#for that reason I changed my source from a link to a citation.

[puckpocketed]

ok the stick story is this

according to The Hockey Media, who as we know do not actually follow any teams closely so know NOTHING, ovechkin was finally hit by father time. he's finally slowing down. he's a shell of his old self. he has old man syndrome. blah blah blah

as a caps fan, i know that this is false, because our russian machine never break. he's a freak. who btw had like 13 goals disallowed or something crazy like that in the first half of last season but i digress

gee i wonder why ovechkin's goals went down? is it because his longtime center and future hall of famer nicklas backstrom retired in all but name? is it because our other top 6 center in evgeny kuznetsov had by far the worst season of his career (from point a game to not even half a point a game) and then went into the player's assistance program before being traded to the canes and then bolting for the KHL?

actually, as it turns out: no.

i mean probably those were factors, but there was another factor. a factor that many caps fans are very aware of but almost no one reported on for some reason (probably because they were too busy writing about how SiDneY CrOsBy was having SuCh an AmaZiNg season for a 36 year old despite ovechkin literally having just as a good a season the year prior at the *checks notes* age of 36. also this is a reminder that one of those two actually led their team to a playoff berth and it wasn't crosby)

ovechkin is, among other things, an elite shooter. like many elite shooters, he is EXTREMELY picky about his sticks. he has been using the same CCM model for the last 7 seasons...and prior to this season they discontinued it.

the first half of the season (roughly), ovi was constantly trying out new sticks from CCM, from Bauer, whoever. he tried quite a few different sticks. results: 8 goals in 43 games.

then, ovechkin found an independent supplier. apparently (i can't remember where this info came out, maybe 32 thoughts?), these guys have an "ovi pro curve" model based on his old stick with CCM and he bought it and tried it out. curve was identical, and it felt right to him. started using those. results: 23 goals in 36 games.

am i saying that he is going to continue on that pace this coming season? probably not. do i think that the rumors of his demise as a goal scorer are greatly exaggerated and almost surely mistaken? yes. am i optimistic that with some stability in our center depth and stability in stick choice, ovechkin will have a 40 goal season again and possibly break wayne gretzky's all time goals record? YES.

what this means for PLD our beloved failhorse wife: he's not getting some washed up old man former great on his wing. he's getting the greatest fucking goal scorer in the history of the sport. and i, for one, am excited to see what they can do together.

link i thought about this all morning during baking and while i was out!! thank you for the stick explanation and all the sources i LOVE citations i am eating them up like theyre cakes at teatime....! more under the cut but heres what i was thinking about when i read this:

thinking about how,, particular some players get about their equipment, how superstitious, it's crazy to me that a manufacturer can just do all that. if it were me and MYE special stick got discontinued id be suing for damages

i was super interested in what actually changed in the second half of the season because i saw ovechkin was back to scoring basically at-will again, so really thank you for explaining.. the bond between a hockey and their stick is so beaugtiful <3

cr-sby is my babygirl-in-law and i fear i will always be fond of him because of this, so i shall tread carefully here (pens friends look away) it DOES suck that they're not recognising your old man for his achievements while that old man gets hyped. is it like, weird anti-russian sentiment? or a more general anti-caps bias? every team fan space i dip into feels unfairly maligned one way or another - which, yeah! clenching my fist of rage.......

you spin such a tale and im VERY excited to see how next szn shakes out in light of all this and also . grabbing dubois by the scruff of his neck like i will stan either way but PLEASE dont embarrass me in front of my cool new friends kjlasdklasdkl....

thank you so much for stopping by and for the warmest welcome ever <3

[talisidekick]

My life is on Tumblr. Not all of it, but enough. Why? Because I finally broke out of the illusion I made for myself growing up. I felt like a monster because thats how I was told to feel for feeling what I felt, and so I lied to myself until I believed I didn't feel the things I did. It was a self-made, bunker thick, mysoginistic and misandristic shell of toxicity that made me miserable for the purposes of others convenience in upholding a fantasy world of simplicity. Upon rediscovering truth and having to face all I'd lost in making unappreciated sacrifices, I started to learn how to reclaim and rebuild myself. I want to show people it's okay to be yourself. That being transgender doesn't make you inherently evil. That I, at the end of today, am human, a person, like any of you.

I've shared my thoughts, my frustrations, some of my joys, my hardships. I've made statement pieces, analysis, and even science posts. I've, on occasion, written papers on here with citations/links to my sources. I've put a sizeable amount of time and energy into letting everyone on this site into my life in some small way to combat the idolization and demonization political actors on the local, provinicial/state/territorial, national, and global stage are doing to transgender people. Because the term "transgender" is not synonymous, a thesaurical equivalent, or a replacement for the words "predator", "pedophile", "rapist", "adulterer", "monster", "assaulter", "victim", or "survivor" to name a few. It means "to identify as any gender other than the one assigned at birth". Thats it. Someone could literally decide "I'm just not the gender the doctor said I was" or "I'm not just what the doctor said I was" or " I'm just me" and that's enough. Those are people you know, love, talked to, interact with, laughed with, but maybe also argued with, had a heated discussion with, fought with, or got mad at in traffic for not using a turn signal to change lanes (we've all done it by mistake). Transgender people are just people. Capable of making mistakes, helping others, needing help, and fucking up like everyone else. We all make bad calls, and stupid decisions. We learn, we correct, we hold eachother accountable.

Logging in today to see a long-standing transgender persons blog getting nuked for the either the stupidest idle threat ever made (or so thats the official reason by the Tumblr CEO) or for simply being transgender (as other and numerous members of the public claim) has made me personally a bit wary. The way I see it, it's both. An idle threat was made to a Tumblr executive and because of the prejudice thats become common place world wide, Tumblrs CEO felt vindicated in going to the excessive lengths of full account deactivation on a transgender persons blog. It's absolutely expected to have a zero-tolerance policy on issuing threats, especially to staff. It's not okay in an online forum of supposed neutrality to utterly silence a person completely without fair warning of a Terms of Service failure and a chance to remove, redact, or re-edit a response. We ALL get heated, even myself, and do stupid things in a reactionary moment of passion. What the issue here is, is the disproportionate response. Given I and numerous other transgender people have recieved threats, those on our very lives in fact, which have gone completely ignored, why is there suddenly a zero-tolerance immediate ban policy on a threat that was, in comparison, the kind of insult you'd expect from a grumpy five-year-old?

I see why this is blowing up, because it's a clear display of power privilege. And rather than going through the established review path, as far as anyone can tell, this was a direct response. This sends, whether intentional or not, a clear message: if you're transgender, you're on thin ice here. And it's not just transgender people and queer and cisgender allies who are getting the message. The transphobes, the so called 'gender critical' crowd, the terfs, are seeing it too. That is why I'm calling for Predesterone's account, all associate blogs, be reinstantiated.

The constant misgendering, libel, misinformation, verbal violence, abuse, and conjecture transgender people of all identities face on this site without any reprocussion to those responsible has, for a long while, helped set a clear standard that users of this platform are afforded the privilege of a degree of disrespect towards marginalized groups and minorities. Ableists attack the disabled and neurodivergent, Nazi's attack Jews, Transphobes attack Transgender people, homophobes attack the gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, and racists attack people of colour with -very- little the victims of such hate can do to make it stop. The bigots know this. And this ... this is going to make it worse. Bigots are going to try and instigate harsh responses from minority groups with the intent of forcing queer people and other minority groups off Tumblr. It has already begun in the reblogs of several posts like this one directed at transgender people. Predestrogen is already getting misgendered and disrespected outside the scope of the issue. Conjecture is already being made enmasse.

I'm on Tumblr because Reddit and Twitter were too unsafe. I'm not on any other blogging sites because Tumblr has, for the moment, a supportive queer community. That can change, given this whole situation has been done in such a way that it's being interpreted on all sides as an attack on transgender people.

Tumblr has no obligation to listen to me or others, but Tumblr has always struggled to get by, and I have to ask: is one persons dumb 'threat' really the spark you want to make to get people to leave. Is becoming a truly unprofitable cesspit and hate-haven like Twitter what's desired? Because this is the exact kind of rallying cry to make if you do.

I'm adding my voice to this. Bring back predesterone, this response is out of proportion. No, the CEO does not deserve to be threatened to have hammers thrown at his car until it explodes, or whatever. The point has been made: DO NOT THREATEN TUMBLR STAFF. But neither does a long-standing account deserve to be wiped off the face of Tumblr permanently for a blog post that is so benign compared to what the average transgender site user has to deal with on a regular basis with no recourse. Someone threatened to actually shoot me, kill me, if I was walking down the sidewalk and they saw me, and that post is still up and so is the account despite being reported. It's been 2-3 months or more. If I'm expected to stomach that, you can stomach someone saying they'll throw hammers at your car from a person who in all likelyhood is paying so much into transition she can't afford to buy one tiny kids-sized hammer. The person who threatened me actually openly admits to already owning guns.

[sohushygrayness]

Code of Conduct

As I approach my 50th project, I thought now would be a pertinent time to lay out some ground rules for myself and this blog by developing my own Code of Conduct which will give this blog (and those reading it) a clear expectation of what they can expect from me and this blog. Expect this to be a live document which is updated over time but will still be the guiding structure which I will operate under.

Project Types: I often begin my posts by specifying the project number. These are unique to me and refer to a master list which I run to keep me organised. However, I often specify a project type. Below is the guiding principle of these types.

Task: these projects are completed within 24 hours, will include at least 3 photos and at least 100 words.

Story: these projects are completed within 7 days. A story contains 7 Tasks.

Epic: these projects are completed within 28 days. An epic will contain 4 stories.

Initiative: these projects are completed within 84 days/3 months. I will use my template each time to ensure continuity and familiarity with my structure.

Posting Frequency

I will aim to upload and/or update once per day.

I will publish my upload and/or updates at 17:30 GMT.

Quality Standards

I will aim to ensure that all information I share is well-researched, accurate and proper citations are cited where necessary.

I will aim to ensure that posts are proofread to maintain a high standard of grammar, spelling, clarity and alignment with project type specifications.

Engagement and Feedback

I will aim to respond to comments within 24 hours.

I will remain open to the idea that what I can do today can be done better tomorrow and will be guided by reader feedback as well as my own internal affiliation for continuous improvement.

Ethical Considerations

I will aim to always create projects based on my own ideas. However, where this is not possible, I will always credit sources ands inform you of where inspiration comes from.

I will always remain transparent about any sponsorships, affiliate links, uses of artificial intelligence and uses of random generators.

Edits: 27/12/2024.

As part of a reflection at the end of 2024, I've realised that this limiting structure has hindered my creative productivity rather than supported it. For 2025, I'll look to make the following changes:

I will stop using the template that I have been using up to this point. Reason: you as the reader/s don't need to sit a template which support me in structuring my projects and thoughts. Going forward, it will return to a more normal text and photo format.

I will stop numbering my projects. Reason: Whenever I skip a number, it looks rather silly. And it puts more pressure on me to complete a project which I may have felt inspiration for in the moment but when I sit down to work on it doesn't fill me with the same excitement to create.

I will stop using Artificial Intelligence. Reason: over the course of this calendar year, I've felt a certain anxiousness towards the idea that artificial may replace our creativity. By using it, I take part in supporting that very issue. Therefore, I'll stop using it.

[possiblythreefourthspeahen]

The reason you can't cite Wikipedia is because it is in a constant state of change and the passage you're citing can be edited at any time.

Which is why my teachers taught me to go to the sources in the citations section and quote from there instead. I suppose if you really wanted to, you could save a page on archive.org and quote that with the relevant link in your citations, but there's little point in that for most papers.

The point of writing a paper is to force you to do critical thinking and practice communication. An encyclopedia like Wikipedia is a good starting reference because you still have to read and process the information. ChatGPT is not a useful tool for honing these skills because all you do is put in a prompt. There's no analysis or critical thinking required in that.

An important message to college students: Why you shouldn't use ChatGPT or other "AI" to write papers.

Here's the thing: Unlike plagiarism, where I can always find the exact source a student used, it's difficult to impossible to prove that a student used ChatGPT to write their paper. Which means I have to grade it as though the student wrote it.

So if your professor can't prove it, why shouldn't you use it?

Well, first off, it doesn't write good papers. Grading them as if the student did write it themself, so far I've given GPT-enhanced papers two Ds and an F.

