#its the 1960s and things are getting wild

[lesbianjohnlennon]

It's queer! by Nelson Motta (O Pasquim)

"o pasquim" was a brazilian alternative weekly, known for its paradoxical and satirical nature, published between 1969 and 1991. it was recognized for its engagement with the brazilian counterculture scene of the 1960s and for its role in opposing the military regime. in 1970, the magazine published an article about john and paul (and brian) affair, written by nelson motta. here's the translation (with adicional notes) 👇

It’s queer! by Nelson Motta

Paul McCartney loved John Lennon, who loved Brian Epstein, who loved Paul McCartney. All the whole London music scene (1) knows this, and there, the famous suspicion about Paul's “death”, which originated with an American DJ, didn't catch on.

The "death" theory is well-constructed, but the true story (the one about their faggotry (2)) makes much more sense. And it's much spicier. I prove what I said (3):

Everything was going great in the John-Paul-Epstein triangle. Everyone loved each other, they adored jelly beans, everything was rosy, smoke and mirrors, etc. Ringo and George Harrison were always on a different page. The duo was Lennon and McCartney — they sang together, composed together, did everything together. Together with Brian Epstein, of course, who was openly queer and quite relaxed about it.

Everything was fine until Paul and John decided that two's company and three's a crowd, etc., and kicked Epstein out of the bed.

It's not proven, but many serious and well-informed people claim that Epstein committed suicide after a fight with Paul. Epstein supposedly gave Paul a very valuable gift, which Paul not only ignored but also hung up on Epstein, who, in despair, killed himself.

But John and Paul had many arguments, especially when Paul was still single and John was already tied down with the Japanese woman. The nippo, who is very wild and forward-thinking (4), didn't mind sharing John with Paul, but McCartney (that face never fooled Sérgio Cabral (5)) had jealousy issues. They fought and made up many times, even through music.

To "show the proof"(6) (I'm not sure why this phrase keeps coming up): Paul made up by composing Get Back (To Me) (7), and Lennon responded with a passionate interpretation of Oh Darling that everyone thought was "darling" (in the female sense) but was actually "darling" (in the male sense)(8). These are some of the great ambiguities of the English language.

But the Japanese woman really tied John Lennon down; no one knows exactly how. Or rather, everyone knows how.

The press started reporting that they were fighting a lot, and the explanations were always about "business and musical matters." Only a fool would believe that, since it's known that Apple was never in danger, none of the Beatles were at risk of starving, and the duo's musical production never suffered any drop in quality or sudden change in style.

After his last fight with John, Paul met Linda Eastman, who, through talks and things like that, convinced him to re-establish his heterosexuality (9). Probably out of revenge, Paul ended up marrying her to get back at John with a "for your information, I've already found someone else to replace you." (10)

The final result: John recording solo (Instant Karma is third on the American charts) while Paul is also making waves as a solo artist with Let It Be, first place on the American charts, and Paul's solo album has already been released.

Some clueless people might ask, "But how do Lennon & McCartney songs keep appearing?"

Elementary, my dear Jaguar (11): The duo has an exclusive contract with the music publisher Northern Songs until 1972, and everything one does will carry the other's name, at least nominally, as a partner. This practice is very common among songwriting duos where both contribute to the lyrics and music interchangeably.

You must admit that, at the very least, this is a respectable theory. I can't prove it because I've never been involved in this affair, which is absolutely not my specialty.

They’re the ones who are queer; let them figure it out.

notes:

(1) in the original, “patota musical de londres”. “patota” has a kind of pejorative meaning of a group of people. also means a group of friends or colleagues.

(2) in the original, “bichisse”, and it was the best way of translation that i could find.

(3) in the original, “mato a cobra e mostro o (the) pau”. again the best i could find.

(4) in the original, “superprafrentex”, which was a common slang in brazil in the 70s, used to describe someone who was modern and progressive.

(5) sérgio cabral was a famous journalist in brazil, and one of the founders of “o pasquim”.

(6) again, in the original, “mato a cobra e mostro o (the) pau”.

(7) in the original, “Get Back (Volta pra mim)”, which is funnier in portuguese and i tried to keep the tone.

