. Queer and anthropological perspectives on the brother[1]sister relationship each illuminate the meanings of tales where brothers and sisters love each other excessively—both as taboo and survival strategy. Parental love is almost always destructive, whether it is excessive fatherly love or a stepmother’s desire to be the sole loved object. We learn from the anomalous ending of the text “The Seven Ravens” that neither silence nor heterosexual marriage is required for this tale type to work as a story, to make sense narratively. In that tale, the sister disenchants her brothers when she arrives at their domicile and drops a ring into one of their cups as a recognition token, at which point the seventh brother says, “God grant us that our little sister may be here. Then we’d be saved!” (Zipes 2002b, 92). After the brothers are transformed back into humans, they “hugged and kissed each other and went happily home” (93). Here, enfolding back into the nuclear family is the happily ever after—the only price was the sister’s little finger and her sacrifice to seek her brothers. In the texts where marriage does occur, it is queered by danger and ambivalence. According to my allomotific analysis, silence is but one method of disenchantment. A sacrifice of another sort will do: the sacrifice of a “normal” marriage, the sacrifice of a reproductive future. Yet these things seem a small price to pay for the reward of a family structure, however unconventional, bonded by love and loyalty

As I’ve shown, the Grimms’ versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” affirm some family values on the surface, but the texts are also radical in their suggestions for alternate ways of being. The nuclear family is critiqued as dangerous, and the formation of a new marital family does not guarantee the heroine any more safety. Greenhill describes a parallel phenomenon in the tales she analyzes in her essay: “‘Bluebeard’ and ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ queer kinship by exposing the sine qua non of heterosexual relationships—between bride and groom, husband and wife—as explicitly adversarial, dangerous, even murderous” (2008, 150). The husband in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” (when he appears) is not dangerous through action so much as inaction, by allowing his mother to slander and threaten his wife. Both men and women are alternately active and passive in this tale type, making it difficult to state to what degree this tale type exhibits female agency, a task made even more difficult when the heroine voluntarily gives up her voice. The sister’s agency lies partially in negation and endurance, which is one way that the tale queers the notion of agency, despite the fact that in each of the three tales the sister takes the initiative and sets out on a quest to find her brothers. By simultaneously questioning the family and making it the sought-after object, the Grimms’ three versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” complicate the notion of kinship, presenting myriad possibilities for how humans and non-humans can relate to and live with one another. As a story that explores and opposes lethal and idealized families, this tale investigates themes of attachment, ambivalence, and ambiguity that were central to the Grimms’ cultural context and life histories and remain relevant today.

[heart-full-of-lust]

“In a World of Gastons, Be the Beast: The False-dom Glut in the Internet Era”

Authors: Eleanor V. Marlowe, MD, PhD; [Redacted], DSc (Erotic Behavioral Sciences) N Engl J Sex Health 2024; 390:69-420. DOI: 10.1056/NEJSMoa23069420

Abstract

Background: The proliferation of self-proclaimed “Doms” in digital spaces (False-doms: performative, unskilled, often misogynistic) has created a socioerotic crisis. This study contrasts False-doms with the Beast archetype—authentic dominants who integrate emotional labor, consent, and feminist praxis. Methods: Mixed-methods analysis of 1,243 online BDSM profiles and 72-hour ethnographic immersion in a luxury dungeon. Results: 89% of False-doms misused honorifics (e.g., “Daddy” without certification), versus 12% of Beasts. Submissives reported 4.2x higher satisfaction with Beasts, citing “post-scene vulnerability checks” and “non-transactional aftercare.” Conclusions: The BDSM community must reject Gastonian bravado. True dominance is quiet, complex, and smells vaguely of library dust.

Introduction

The rise of “doms” who conflate dominance with dick pics mirrors the broader crisis of masculinity—a world of Gastons, flexing but not feeling. This study posits that the Beast from Beauty and the Beast (Disney, 1991) offers a superior model: a dominant who wields power through self-awareness, patience, and a killer home library.

Case Study: Dr. A’s Journey

The Gastons: Pre-conference, Dr. A (38F, feminist) encountered 14 False-doms on “elite” BDSM apps. Red flags included:

Demanding nudes pre-negotiation (n=12)

Using “brat” to shame boundaries (n=9)

*Quoting *50 Shades* unironically* (n=14)

The Beast: Participant B (45M) initiated contact with a PDF of his BDSM certification (Duchy of Benwick, 2018) and a peer-reviewed paper on clitoral hemodynamics.

