#guine talks

[wiishopchanelboots]

The Books of Earthsea Illustrations from the complete illustrated edition, Illustrated by Charles Vess [X]

[shorthaltsjester]

it is quite funny to me as someone who studies philosophy and has had to have the conversations that bh and ludinus have been having many times over and often with people who like ludinus do not have any reading comprehension and truly like. the notion of “this shouldn’t exist” is almost always one that comes up regardless of whether it’s a discussion on the metaphysics of a potential God(s) or divinity, high political powers, or vehicles of systemic oppression. and what anyone who cares about people more than their ideals (even, sometimes, ideals that started out being about people but quickly come to be about the ideals themselves) realizes very quickly in a philosophical discussion about what should and shouldn’t exist is that it does not matter if what you’ve decided ‘shouldn’t’ exist does in fact already exist. like that tends to be the difference between sociopolitical philosophy that actually has teeth and substance in the world — a willingness to engage with the world as it is, not as it should be. because you can have the perfect image of a just and wonderful future world, but if you do not at every step reckon with the unjust world from which you are aiming at that future, you’re doing nothing. ideals are helpful because they aim us toward goals and hopes, but they’re nothing without a reality that grounds them.

and so people like ludinus, who in the real world would play the role of a graduate student with critical thinking skills that make every professor he comes across question how he arrived at his level of study, they don’t have Wrong ideals, there’s obviously plenty of reasons why an exandria without gods might in fact be a better place for mortals (there are also many Many reasons why it would not). but ludinus has also chosen his ideals to weigh heavier than the mortals he claims to uphold them with. i think ashton is also interesting, because i think a lot of their positions have a fun fluctuation between being ideal focused and person focused, where sometimes they’re focused on how unfair life is in a very nihilistic position, and at other times they seem quite clear about how much ideals help no one if they’re not second to the desire to help others. and i think that made their role in the convo with ludinus in 102 especially interesting and irritating (but in a narratively fulfilling way). anyway, truly so fun watching ludinus argue with the amount of fallacies and undeserved confidence of like right wing first year students in an ethics class explaining how actually the ends justify the means and thanos had the right idea actually if it means no more starvation. get a grip old man.

[heliological]

omelas writing masterpost

accepting that I will be thinking really hard about omelas approximately once per year for the rest of my life so here's a bunch of links for future me next time I go down this rabbithole

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin (1973)

Omelas, Je T’Aime, Kurt Schiller (2022)

The Ones Who Stay and Fight, N.K. Jemisin (2018)

The Ones Who Yell at Omelas, Rite Gud podcast (2022) [links a bunch of other responses]

tumblr post by shedoesnotcomprehend (2018)

After We Walked Away, Erica L. Satifka (2016)

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole, Isabel J. Kim (2024)

and bc I always forget, the BTS music video that references it is Spring Day

@ myself read another story jfc

[snoozingbear]

ursula le guin’s afterword to the farthest shore

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

I've been thinking about the various Omelas takes (in creative or directly argumentative form) I've seen or am familiar with. And personally, the "Omelas story" I want is one where there is no child suffering for the utopia, and there never has been one.

The very idea of the suffering child as a necessary condition for imagining a radically improved world is, in my opinion, the very thing the story is criticizing. In the original story, Le Guin presents the Omelas utopia in quite a bit of detail, and punctuates it by asking at what point it becomes believable, what it would take for us to believe in Omelas, to even imagine or describe such a society, altering and discarding details as she goes to suit the imaginations of the audience and herself.

The narrator introduces the conceit for which the story is known—the terrible "terms" exacted for Omelas's utopia to function—because she cannot persuade us of the utopia without such a price at the heart of it. We will only imaginatively engage with the concept of utopia if there is some dreadful truth that renders the whole thing monstrous and hypocritical.

The narrator essentially goes okay then, if you insist on a dreadful truth behind all the joy of Omelas's people, here's your dreadful truth and how that goes. After explaining the lore of the suffering child, the narrator specifically says of Omelas's people:

Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible?

I mean, I don't think the story is about "solving" the problem of the suffering child, or even the futility of solving the problem of the child. It's about the assumption that there must be one. The arguments that "the ones who walk away" should instead overthrow the exploitative government of Omelas (if it has one) or free the child or whatever generally seem to ignore this element of the story altogether. I think the story's indictment is less of the ones who walk away, or the government of Omelas, or the people who know about the child and just ignore them, than of the audience's demand for suffering at the heart of utopia.

(To be honest, I think this demand is what the ones who walk away are rightly turning their backs on.)