(8) in Portuguese, every noun has a gender. darling can be translated to “querida” (feminine) or “querido” (masculine). 

(9) in the original, “restabelecer a mão única”. “mão única”, which literally translates to “one-way street”, makes a reference to paul’s sexuality, implying he was going (or into) on both “ways”, men and women.

(10) in the original, “pra teu governo já tenho outra em teu lugar”, another idiom. but works in english, anyway.

(11) in the original, “Elementar, meu caro Jaguar”, a playful reference to sherlock holmes’ line.

disclaimer: this was written in 1970, so is full of outdated expressions (and slurs) so read carefully!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Emil Ferris’s long-awaited “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two”

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Seven years ago, I was absolutely floored by My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, a wildly original, stunningly gorgeous, haunting and brilliant debut graphic novel from Emil Ferris. Every single thing about this book was amazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

The more I found out about the book, the more amazed I became. I met Ferris at that summer's San Diego Comic Con, where I learned that she had drawn it over a while recovering from paralysis of her right – dominant – hand after a West Nile Virus infection. Each meticulously drawn and cross-hatched page had taken days of work with a pen duct-taped to her hand, a project of seven years.

The wild backstory of the book's creation was matched with a wild production story: first, Ferris's initial publisher bailed on her because the book was too long; then her new publisher's first shipment of the book was seized by the South Korean state bank, from the Panama Canal, when the shipper went bankrupt and its creditors held all its cargo to ransom.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters told the story of Karen Reyes, a 10 year old, monster-obsessed queer girl in 1968 Chicago who lives with her working-class single mother and her older brother, Deeze, in an apartment house full of mysterious, haunted adults. There's the landlord – a gangster and his girlfriend – the one-eyed ventriloquist, and the beautiful Holocaust survivor and her jazz-drummer husband.

Karen narrates and draws the story, depicting herself as a werewolf in a detective's trenchcoat and fedora, as she tries to unravel the secrets kept by the grownups around her. Karen's life is filled with mysteries, from the identity of her father (her brother, a talented illustrator, has removed him from all the family photos and redrawn him as the Invisible Man) to the purpose of a mysterious locked door in the building's cellar.

But the most pressing mystery of all is the death of her upstairs neighbor, the beautiful Annika Silverberg, a troubled Holocaust survivor whose alleged suicide just doesn't add up, and Karen – who loved and worshiped Annika – is determined to get to the bottom of it.

Karen is tormented by the adults in her life keeping too much from her – and by their failure to shield her from life's hardest truths. The flip side of Karen's frustration with adult secrecy is her exposure to adult activity she's too young to understand. From Annika's cassette-taped oral history of her girlhood in an Weimar brothel and her escape from a Nazi concentration camp, to the sex workers she sees turning tricks in cars and alleys in her neighborhood, to the horrors of the Vietnam war, Karen's struggle to understand is characterized by too much information, and too little.

Ferris's storytelling style is dazzling, and it's matched and exceeded by her illustration style, which is grounded in the classic horror comics of the 1950s and 1960s. Characters in Karen's life – including Karen herself – are sometimes depicted in the EC horror style, and that same sinister darkness crowds around the edges of her depictions of real-world Chicago.

These monster-comic throwbacks are absolute catnip for me. I, too, was a monster-obsessed kid, and spent endless hours watching, drawing, and dreaming about this kind of monster.

But Ferris isn't just a monster-obsessive; she's also a formally trained fine artist, and she infuses her love of great painters into Deeze, Karen's womanizing petty criminal of an older brother. Deeze and Karen's visits to the Art Institute of Chicago are commemorated with loving recreations of famous paintings, which are skillfully connected to pulp monster art with a combination of Deeze's commentary and Ferris's meticulous pen-strokes.

Seven years ago, Book One of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters absolutely floored me, and I early anticipated Book Two, which was meant to conclude the story, picking up from Book One's cliff-hanger ending. Originally, that second volume was scheduled for just a few months after Book One's publication (the original manuscript for Book One ran to 700 pages, and the book had been chopped down for publication, with the intention of concluding the story in another volume).