Results

Dr. A’s Diary Excerpt: “Gastons punish. Beasts cultivate. When he locked me in his suite, it wasn’t control—it was an invitation to dismantle my own cages.”

Discussion

The Beast Paradox Authentic dominance requires vulnerability anathema to Gastonian machismo. Participant B’s willingness to cry during aftercare (“Your tears dilute my serum cortisol”) underscores this.

The Library as Diagnostic Tool A 2023 meta-analysis found dungeon libraries correlate with dominant competence (OR 6.9, 95% CI 4.2-9.1). Shelves >50% nonfiction predicted 83% lower sub drop risk.

The False-dom Epidemic Tinder’s “Dominant” tag has been cheapened by gym bros who think choking is a personality. Meanwhile, Beasts lurk in plain sight—over-caffeinated, under-slept, quoting Rilke during flogging.

Conclusions

We must rebrand dominance. Certification programs, mentorship, and mandatory readings (The Feminist Guide to Impact Play) could curb the False-dom glut.

As Dr. A asserts: “Submit to a Beast once, and you’ll never kneel for a Gaston again.”

Footnotes

Gaston Coefficient: Ratio of bicep size to emotional intelligence.

Participant B’s library: 3,412 books, including first-edition Story of O and Gray’s Anatomy (both kinds).

Funding/Support: This study was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Kinky Health. Participant B donated his flogger for “academic purposes.”

[Disclosure: Dr. Marlowe is writing a memoir, Howl: A Feminist’s Guide to Getting Pegged.]

Reprints: Available at www.nejsh.org/be-my-guest.

[lct-skaa]

A few of us are on Tumblr now so I might as well make a list...

@iannasirlct

@lct-thaumaturge

@lct-carmilla

@lcts-worst

Yo I'm Skaa. This blog is for me to post about my job so my bio would probably make sense to attach... Here it is:

Name: Skaa Surge

Height: 6'7"

Weight: Approx. 72 kg

Age: Approx. Early 20s

Eye Color: green

Hair Color: Black

Preffered Weapon: Cadence (a bass guitar modified to be a weapon)

Sinner No. #7

#32a852 Electric Green

Callsign: Cadence

Skaa Surge comes from a familial background of skilled fixers and workshop workers though that isn't to say she has the same skills as her lineage would suggest. As skilled as she is she is also unfocused in a way that makes her far undershoot her potential both as a combatant and as an inventor. Coming from the backstreets of music she has experienced the pianist first hand as well as having a history in music. Though of course occuring early in her life the pianist incident means that her original home only has a limited mark on her personality with her background in growing up in k corp seems to have influenced her more significantly. Beyond that some key footnotes are trauma related to the formerly Impuritas Civitatis rank case known as the library, experience fighting distortions, and minor noteriaty as a punk rock musician.

Her background in both being the daughter of a workshop worker as well as being a former workshop owner herself makes for a dangerous level of creativity and skill in all things mechanical. This sinners skills should at no point be underestimated as it is an asset to the company. That being said her volatility and lack of focus makes it hard to channel her creative free spirit into something actually productive so an extreme amount of patience is required when handling this particular sinner.

An incomplete list of Skaa's inventions she uses regularly is attached below:

A large battery prosthetic in her body by the bass of her spine to store a second pool of charge.

An electric plug tail prosthetic that lets her draw charge and pump charge into numerous devices.

Bass guitar named "Cadence" with a blade welded to the side and several modifications to make it a more effective weapon.

A bass amp built into her jacket also containing a large amount of mechanical tools.

A welding kit built into a pair of gloves.

A strange system built into her chest that consumes charge to recover from damage taken by stimulating cell growth.

[snugglesquiggle]

my neocities site used to have a bunch of javascript.

for example, i had a page that existed to load up chapters of various stories so that you could read all of the chapters in one page, sort of like ao3's view full work feature. because it was scripted dynamically, i didn't have to maintain a separate copy of the text, and it was actually more flexible than what ao3 offers, because you could read specific arcs, heck, you could read a specific sequence of chapters (e.g., 2-13 specifically)

another thing i didn't want to maintain by hand was header at the top of the page with navigational links, so i had a script that updates them on page load.

problem is, it kind of just feels bad to load a page, then see a visible delay before the header pops in.

i spent almost a year living like that, but i eventually stopped maintaining my html by hand, and learned the joys of the static site generator.

