#i don't read it often

[read-alert]

Happy Spooky Month! 👻 It's impossible to describe what the hell The Vampire Chronicles is about. Full titles under the cut as always

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology ed by Shane Hawk and Theodore C Van Alst Jr

Thr Reformatory by Tananarive Due

Lone Women by Victor Lavalle

Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski

Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury

The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice (I've read Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned)

[mirensiart]

I like the idea that hyrule+lorule have different cultures and sometimes there’s a lil cultural shock between the hyrule duo and the lorule duo

anyway, lorule’s way of greeting people is via hand kissing, which clashes with hyrule’s more hands off way of greeting

[keferon]

The tac net crash chapter is one of my favorites so far~

Ah and. Guess what. I just discovered that including this post, I made 50 pieces of fanart for Mistakes on mistakes until.. I’m so sane and normal about this story can you tell👍

[uncanny-tranny]

I recently had to do a project in one of my psych classes, and man, I knew that CBT was used for every little thing, but seeing over and over, "do CBT! CBT is the best for every mental illness!" was so jarring. I'm absolutely biased because of my own experiences, but I just don't think it's as universal a treatment model as it's touted.

If you didn't benefit from CBT, it's not because you're lazy or didn't try hard enough or lacked intelligence or foresight into your own needs. Frankly, it's a therapy model that (I think) shouldn't be the only readily-accessible model and among the only therapy models covered by insurance. Some of us should not be treated in a CBT model and that's okay. It's not a sign of poor character or unreasonable demands, and if you don't think it's a model that works for you, then it's your right to express that!

[kaiserouo]

"Huh."

[redysetdare]

A character looks straight into the camera and says "I'm not interested in romance" and people will still say "No, it's not confirmed they're aromantic!!!" "They could change their mind!!!" "it's a challenge for them to overcome!!!" "They'll have character development that makes them fall in love"

It's like they are given the most blatant answer to a character romantic orientation and they actively ignore it. all the while all it takes is subtext for people to speak as if it is fact for a character to be any other sexuality.

[khattikeri]

one of my favorite things about mdzs is that for how heavily its plot involves politics of classism and misogyny... even the characters most directly impacted by it can't and don't free themselves from it. literally the closest exception is mianmian.

meng yao being the "son of a whore" wasn't some sort of commie awakening for him that led him to wanting everyone to be socially equal. he played the political game, climbed the ladders, sucked up to and backstabbed and murdered people, including other prostitutes who actually had nothing to do with how he and his mother were treated at the brothel he grew up in.

he put in so much extra excessive effort for even a fraction of the same respect that members of gentry cultivation clans got. and he did deserve to be treated more humanely! but he feeds into the exact same system that created him, leading to his own undoing.

his efforts were for a fragile upward mobility that was never going to hold up. he never surpassed his origins nor did he empower others in similar stations, because the society he lives in is not one that would accept that.

the second he got caught and all those crimes exposed, he was scapegoated to hell and back, replacing wei wuxian as society's terrible one-sidedly evil boogeyman overnight.

speaking of not-quite male gentry, i think it's interesting that wei wuxian explicitly doesn't try to climb the ladders in BOTH lives, knowing full well that anything he does will be punished just for the sheer fact that he is wei wuxian.

wei wuxian is scolded for giving intelligent and correct answers in school. lan wangji does the same and is praised.

wei wuxian occasionally lounges around with fellow disciples and is punished. jiang cheng does the same and mostly escapes.

wei wuxian refuses to carry his sword around in public (after losing his golden core, which nobody knows) and is scorned as an arrogant upstart. nie huaisang has been doing the EXACT SAME THING for YEARS and nobody bats an eye.

unlike jin guangyao, wei wuxian knew subconsciously from the start that his acceptance was superficial and that he could be cast out any time. when he was 10 and recently taken in by the jiangs, he canonically would not eat or use "too much" food and water because he thought they'd find him a nuisance for "wasting their things" and kick him back out.

now away from just the classism, yu ziyuan is a proud and strong noblewoman in a society that belittles and derides women for everything they do. her strong cultivation doesn't matter. she's victim to the vicious rumors of her husband loving another woman who is strong like her but apparently had a more likeable personality.