But the book was mysteriously delayed, and then delayed again. Months stretched into years. Stranger rumors swirled about the second volume's status, compounded by the bizarre misfortunes that had befallen book one. Last winter, Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnston published an article detailing a messy lawsuit between Ferris and her publishers, Fantagraphics:

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/fantagraphics-sued-emil-ferris-over-my-favorite-thing-is-monsters/

The filings in that case go some ways toward resolve the mystery of Book Two's delay, though the contradictory claims from Ferris and her publisher are harder to sort through than the mysteries at the heart of Monsters. The one sure thing is that writer and publisher eventually settled, paving the way for the publication of the very long-awaited Book Two:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two

Book Two picks up from Book One's cliffhanger and then rockets forward. Everything brilliant about One is even better in Two – the illustrations more lush, the fine art analysis more pointed and brilliant, the storytelling more assured and propulsive, the shocks and violence more outrageous, the characters more lovable, complex and grotesque.

Everything about Two is more. The background radiation of the Vietnam War in One takes center stage with Deeze's machinations to beat the draft, and Deeze and Karen being ensnared in the Chicago Police Riots of '68. The allegories, analysis and reproductions of classical art get more pointed, grotesque and lavish. Annika's Nazi concentration camp horrors are more explicit and more explicitly connected to Karen's life. The queerness of the story takes center stage, both through Karen's first love and the introduction of a queer nightclub. The characters are more vivid, as is the racial injustice and the corruption of the adult world.

I've been staring at the spine of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book One on my bookshelf for seven years. Partly, that's because the book is such a gorgeous thing, truly one of the great publishing packages of the century. But mostly, it's because I couldn't let go of Ferris's story, her characters, and her stupendous art.

After seven years, it would have been hard for Book Two to live up to all that anticipation, but goddammit if Ferris didn't manage to meet and exceed everything I could have hoped for in a conclusion.

There's a lot of people on my Christmas list who'll be getting both volumes of Monsters this year – and that number will only go up if Fantagraphics does some kind of slipcased two-volume set.

In the meantime, we've got more Ferris to look forward to. Last April, she announced that she had sold a prequel to Monsters and a new standalone two-volume noir murder series to Pantheon Books:

https://twitter.com/likaluca/status/1648364225855733769

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/01/the-druid/#oh-my-papa

[fictionadventurer]

Top 5 obscure light vintage novels! (Not sure if my previous ask got eaten, but also curious about this one specifically)

The strictest definition of what I consider "obscure light vintage novels" requires a book to meet a lot of criteria:

Published before 1960

Not recommended to me by anyone I know personally (including on tumblr)

Doesn't have a fancy Oxford-Classics-type edition with an introduction. (And none of the author's other books are well-known enough to have one)

Has a realistic setting

Ideally written by a woman or centered around a female main character

Which means that very few books fit this list. But of those few, here are my top five.

Desire by Una Silberrad: Flawed but fascinating Edwardian novel about an eccentric heiress who meets a soulful author and eventually winds up working for him when she loses her money and he inherits his father's pottery business. Fascinating characters, amazing romance, lots of interesting themes. I'm also going to count the author's other novels in this category, because she's come to epitomize "obscure light classic" for me. The Good Comrade is a much frothier novel with some great characters, and Curayl is highly flawed, but its silver-tongued hero lives rent-free in my head.

The Ark by Margot Benary-Isbert: I finished this book less than twenty-four hours ago (so I could include it on this list). It's a 1953 German novel set in 1947, about a refugee family building a home after the end of the war. It reads like, if you can believe it, a cozy post-apocalyptic novel. These people are living through some terrible things, but they make the best of things and manage to find joy. It's chock-full of fascinating details about life in post-war Germany, and reminds you that the people on that side of the war were human too, losing people and places they loved, and doing their best to live in terrible times. There are some superstitious elements later on that I wasn't crazy about, but otherwise I adored this story.

The Romance of a Shop by Amy Levy: Novel from the 1880s about four sisters who open a photography studio to support themselves after their father's death. Extremely underwritten (one of the girls meets an old flame and marries him between chapters), but a very easy, pleasant read with interesting historical details, and some nice sisterly relationships that remind me just a bit of Little Women meets Oscar Wilde.