If you're unlucky enough to get a professor like me, they've designed their assignments to be hard to plagiarize, which means they'll also be hard to get "AI" to write well. To get a good paper out of ChatGPT for my class, you'd have to write a prompt that's so long, with so many specifics, that you might as well just write the paper yourself.

ChatGPT absolutely loves to make broad, vague statements about, for example, what topics a book covers. Sadly for my students, I ask for specific examples from the book, and it's not so good at that. Nor is it good at explaining exactly why that example is connected to a concept from class. To get a good paper out of it, you'd have to have already identified the concepts you want to discuss and the relevant examples, and quite honestly if you can do that it'll be easier to write your own paper than to coax ChatGPT to write a decent paper.

The second reason you shouldn't do it?

IT WILL PUT YOUR PROFESSOR IN A REALLY FUCKING BAD MOOD. WHEN I'M IN A BAD MOOD I AM NOT GOING TO BE GENEROUS WITH MY GRADING.

I can't prove it's written by ChatGPT, but I can tell. It does not write like a college freshman. It writes like a professional copywriter churning out articles for a content farm. And much like a large language model, the more papers written by it I see, the better I get at identifying it, because it turns out there are certain phrases it really, really likes using.

Once I think you're using ChatGPT I will be extremely annoyed while I grade your paper. I will grade it as if you wrote it, but I will not grade it generously. I will not give you the benefit of the doubt if I'm not sure whether you understood a concept or not. I will not squint and try to understand how you thought two things are connected that I do not think are connected.

Moreover, I will continue to not feel generous when calculating your final grade for the class. Usually, if someone has been coming to class regularly all semester, turned things in on time, etc, then I might be willing to give them a tiny bit of help - round a 79.3% up to a B-, say. If you get a 79.3%, you will get your C+ and you'd better be thankful for it, because if you try to complain or claim you weren't using AI, I'll be letting the college's academic disciplinary committee decide what grade you should get.

Eventually my school will probably write actual guidelines for me to follow when I suspect use of AI, but for now, it's the wild west and it is in your best interest to avoid a showdown with me.

[tinyelephentalchaos]

I’ve been reading His Dark Materials, somewhat slowly, after having watched the show. I also saw the movie when it came out, what, 12 years ago, maybe?

Thinking about the guard and what their dæmons would be. Also what gender/sex: it would make sense, with most if not all of the guard being queer, and Andy… possibly being older than the concept of gender as we know it (are non-binary dæmons a thing? Also what do we know about neolithic conceptions of gender?) for them to have dæmons of the same gender… Though, would this go against the theme of them being the same as everyone else, since same-gender dæmons are rare...? Plus, the intersection between dæmons and sexuality is murky re: gender, given Pullman's answer to "could a character's dæmon being the same gender as them mean they're queer?" was "maybe", iirc.

Anyways, we know that they were born several centuries-to-millennia apart, so it wouldn't be that strange if they all happened to have same-gender dæmons, but it might make them stand out in public...

Anyways, here's a list of the guard and their dæmons, Lykon's is unnamed as of now because I have very little idea of where he could be from, or what language he would have spoken, aside from the Greek name he took.

Andy has a saker falcon, called Nyx (Νύξ "night"). That's not their first name, just as Andromache isn't Andy's: they remember the starting sound of each other's name throughout the millennia, bits and pieces of PIE which they speak amongst themselves and Quỳnh. Well, now, with her dæmon.

Quỳnh has a blue krait, named Tâm (from 心 "heart"*), who coiled herself around Andy's shoulders after Quỳnh was lost and never let go.

Nile had thought, at first, that Andy just.. had two dæmons. Why not? Here's this immortal warrior who claims that they lead an army of four people, has been a god, etc. They can have two dæmons, it's fine.

Nile's just... trying not to let her mind break, thank you very much. So, she's just accepting whatever at this point.

Lykon had a painted dog, who alongside him in, uh, whatever-post 331 BC/pre-1099 AD. (I'm begging, Greg/Victoria/Gina, give us a more concrete timeline.) When they disappeared, that's when Andy and Quỳnh knew he wasn't reviving.

Joe has a lion named Mahaad/Liyana (مَهّاد/لِيانَةٌ "comforter"/"tenderness"**) who preferred a rabbit form when he was a child.

Nicky has a wolf with a winter coat because fluffy wolves are adorable, named Concetto/Rossana ("Conception (of Jesus)"/"Dawn/Bright Star"***).

The two have long abandoned any sense of taboo around touching each other's dæmon: brushing past them on missions, cuddling with them during downtime: Mahaad/Liyana will often laze around in the kitchen while Nicky cooks, stretching their neck so Nicky can scratch their chin as he passes by their sunspot, and Concetto/Rossana'll rest in Joe's lap while he draws. As it was, it took Nile that entire first weekend to figure out who's dæmon was whose, not helped that they respond to each other's names. Nicky explained it like this when she asked: "Over the centuries, we've become intertwined, our souls bound together as one. Why shouldn't we call our dæmons by the same sounds, or touch them with our own hands?"

Booker has a polecat with white-ish markings on their face and body named Jules/Chloé (French form of Julian/French form of Chloe****).

Nile has a fox sparrow with russet feathers named Seth/Lucy (from Hebrew שת "Appointed"/Latin Lux "Light"*****). I feel like both are appropriate given Nile's probably Protestant background.

All of the immortals, minus Nile and excluding Quỳnh as an outlier since she's been separated from Tâm for centuries, can separate from their dæmon to some extent. Andy often asks Nyx to scout for the group, and while they tend to slow down for the duration of separation beyond ~ 20 meters, they no longer experience pulling (separation from one's dæmon) as everyone else. (But Tâm'll coil closer around Andy's shoulders, regardless, whispering soft nothings in whatever language she can think of.)

Joe and Nicky, meanwhile, if they can help it, will go with one another's dæmon if they need to separate. So that they can take comfort from the other shape of their soul, and know their first soul-form is protected above all else. When other circumstances arise and they're separated from both their dæmons, they look to each other for comfort through the pulling.

Booker ( like Ms. Coulter), can go the longest time apart from his dæmon without a shared goal or someone else to rely on. It's... not great, and he tries not to do so often simply because it's noticeable and he's trying to pretend, at least, that he's relatively happy, but it's a useful skill especially when there are tight spaces or small openings in a structure.

The first time this happened, actually, was while he was dying his first deaths. Jules/Chloé left to find some kind help, after the first few days. Ended up finding Andy, Joe & Nicky, and lead them all back to Booker. Of the others in the guard, Jules/Chloé is the closest to Andy and Nyx, simply because the pair were the first the dæmon had seen in weeks.

Lastly, as to Quỳnh, Tâm and separation: when Quỳnh was taken in the iron maiden, both Tâm and Nyx were held in another part of the dungeon, as the captors thought that would weaken their powers. So, she's been apart, not only from Andy, Joe and Nicky, for the past 400-500 years, but from her dæmon, too. The Pulling alone was excruciating, halfway down to the bottom of the ocean, she died from it alone. Yet, coupled with the drowning, the riviving, the snippets of dreams... when she finally escapes, Quỳnh's barely clinging to the last shreds of her sanity, and that's only because she knows Andy's been looking after Tâm-- their bond, though stretched to its last threads, still exists and she just knows Tâm's been safe 'til 1812, when she first glimpses her again. She goes peacefully to death that time. What should she care of her own suffering if her dæmon is truly safe? And then she revives, again and again, and she recalls her rage...

---

Sources on names that I'm pretty sure are accurate, but again, please correct me if they're not:

*https://www.behindthename.com/name/ta13m/submitted

**https://quranicnames.com/liyana/ and https://quranicnames.com/mahaad/

***https://www.behindthename.com/name/concetto (masculine form of Concetta, unrelated to the Italian word meaning concept or the English word meaning conceit. Spelled the same though, and is a cognate of Concepción) and https://www.behindthename.com/name/rossana and https://www.behindthename.com/name/roxana

**** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloe

***** Gen. 4:25, New Revised Standard Version and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius

[flightlessnightingale]

On Lesbianism

I’ll state it at the top here, because many have not understood my stance. The purpose of this essay is not to say that Lesbian cannot mean “Female homosexual.” Rather, my objective is to show that Lesbian means more than that single definition suggests. Female Homosexuals are lesbians, unless they personally do not want to use that label. Now, on with the show: Lesbianism is not about gatekeeping, and I don’t want to have to keep convincing people that the movement popularized by someone who wrote a book full of lies and hate speech then immediately worked with Ronald Reagan is a bad movement. In the early ’70s, groups of what would now be called “gender critical” feminists threatened violence against many trans women who dared exist in women’s and lesbian spaces. For example, trans woman Beth Elliott, who was at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference to perform with her lesbian band, was ridiculed onstage and had her existence protested. In 1979, radical feminist Janice Raymond, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, wrote the defining work of the TERF movement, “Transsexual Empire: The Making of the Shemale,” in which she argued that “transsexualism” should be “morally mandating it out of existence”—mainly by restricting access to transition care (a political position shared by the Trump administration). Soon after she wrote another paper, published for the government-funded, National Center for Healthcare Technology — and the Reagan administration cut off Medicare and private health insurance coverage for transition-related care.

Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism is a fundamentally unsustainable ideology. Lesbianism is a fundamentally sustainable existence.

There used to be a lesbian bar or queer bar or gay bar in practically every small town — sometimes one of each. After surviving constant police raids, these queer spaces began closing even Before the AIDS epidemic. Because TERFs would take them over, kick out transfems and their friends. Suddenly, there weren’t enough local patrons to keep the bars open, because the majority had been kicked out. With America’s lack of public transportation, not enough people were coming from out of town either.

TERFs, even beyond that, were a fundamental part of the state apparatus that let AIDS kill millions.

For those who don’t know, Lesbian, from the time of Sappho of Lesbos to the about 1970′s, referred to someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy. It was not only a sexuality, but almost akin to a gender spectrum.

That changed in the 1970′s when TERFs co-opted 2nd Wave feminism, working with Ronald fucking Reagan to ban insurance for trans healthcare.

TERFs took over the narrative, the bars, the movement, and changed Lesbian from the most revolutionary and integral queer communal identity of 2 fucking THOUSAND years, from “Someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy” to “A woman with a vagina who’s sexually attracted to other women with vaginas”

How does this fit into the bi lesbian debate? As I said, Lesbian is more of a Gender Spectrum than anything else, it was used much in the same way that we use queer or genderqueer today.

And it’s intersectional too.

See, if you were to try to ascribe a rigid, biological, or localized model of an identity across multiple cultures, it will fail. It will exclude people who should not be excluded. ESPECIALLY Intersex people. That’s why “Two Spirit” isn’t something rigid- it is an umbrella term for the identities within over a dozen different cultures. In the next two sections, I have excerpts on Two-Spirit and Butch identity, to give a better idea of the linguistics of queer culture: This section on Two-Spirit comes from wikipedia, as it has the most links to further sources, I have linked all sources directly, though you can also access them from the Wikipedia page’s bibliography: Two-Spirit is a pan-Indian, umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people who fulfill a traditional ceremonial and social role that does not correlate to the western binary. [1] [2] [3] Created at the 1990 Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg, it was "specifically chosen to distinguish and distance Native American/First Nations people from non-Native peoples." [4] Criticism of Two-Spirit arises from 2 major points, 1. That it can exasperate the erasure of the traditional terms and identities of specific cultures.           a. Notice how this parallels criticisms of Gay being used as the umbrella           term for queer culture in general. 2. That it implies adherence to the Western binary; that Natives believe these individuals are "both male and female" [4]          a. Again, you’ll notice that this parallels my criticisms of the TERF definition of Lesbian, that tying LGBT+ identities to a rigid western gender binary does a disservice to LGBT+ people,—especially across cultures. “Two Spirit" wasn’t intended to be interchangeable with "LGBT Native American" or "Gay Indian"; [2] nor was it meant to replace traditional terms in Indigenous languages.  Rather, it was created to serve as a pan-Indian unifier. [1] [2] [4] —The term and identity of two-spirit "does not make sense" unless it is contextualized within a Native American or First Nations framework and traditional cultural understanding. [3] [10] [11] The ceremonial roles intended to be under the modern umbrella of two-spirit can vary widely, even among the Indigenous people who accept the English-language term. No one Native American/First Nations' culture's gender or sexuality categories apply to all, or even a majority of, these cultures. [4] [8] Butch: At the turn of the 20th century, the word “butch” meant “tough kid” or referred to a men’s haircut. It surfaced as a term used among women who identified as lesbians in the 1940s, but historians and scholars have struggled to identify exactly how or when it entered the queer lexicon. However it happened, "Butch” has come to mean a “lesbian of masculine appearance or behavior.” (I have heard that, though the words originate from French, Femme & Butch came into Lesbian culture from Latina lesbian culture, and if I find a good source for that I will share. If I had to guess, there may be some wonderful history to find of it in New Orleans—or somewhere similar.) Before “butch” became a term used by lesbians, there were other terms in the 1920s that described masculinity among queer women. According to the historian Lillian Faderman,“bull dagger” and “bull dyke” came out of the Black lesbian subculture of Harlem, where there were “mama” and “papa” relationships that looked like butch-femme partnerships. Performer Gladys Bentley epitomized this style with her men’s hats, ties and jackets. Women in same-sex relationships at this time didn’t yet use the word “lesbian” to describe themselves. Prison slang introduced the terms “daddy,” “husband,” and “top sargeant” into the working class lesbian subculture of the 1930s.  This lesbian history happened alongside Trans history, and often intersected, just as the Harlem renaissance had music at the forefront of black and lesbian (and trans!) culture, so too can trans musicians, actresses, and more be found all across history, and all across the US. Some of the earliest known trans musicians are Billy Tipton and Willmer “Little Ax” Broadnax—Both transmasculine musicians who hold an important place in not just queer history, but music history.