it doesn't matter even if jiang fengmian didn't cheat or that wei wuxian is wei changze's son with cangse sanren; yu ziyuan can't bear with the humiliation of herself (and by extension her children) not being "good enough". she's ridiculed for "failing" in that one duty as a wife, mother, and woman.

she lashes out and takes out that anger on everyone present for years, giving her children lasting trauma and also being a key element in how the jiang family and yunmeng jiang sect are effectively wiped out at the hands of the wen clan.

madam jin doesn't even have a name outside of the fact that she's married to jin guangshan. i don't even remember reading anything that indicates if she's a strong or weak cultivator, or what, which in itself proves that to most people, it doesn't matter. she's "just" a woman.

of course she's angry at her husband's affairs and all the bastard children they bring in. but she also can't do anything about them, so she lashes out at the few people she can: servants. non-cultivators, probably. those very same bastard children.

shoutout to meng yao getting shoved down a flight of stairs at age fourteen, because if madam jin tried that move against her husband instead, it would make her lose even more face, which as a noblewoman she'd never do.

and that's not getting into how jiang yanli is consistently sidelined for being physically weak.

that's not getting into how mianmian was actually a good cultivator, but was mocked by everyone around her for trying to stand up for wei wuxian when everyone was turning on him. how everyone scoffed at luo qingyang's words as "just some lovesick woman" who "obviously wants to marry or bed him since he saved her".

luo qingyang is the only one of these characters who HASN'T died. she didn't play society's games like jin guangyao. she didn't dig her heels in confidence of her own abilities like wei wuxian.

she didn't bitterly lash out like yu ziyuan and madam jin. she didn't gently accept it like jiang yanli.

she just LEFT.

she married an ordinary merchant and cultivates separately from mainstream cultivation society, and therein found her own peace and happiness.

mxtx doesn't bother with particularly class conscious or feminist vocabulary to hand-hold readers into understanding these disparities, but that choice highlights them & the deeply entrenched politics of their society even more. i really love it.

[the---hermit]

24|10|2024

New day, same book and same struggle to focus. I need this thing to be done, it's so stressing and tiring to try to keep my focus on this. It's written so fucking badly I can't take it anymore. And after sending a few passages to a friend I can confirm I am not the problem, the book is. It's so tiring on my brain that I am also less motivated to read in my free time, which is fine, but it shows how badly it's influencing me. My free time, when I am alone, these days mainly consists of listening to music, doing sudoku puzzles and continuing my Lost rewatch. I am now at the end of season 3 and I am not joking when I say I don't remember shit. I mean I do have a few memories of things that will happen, but there has been so many plot points amd twists I had completly forgotten.

productivity list:

read first thing in the morning

finished reading and underlining the first half of the last section of the book (now I only have to work on the second half and the epilogue which should be less than 50 pages)

started writing down notes for what I have read yesterday and today

started outlining a few thoughts on what my 2025 reading goals are going to be (I feel like this year I really learned a lot on what I want my reading to be, I will be writing a post on that around the end of the year)

duolingo

[abbeyofcyn]

Turtle tots doodles

Top right was inspired by me and my sister. Too many photos of me squeezing her to death

[hahasuchagarbage]

🚨 TW limb(s) missing 🚨 (yes, it's not that graphic - no blood, raw meat or shattered bones poking through flesh, but better put a warning just be sure)

I give you guys ZERO context of what is going on here, so you can go wild with the guesses in your heads :)

[apas-95]

I’m an anarchocommunist that thinks a lot of other anarchists are stupid. For example, I don’t think that most people will just make insulin or do garbage collection/processing out of the kindness of their heart, and I also don’t think if it was genuinely done out of the kindness of their hearts that it’d work great. My idea is that for the “getting people to do the shitty jobs” question, the people that do those jobs should be compensated better in some way. Maybe a larger/nicer house, I’m not sure on the details. But other anarchists will say “all labor is equal”, and while I’d like to agree in the “work is hard” sense, I think things for the obvious common good, like teacher or garbage man or doctor deserve some sort of reward over other jobs. And for the efficiency of the labor, I think *specifically for labor* there needs to be some sort of organization, and we can use what’s worked before. We don’t need to have bathtub insulin if there’s a factory right there, and if there’s no connection from the insulin factory to doctors/pharmacists and truck drivers then it won’t work either. Really, my main problem with Marxism/Leninism or Stalinism or Maoism or any combination of those is that there are specific people with far too much power over others. I’m ok with light power in the way of “man you gotta drive the firetruck to the burning building even though you hate the dude that lives there”, but I’m not ok with the idea of a supreme leader or representatives in a political sense due to as I’ve amounts of power obviously corrupting people.