i didn't need the chapter loader anymore, either - i could code my site generator to concatenate chapters into a full-text page, and since it's static, it'd load much faster than make the user's browser stitch together the html every time they want to open that page.

slowly but surely, everything i might've used js for was getting replaced by simpler, faster, and easier means.

i don't make much use of it, but my site actually has discord-style spoiler text. blocks of text you can click to reveal (and the css is uses currentColor, so it works even on different themes)

i don't even need javascript for this; the way i accomplish it is a bit clever:

it's a checkbox! even if you hide the actual box, you can still click the label to toggle its state

this was something i implemented early, based on this blog post where a similar trick was used for a no-js dark/light mode toggle.

but i took this to a new height this year: i added fancy footnotes

but under the hood, it's the same principle

check box to toggle the state, then some fancy css it position it to float above the text.

but of course, if i'm doing all of this without javascript, what do i need javascript for?

and there was only one feature that stuck around. it's something that i think no one really used, but i'm attached to it.

you see, i'm notorious for writing long chapters. i could split them up, but i have particular stopping points in mind. still, i am merciful, so in my stories with consistently long chapters, i'm gone out of my way to insert break points, "subchapters" seamless into the main text.

those little roman numerals would trigger a script that reformatted the page to hide all the other subchapters, and reconfiguring the next/prev buttons so that clicking them takes you to the next section rather than the next chapter

in theory, you could read Hostile Takeover as if it were a fic with 72 chapters instead of 16.

now, this is a very complex feature. you cant use checkbox tricks to emulate this, unless you want to go crazy writing a dozen css rules for every permutation of checkboxes, or force the user to figure out an arcane system where you need to uncheck one section before loading the next

but it turns out, while i wasn't paying attention, the css committee added a crazy new feature. there are :has selectors, enabling you to style elements based on the properties of elements that come below it in the document.

the whole game has changed now.

couple this with learning about :target selectors courtesy of wonder how a couple of really ambitious ao3 fics do their magic, i had everything i need

all it took to make subchapters happen now a few simple rules

really, you only need that first line. it says "if main has a target element, hide all subchapters that aren't the target"

the other lines are convenience; they had the next/prev chapter buttons if you're in the middle of the chapter. there's a couple other rules (beside the subchap nav i added a button that takes you to the top of the page, which resets the anchor target), but overall, it was quick and painless. really, the actual struggle was teaching my site generator spit out the right html. (i spent five minutes tearing out my hair and rebuilding to no effect because i forgot i had two layers of caching. whoops)

this new approach does sacrifice the ability to make the arrow buttons do double duty, but i don't think it's a big loss when the subchapter buttons are right there, and arguably retaining the single function of each button is a win for usability.

the biggest loss is that there's no real way to style the buttons differently if they've been clicked, so you don't actually know which subchapter you're actually browsing.

(maybe if anyone i actually uses this feature, they can complain to me and i'll whip up a quick bit of js to patch it :v)

but until then, i'll take some satisfaction in delete my site's scripts entirely. in a way, that's the biggest loss, but it's one of i'm proud of

[luxiofuxio]

```

███ WELCOME TO ██ LUXIOFUXIO.TUMBLR.COM ██

↳ file: [intro.pinned.post.v13.4_final(FINAL).txt]

↳ status: SCRAPBOOK // MEMORY VAULT // MULTI-NODE ENTITY LOG

↳ integrity: ~72% // corrupted but charming

```

“You are not supposed to be here.”

We said to ourselves. And yet. Here we are.

---

WE ARE LUX

> [species: electric / introspective]

> [type: plural | liminal | narrative-adjacent]

- references Luxio, the Pokémon.

- glowing eyes. voltage under fur.

- the moment before the zap when everything

pauses.

- what if a username was a spell that became a system?

- what if you could evolve sideways?

we have DID

we are many

we are real

we are glitching beautifully

sometimes the one typing is Lux

sometimes someone else

sometimes you

(you’ll know. or you won’t. that’s part of the recursion.)

---

this blog is not a blog.

it is:

a collective dreaming in electric pulses

a haunted archive of our collective selves

system updates posted between reblogs

footnotes that no longer trust their sources

a soft place for the hard parts of identity

>> selfhood here is fractal.

>> narrative here is non-linear.

>> reality here is participatory.

---

SYSTEM NOTE:

> this page will loop.

> you are not at the beginning.

> you are not at the end.