The Heir of Redclyffe and Countess Kate by Charlotte Mary Yonge: Books by one of the bestselling authors of the Victorian age who's completely forgotten today. Both get too preachy at times, but make up for it by having amazing characters. The first one is a family saga about cousins caught up in an old feud, and the second is like if Anne Shirley suddenly found out she was a countess.

The Rosary by Florence Barclay: The bestselling novel of, like, 1920. It gets very melodramatic, but I was also surprised at how grounded and witty the characters were. I remember very little about it, but I have fond memories of the reading experience, and it earns a place on this list because when I want to find an "obscure vintage light novel", on some level I'm thinking I want to find a book like this.

I know you didn't ask, but I find myself wanting to list five novels that don't quite meet the strict criteria above, but are close enough that I want to highlight them.

The Dean's Watch and The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge: Goudge isn't exactly obscure in this section of tumblr (which is why I heard of her in the first place), but she's obscure enough that a lot of her books are out-of-print or otherwise hard to get, and these two in particular are among the best books I've ever read.

The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery: Montgomery is extremely well-known, and this book has an ever-growing and very devoted cult following, so it's not exactly obscure, but it's much less well-known than most of her other books. A deep cut, if you will. It fits perfectly within the light vintage novel category, and has long been one of my favorite novels of all time.

Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon: It's got an Oxford Classics (or similar imprint) edition, and is well-known as one of the very first sensation novels, but it's not exactly known among people who don't deep-dive into Victorian literature. I read this last month and loved it. It's a cozy sensation novel with an amazing main character, great atmosphere, and a plot that manages to grip you even while not much happens.

Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther: It's not exactly obscure if it has a movie adaptation, but from what I know, the movie basically ignores the book, which isn't that well-known today. Charming slice-of-life from the very early days of WWII England.

Helen by Maria Edgeworth: Not exactly beloved, and Edgeworth isn't exactly obscure, but this is a lesser-known novel that fits well within this category. The first half had some moments that were so dull I considered not finishing, but the second half was gripping enough that I can mention it as a nice, obscure surprise of a book.

[longwuzhere]

My Adventures with Superman Season 2 Easter Eggs

Welcome to the penultimate episode of My Adventures with Superman! Very sad that the season is ending next week but we still got the comic in the next 4 months! Hell yeah!!!!

My Easter eggs lists for season 1 is here if you haven't seen it!

My season 2 episode 1 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 2 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 3 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman comic issue 1 post is here

My season 2 episode 4 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 5 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 6 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My Easter eggs and references for My Adventures with Superman comic issue 2 post is here

My season 2 episode 7 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 8 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 10 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My Easter eggs and references for My Adventures with Superman comic issue 3 post is here

Spoilers if you haven't seen the episode

Starting things off, we see Clark, still trapped by Brainiac live a life on "Krypton" with his "family" and we see him feed a Sun Eater.

In the comics, the Sun Eater makes its first appearance in Adventure Comics #305 (1963) where Mon-El, disguised as Marvel Boy is trying to get in the Legion of Superheroes team and in order for him to pass and be accepted, one of their test was to stop a Sun Eater and Mon-El was able to successfully drive it away from a sun.

The scene that this is homaging is similar to what happened in All-Star Superman #2 (2006) [<- highly recommend everyone read it btw] where Superman feeds a Sun Eater that he has in the Fortress of Solitude, a miniature sun that he created as seen in the page below (W: Grant Morrison P: Frank Quitely, I&C: Jamie Grant, L: Phil Balsman).

In the comics most of the time Sun Eaters are depicted as nebulous black hole-esque things, other times its a creature, but the closest MAwS's Sun Eater design is based on is the Sun Eater from the Supergirl CW tv show.

Next we see "Lara", invoke Rao's name after seeing Clark feed the Sun Eater a miniature sun.

So for those who do not know, Krypton's red sun is named after Rao, Krypton's sun god.

Rao, the red sun of Krypton, makes its first appearance in Superman #141 (1960) [W: Jerry Siegel, P: Wayne Boring, I: Stan Kaye] where Superman investigates a strange planet that turns out to be a creature and as Superman chases after it, he hits the time barrier and flies back to before Krypton's explosion.