Lesbian isn’t rigid & biological, it’s social and personal, built up of community and self-determination.

And it has been for millennia.

So when people say that nonbinary lesbians aren’t lesbian, or asexual lesboromantics aren’t lesbian, or bisexual lesbians aren’t lesbian, it’s not if those things are technically true within the framework — It’s that those statements are working off a fundamentally claustrophobic, regressive, reductionist, Incorrect definition You’ll notice that whilst I have been able to give citations for TERFs, for Butch, and especially for Two-Spirit, there is little to say for Lesbianism. The chief reason for this is that lesbian history has been quite effectively erased-but it is not forgotten, and the anthropological work to recover what was lost is still ongoing. One of the primary issues is that so many who know or remember the history have so much trauma connected to "Lesbian” that they feel unable to reclaim it. Despite this trauma, just like the anthropological work, reclamation is ongoing.

Since Sappho, lesbian was someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy. For centuries, esbian wasn’t just a sexuality, it was intersectional community, kin to a gender spectrum, like today’s “queer”. When TERFs co-opted 2nd Wave feminism, they redefined Lesbian to “woman w/ a vag attracted to other women w/ vags”. So when you say “bi lesbians aren’t lesbian” it’s not whether that’s true within the framework, it’s that you’re working off a claustrophobic, regressive, and reductionist definition.

I want Feminism, Queerness, Lesbianism, to be fucking sustainable.

I wanna see happy trans and lesbian and queer kids in a green and blue fucking world some day.

I want them to be able to grow old in a world we made good.

[kimyoonmiauthor]

“But conflict and problem can be different, you misunderstand conflict. All stories need a problem.”

Is that what Lit profs are teaching you? ‘cause ummm... that is load grade A retconning there. Those are Lit profs that are scared that their knowledge might be *gasp* wrong, which it is. I’ve covered this multiple times and even found the origins of the conflict narrative.

Seriously, I think they need to do some studying of Writing Advice Books and Writing Theory itself before making such assertions. Honestly, it’s poor study of literature, from my POV, but I understand why the assumption was made. So let’s get into it.

Academics basically functions like this

You have a summer, usually, to read a bunch of books, but you don’t have time to read those books, so what do you do? You find other people who have read those books and find their takes on those books. The thing is that Writing Advice books, as I’ve griped over and over and over are traditionally poorly sourced. So if you find one, and read it, but only part of it, its’s really difficult to back trace where the ideas came from. But you have say, 3-4 months.

This leads to copy errors and so often the fallacies continue, until someone comes along and challenges the entirety of the copy errors (There is a great paper, for example, which I linked in the master post about Short Story Advice manuals and the origin of Writing Advice manuals started with short stories--if you’re thinking that’s after Poe, that is correct.)

So is it your teacher’s fault they listened to professors who couldn’t back trace and read all of say, Freytag and find out that he was really racist, ethnicist, etc? No. It isn’t. But the blind worship of him is. Because reading him took me with free time to spare a week because frankly he’s an asshole. (There is no milder way to put it.) He’s not a genius, BTW, because he didn’t publish that much. Nor is he lauded for those works in Germany because honestly, genocide and Germany no longer mix.

So basically people were picking and choosing without citation. Which is where I say, !@#$ Cite your works kids, it makes the academics happy. It’s not all about plagiarism. It’s also because people don’t want to call you ut for being an a-hole later and doubting your motives.

So forgive your teachers and take it from me that Writing theory is very poorly cited. And it took me forever and a day to figure out what I’m about to lay down. (And yes, I’m still working on connecting it.)

Conflict, from Percy Lubbock Craft of Fiction 1921

BTW, later attributed wrongly to Shakespeare, Aristotle, Brecht and a bunch of straight guys (Lubbock was gay, and came out much later, but tried to appear straight passing.)

I should note I pulled a lot of teeth tracking down this book and triangulating it. I read through the Aristotle to the 19th century, couldn’t find it, read through the 1940′s, couldn’t find it, took a few blind stabs, couldn’t find it, and then guessed after World War I, and using those previous points finally found it with the type of argument you expect from someone making a pioneering argument.

Complete text to check my work is here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18961/pg18961-images.html

“What is the story? There is first of all a succession of phases in the lives of certain generations; youth that passes out into maturity, fortunes that meet and clash and re-form, hopes that flourish and wane and reappear in other lives, age that sinks and hands on the torch to youth again—such is the substance of the drama. The book, I take it, begins to grow out of the thought of the processional march of the generations, always changing, always renewed; its figures are sought and chosen for the clarity with which the drama is embodied in them.“

Because I had an extreme amount of time, I actually looked for reasons he might have thought this way. He’s described mostly as a reluctant modernist. He was gay, as I cited, but not out. He did write this after WWI, and if you remember, the world was basically in chaos then. People thought the world was ending. There was a massive world war. War was no longer “fun” as LM Montgomery put it (Rilla of Ingleside covers this--BTW, still one of my favorite, if not my favorite WWI account books.). People saw the cost of war. There was also a big plague of 1918 prior. People were staring at a ton of sudden industrial flurry too. And so, by 1921, of course the world looks like a bunch of conflict. Of course people think things need to change.

But the question is in what direction?

Modernists

The Modernists, unlike what was taught to me, already had a start long before 1921. It wasn’t all in reaction to WWI. Some of it was people getting tired of the endless wars and making commentary on social conditions of industrialization. Édouard Manet is credited with starting the art version of it. And on the writing side, Gertrude Stein is mostly credited with the start, but you can see roots in other 19th century writers, such as John Ruskin George Elliot, etc. (She didn’t take it from nowhere.)

Yes, yes, some of the ideology was Marxism, though not formalized until later, but some of it was asking questions which were viewed as highly offensive. (I kinda of think Waldemar Januszczak's documentary series probably does the best job to lay down the principles for you in ways my art profs would approve of. I could cite snobby books for you, but Waldemar is fun to watch.) 

If you want to look at the early modernists, and paintings like the Gleaners, it’s all questions about industrialization and its effects. The Modernists are by definition, anti-structuralist because industrialization feels like a lot of constraint, and the WWI part is a “See, I told you moment.” Modernists are also popular outside of Europe because of the destruction colonialism and imperialism has done to the rest of the world. (Also, not usually covered by Lit professors). Because Modernism questions industrialization and power structures, it’s not particularly popular with the elite beyond knowing of its existence, but it is popular with people who feel oppressed by those systems: Gays, Lesbians, Women, People of Color, etc.

Modernists embraced the flurry of activity from lower classes and the invitation to literature from the Rotary Printing Press.

But then you had...

The Structuralists

These are basically the opposite end of the Modernists--how do you make Capitalism work for you? Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) is usually credited for the start of Structuralism and Functionalism. (BTW, neither of which should be taught to you in the social sciences as anything more than long debunked, but so seductive to think about. I’ve covered over and over though how the writing community loves to hang onto theories from other fields that have long been debunked.) So you should be thinking Levi-Strauss, Durkheim, and a bunch of French Philosophers.

In this corner, you have Freytag (Germany needs to exterminate all of the Polish people and anyone outside of Germany is backwards and not worth your time because English Lit has gone down the drain compared to German Lit. And Freytag is the greatest writer of all time--greater than Shakespeare, even though he’s written far less plays. --;; This is basically the summary of his book.)

Structuralism is sexy because it says there is a formula to life: You just have to find it. And if you find the formula to control, manipulate, and put everyone into tiny little boxes, then you can beat the entire system, and in fact, help build the system. 

Say like Michel Foucault did by sexually assaulting a bunch of boys https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/french-philosopher-michel-foucault-abused-boys-in-tunisia-6t5sj7jvw and had philosophy about the Panopticon, also scarring a bunch of French boys and girls at the same time. Or his theories about the mental health wards, which to my mind, made them worse, but you are free to disagree by reading his essays, which, to be clear, he made harder to access on purpose so he could sound like a rich academic. (I’m not a fan. And no, it’s not because he’s gay, but because his ideas went to scar generations of people and sexual assaulters being worshipped isn’t my favorite thing in the world.)

Levi-Strauss is mostly a dick, but I do like his essay on the Raw and the Cooked philosophy that was is not culture is often seen as “Nature” (Only works pretty much for Europe, because these French guys never really ventured outside of France). And anything in between is seen as Taboo good or Taboo Bad, but it’s an exercise in patience reading his work, because he tries to sound more academic, again, also because he’s pro-imperialism in a lot of ways and sounds absolutely racist.

But if there was a formula to control people and social structures, it might also work for books, and this is the side that your Lit Profs are usually taught as “Commercial” and “correct” writing, even superseding the actual philosophies of the Modernists, even if the Modernists, over and over objected to the Structuralists. You have both EM Forster and Virginia Woolf hating the fact that Percy Lubbock is breaking away from Modernism.

Likewise the Structuralists hated the Modernists--the amount of hate towards Gertrude Stein is high, which starts with Rowe, and continues with Lajos Egri and she gets snubbed by Syd Field when he boasts about knowing Modernist artists, and skips her over.

In the writing theory corner, the structuralists came late as theorists, So you’re looking at Roland Barthes, somewhat Bertolt Brecht, etc. Mostly the structuralists like to call on the powers of Shakespeare and Aristotle retcon them hard. It’s a tradition, you see, because Freytag started it. It’s a false call to authority (which BTW, people don’t understand the fallacy for). Because Shakespeare never said anything about his own writing. And most of the time it’s a decontextualization and misunderstanding of Aristotle (Whom I carefully cited on his ideas one by one.)

Honestly, though Barthes was writing in the 1960′s, and was only translated sometime probably in the 1980′s, (My loose theory is that the US wasn’t interested in Structuralism in the 1960′s, but the backlash in the 1980′s fit very well with the ideals. See Satanic Panic) by the 1980′s, in the US, Structuralism, as an idea in Sociology, Anthropology and History was losing a foothold (Along with the Great Man theory, which fed into the idea of Character-Driven v. Plot-driven. Both based in Imperialism, BTW.)

But as I said, the writing community loves, loves to hang on to old ideas and so, it gained steam and played well with the other writing advice books, which publishers had carefully selected to be, and I wish I was kidding, mostly White cishet abled men. Women got to publish in the 1980′s, sure about theory, but not quite in that section of the bookstore, so most of the writing advice is located either in academic texts out of the public eye, i.e. inaccessible, or in Memoirs, which people won’t read unless they are interested in the author.

This means, in the public eye, who aren’t questioning this, the Structuralists have won.

But what does that have to do with Conflict v. Problem?