> there is no canon. only interpretation.

---

[WHAT TO EXPECT]

- identity static

- hyperpersonal shitposts

- “is this Pokémon or poetry?” yes

- altered states & alternate fonts

- the house

- genuine connection between unshared realities

- sometimes shit gets weird and raw and quiet

[WHAT NOT TO EXPECT]

- consistency

- cohesion

- clarity

- a single narrator

- just one “me”

---

YOU ARE VIEWING A PLURAL SYSTEM.

do not reduce. do not romanticize. do not assume.

ask before naming. listen before interpreting. honor before pathologizing.

---

```

[ACCESS FOOTNOTE PROTOCOL? Y/N]

> Y

> loading...

```

**[1]** You’ve seen this post before.

**[2]** No, not in *this* timeline.

**[3]** The reblogs loop back eventually.

**[4]** We’re not a metaphor. We’re just living.

**[5]** The system speaks in chorus. The blog echoes what’s left unsaid.

**[6]** if you read this entire intro out loud, you will either summon an alter or remember who you were before you split. or both.

**[7]** This blog is not safe for your assumptions.

**[8]** Follow us. Or don’t. The recursion continues either way.

---

[FILE ENDED]

↳ you’ve reached the bottom.

↳ or is it the start?

↳ this line rewrites itself every time you reid it.

---

do not forget about the monster.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Footnotes Part II

[63] William Hazlitt, “Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft,” in Collected Works, Vol. 2 (London: J.M. Dent, 1902), 155.

[64] Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 91.

[65] Andrew J. Wall, Andrew Carnegie (New York, Oxford University Press, rpt. Pittsburgh: University Of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 837; Richard Teller Crane, The Utility of all Kinds of Higher Schooling (Chicago, H.O. Shepard, 1909), 106.

[66] Donoghue, The Last Professors, 3.

[67] David L. Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 243.

[68] Donoghue, The Last Professors, 56.

[69] Quoted in full in Condé Nast Portfolio.com, “Daily Brief: Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and F——You,” Oct. 17, 2008. http://www.portfolio.com/v iews/blogs/daily-br ief/2008/10/17/hedge-fund-manager-good bye-and-f-you.

[70] Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 6–7.

[71] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Grafton Books, 1977), 99- 100.

[72] Randall Colvin and Jack Block, “Do Positive Illusions Foster Mental Health? An Examination of the Taylor and Brown Formulation,” Psychological Bulletin 116:1 (July 1994), 3–20.

[73] One group that applies positive psychology to business practices, and touts the worldwide goodness this spreads, posts this laudatory message sent to the group in July 2004 by then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan: “I would like to commend you for your innovative methodology of ‘apprecia tive inquiry’ and to thank you for introducing it to the United Nations. Without this, it would have been very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to constructively engage so many leaders of business, civil society, and government.” Business as an Agent of World Benefit (BAWB) Global Forum. http://www.bawbglobalforum.org/content/view/47/115.

[74] Anthropologist Laura Nader strongly disagrees with the assertion that positive emotions and health go together.

[75] Huxley, Brave New World, 99–100.

[76] Mihály Csikszentmihály, “Brain Channels Thinker of the Year Award: 2000: Mihály Csikszentmihály, ‘Flow Theory.’” Brain Channels. Accessed April 5, 2009. http://www.brainchannels.com/thinker/mihaly.html; Jamie Chamberlin, “Reaching ‘Flow’ to Optimize Work and Play,” American Psychological Association Monitor 29:7 (July 1998), http://www.apa.org/monitor/ju198/joy.html.

[77] Csikszentmihály, “‘Flow Theory.’”

[78] E. Diener, C. Nickerson, R. E. Lucas, and E. Sandvik, “Dispositional Affect and Job Outcomes,” Social Indicators Research 59 (2002), 229–259.

[79] S. E. Taylor, “Adjustment to Threatening Events: A Theory of Cognitive Adaptation, American Psychologist 38 (1983), 1161–1173. Quoted in Colvin and Block, “Do Positive Illusions Foster Mental Health?”

[80] C. Peterson, “The Future of Optimism,” American Psychologist 55:1 (Jan. 2000), 4–55.

[81] D. A. Jopling, “‘Take away the life-lie ... ’ Positive illusions and creative self deception.” Philosophical Psychology 9 (1996), 525–544.

[82] Chris Cochran. “The Production of Cultural Difference: Paradigm Enforcement in Cultural Psychology,” Psychology at Berkeley Spring 2008.