Now Rao the Kryptonian God, makes his first appearance in Superman: The Last God of Krypton #1 (1999) [W: Walter Simonson P,I,&C: Greg and Tim Hildebrandt (yes Greg and Tim Hildebrandt who designed the original UK Star Wars poster from 1977), L: Ken Lopez] where Cythonna, Kryptonian goddess of ice, emerges from her banishment and sees that Krypton is no more. She goes after the last Kryptonian, take a wild guess who, to kill the last of Rao's descendants . We see Rao in the comic where Superman and Lois go to the Fortress of Solitude to see what Cythonna's history was before Krypton's destruction.

The episode's title is a reference to Gurren Lagann (<-Great anime if you're a Studio Trigger fan) where it is a quote from Kamina who says "Your drill is the drill that will pierce the heavens." Appropriate title considering what Clark and Lois does to free Clark from Brainiac's control.

We see that Lois is still under the Black Mercy's, well, mercy and I talked more about it here.

In the Black Mercy's dream world for Clark, we see that Lois has been captured by "Jor-El" and we see Clark and Lois meet up again, however both do not have memories of each other. Clark mentions that he's always in the Hall of Science where they keep the alien species, like the Sun Eater we saw before, working as a scientist.

The first instance of the "Hall of Science" was in Brave and the Bold #28 (1960) the first appearance of the Justice League where Starro was attacking Science City, and thus the Hall of Science. The Hall of Science's association doesn't come up until Secret Origins #1 (2014)

[W: Greg Pak, P: Lee Weeks, I: Lee Weeks, Sandra Hope, C: Dave McCaig, L: John J. Hill] where we see a retelling of Superman's origins. where scientist, Jor-El was trying to warn about the planet's explosion, but the Hall of Science expelled him for his alarmist warnings thinking nothing of it. Guess how that turned out for the planet. Very cool thing to have Clark be a scientist on this fake Krypton just like his father in the comics.

Back in MAwS IRL, one of the OMACs destroys the spaceship that was carrying Lois, Jimmy, Kara, Mallah, and the Brain and when Kara, Jimmy and Lois crash land, they get arrested by Waller and Taskforce X. Lucky for Jimmy that he was live streaming and this caught Perry's attention and he, the Daily Planet, and Vicky Vale were able to stall Taskforce X so Steve Lombard can sneak behind the Taskforce X prison carrier and break the trio out.

Steve's van has wolves howling at the moon painted on its exterior kinda invokes the three wolf moon shirt (designed by Antonia Neshev) vibes.

Later when the trio are in Steve's van, we see a blink and you miss it easter egg where apparently Steve went to Jump City Community College.

Jump City is a reference to the city that the Teen Titans from the 2000 cartoon are located in. So hey we got a Victor Stone and a city where one iteration the Teen Titans were in, so the Teen Titans are possible in the MAwS universe!

Jimmy's speech to Kara kinda gives off that "you choose who you want to be" quote vibes from Iron Giant, appropriate considering the Iron Giant is a Superman fan. Good movie too highly recommend checking that movie out too.

Back on "Krypton", Clark and Lois were able to get their memories back after so many groundhog day moments for Lois and we see this cool AF moment for her paying back how Clark protected her when they were attacked in the forest by the OMACs in episode 6 of season 1.

This scene specifically^

As Brainiac loses control over Clark thanks to Lois, Brainiac puts on anti-Kryptonite armor for him and his robots thanks to Lex using his Metallos that are now powered by Kryptonite (I talk more about Metallo here). Brainiac hacks into the Metallos and prepares to fire on Earth with an Archer beam from Kandor.

The Archer Beam, well technically the weapon itself makes its first appearance in Superman: The World of New Krypton #2 (2009) [W: Greg Rucka, James Robinson, P&I: Pete Woods, C: Brad Anderson, L: Steve Wands], where the Archer Rifle was developed as a weapon to stop rogue Kryptonians as the rifle blasts red sun to depower them for 30 minutes so they can be apprehended.

And finally, after Kara blocks the first Archer beam with her body, Clark comes in to stop the second and gets a new outfit.