Since conflict was invented in 1921, by structuralist/Modernist Percy Lubbock, whom again, needs to get more credit for his actual work (and preferably read in tandem with Forster and Woolf when examining writing theory), he actually did mean it to be conflict. Because that’s the word he uses over and over again. He did not mean problem. He meant it as the central driver of the story: Story Driver. This was his intention, which is picked up later by Rowe (no credit. !@#$ I have so many curse words for Rowe’s plagiarism. He was a university professor who got Shakespeare and Aristotle wrong and was called on it by Lajos Egri, dammit.), and mainly Syd Field, who popularized the Three Act (though it got away from him in the 1970′s-1980′s. I’m still working out how).

This was doubled down by Brecht (1898- 1956), because the “proper” model is that the climax is the main character’s lowest point. The discourse is that it “Makes the story interesting” But Brecht’s first assertion was that it would show what the character was truly made of. If you notice the dates, he lived through a ton of trauma. SO of course he’s going to think that. I should note he hated Aristotle. (Aristotle got the credit later for his ideas. --;; It’s not completely wrong on one hand to make them join together, but the motivation for both is very, very different.)

Brecht absolutely, and positively did mean conflict. I mean look, he lived through 2 world wars, several other wars, a pandemic, and of course he’s going to think that conflict could show the worth of a person. What do you think? But unlike Aristotle who is using it as negative reinforcement, Brecht is viewing it as a way to uplift, because what? The person gets out of the conflict.

If you don’t believe me, then let’s look at Romance as an example (Note that most Romance authors know this is not a healthy relationship.) You have introduction, cutemeet (Inciting incident), and the climax is what? Let’s say it together: The couple breaks up. This is following the Brecht model. The conclusion is that the characters get back together.

Is this healthy? No. Do people encourage you to do it in real life? Hell no. In fact therapists say if you are in a cycle of doing this, it’s unhealthy and to find better conflict resolution.

Action movies? What’s the worst fear for the main character? Let’s make it become true.

Horror movies: Highest anxiety is met by making the worst become true.

This was the accepted formula.

Saying it was always problem, is retconning Literary history without the text support, in which case, you shouldn’t do that, and often Lit profs lecture heavily against it.

Then why does my teacher say problem?

Honestly, the education system is poor. Your professor/teacher should be teaching Shakespeare like the Historians do and talking about Morality. As they put it bluntly: Honor the Monarchy, or get your head chopped off. 

They should be talking Emotionality with the Gothic writers and John Locke.

They should be talking about Discovery.

About Naturalism, and all of the ideas that flooded the 19th century, but the truth is they weren’t really taught those things, and working from one formula, hearing someone talk about “But not every story has conflict” it’s hard to switch ideologies when it’s rooted that hard into your psyche.

So then, you start with, “Well, if not conflict, then problem.” Because the later thought is, if there is no problem then will not be interesting.

But let’s challenge that thought.

Is human motivation purely conflict? This is the question the Modernists actually rose, if you bother to look at them.

Do humans not also cooperate? 

Gleaners, again. Art. But it asks a lot of questions about human cooperation.

I mean if you’ve watched reality TV shows and read the comments on Youtube, the same comment pops up over and over--they are sick of the conflict in reality TV shows and applaud the cooperation narrative and rat on the US for being terrible and manufacturing such things, even going so far as saying the judges are better when they aren’t doing that and comparing regionalities of shows with each other. Even “It’s Me or the Dog” has taken down most of the These are terrible owners” aspects of the show, because people like compassion too. 

People actively complain when they feel like the conflict is created by the producers. Do humans not have points of fascinating discovery about the world and themselves? 

This is where the Futurists and the eventual Speculative Fiction roots actually come from. The exploration of this question.

Do humans not have systems by which they need to teach the next generation how to live?

What are Children’s books for? But generally, a lot of folktales, either cautionary or not are talking along this line. Apache stories, BTW, from my looking at own voices talk about their stories say that their stories also teach parents and adults too. Because they design it so it means different things at different stages of your life.

Do humans not have questions about morality? 

I mean the whole of Star Trek, if you think about it. Star Wars? Rashomon? Should that morality enforce the given powers or challenge it? (And you can see why Privileged Elitists hate this one. OMG, you’re challenging the structuralists powers.) Adam Bede? Most of George Elliot’s writing.

Might be unintentional, but Tolkien had a ton of morality in his work. And you have to be kidding me if you seriously think CS Lewis can’t be examined through this lens. He put Jesus. Figurative Jesus and bragged about it in his novels for children. And he tried to get Tolkien to embrace Christianity too. (Which drove Tolkien up the wall sometimes... since Tolkien was pro-Science they had quite the up and down friendship.)

Do we lack emotions? What separates us from animals? Are humans robots?

Every robot story ever. But the fundamental of this is always what separates us from being terrible people?

But is the greatest part of humanity its ability to remember?

Regret stories are often like this. Not a surprise that Foucault hated Confession Stories since they operated on memory and regret. If you view What Dreams May come through memory, the story transforms.

And the thing is that stories are flexible enough to encompass all of these. There may be some we don’t know or have lost along the way. They can drive the story forwards. There’s stories there the events are selected around themes or tone as well.

Backfire Effect and why call it a problem?

But the actual problem is that when you’re taught one way, and suddenly challenged there is another way, you think everyone hates your way, but that’s not what’s happening and you’re shown alternatives, so you often have what would be called “selection bias” and “correlation bias”. You might be challenged like I just demonstrated that Brecht and Lubbock were wrong. There isn’t one way and we shouldn’t be boiling stories down that way, so you need to preserve your base belief (This, folks, is called the Backfire effect). 

Of course every story has a problem, even when faced with child stories like: I saw a dog. The dog licked me. I liked it. The dog was fun.

If you were to try for correlation and selective bias it would look like this.:

The problem clear is that there is a dog, see... and and...uhhh, the inciting incident is that the dog licked the kid. And see.. the climax is that the kid liked it. OK, it doesn’t fit the Brechtian model, but see that’s tension, right there. And the “Denouement” is that the kid found the dog is fun. The other tactic is to state: This is not a story. Look, the kid doesn’t face any problems. It’s not that interesting. Sure it has a narrative set of events that are strung together by a central theme, but is it a story? (And then loose canon, no.) But will the kid themselves call it a story? Probably. Are you going to tell a little kid to their face that it doesn’t pass academic rigor, therefore it’s not a story? If you say yes, I’m going to ask what is wrong with you?

BTW, Japanese would call that a story that fits Kishotenketsu. The I saw a dog is the introduction. The “The dog licked me” is development. The “I liked it” is the emotional height/twist and a discovery. The result is “the dog was fun.”

But if you want to see it, without looking at the paratext, you’ll always find what you’re looking for, but this is super true if you don’t read the entire text. (Say Bible Thumpers who don’t read the entire passage before waxing on and on, until you contextualize it for them.)

And so, they need to put it down to “Problem”. They see the story of Spirited Away, which is about self discovery and memory as boiling down to problem. But I’d beg, beg people who watched the movie this way to go back, read up on Kishotenketsu, and look specifically for where the memory and discovery parts are and pause and think which model works best? Is there really a problem? Chihiro doesn’t remember everything that happens by the end of the movie. Her problem of moving to a new town isn’t solved like it would be in a Syd Field formula. How she approaches it, also isn’t solved. But there is some core to the movie that grabs your emotions: And that is discovery of memory and questions of how it works. If you watch it this way, then the movie opens up a lot more. (Also, makes me cry more because I’m less invested in feeling anxious or expecting depression.)

And this is where I say, that saying there is more than conflict or problems isn’t a threat to Conflict as a Story Driver. I loved Wandavision for using Discovery and Conflict as the story drivers.

Conclusion  

Percy Lubbock’s original treaties was hated for being too reductive: I side with Woolf and Forster on this one. But I also side on Percy Lubbock’s side that it’s good to have academic discourse and tools to talk about the academic discourse. Selden Whitcomb, BTW, demonstrates this very, very well in Study of a Novel (1887). He goes over several novel types in his PoV and looks at the macro and microcosm of the novel. So it’s not saying that the conflict narrative is never true. It’s saying that maybe add more tools to your toolbox and refine your toolbox so you can sort like Selden Whitcomb did. I mean he managed to delineate between braided essays, the main plot, the plot chain, and examine different novel types enough to impress Esenwein, a school teacher and then have Kenneth Rowe plagiarize from both of them. (Still cursing Rowe. You seriously thought you wouldn’t be caught?) If academia can do that and teach signs and reasons, then wouldn’t we achieve Lubbock’s goals better than he imagined?

Knowing about different story structures and ways of doing things helped me to read Aristotle better. I understood where the error about 3 act began because I understood I was originally reading the text wrong. The main points are at the end, because of the QED model. You give lines of evidence, and then the main thesis is at the end. And this is an error a lot of people make when reading Greek texts. But thinking about that, don’t you want to reread the texts in that light and have better discourse? Because the Five Paragraph essay wasn’t invented until the 19th century where the thesis and topic sentence is near the beginning. It’s also saying that humanity is far, far richer than inducing depression and anxiety in people like the Functionalists and Structuralists wanted for people. Sometimes, we want that as storytellers, yes--but why not explore the awesome breath of humanity itself and give yourself more options to explore it when one is writing story?  This is what I beg of you and your teachers. Think of humanity as better than only creating problems and conflict. Some of the other stuff are humanities’ greatest weapons and ponders the nature of humanity a lot deeper than saying that humans are all conflict or cooperation (via the 1980′s docs on chimps v. bonobos. They do both, BTW.)? So why not take that journey?

[rotationalsymmetry]

About misinformation and public education in the US:

I don’t really know anything about literacy education, so I might really regret sticking my neck out on this.

What I do know is there’s an ongoing decades long smear campaign against public education, because when people believe that public schools are incompetent they are reluctant to give public schools money, and support things like private school voucher programs and charter schools (which are sometimes for-profit and drastically under-regulated) and/or just less educational funding period. Funding public education requires some level of assuming that educators are basically competent — that they don’t just change the curriculum to something worse for no reason.

Which is an excellently reinforcing cycle, because the less you fund public schools, the easier it is to make them look incompetent.

Several years back it was common core. Math education stuff got shown out of context and people (generally people who don’t know anything about math) were like “hey, that doesn’t look like how I was taught math and it doesn’t make immediate sense to me, therefor it must be bad and wrong.” (What common core was supposed to be doing was offering students multiple ways of solving the same problem — ways that did actually make sense to people who do actually understand math — because for some learners one approach just won’t click but another one will. That’s a good thing.)

The way people teach stuff should change over time, and sometimes that’s going to mean a new pedagogy looks incoherent or just wrong to someone who was taught using a different approach. That doesn’t mean a newer approach is automatically better either. It’s fine to have criticisms of curriculum changes based on something real. Knee jerk reactions aren’t real. Neither is citing an overall literacy rate with no context, like whether it’s changed over time and in the ways you’d expect if it was due to a changed curriculum, and whether other things that affect literacy rates (like how many people are ESL speakers) have changed. I don’t know much about this issue but I sure don’t know more about it from looking at current literacy rates with no context or the report of an organization I know nothing about that asserts ideas without providing citations of any sort.

Be very, very skeptical about stuff going around on social media that has an overall message of “public school educator are incompetent.”

also not a huge fan of “dramartic claim (complete absence of any source)” and having links that don’t actually back up the claim in any way does not make that better. Causal relationships like “literacy rates are low because phonics isn’t being taught any more” are difficult to show.

Quick question, genuine question:

Why on earth does "more than half of US adults under 30 cannot read above an elementary school level" not strike horror into the heart of everyone who hears it?

Are the implications of it unclear????

I'm serious, people keep reacting with a sort of vague dismissal when I point this out, and I want to know why!

If adults in the US cannot read, then the only information they have access to is TV and video, the spaces with the most egregious and horrific misinformation!

If they cannot read, they cannot escape that misinformation.

This obscene lack of literacy should strike fear into every heart! US TV is notoriously horrific propaganda!

Is that???? Not??? Obvious???????

I know this sounds sarcastic, I know it does, but I'm completely serious here. I do not understand where the disconnect is.