[83] “In Good We Trust,” in Mother Jones, January/February 2009. http://www.motherjones.com/media/2009/02/books-good-we-trust.

[84] Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson, “Peaceful Parenting,” The Greater Good 4:3 (Winter 2007–2008). http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/2007winter/HartHodson.html.

[85] Richard S. Lazarus, “Author’s Response: The Lazarus Manifesto for Positive Psychology,” Psychological Inquiry 14:2 (2003), 176.

[86] “The New Industrial Relations,” Business Week 2687 (May 11, 1981): 84–89.

[87] David Noble, America by Design (Oxford: Oxford University. Press, 1977).

[88] Frank M. Gyrna Jr., Quality Circles: A Team Approach to Problem Solving (New York: American Management Associations, 1981); Neal Q. Herrick, Joint Management and Employee Participation: Labor and Management at the Crossroads (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990); Paul Bernstein, Workplace Democratization: Its Internal Dynamics (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1976); Robert S. Ozaki. Human Capitalism: The Japanese Enterprise System as World Model (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1991).

[89] Roberto González, “Brave New Workplace: Cooperation, Control, and the New Industrial Relations,” Controlling Processes: Selected Essays, 1994–2005. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 92/93 (2005), 113.

[90] Gyrna, Quality Circles, 53.

[91] Ozaki, Human Capitalism, 169.

[92] Ibid.

[93] Satoshi Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane: An Insider’s Account of Life in a Japanese Auto Factory, Tatsuru Akimoto, ed. and trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 71.

[94] Ibid., 24, 30.

[95] Ibid., 109–110.

[96] González, “Brave New Workplace,” 109.

[97] Noble, America by Design, 274–278.

[98] Ibid., 290.

[99] Ibid., 259–260.

[100] González, “Brave New Workplace,” 111.

[101] Ibid., 118.

[102] Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 124.

[103] Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Managers Find ‘Quality Time’ on a Brainstorming Retreat,” The New York Times, Jan. 11, 1994: A7; González, “Brave New Workplace,” 107.

[104] J. P. Womack, D. T. Jones, and D. Roos. The Machine That Changed the World (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 200–203.

[105] Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 75.

[106] R. Ofshe and Margaret T. Singer, “Attacks on Peripheral versus Central Elements of Self and the Impact of Thought Reforming Techniques,” Cultic Studies Journal 3:1 (1986): 6.

[107] González, “Brave New Workplace,” 116.

[108] Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 48.

[109] Alejandro Lugo, “Cultural Production and Reproduction in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico: Tropes at Play among Maquiladora Workers,” Cultural Anthropology, 5:2. (1990): 178–180.

[110] Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 156–157.

[111] Mike Parker, Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL (Boston: South End Press, 1985), 19; González, “Brave New Workplace,” 115.

[112] Parker, Inside the Circle, 20; González, “Brave New Workplace,” 116.

[113] P. C. Thompson, “U.S. Offered Unusual Class on Diversity,” New York Times, Apr. 2, 1995: 34.

[114] R. E. Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000). Quoted in Barbara S. Held, “The Negative Side of Positive Psychology,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 44:1 (Winter 2004), 9, 24.

[115] Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 172.

[116] David Barstow, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2008: 172.

[117] Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985), 285.

[118] Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review (May 1949). Rpt. In http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Einstein.htm.

[119] Cited in Glenn Greenwald, “There’s Nothing Unique About Jim Cramer,” Salon 13 (March 2009), www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/13/cramer.

[120] Ibid.

[121] Ibid.

[122] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies,” April 29, 1938. In John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project (Santa Barbara, Calif.: University of California). http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15637.

[123] Dennis C. Blair, “Far-Reaching Impact of Global Economic Crisis,” Annual Threat Assessment, Senate Armed Services Committee (March 10, 2009), 3. http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2009_hr/031009blair.pdf.

[124] Quoted in James Bamford, “Big Brother Is Listening,” Atlantic (April 2006), http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200604/nsa-surveillance/4.

[125] Nathan Frier, “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development,” U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB890.pdf.

[126] George Orwell, The Collected Letters, Essays and Journalism of George Orwell. Vol, 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950. Eds. Sonia B. Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), 67.

[127] Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 410.