The new suit doesn't have the red trunks anymore and that kinda makes you think of the New 52 suit that Superman wore during the DC universe reboot in 2011 (Final page of Justice League #1 (2011) [W: Geoff John, P: Jim Lee, I: Scott Williams, C: Alex Sinclair, L: Patrick Brosseau]). Ngl not a fan of this new look for MAwS Superman. The red trunks helps break up the large areas of blue, plus symbolically it helps tie back to his origins on Earth with Ma Kent being the one to give him the trunks. Also I do not like the yellow outline S-Shield, it makes me think of the new 2025 Superman movie S-Shield, which irks me when movies try to influence the source comics, when it should be the other way around *death glares at the MCU*. Really hope we get the red trunks again by the end of the season or at least in season 3.

Anyways come back next week for the final episode of My Adventures with Superman season 2 and then in August and the following 3 months for issues 3-6 of the comics too!

My Easter eggs lists for season 1 is here if you haven't seen it!

My season 2 episode 1 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 2 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 3 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman comic issue 1 post is here

My season 2 episode 4 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 5 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 6 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My Easter eggs and references for My Adventures with Superman comic issue 2 post is here

My season 2 episode 7 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 8 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My season 2 episode 10 Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My Easter eggs and references for My Adventures with Superman comic issue 3 post is here

[vintagerpg]

Alan Garner’s debut novel, The Weirdstone of Brisigamen (1960) is set mostly in Alderley Edge, in Cheshire, and features a version of the Sleeping King legend, where the wizard of the Edge watches over a sleeping troop of knights who would one day save the world from an untold evil. To do so, though, requires the titular weirdstone, which was lost, but conveniently comes back to the Edge on the wrist of a visiting girl. She and her brother get embroiled in the machinations of a coven of witches, led by Selina Place (actually the Morrigan) and an evil sorcerer Grimnir, who both wish to possess the stone. The siblings wind up lost in the caves and mines of the Edge, are saved by two dwarves and eventually traverse the Cheshire countryside to deliver the stone to the wizard and provoke a final confrontation between the forces of good and evil.

The underground portions of claustrophobic and terrible — any dungeoneer would think twice about spelunking after reading Gardner’s descriptions of stumbling through perfect darkness, squeezing through narrow openings and, worst of all, getting stuck. Nightmarish. The later portion in the Cheshire countryside is deeply strange — mundane fields and woodland becomes overlaid with a fantastic world, populated by witches and terrible creatures — this comes across in Jack Gaughan’s bizarre cover art. The focus on landscape, and its dual nature, is something just about all of Garner’s novels ponder.

The Moon of Gomrath (1963, cover by Jeffrey Catherine Jones) sees the siblings again embroiled in a supernatural conflict with the vengeful Morrigan, an evil spirit called the Brollachan and the Wild Hunt. As an adventure yarn, Moon is probably superior, but it lacks the raw strangeness of Weirdstone. A third novels was meant to wrap things up, but Garner decided he didn’t like the protagonists, so the sequence remained incomplete until Boneland came out in 2012 (which is weird in completely different ways).

[quillpokebiology]

Duraludon Facts

(Art by Tomycase on Deviantart)

-The scientific name for Duraludon is "Tyrannosaurus Mechanicus," which roughly translates to "Mechincal Tyrant Lizard"

-Duraludon inspired a lot of the building designs for Galar, especially its Gigantimax form. Because of this, they're often represent cities, and Wyndon is often associated with Duraludon

-Despite their alloy bodies being quite strong, they rust very easily. Because of this, Duraludon have an aversion to rain and sunlight, living in dark caves to avoid it

-Duraludon will often get into territorial fights with Tyranitar

-Despite their rivalry with Tyranitar, they are in the same family, with both of them being descendants of Tyrantrum

-This pokemon eats rocks and other minerals. To get the nutritional value they need, they'll often seek out minerals of varying colors

-While Duraludon prefer to stay in the mountains eating the minerals they find there, there have been times that they wander into cities and eat chunks of the steel buildings

-Duraludon's inward facing claws work like a shovel when digging, collecting dirt that they fan throw to the side. It also helps keep minerals from falling out

-Duraludon bones feel similar to metal

-Duraludon can't run very fast, but they are great for traveling long distances. The best thing to do if you come across a wild one without a pokemon is to run away and hide, since they can't see far away well and will hopefully lose track of you before they can catch up to you