[lepertamar]

speaking of the jewish soul, there’s a.....thing i guess. that dramatically illustrates weird frustrating didactic blockages even in heavily analyzed and debated strains of topic. i’m not sure how known this is, but there’s this occasional/non-central concept of a jewish soul as something a jew is born with that is qualitatively different from gentile souls; and also, an idea of if someone who converts to judaism ‘gets’ a ‘jewish soul’ upon conversion. there’s various...takes, i guess on this? like there’s some fringe ‘even if you convert you still have a gentile soul’ (stupid), there’s ‘there’s no categorical difference between gentile souls and jewish souls’ (okay but boring), there’s ‘if you convert, that means that secretly you, unlike other gentiles, have always had a ‘spark’ of the jewish soul that distinguished you from true gentiles and you were always destined to become jewish’ (more thoughtful but REALLY REALLY ANNOYING, my beloathed), and others. 

however i have read....but forget sources, and searching brought up only off-the-cuff q & a’s from contemporary rabbis. but anyway there’s a comparison of this to another aspect of the jewish soul, which is the shabbat soul, where you ‘get an additional soul’ on shabbat, or your soul ‘expands’ during shabbat (the difference between the two may be negligible, depending on what background you base it on, because the jewish soul is usually thought of as multi-part but i don’t have room to describe all that here). your ‘weekday soul’ isn’t replaced by your ‘shabbat soul’ but the idea is that for one day a week it morphs and expands to become capable of containing the holiness of shabbat. anyway the comparison was that when a gentile converts to judaism, their soul irrevocably expands or changes shape, or unfolds in its chambers like leonard cohen sings, or new parts to their soul are added, or however you want to call it, to become identifiable (to whom? to g-d? to yourself?) as a jewish soul. 

this seems to arm-link yet another subject of analysis of the jewish soul, where there’s disagreements (lol) between different rabbis along the whole chain(s) of reasoning, but one of the many disagreements that can be seen is between a strain that claims your soul starts pure and inert and can only be tainted or kept the same by the righteousness or unrighteousness of your life, and a strain that claims a soul starts as something but changes and grows over the lifetime through actions and acquired knowledge. I don’t remember a citation relating this directly and explicitly to the premise that conversion to judaism is one of the many ways a person’s soul would change and permanently alter itself over the course of a lifetime. perhaps a very major way. but life, as i think is well known, is extremely, centrally, vitally important to judaism. choose life, so that you may live, commands G-d and Moses, in a tautological riddle, and it seems any soul that lives is more by living than a soul that does not, which seems self-evident when more is understood as either a morally-neutral or morally-ambiguous or morally-unanswered quality, but is remarkably hard to get anyone to say.

[berkowitzbrat]

Berkowitz and the Inverted Electra

Hello! Well, this is where i’ve been all this time. This post required a lot of sourcing and research, and therefore a lot of time, because it’s very theoretical. Anyway, here’s my magnum opus. Enjoy.

An Electra Complex is defined by the psychosexual relationship between a girl (or, in the ‘inverted’ sense, a boy) and her (his) mother, coupled with a sexual desire to possess their father. Oedipal and Electral urges originate during the Phallic (3rd) stage of psychosexual development.

As a male, Berkowitz would be expected to cleave to the Oedipal urges to kill his father/possess his mother; however, I don’t think this is the case. The Phallic stage takes place between the ages of 3-6 years old, around the time that Berkowitz was informed of his biological mother’s death, and his biological father’s abandonment of him. This, coupled with the continuous image of death surrounding women as he was growing up [1], helped to solidify this inverted Electral urge, the fascination with death&women and possession&men. In terms of possession and men, Berkowitz would have thought that only his biological father was still alive, and this developed (particularly later in his life) a great need to find his father, to reclaim some part of himself, and rid himself of the guilt he felt for driving his father away after (as he thought) killing his mother [2]. Another scenario during which he exhibited possession&men linked directly to death/control&women was when he would be taken to indoor pools and witnessed the thrall and power which men held over women, particulalry in situations in which there is sexual subtext, such as changing rooms [3]. 

So, great. He’s attracted to the same sex (more on this later) and death&women are interdependent concepts for him. What next? For Freud, it’s the Latency stage. This stage begins at age 7 and continues until puberty, which for boys is around 12/13 years old. This is the stage at which the Oedipal/Electral complexes begin to dissolve in order to decrease the tension and take on their  gender role (whatever that may be) as the child realises that sexual gratification exists without, not within, their parents. At this stage is usually when the child begins to become more comfortable with the same sex parent--but David has always been more attracted to the idea of his biological father, as it is all he has. It could be said, then, that the Electra complex was forced upon him by circumstance, the circumstance of his adoptive-father’s lie about his biological parents. Regardless, Berkowitz eventually becomes very close to his adoptive mother, Pearl, and began to vie for her attention, such as poisoning her parakeets in order to have nothing to compete with for her affection [4]. The typical progression of Berkowitz is entirely inverted in terms of Freudian psychosexual stages. This is a stage of negated sexuality, hence the attatchment, traditionally, to the parent of the same sex, and to make friends of the same sex; however, because Freud’s an asshole, he doesn’t consider that ✨homosexuality✨ is a concept and thinks that all children must go to the parent/friends of the same sex as sexuality cannot be prompted here. But we can take liberties here because we live in the real world. There’s nothing abnormal about Berkowitz, he was just following the pyschosexual stages as somebody interested in the same sex.

Woah! You say. But he killed women because of pent-up sexual frustration! The gun is his penis!

Sure. For most; but I’ve always felt that Berkowitz did things a little bit... differently.

The Genital stage, or the final stage, begins at puberty (12/13) and continues/ends into adulthood. As traumatising as Pearl’s death was for David, her death coincided perfectly for her metaphorical death in the psyche of 13-year-old David. During the Genital stage, sexuality is no longer ‘hidden’ (latent), and rather becomes a thing necessary to be fulfilled for emotional release. Attention turns once more to the gender in which one is interested, and David, growing up in the culture that he did, turned to women. At 15, he had his first sexual experience, a blowjob, and sources (unknown) state that he preferred ‘oral sex and petting over regular intercourse’[5]. It would be plausible that he perhaps came to prefer this, considering his one known experience with ‘regular intercourse’ resulted in a venereal disease, but I’ve always contended that maybe he preferred so-called ‘petting’ due to his... less favourable position with heterosexuality. But, as I said, I feel as if David did not explore, or rather felt he could not explore, his sexuality until later on in his life (and, even then, due to his Baptist beliefs, promoted homophobic views because, y’know, Christianity and being born in the 50s) and was, in fact, more interested in men than women. If this is grabbing at straws for anyone, I will mention his ‘homosexual fling’ [6] with inmate Gary Evans, who was long suspected to be bisexual/homosexual due to his collecting of gay magazines and, according to Hugo Harmatz, ‘love letters’[citation needed] from Berkowitz stashed amongst them.

An addendum about Berkowitz’s latent stage: when he was around 10 years old, his parents had sex whilst he was in the same bed [8]. What could be more confusing, traumatising, and shaping, than your parents doing... that... during one of the most sexually devoid periods of your life! I believe this shaped his view of performance hugely. He was shown, at a formative period, that it was okay to perform in a sexually motivated manner whilst other people were around--non-consenting other people, at that. I believe that this is the reason he took his killing out into the open. It was a sexual thrill, the killings. It was heavily related to the sexual negation of wanting to kill your mother in order to  possess your father. I am by no means saying that this is Berkowitz’s 100% proven, uncontestable motive, but the ideas of psychosexual analysis seem to apply to him in an accurate and very curious way. The traditional, heterosexual view of these stages do not match up to his psychology, but the homosexual interpretation does. 

So, we move forward to his early 20s. He returns from Korea, looking for his father, the only piece of his biological existence he believes to be alive. He still wishes, all these years later, to possess the father--the destruction of the woman has only intensified after multiple failed attempts at dating, a horrendous virginity-loss experience, and the frustration surrounding an attempt at heterosexuality. But, here we stand: his biological mother is alive, and his biological father is the one who is dead. How terribly, terribly confusing. And still, Berkowitz attempts a relationship with his biological mother and half-sister. This goes south, however, when he discovers that he was given up due to being born out of wedlock, and he drops contact with his biological family.

The disollusionment is unfathomable. His biological father, his raison d’etre, is dead. His adoptive father has moved to Florida with his new wife: this new wife has fulfiled Berkowitz’s Electra Complex, in his mind, at least. Kill the mother. Take the father. His biological mother is not who he wanted to have. His adoptive mother is dead. What is left? A display of fulfilment, sexual fulfilment, as public as it has always been shown to him--through the bedroom of his parents, through the public changing rooms. Murder on the streets. Getting to kill a woman as he always thought he had been decreed to from birth, from his first supposed mother, his biological mother.

(bibliography under the cut. thank you for reading)

Bibliography:

Radford University: Berkowitz, David [3, 8]

Simply Psychology: 5 Stages of Psychosexual Development

Tumblr/Berkowitzbrat: Exploring the Why [1]

Tumblr/True Crime and Cannibalism: David Berkowitz’s Timeline [5]

Westchester Magazine: David Berkowitz’s History in Westchester County [4]

Wikipedia: Phallic stage, Latency stage, Genital stage

Wordpress/Can’t Stop the Bleeding: How to Stuff a Wild Bikini [6]

Youtube: David Berkowitz: In His Own Words (1/9) [2]

And here’s my whole folder of resources for general Berkowitz reading materials and media: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VKlZJwRR4bpoPzO7AejAMtAJaVoBGuTg

[infiniteglitterfall]

Okay, EVERYONE, listen.

This feels like roughly the one hundredth time that I've seen someone on this earth complain about the antisemitism on Wikipedia. And I need us all to understand just one thing:

WE ARE WIKIPEDIA!!!!!!!!

Every single one of us has just as much power to edit that freaking page and put in the information from the Holocaust Encyclopedia as whoever fucked it up did.

You don't even need to make a Wikipedia account.

(But it's easier to keep track of what you change, and discuss changes with people, if you do.)

You can add anything you can back up with a citation.

(You can, in fact, also add things you CAN'T back up with a citation. As I'm sure we've all noticed. And I might as well point out here that you can ALSO add things you can't back up, and put in citations that DO NOT BACK UP WHAT YOU SAID.

You shouldn't. And hopefully, people like me will notice and change it. But you CAN.

My point here is actually that when you're doing research about something important and complicated, you should always click through to see what the source cited really says.

Because frequently, someone will be wrong about either what they're writing, or whether their source backs it up. This happens in academic papers too. Critical thinking is hard.)

You write whatever you want. You type the period. Then you type in your citation.

Under the cut, I'll show you how. It's really easy. Or you can use Wikipedia's guide!

It even lets you preview your changes before you finish, so you know if you're making a mess.

And there's a place where you can briefly explain why you're editing it. Like "adding details about Nazi connections," or "correcting punctuation."

And yes. Not all of us can edit every article on Wikipedia; "controversial" topics are frequently locked so that only "extended-confirmed" editors can change them. (Which just means "people who are logged in and have made at least 500 edits.")

But you can join in the discussions on those articles.

And on Wikipedia, "they're too Zionist!" is not an acceptable argument.

Sometimes people "watch" an article to get notified when it changes. (You can do this too!)

Sometimes they do that so they can revert the exact kind of change you're there to make.

But they have to put in a reason for reverting it. Which means you can also change it back, argue them out of it, or make changes to make it work. (example under the cut!)

The way you add a citation/reference looks like html gibberish salad. But it basically goes:

put in a tag that says "ref," so it automatically gets added to the list of references cited at the bottom of the Wikipedia page;

put in "cite" and what you're citing, like a book, a video, a website, a journal. Getting the type right doesn't really seem to be a big deal. In this case, you want to put "web."

And then there are a fuckton of different things you can add, which get separated by pipes. Pipes are that long vertical line that's probably above your enter key: |

You need the URL. That's... kind of all you need.

pro tip: going back in to add more details to the citation later counts as more edits!

Even though you only NEEEEED the URL, it's really good to add other details like the title of the page (if there is one), the publisher (Holocaust Encyclopedia), the day you looked at it (because websites can change over time), and it's especially nice to go dig up an archived version of the site and the date of the archive. Because links break.

oh yeah and my favorite thing to add: a quote from your source, so that people don't have to click through to verify what it says! this can be a great way to add more information that seems too long for the Wikipedia article.