So, for me, I feel that an Omelas story that really engages with the "point" of Omelas needs to engage with this desire for a metaphysical dependence on exploitation and suffering, and the refusal of so many to imagine a better world without those things. And even in-story, the assumption of a "suffering child" behind Omelas's prosperity and decency seems like it'd certainly be convenient for Omelas's neighbors. I can imagine a sort of "well, some amount of poverty and exploitation is inevitable, but at least we don't have a suffering child" or "we can't change things too much, we all know how that goes, you end up with a suffering child" while ignoring the many suffering children all around them. At least they don't have that specific suffering child that absolutely must exist!

[thatlittlesentientfox]

they would be best friends

[spookygibberish]

@july-19th-club HI I just thought I'd respond to these EXTREMELY flattering tags because they were the push I needed to finally get around to listening to the Xenogenesis series. I've been meaning to check out Octavia Butler for a really long time, and after finishing those books I'm actually mad at myself for not getting around to it sooner, because like, holy shit.

Looking at the books I've enjoyed the most out of all the titles I've listened to in the last year, to picking out commonalities and trends, I came up with:

Explorations of speculative societies and cultures

Xenofiction! Inhuman perspectives, inhuman thought processes; monsters, aliens, and animals as perspective characters

Alienation. Relfect the experience of living in a society which is strange to you, persisting, finding value and beauty in a world that is ugly, complicated, and hostile

Body horror, shape-shifting, transhumanism

Surreal imagery and situations

Often violent, often sexual, (frequently both at once...). strongly visceral

Unsurprising preference for sci-fi over fantasy (it's much more prone to high concept strangeness, though on a surface level I like the trappings of fantasy more)

A LOT OF THESE ARE DOWNERS but I noticed there aren't a lot of straightforwardly bleak endings, I guess I can't resist that uncertain glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel... barring what they say about oncoming trains

Given all that it turns out Xenogenesis was baisically laser targeted to appeal to me and I'm incredibly grateful for these tags for nudging me to nudge Butler to the front of my queue.

[idlesuperstar]

The My-Eyeballs-Are-So-Happy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Bluray Watch

Episode 5: Tinker Tailor

- You don't break exactly, you just run out of stories to tell.

[ocheeva]

— ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴇꜰᴛ ʜᴀɴᴅ ᴏꜰ ᴅᴀʀᴋɴᴇꜱꜱ, ᴜʀꜱᴜʟᴀ ᴋ. ʟᴇ ɢᴜɪɴ

[milkman-zahhak]

I wanna share more erm.. belly stuff about my favorite characters and media on here but I'm already REALLY pushing it with this blog being named after e/q/u/i\u\s since I'm, like, one of maybe 5 of his total fans, and make it very obvious on all my main accounts.

If anyone finds the art or fics it's like. There's maybe a handful of people that even care about that character or fandom enough to make something for it and it doesn't take a lot of searching to see who they are and narrow it down lol.

I'll try to hint at what some of them are in the tags if anyone is curious, and wants to request anything with the characters from those medias so I have an excuse to post about em lol.

[sirbogarde]

Tunes of Glory (1960) dir. Ronald Neame

[tyrannuspitch]

mildly annoyed today and turning evil about it

[pulchrasilva]

I am clearly much more insane about ursula le guin than either I or anyone else bargained for

[gorgynei]

i DO wanna know about butches and werewolves btw

read the werewolf pride movement and then @queen-maybe's beware the bite of the were-lesbian zine and then think REALLY hard about werewolves for like 6-9 months. and then youll know.

[cooking-with-hailstones]

Y'ALL

I just saw an article about this incredible photoshoot and I'm completely obsessed.

During covid restrictions, photographer Steven Haining was joking with some friends that "well hey if we all have scuba tanks we could all be breathing our own air during a photo shoot" and then was like wait hold on that's not a bad idea.

Flash forward, and he's doing a full photo shoot in Fathom Five National Marine Park.

Now please keep in mind that this park is in Tobermory, Canada, on Georgian Bay. It is COLD. The water temp is about 14 C (or 57 F) in the middle of July when they did this shoot. They shot for close to 30 minutes at a depth of 9.5m (32 ft) with the model, Ciara Antoski, having a support person nearby at all times to give her air. Everyone else is in full wetsuits or even dry suits and she has this pretty dress and a weight belt. I have been swimming in Georgian Bay. It is COLD. This is incredibly impressive and must have required intense training.

The results are breathtaking.

And safety first of course:

Link to the photographer's website:

I cannot find any links for the model Ciara Antoski but if I do I'll add them here.

Anyways. Figured this is the kind of thing tumblr might appreciate!

[fudanshifoucault]

it goes without saying i am hopelessly nostalgic for my 8th grade english class