-Like stated above, they can't see well far away. This is because seeing far away in a dark cave that you're foraging for metals in isn't much needed when practically nothing hunts you, you're in the dark, and your food is rocks

-Their flat teeth helps them crush metals

-Duraludon's eyes are flat and have a third eyelid to protect from potential falling dust and other debris

-Theie brains are about the size of a walnut

-This pokemon's only predator are humans and Tinkaton. Humans have hunted Duraludon for their alloy bodies and was very popular in the 1960s. While they don't often interact with Tinkaton in the wild due to not being from the same regions, the rare Tinkaton in Blueberry Academy will sometimes hunt a Duraludon or Archaludon. Scientists don't really count Tinkaton as a natural predator because they hunt anything steel and they don't interact much, but I am, bcuz F science

[doodlin-deer]

Okay, has anyone else tried connecting the dots between the Cooper Clan members? Because recently I just started and in doing so, by putting them on a timeline, I’ve noticed that many of them are probably direct relatives to each other

Now bear in mind, this is me operating under the understanding that all of these Coopers are directly descended from one another (because that’s what an ancestor is, not an uncle, an aunt, or a distant cousin once or twice removed), plus Sly himself has said more than once that he’s from a long LINE of thieves, so let’s just work with that in mind.

I’m also basing this off of all available information from all of the games, primarily Thieves in Time

Some examples:

Rioichi and Henriette

In Thieves in Time, we learn that Rioichi was alive and already well-established during the chapter “Turning Japanese” (roughly in his 30’s or 40’s at the time) in the year 1603.

Later in the game in the chapter “40 Thieves” Sly discovers treasure that would later be stolen by Henriette in the year 1616, thirteen years after Rioichi, making her more than likely his daughter. Though it does make me wonder why a Japanese guy would give his daughter a name like Henriette. But then again this is a family that has a thieving reputation dating back to the dawn of time and a centuries old book with seemingly unlimited pages to record it so let’s not think too hard here about logic.

Thaddeus and Tennessee

We also learn I n Thieves in Time, “Go West Young Raccoon” that “Tennessee Kid” Cooper was active in the year 1884, during the Wild West (which for any non-Americans was roughly around 1865 to the 1900s, though that’s a matter of debate for some). Let’s assume he’s somewhere in his late 20’s or early 30’s, putting his year of birth in either the 1860’s or 1850’s.

We also know, thanks to dialogue from Sly 3, that Thaddeus Winslow Cooper the III was active during Victorian London which lasted from 1837 to 1901. From here, things get tricky. In “Goodbye my Sweet” we get a look at Thaddeus’ section of the Thievius Raccoonus, which gives us two different contradicting dates to work with. His chapter is shown to have been penned in 1839, however, the included picture of Thaddeus is shown to have been made in 1893, roughly nine years after the Cooper Gang’s encounter with Tennessee.

Based off this, my preferred theory is that Thaddeus is Tennessee’s grandfather, or (and I can’t think of a single reason why Clockwerk would allow this fly) Thaddeus and Tennessee are cousins in some way.

And before someone brings up the Cooper Vault, and how Tennessee’s shrine comes before Thaddeus’, I’d like to point out that also in the vault, Sir Galleth’s shrine comes before Salim Al-Kupar, despite Salim having lived some 300 years before him.

Otto and Conner

And here is where the Cooper record comes to its blurriest. While we do have an idea of when Conner was born (with him having died in 1992, and his birth year suspected to be around the 1960s, maybe the late 50’s), we know next to nothing about Otto, besides that he was an ace pilot and skilled mechanic. It is generally accepted that he was active during WW1 or WW2.

If Otto was around for WW1, then at the very least he was born in the 1890’s, but there’s a small snag named Tennessee that says otherwise. If he was born in the 1890’s then he’d almost certainly be Kid Cooper’s son. Which raises the question of why Otto is presumably European (seeing as his surname is Van Cooper) while Tennessee is unashamedly American.