So, broken up with lots of space for easier reading, it looks like this. We'll pretend we're doing one on Heinrich Himmler, because I have no idea who anon was looking at:

<ref> {{cite web | url = https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/heinrich-himmler | access-date = November 19, 2024}} </ref>

That's a very short "I just found this url, today" version. Here's a more thorough citation:

<ref>{{cite web | url = https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/heinrich-himmler | access-date = November 19, 2024 | publisher = Holocaust Encyclopedia | title = Heinrich Himmler | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20241008214021/https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/heinrich-himmler | archive-date = October 8, 2024 | quote = As Reichsführer SS, Himmler received authority directly from Hitler to carry out ideological policies that the laws of the state might not permit. This ideologically rooted “Führer authority” enabled authorization of indefinite incarceration and mass murder.}}</ref>

I bet someone out there even knows of a website where you can paste in the url you're citing, and get all that code automatically generated for you.

Oh - here's my example of getting into a silly debate about something that should be cut and dried, and changing shit to make it work!

I came across the page for GUPS, the General Union of Palestinian Students. It made the ludicrous statement that the group OFFICIALLY started in the 1950s, but had been around since the 1920s.

I was like: ok, there's no place that says this other than their cited source, a now-gone website for the San Francisco State University chapter of GUPS. There were no universities in Palestine in the 1920s. This is clearly not true.

I took that part out. Someone REVERTED IT, and told me that all I'd proven was that it wasn't logical, not that the citation was wrong!

We argued back and forth a bit. I ended up finding a fuckton of Arabic-language sources with more information, and showing that none of them talked about it starting in the 1920s. This person said, "no, that source says it started in the 1950s, and evolved from this other group that started in the same Egyptian university, which had started in the 1920s! It never said that it had started in PALESTINE in the '20s!"

I haven't even dealt with that one yet lmao. Normally, I would probably just demand a source that showed the original group had started in the 1920s, and then maybe change it to like "it evolved from this other non-palestinian student group that started in 192X."

But the thing is... while I was doing all this digging, I found soooo much information about how GUPS was connected to the PLO. How it had become a part of the PLO when the PLO was an active terrorist organization. All kinds of crap.

And you can fucking bet that all of it is going into the article.

This thing is going to end up being a detailed piece about every terrible thing GUPS and the PLO have ever done.

It's going to be beautiful. And nobody will ever be able to argue that any of it is incorrect. It will go from "this is a normal club that goes sooo far back, it's considered the first Palestinian group ever" to "this is a normal terrorist club that was rooted in the movement to terrorize Jews, like in the 30s when X happened, like in the late 30s when Y happened, like this series of PLO massacres in this decade, like--"

went to wikipedia to fact check somethings about a guy from ww2 era history and it had been edited beyond belief to erase this person's connections with nazi germany. the second google result is the holocaust encyclopedia page all about his horrible crimes in the nazi regime. but on wikipeida, his description is vague and mild and barely mentions it. it's so worrying. I hate it. what happens when gen z only reads wikipedia pages and denounces any sources that are "too zionist" like a holocaust museum's encyclopedia? thank g-d for jewish historians, what would we do without them, but i'm so so scared that our history is going to be rewritten because no one will listen to us on our own history.

.

[on-the-heath]

notion set up ~~

i’ve been using notion for about 3 years now, thanks to a rec from @post--grad ; i changed my set up around a little while ago, partially inspired by the beautiful @shapelessfrock and partially bc i needed something more easily expandable for my phd

it got long so click through for details 

the home page is just a collection of links and general inspo. i have three main columns: fiances (budgeting, insurance info, stuff for my cat), “i’m a person” (which has recipes, journaling, music/ movie recs, travel plans), and stuff from the master’s i just finished (old cvs, papers, applications, a list of skills). 

home also includes a collage of pictures a quotes that make me happy: 

((anyone is welcome to talk to me about woodcuts, andrew wyeth, normal people, climate action, or astrology))

i typically jump directly to the to do page, which has 3 main lists: that week, in the future, and reoccurring/ daily tasks. i also have a calendar underneath those, which is mostly for annual/ reoccurring stuff, like fellowship applications and drs appointments. i have a paper planner that i use religiously, so this doesn’t get updated very often lol

next i have general phd stuff, which includes uploads of all my administrative stuff with tags (financial, contract, etc.) and the date of when i got them and my coursework. i have a separate page for my tentative 5-year timeline that includes my program’s guidelines and benchmarks, and every semester i create a master list of all the things i need to do and favorite that page, so i can jump there and see it all laid out. the title of each course opens up into a separate page for all my notes.

part of the reason why i love notion is that you can store docs in a variety of different ways; i find you can organize them a lot more clearly than on a computer (i have a chromebook, so i can only store a very limited amount of stuff on my hard drive to begin with.) here i can easily access all the syllabi and assignments of all the classes i’ve taken. 

i also have individual reading, writing, and teaching pages. reading is broken up into fun, primary, and secondary sources, teaching is empty but for a few ideas because i haven’t taught yet, and writing is organized by project. i usually use inline tables to for everything, and include the citation! pdf! tags! when read! and notes (the title once again opens up into more robust notes)! for everything, because i have the memory of a sieve and otherwise i would never be able to find any information i was looking for. 

that’s pretty much it! i’m sure it will grow and shift again once i actually start my coursework. i’m kind of aimless right now. if you made it this far, thanks for reading, and i hope this was helpful!

[ask-marine-mitsu]

What would be Mitsus real world ethnic

Now that's an interesting one... I've actually been considering this because of another little project I was working on with Mitsu, and I think I'd have to say I'm UNSURE what her exact ethnicity would be.

Specifics are under the cut but the TLDR is: Mitsu would definitely be from Japan and most likely a member of an indigenous people called the Ainu. But I have not settled on the second part yet as I am still learning about the Ainu and want to approach their representation respectfully in any writing I may do.

I greatly encourage anyone who is interested in learning more about the Ainu to research them independently as I am by no means an expert. At the very bottom under the cut I’ve listed a few resources I’ve used myself, just to get started. As always- be careful of your sources, and think about things critically folks. (Also if you plan on sending any follow up asks, please read everything under the cut before doing so.)

Mitsu’s home country as far as I'm concerned is Japanese, and her name is also meant to be Japanese. It always has been. I've actually gone all out and researched a lot of Japanese naming conventions and Kanji. It’s actually resulted in a slight change to her name, before she was Mitsu Murata, now she is Mitsu Muratan. But because I don't wanna get bogged down kanji and confusion here, gonna keep any more specifics to myself for now. Now I tend to do a lot of research for my characters when translating them to real world ethnicities, jobs, schooling, and lifestyles. Especially with a character like Mitsu who has gone through so much, and whose culture and history is meant to be a major part of her character arc. Taking this part of her character into account, what was done to her family/clan in the past, and how she was made to assimilate in the Marines all led me to research cultures and religions more deeply. I am not gonna half ass anything about my characters, and I want to try and avoid being disrespectful to any cultural groups as much as possible. Even if members of said groups never come across my work. This is how I started learning about the Ainu People of Hokkaido. The Ainu population of Japan is incredibly small, and they are indigenous to Hokkaido, and have a very long history. Their language is classified as being nearly extinct, having been banned in the 19th century, though since at least the 1990′s people have been actively trying to revitalize it. For much of their history the Ainu were forced to give up their cultural practices, and in fact many still do because of discrimination that they face.

And this isn’t a thing of the past, they were only really recognized as an indigenous people in 2008.

This is all very real and very recent.

BUT

Although Mitsu’s experiences may align with some of Ainu history and oppression, this is by no means a one to one comparison. And it is not meant to be. I am simply trying to find a people and a place for Mitsu, that aligns well with what I have pre-established in One Piece, and I believe the Ainu culture and people fit closest.

However this is all something I am still researching, and something I do want to be respectful about for a lot of reasons. This is incredibly real history, with very real people, who deserve to be represented with respect. And I am very much not Japanese, and certainly not Ainu, I am coming at this from a western perspective and trying to understand a lot of new things. While I don't think you have to be part of a marginalized group to write characters who are part of that group, I do believe it is highly disrespectful to do so without first researching everything thoroughly.

Bellow I’m going to link some of the resources I used when starting my research, for those who want to learn more about the Ainu and their history. Please remember to be respectful and kind to all people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7437244.stm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3FM5gn5ITk

(Wikipedia is always a good jumping off point, make sure to check their citations for more info- tip from a former struggling college student)

[ckret2]

So I've been deeply pulled into the Radiosnake pairing bc of your fantastic writing! Problem is, now I have fic ideas but no knowledge of the Hazbin background. Can you tellI me where I can get more Hazbin info? I've only watched the pilot and read your stuff. I heard there were comics??

That is an excellent question anon, because right now it is really hard to get Hazbin background easily.

Okay, so, the canon info on Hazbin Hotel can be sort of sorted into four tiers, from most to least canon.

Tier 1: The Definitely Canon

There is, of course, the pilot. And then there is an Angel Dust prequel comic, only seven pages of which have been released so far. We’ve been told it’s gonna be finished and we’ve had glimpses of in-progress prequel comics for a couple other characters—most prominently Alastor’s and Charlie’s—but so far that unfinished Angel Dust comic is the only one that’s been officially released.

Finding the in-progress comic pages is... a challenge. Nobody, as far as I can tell, has been specifically collecting all of the pages we’ve seen so far. I was able to scrounge up:

Couple more Angel pages

some Alastor pages

another Alastor page

a random Alastor panel

another random Alastor panel—I’ve seen the full page of this before, Alastor goes “Hello ladies!” and they go “HELLO ALASTOR~<3″ but I can’t find the full page now

There’s a smattering more canon panels on the artist faustisse’s twitter, but I haven’t dug them all out, and some of the posts I’m gonna link in a lil bit have a glimpse of another panel.

If you haven’t already heard of Helluva Boss, I recommend looking into it as well. It’s a second series being created by the same folks, different cast of characters but set in the same version of Hell, so any canon details we learn in Helluva also apply to Hazbin.

Helluva’s pilot is here. Plus a cute music video here.

Earlier this month, during a BLM charity stream hosted by show artist Ashley Nichols—she runs regular streams under the title “HuniCast”—they released a few sneak peaks of future Helluva scenes, all compiled here.

And that’s it for canon. Two pilots, a music video, a smattering of future scenes, part of one comic, a few WIP pages/panels from other comics.

Tier 2: Pseudo-Canon

Everything else we currently know about Hazbin (and Helluva) are things that the creators have told us. Consequently, they’re all pseudo-canon—and likely subject to change in the future as the shows and comics are further developed and released. Some details that were released/described in the past have been contradicted at other times, or else radically changed by the time the pilot came out.

(For example, when Alastor was first created years and years ago as an OC with no plans for Hazbin, he was a demon deer who could shapeshift into a human shape—now he’s a demonized human with a few deer traits. And Charlie and Cherri Bomb used to look very different.)

So until and unless they make it into canon, all these pseudo-canon details are subject to change and should be taken with a grain of salt—but, they also comprise most of what we know about the characters’ backstory and the as-yet-unaired characters.

Pseudo-canon info on Hazbin is scattered mainly between two sources: the creators’ twitter accounts, and livestreams where they take questions and talk about the making of the show. If you and livestreams do not get along (my ADHD and livestreams do not get along), or if you don’t want to wade years and years back into twitter accounts to dig up every scrap of info on the characters the creators have ever mentioned, collating all the pseudo-canon info is gonna be hard. (It’s gonna be hard even if you do want to sit through the streams and dig through all their tweets.) Lots of fans, me included, depend on the absolutely heroic work of various fans who are willing and able to watch hours-long streams and collate a list of canon factoids released during the streams. I’ve reblogged as many of these posts as I’ve been able to find:

Alastor’s sound design (on twitter)

Alastor's Sound Design (post I made with screenshots of weird—but very interesting—subtitles slipped into the aforementioned video)

Sir Pentious and Cherri Bomb’s sound design

Niffty and Husk’s sound design

Charlie, Katie, and Tom’s sound design

Intro song’s sound design

Happy Hotel’s sound design

details from Faustisse (including a pic of a couple costume designs. Most of these posts come from zatyrlucy, who’s been doing a fantastic job of going stream-by-stream to get lists of details from the regular streams by Ashley Nichols and by comic artist Faustisse.)

more details from Faustisse (including a pic of the Von Eldritch family dining room)

Faustisse 3 (better look at that table)

Dollymoon’s Hazbin Hotel Facts - PART ONE (Shoutout again to dollymoon for compiling these, we’ve never spoken but I am eternally grateful for this service. Dollymoon’s posts are THE single most reliable compilation of Hazbin Hotel’s nebulous pseudo-canon facts that I have found to date, including both links to the sources and timestamps where applicable. Dollymoon’s URL has changed since making this post so the “read more” link doesn’t work but the “source” or “reblogged from” links direct correctly to the new blog. Incidentally, the risk of other blog creators deleting their blogs/posts or changing their URLs is why in info posts like these, I always link to my own reblogs rather than their original posts—their original posts might vanish without warning, but I know I ain’t gonna delete my posts, so these links will still work in the future.)