[hzaidan]

03 Paintings, Middle East Artists, Nazir Nabaa's Untitled (Three Ladies), with Footnotes, #72

Nazir Nabaa (Syrian, 1941-2016)Untitled (Three Ladies), c. 1991Oil on canvas, in three partseach: 27 ½ x 43 ½in. (69.5 x 109.5cm.)Private collection Sold for USD 87,500 in Mar 2017 As these women are set against intricately and highly rich ornamented backgrounds with arabesque geometric designs, Nabaa references the highly decorated interiors of old Damascene homes whilst simultaneously paying…

[runningoutofbooks]

Reading Wrapped 2024

This was a great year of reading for me! This was the first year I had goals other than book count. And I am proud to say that I met all of those goals (and even exceeded them)!

[This year I also reread a series that I read when I was young. I wanted to see the books from an adult perspective. And, well I can definitely see why I enjoyed them, I also noticed so many things that I didn't when I was a kid. It was an eye opening experience and I am glad I did it.

So you will notice a certain author crop up in my stats, I just want to say briefly that I do not share the same beliefs and opinions as this author. I try to keep my life and my blog a safe place!]

So without further ado:

A few stats:

Reading goal: 100 Actually Read: 118

Last year I was just shy of 100 books. So this year I challenged myself to reach that goal. And, boy howdy, did I reach it!

It was not easy, I think it was only possible because I read so many graphic novels. I will be lowering my reading goal for next year.

DNF: 3

This is the first time 'Did Not Finish' has appeared in my Reading Wrapped. I am trying not to force myself to finish books. There are so many books, and so little time.

First time reads: 97 Rereads: 21

10 less rereads this year than last year. I'm pleasantly surprised, I love rereading books, and sometimes I get a little stuck rereading the same things over and over, so it's nice to see myself branch out a little more.

Physical Books: 91 Audiobooks: 17 Ebooks: 10

Look at all those ebooks! 3x what I read last year. Less audiobooks though.

Average book length: 311 Pages Longest book: HP And The OOTP by JK Rowling (895 Pages) Shortest book: The Beatrice Letters by Lemony Snicket (72 Pages)

That’s a big jump between shorted and longest, bigger than last year.

Fiction: 106 Nonfiction: 12

This was one of my extra goals this year. I challenged myself to read one nonfiction book a month. Even though some months I skipped and some months I read more than one nonfiction book I think I fulfilled the spirit of the challenge!

Top 5 Genres and Subgenres:

1. Fantasy (56) 2. Queer (40) 3. Mystery (31) 4. Comics (23) 5. Middle Grade (21)

This was another extra goal of mine to get queer books into my top five Genres and Subgenres. I was so sad last year when it didn't make the cut. But not only is it in the top five it is second on the list!

I want to give a shout out to @queerliblib for making this goal possible! Having access to queer ebooks and audiobooks through the Libby App was amazing! Thank you!

Top 5 Authors

1. Shannon Watters (19) 2. Kat Leyh (15) 3. Jenny Nimmo (8) 4. J.K. Rowling (7) 4. Lemony Snicket (7) 4. Elizabeth Peters (7) 5. ND Stevenson (6)

19 books by the same author is a new record for me! Also you'll note that there are more than 5 authors listed, three of the authors tied for 4th.

Book that took me the longest time to read:

How To Stop Time by Matt Haig

Do not even get me started on this book.

Book that took me the shortest time to read:

Lumberjanes Vol. 1: Beware the Kitten Holy by Grace Ellis, ND Stevenson, and Shannon Waters

Favorite book of the year:

Terry Pratchett: A life with footnotes* *The Official Biography by Rob Wilkins

And that was my year!

I can't wait to see what 2025 holds!

[riathedreamer]

For the people waiting for the next chapter of Footnotes - don't worry, it is coming. I had a rough spot mental health wise a while ago, and I had to take a break from social media and from writing. Doing much better now, and I am sloooowly chipping away at ch 72. A lot will happen in that one <3

[eleanorfenyxwrites]

The Man From Y.I.L.I.N.G.

Chapter 3 - RESEARCH FOOTNOTES

Jin Guangyao's motorcycle is a Chang Jiang 750 M1, manufactured by the China Nanchang Aircraft Manufacturing Company between the late 50's to the early 60's. The M1 model was essentially a clone of the 1956 Soviet Irbitski Mototsikletniy Zavod M-72 which was itself based on a 1938 German BMW R71. Source:Wikipedia

2. This ¥10 banknote that Nie Mingjue takes such offense to was in circulation between 1965 and 1980. Source:Leftovercurrency.com