Really I’m sending this to you to get your criticism of my ideas- I think you’re pretty smart, and even if I disagree with you on some issues, I think I agree with you on others. I also want to say that not all anarchists are… like that.

So, years ago, before I started reading any Marxist theory, this is about where I was at politically. If you think about any of the practicalities, you come up to points where, very clearly, the maxim of 'no authority at all' conflicts with being able to do anything. If you're seriously considering how society could be better organised, if this is something you actually intend on bringing about, then you make some amount of concession to reality - as you did with the firetruck example!

Now, myself, I went on like this for a good while, coming up with methods of truly democratic organisation that wouldn't be susceptible to the types of totalitarianism I'd heard about, ending up very similar to your position. I was interested, however, in how these 'failed experiments' that I'd learned devolved into bureaucracy started out, and I started reading up on the history, and realised, with some discontent, that what I'd developed, once I'd made all the concessions for reality that would be necessary if this system were to be the actual one real human beings lives depended on, was essentially identical to the Soviet system.

From there, I read up on Marxist theory, still basically wary that this had all, at some point, been taken over by an evil dictator, but able to see that the earliest stages, at least, had been exactly what I was imagining, but put into practice. Reading the theory, reading how their experience experimenting with different forms of organisation, and the failures of some types, had led them to discover what did and didn't work, and adjust accordingly, made me suddenly appreciate why certain things were done certain ways. The harsh experiences of civil war had revealed certain dynamics and mechanics in the way society and production worked, which translates into political theories that bore out results I wouldn't have expected (and neither had the communists who had discovered them through practice!).

Eventually, with some chagrin and a significant deal of excitement, I realised that much of what I'd passively absorbed about socialism, many of the common-sense maxims that I'd been taught by capitalist society about the nature of power and so on, were very much artifacts of a decades-long war against these communists and the system they'd built, carried out by exactly the corporations and empires I had thought myself opposed to.

I won't critique any individual point of yours, but I will enjoin you to try out some Marxist theory - Dialectical and Historical Materialism, or Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, or Principles of Communism, or even the Communist Manifesto, and to read between the lines of whatever capitalist source you read on socialism, to notice every [citation needed] and wonder what actually happened such that someone felt the need to make something up.

[gray-thistleclan]

Cotv day 1 in camp

[aimtodraw]

Babysitting as a love language (superbat)

Richard: Don't get me wrong, he loves me too (obviously) just not enough to go through today again.

Bruce: What the hell did you guys do today anyway??

[zivazivc]

I've been slowly tweaking these designs for a couple of weeks now, and now I can finally introduce the Uncles, the colorful group of friends/roommates who raised Hed and Les (word "raised" used loosely, but they definitely shared the living space with them).

From left to right: Kymani, Bramble, Adewale, Benji, Jenga, and Licorice "Ish" with his boys. Let's say Hed and Les are 15 and 19 here, maybe a year older, which means the rest are only in their mid 30s.

[makiswirl]

can i just say. and this is probably a niche hill to die on. that i am so gobsmacked every time someone vaguely hints at the idea that jotaro doesn't care meaningfully for the other crusaders, usually particularly kakyoin and joseph, when those two actually tend to be the ones he reacts to being hurt the hardest

like he cares for his loved ones!!!! that literally plays into his character motives in every single part he shows up in!!! stop lying to me!!!!!!!

[aethersea]

it is funny though how kids' shows are so so so careful about death, no one's ever killed except MAYYYYBE the big bad, all those random side characters are fine, here have a quick shot of them before we leave just so you know they really did survive that 50-foot drop into a stormy sea,

and meanwhile kids' books nearly all agree that it's not an adventure until it has a body count.