Hazbin Hotel Facts - PART TWO

Hazbin Hotel Facts - PART THREE

Faustisse 4

HuniCast - Australian Wildlife Relief charity stream

I think this was a faustisse stream (the original source deleted these posts, so the comic pages that were originally behind that read more cut are now gone.)

Faustisse stream 6?

And those are all the masterposts of factoids I’ve managed to collect. If anyone has more masterposts, chuck ‘em at me.

Even this isn’t all the knowledge that’s been released about the show. The posts that dig the farthest back are Dollymoon’s, and even they don’t comprehensively cover all of Hazbin’s production. A couple of these characters, Vivziepop created as a teenager, so there’s some truly ancient concept art floating around out there that will have details that probably aren’t canon anymore... but might still be until something happens to actively contradict them.

Tier 3: The Wiki

The wiki is kind of an absolute mess. It’s a chaotic blend of things actually seen in the pilots/comic, things mentioned at some point in some stream somewhere, and wild fan speculation based on what they headcanon as plausible based on the above, all mixed together with very little indication for which is canon, pseudo-canon, fanon, or speculation. Most of the statements on the wiki don’t have citations.

(And, on top of that, half the main characters’ info gets split up into separate tabs instead of just having a normal-ass wiki page, AND their image galleries are on COMPLETELY SEPARATE pages that are linked to in one of the tabs, and the most important characters all have TWO SEPARATE GALLERIES. Which doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the facts hidden underneath those tabs, but nevertheless drives me up the wall.)

Some things on the wiki were added according to info released so long ago it’s probably changed by now. Some are possibilities that got reported as facts. Other things on the wiki have unambiguously changed, or else are just flat-out incorrect. (For instance, at this moment Alastor’s page still lists him as an overlord, even though it's been confirmed that Alastor is not an overlord despite his power level because he isn’t interested in and didn’t pursue that position, per this stream. For a little bit, somebody’s fanart of their headcanon human Alastor got added to the wiki as concept art.)

tl;dr: the wiki should never be trusted as a primary source. The wiki’s better than it used to be. Even so, at this time, it’s only trustworthy to fill in the gaps of what you already know is true from other, better sources.

The thing it’s good at is it more or less compiles all the known info all in one place. Trying to figure out who the hell this Vox guy is is really hard if you’re reading for mentions of him in compilations of a dozen different streams, much less if you’re trying to comb through those dozen streams yourself, plus a dozen more, plus three different artists’ twitters. In comparison, it’s really easy to, say, just go look at Vox’s wiki page, where all the trivia is compiled. (And Vox’s page is actually one of the better cited on the wiki. Look at all those numbers!)

So, if you need to find out who this character is you’ve never heard of before, if you want to see a full list of the thus far named characters, if you don’t remember whether Alastor likes coffee or tea, if you want to know what Angel’s twin sister looks like, if you need a reminder of Sir Pentious’s death year... check the wiki. It’s an okay starting point.

But, if you see a “fact” on the wiki that you yourself don’t remember from straight out of the pilot, and it doesn’t have a citation that links to a tweet or a stream... regard it suspiciously. And do not trust it unquestioningly as fact until and unless you have seen the source.

Tier 4: Noncanon Creator Shitposting

I’ve mentioned Ashley’s HuniCast streams a couple times. The biggest draw of them is that she usually gets several of the voice actors in the streams, where they’ll happily say nonsense in their character voices. For the most part, they’re not sharing any actual canon info they’ve been given on their characters, just goofing around pretending to be their characters. Nevertheless, a lot of the things that happen in streams get accepted as broad fandom headcanons, like Alastor being into dad jokes. (My favorite, for obvious reasons, is this one.)

It’s easy to find the source audio for all this wonderful nonsense by searching youtube for “HuniCast highlights,” and then rummaging around for animatics people make out of the audio. The only one noncanon video of this sort I can think of that didn’t originally come from HuniCast is a lone one from Alastor’s singing voice (who’s a different voice actor than his speaking voice).

So, obviously, none of these are canon. But they do come from some of the people actually involved in the creation of the show, and they are in the characters’ canon voices, so a whole lot of people treat them as semi-canon anyway. (Even the wiki lists “dad jokes” among Alastor’s likes, which to my knowledge hasn’t come up anywhere except for HuniCast streams.) Since they’re so broadly-known, they’re worth knowing about as important sources of fanon, even if you don’t want to adopt them into your own headcanons. They’re basically the same level of canon as blooper reels.

[seethedawn]

Hi! I was reading the notes on that post about pregnancy + misogyny and I saw your comment about women trying to persuade their husbands to have platonic marriages, and I was wondering if you could share your sources so I could read more about that? Thanks!

Hi! So for research purposes, the phrase you’d be looking for is “Companionate Marriage”. 

Simon Szreter discusses married abstinence as a form of BC in Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain. And again with Kate Fischer in Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England. Pretty much anything by either of those two historians will reference it. 

I also found this article: “Birth Control and Abstinence in England,″ as an example of the discussion. 

There is also a book called A Cultural History of Twin Beds by Hilary Hinds which has a few chapters that are relevant - specifically the adoption of twin beds for married couples as a method of enforced sexual self-restraint.

Essentially, their premise is that companionate marriages were a traditional form of family planning in an era before the wide dissemination of birth control information/access.

The reason it was relevant to the post where you saw me reference it, is that women in companionate marriages didn’t have any kind of recourse if their husband eventually decided to change the terms of the agreement. From a legal perspective, when a woman consented to marriage it was a blanket sexual consent.

So these books are all referencing the same set of primary sources - Marie Stopes. 

Marie Stopes was a famous birth control advocate in the 20th century. In 1918 she wrote a book called Married Love, which was a best seller and prompted women to begin writing to Marie about their marital concerns, which very much included prevention of pregnancy. I don't remember thr specific citation, but Marie Stopes would be the most likely written source of information on Convincing Your Husband To Go Companionate. 

The Wellcome Library is a British archive that hosts a lot of content digitally, and they have the Marie Stopes letters but I’m not associated with a University anymore so I can’t get in. Here is the link in case you have access. 

On the American side you have Margaret Sanger, who wrote on very similar themes. Some of Sanger’s papers are available here. An American historian who writes about reproductive family life in this era is Rima Appel. 

To be clear Stopes was a eugenicist and she absolutely sought to utilize birth control to ensure that the "right" babies were being born. She was in favor of compulsory sterilization for those deemed "unfit" to reproduce, etc. She made huge strides for women seeking access to birth control and just reproductive information generally, but also she was kind of a monster. Ditto Margaret Sanger.

Thank you for your Ask! I had so much fun digging out my old thesis stuff, and I hope I was able to help <3 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 24 Mar 2020 (Nebula Awards move online, Make America Well Again stamps, Data is the new toxic waste, Stock Jump, Grandparents Optional Party, Quarantine Book Club, the Party of Death, financial stability vs economic stability, quarantine vs workforce automation, bailouts and moral hazard, MIT's open source ventilator)

Today's links

This year's Nebula Awards will be held online: It's $150, and raising funds to bail out corona-shattered writers.

Make America Well Again stamps: from the artist who brought you the Trump Zero Cents stamp.

Data is the new toxic waste: It never was the "new oil" (my latest podcast).

Stock Jump: A ski-game that lets you play the stock charts of cratered businesses.

Murdering 20% of elderly Americans is bad strategy for the GOP: Terrified old people are the turkeys who vote for plutes' Christmas every four years.

Join me on the Quarantine Book Club: April 1, 3PM Pacific.

The Party of Death: It's a good time to buy exterminism futures.

Financial stability vs economic stability: Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid.

Quarantine reveals the falsity of the automation crisis: Augmentation isn't replacement.

Bailouts and moral hazard: If we never teach big business, it won't ever learn.

MIT's ingenious manual/automatic open source ventilator: Now in FDA testing.

This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

This year's Nebula Awards will be held online (permalink)

This year's Nebula Awards weekend is moving online, thanks to decisive action from SFWA and Mary Robinette Kowal.

https://www.sfwa.org/2020/03/22/announcing-the-transformation-of-the-2020-nebula-conference-and-covid19-relief/

It'll include "panels, solo presentations, conference mentorships, workshops, forums, chats, and virtual room parties (including a dance party hosted by John Scalzi)." Part of the proceeds will go to relief for sf writers who are in covid-related financial distress.

It runs May 29-31, including a livestream of the Nebula Awards banquet. Registration is $150 and comes with a year of access to archived materials and the SFWA Bulletin.

Make America Well Again stamps (permalink)

I bought some of Ben Hannam's Trump No Cents stamps in 2017 and never looked back. I still put 'em on letters.

Now he's got a Make America Well Again stamp, which you can lick (if you dare) and stick for the duration. Remember, USPS is profitable and unsubsidized and Trump's swamp-dwellers want to shut it down and replace it with donors like Fedex and UPS!

Data is the new toxic waste (permalink)

My latest podcast is a reading of "Data – the new oil, or potential for a toxic oil spill?" — a column arguing that data was never "the new oil" – instead, it was always the new toxic waste: "pluripotent, immortal – and impossible to contain."

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/secure-futures-magazine/data-new-toxic-waste/34184/

Data breaches are inevitable (any data you collect will probably leak; any data you retain will definitely leak) and cumulative (your company's data breach can be combined with each subsequent attack to revictimize your customers).

Identity thieves benefit enormously from cheap storage, and they collect, store and recombine every scrap of leaked data. Merging multiple data sets allows for reidentification of "anonymized" data, and it's impossible to predict which sets will leak in the future.

These nondeterministic harms have so far protected data-collectors from liability, but that can't last. Toxic waste also has nondeterministic harms (we never know which bit of effluent will kill which person), but we still punish firms that leak it.

Waiting until the laws change to purge your data is a bad bet – by then, it may be too late. All the data your company collects and retains represents an unquantifiable, potentially unlimited source of downstream liability.

What's more, you probably aren't doing anything useful with it. The companies that make the most grandiose claims about data analytics are either selling analytics or data (or both). These claims are sales literature, not peer-reviewed citations to empirical research.

Data is cheap to collect and store – if you don't have to pay for the chaos it sows when it leaks. And some day, we will make data-hoarders pay.

Here's the podcast:

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/23/data-the-new-oil-or-potential-for-a-toxic-oil-spill/

Here's the MP3:

https://ia801406.us.archive.org/9/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_334/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_334_-Data-_the_new_oil_or_potential_for_a_toxic_oil_spill.mp3

And here's the link to subscribe to the podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Stock Jump

Stock Jump (permalink)

Last week, those of us lucky enough to have retirement savings joined the rest of the world, because our 401(k)s all cratered and all the promising stocks (teleconferencing, guillotines) are all way, way overpriced thanks to panic buying by Republican Senators.

But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla.

Enter Stock Jump, a ski-jump game whose courses are procedurally generated by the stock charts of shares from around the world.

It's really fun! If you can see through the tears.

http://stockjump.sos.gd/

Murdering 20% of elderly Americans is bad strategy for the GOP (permalink)

A thread by Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Making Light crystallized a thought that literally had me tossing and turning all night, about Trump's decision to risk the lives of ~20% of elderly Americans to goose the stock market.

https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016643.html#4402672

The thing I find baffling is how short-term this thinking is.

Not for Trump, of course, who is legendary for his view of life as a game of running across a river hopping from the back of one alligator to another before he can get his leg bitten off.

But for the right-wing establishment, whose whole schtick is "rationality" and "long-term thinking" and "self-control" (think of the gleeful repetition of the discredited Marshmellow Test and the rhetoric about the "poor life choices" that lead to single parenthood, addiction, and inadequate retirement savings or health insurance).

How is it that these self-congratulatory long-game-players can't see that murdering one in five American seniors is a self-limiting move when frightened old white people are the primary source of turkeys who can be counted upon to vote for Christmas every four years?

The right has an antimajoritarian, elitist agenda. Right-wing thought is essentially the belief that some people are destined to rule, and others are destined to be ruled over by their betters, and the world is best when the right people are atop the pyramid. Splits in the right are about who should rule: Dominionists want Christian men in charge; libertarians want bosses in charge, imperialists want America in charge, racists want white people in charge, etc.

Antimajoritarian projects struggle in democracies, for obvious reasons. When your platform is "only 1% of us should be making decisions" it's hard to win 51% of the vote. That's why the right focuses so hard on gerrymandering and voter suppression, and why the otherwise untenable coalitions — finaciers and young-Earth Creationists, say — persist.

But the biggest source of ballots in support of rule by elites is frightened people, especially frightened bigots who think that the elites will promote their interests ahead of the disfavored minorities (think: Dixiecrats).

So murdering 20% of the most reliable source of votes for elite rule is a farcically shortsighted thing to do.

I am terrified of a Biden candidacy not merely because I think his policies are poor, but because I think he is really bad at being a candidate, and will struggle to win.

But Trump murdering 20% of his base might just be enough to make him lose. It may be that while he could murder someone in the middle of 5th Ave and get away with it, he can't sentence 20% of US pensioners to gruesome deaths and get away with it.

I'm not gleeful at this prospect. I am totally aghast. I barely slept last night, waking up dozens of times with this genocide playing out in my imagination.

But I am incredibly surprised. How does the self-declared Party of the Long View not see that this is going to destroy it?

The stock market is circling the drain and obviously this is very distressing for the donor class, but almost no Americans own any significant stocks, because most Americans have NO savings. The idea that rescuing share prices by killing the elderly will get the turkeys out to vote for Christmas is clearly wrong.

For more on antimajoritarianism and the right, read Corey Robin's outstanding book, "The Reactionary Mind."

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1234117673316782082

Join me on the Quarantine Book Club (permalink)

I'm going participate in a session of the Quarantine Book Club on April 1 at 3PM Pacific, where we're discussing my book Radicalized. Tickets here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/quarantine-book-club-cory-doctorow-tickets-100931360416

If $5 is a burden for you, you can get in free with the code ALLAREWELCOME.

Hope to see you!

The Party of Death (permalink)

In his 2017 book Four Futures, Peter Frase uses science fiction to sketch out four ways our society could go as capitalism ruptures, from communism to exterminism, this being the expression of bosses' fear and dependence on workers.

https://boingboing.net/2017/01/06/four-futures-using-science-fi.html

Frase posits a possible mass-automation event that makes workers superfluous (I'm skeptical of this: climate change guarantees 2-3 centuries of full employment, e.g., relocating every coastal city).

But in light of the Current Situation, he imagines a different form of exterminism.

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/coronavirus-economy-public-health-exterminism/

It's not just the GOP's willingness to murder 20% of seniors in the hopes of rescuing the Dow.

Plutes and their bootlickers have been calling for mass-deaths as a preferable alternative since the crisis first manifested, as when Tea Party founder Rick Santelli suggested "Maybe we'd be just better off if we gave it to everybody."

And of course, there was Boris Johnson and Dominick Cummings' plan to infect all of the UK to create "herd immunity." As Cummings said, "if that means some pensioners die, too bad."

Now Trump wants to potentially murder 20% of American seniors to rescue share prices, and the GOP is going along with him.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1242444277264740353

The Republicans have become the Party of Death, with establishment figures like Thomas Friedman providing ideological cover (""let many of us get the coronavirus, recover and get back to work").

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/opinion/coronavirus-economy.html

Frase: "The ghoulishness of this strategy will become apparent when it is too late, when the hospitals fill and the health care system and the economy both collapse."

"Those in power will be held blameless, and those with wealth will sadly lament the foolishness of the lesser orders."

"Socialists have always insisted that human needs should take precedence over profit, that the stock market is not the economy, and that we need to utterly transform an economy that is immiserating working people and destroying the planet. That message will only become more urgent as our opponents across different parts of the ruling class come to the conclusion — mournfully for some, gleefully for others — that in the contest between loss of profit and loss of life, they choose death."

Financial stability vs economic stability (permalink)

Michael Hudson is a fascinating thinker, an expert in the history of debt and debt-forgiveness. See, e.g., this:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/23/tacocat-vs-dog-prostates/#jubilee

In a new interview, Hudson delves into that history: interest-bearing debt was invented in the third millennium BCE, and quickly kings learned that they had to have periodic debt forgiveness, or compound interest would render all debts unpayable.

https://digitalfinanceanalytics.com/blog/debt-and-power-with-michael-hudson/

Greeks and Romans did away with the practice, and so had to live with six centuries of debt-revolts, as ever-larger fractions of their populace ended up in a form of debt slavery.

Greek Democracy was created to allow commoners to serve in government and so vote to cancel debts. Roman emperors conquered Greece and did away with debt-cancellation, creating an increasingly unstable oligarchy.

That's not far off from where we are today. 90% of debts are held by the richest 10%, and these oligarchs own the political process and refuse to countenance debt-cancellation.

Obama promised to write down mortgages, but instead he bailed out finance, who kicked us all out and bought our houses out from under us, and then rented back to us. Since then, the Fed "has created $4.5 trillion of credit to support prices for real estate."

"The aim has been to make housing more expensive, enabling the banks to collect on their mortgages and not go under. Credit keeps the debt overhead in place, thereby keeping the financial system afloat instead of facing the reality that debt needs to be written down."

Trump's gonna do it again, giving $50b to airlines/Boeing. Since 2008, Boeing has spent $45b on buybacks. Trump's message: "Spend 92-95% of your income to buy your own hares, and the government will print money so you can do it again, because our priority is stock prices."

"Financial stability" is incompatible with "economic stability." Financial stability means never writing down debts so that the bad loans oligarchs made never turn into bad debts. Economic stability requires debt write-downs so that people can be productive.

Obama's bailouts increased big banks' Too Big to Fail status. That's why since 2008, "GDP per 95 percent of the American population is actually shrunk. All the growth in America's GDP has occurred only to the wealthiest 5% of the population."

Today, plutes "hope to use the crisis not to revive the economy, but to just pound it into debt deflation, leaving the debts in place while bailing out the banks and the landlord class."

Here's what "financial stability" looks like: "you have to pay this exponential growth in debt, [and] have less and less to buy goods and services."

Quarantine reveals the falsity of the automation crisis (permalink)

Automation-based unemployment has always been overhyped. Any work that robots take over merely frees up human workers for the 2-300 year project of climate remediation, including relocating every coastal city in the world.

But automation is also vastly overhyped. Take the oft-repeated claim that "truck driver" is the most common job in America, and first in line to be automated. It's just wrong.

First, because the BLS "truck driver" category includes long-haul truckers, delivery drivers, couriers, and dozens of other subprofessions, most of which are far, far away from being automatable.

https://hbr.org/2019/09/automation-isnt-about-to-make-truckers-obsolete

(More importantly, though: the most automatable category is long-haul driver, and an automated long-haul truck in its own dedicated lane is just a shitty train).

The overhyped nature of technological displacement is on perfect display during the pandemic quarantine. As many "low skilled" (which is to say, "low waged") workers withdraw from the workforce, the economy has ground to a halt.

So much so that the right is now prepared to throw 20+% of seniors into the volcano to appease the market gods.

The category error committed by automation-fretters is to confuse "automating a job" with "augmenting a worker."

"We know that robots are great at repetitive work. they can do that forever. What's not so great is anything with a human-centered context, a cultural context." -Julie Carpenter

https://www.wired.com/story/robot-jobs-coronavirus/

Bailouts and moral hazard (permalink)

It's been barely a decade since the USG bailed out big businesses and the fact that we're here again reveals some of the glaring failures in the last bailout. Any new bailout should correct those errors by putting restrictions on bailed-out companies.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/19/gb-whatsapp/#peoples-bailout

There have been some good proposals on these lines, like those from AOC and Stephanie Kelton:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/21/most-dangerous-ghost/#peoples-bailout

(whenever I write about this in public, I'm inundated with angry tweets from sociopaths with "investor" in their bios)

We're running out of time to get this right. DC is so filled with money-hungry lobbyists that they can't practice adequate social distancing, and they're collectively seeking trillions in string-free public money for their paymaster.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/rule-number-1-for-government-bailouts-of-companies-make-sure-voters-and-taxpayers-share-in-the-upside

At a minimum, any bailouts should come in exchange for convertible corporate bonds that let the USG take an ownership stake in any business that fails to repay its public debts. That's a minimum, as is a ban on stock buybacks for bailed out companies.

We need very strict limits on lobbying by bailed out firms: "If we are not to finance our own bamboozlement, any company receiving bailouts must be required each month to file full reports on political contributions and lobbying expenditures to candidates and parties."

This goes for dark money contributions, including 527 funds, and corporate/exec contributions to trade associations and other lobbying fronts, think-tanks, and other political influence vehicles.

"Unlike last time, when Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke failed to give the public a serious share of the upside, the bailed out firms should be compelled to issue convertible bonds to the government."

"Those bonds should make the government the senior creditor to the firm for the value of the principal as long as the debt is unpaid…As firms and the economy recover, the shares can be sold on the open market, yielding a handsome return to the Treasury."

The right likes to harp about "moral hazard" as an excuse for cutting aid, to, say, single mothers ("It only encourages them"). But what about businesses that needed trillions in 2008 and now need trillions more? What lesson are we teaching them?

(Image: Alex Proimos, CC BY)

MIT's ingenious manual/automatic open source ventilator (permalink)

At the end of last week, a crowdsourced design for an open-source hardware ventilator entered testing with the Irish regulator, a week after work began on the project.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/20/pluralistic-20-mar-2020/#oshw-breathing

Now, hot on its heels, an MIT open source hardware ventilator team has submitted its design to the FDA for testing and approval, under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) authority.

https://e-vent.mit.edu/

It eliminates many possible sources of failure by replacing an electric pump with a manual one, which can, in turn, be operated by a separate, very simple, Arduino-controlled system (which can be readily swapped out for a human hand if it fails).

As Hackaday points out, "Almost as interesting as the device itself is the comments people are leaving about the design."

https://hackaday.com/2020/03/23/mit-ventilator-designed-with-common-manual-resuscitator-submitted-for-fda-testing/

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Record sales up, P2P sales up — RIAA's story doesn't add up https://web.archive.org/web/20050822053404/http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5631698.html

#15yrsago Octopuses dressed up as sea coconuts sneaking on two legs https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050321/full/050321-14.html

#10yrsago Pooh vs Alien: Webcomics realize their full potential at last http://godxiliary.com/alienvspooh/

#10yrsago Airport worker caught photographing screen as female worker passed through naked scanner https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/mar/24/airport-worker-warned-body-scanner

#10yrsago UK record lobby: democracy is a waste of time https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/corporate-lobbyists-no-need-for-democracy

#5yrsago How medical abortion works https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/medical-abortion/

#5yrsago ACLU sues TSA to make it explain junk science "behavioral detection" program https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/nyclu-and-aclu-sue-tsa-records-discredited-behavior-detection-program

#5yrsago Randomized dystopia generator that goes beyond the Bill of Rights https://www.harihareswara.net/dystopia/

#1yrago Man stole $122m from Facebook and Google by sending them random bills, which the companies dutifully paid https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/lithuanian-pleads-guilty-to-stealing-100-million-from-google-facebook/

#1yrago Chelsea Manning is being held in prolonged solitary confinement, a form of torture https://xychelsea.is/?page_id=28

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Tor.com (https://tor.com), Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing: I'm getting geared up to start work my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Data – the new oil, or potential for a toxic oil spill? https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/23/data-the-new-oil-or-potential-for-a-toxic-oil-spill/

Upcoming appearances:

Quarantine Book Club, April 1, 3PM Pacific https://www.eventbrite.com/e/quarantine-book-club-cory-doctorow-tickets-100931360416

Museums and the Web, April 2, 12PM-3PM Pacific https://mw20.museweb.net/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583