Now if Otto was around for WW2, it would put his year of birth around the 1910s, putting some room between him and Tennessee, while also closing the distance between him and Conner, at the latest, Conner would have likely been in his late 40’s if Conner was born in the 1950’s, maybe he was even in his 50’s. But what really cinches this for me is that Otto and Conner were both technologically savvy, with Otto and his planes, and Conner with computers. As for how Conner is (presumably) American and how Otto is European, well……. I got nothing. I guess Conner must’ve changed it for whatever reason

Thoughts or headcanons?

[cherryflavouredhs]

Ice Cream Man - HS ONE SHOT

Summary: When the readers daughter is excited to hear the music from the local ice cream van the reader has no choice but to pay the ice cream man a visit but its not her usual local ice cream man.

Pairing: Ice cream man Harry x Reader

Warnings: None. Just fluff.

A/N: This is a little short and sweet instalment that I started agesss ago that I might make into a mini series. Its set in the 1960's London so please let your mind go wild for 1960's Harry.

__________

“Mummy the ice cream van is here!” My 5 year old daughter Charlotte squeals in excitement as she runs down the hallway and into the living room where I’m currently sat sewing up the hole in her school skirt. Charlotte leaps onto the arm of my chair and starts tugging at my arm, making me pause what I’m doing and put down the needle and thread. 

“Darling I’m sorry, mummy can’t get you ice cream today.” My fingers run through her dark hair, softly tucking the loose strands behind her ear. Her head drops in disappointment and it makes my heart break for her. “Mummy doesn’t have enough coins in her purse this week but next week you will get your ice cream, okay?” I reason.

Charlottes face suddenly lights up as she quickly jumps off me and runs off in a hurry. I hear the soft thumps of her footsteps upstairs as she rushes around obviously on a mission. In no time at all I hear her racing down the stairs and back into the living room holding her pink mini purse that she uses when she’s playing her game of ‘grown ups’. 

“Mummy come on I have my purse!” Her little hands reach for mine and tugs me to stand up. She might be small but she does have a good grip on her. I let out a chuckle as I let her lead me out the house, her excited laughs fill my ears and I can’t help but go along with her. She continues to drag me towards the ice cream van that’s still playing the playful music with a line of children patiently waiting. It’s the same van that comes weekly, every Friday at 4 but I can’t help but notice that the man serving the ice cream is different which is peculiar as for years it’s been the same man.  

“Mummy we’re next!” Charlotte exclaims, jumping up and down. 

“Hello what can I get for you today?” The man asks, smiling towards my daughter as she puts her hand on her chin as she scans the board that’s littered with pictures of all the treats for sale. 

“That one please.” She points. The man wastes no time in nodding and going to get her the frozen treat. In the meantime Charlotte is digging her hands in her purse and before I can stop her she is opening her hand up showing 3 buttons, a hard boiled sweet and single hair clip. The man visibly freezes, his eyes going from her hand to me before smiling. 

“Darling I don’t think the kind man can accept this-“ The man subtly shakes his head mouthing ‘its fine’ before softly chuckling. He turns around so his back is facing us so I take this as our cue to head back inside but I’m shocked when he turns to us again to hand me an ice cream covered in sprinkles. 

“Your daughter over paid me.” He grinned cheekily. “Please take it before it melts.”

“Mummy now we have matching ice creams!” Charlotte laughs while holding up her half eaten, half melted cone. She’s making a mess of it already. I take the ice cream off of the man and I can’t help but smile at his kindness, its a big difference compared to the other man that drives this van; he’s miserable. 

“What happened to Peter?” I ask. “He’s always driving this thing around even when he wasn’t selling.”

The man lightly laughs and nods his head agreeing with me. 

“He broke his leg, he’ll survive but in the meantime you have me for 6 more weeks.” He grins at me and I’m automatically grinning back at him. I feel a tug on my arm, making me look down at my daughter who’s mouth is covered in ice cream.

“Mummy its melting.” My eyes are snapping down at the cone and she’s right there’s cream running down the sides and without thinking I’m poking my tongue out and licking up the mess that has dripped down. I look towards the man who is now facing away from me wiping down the table in front of him. 

“Right my darling girl lets get you home so I can get you cleaned up in the bath.” Charlotte takes my hand in hers that is also covered in melted ice cream and I cringe at the sensation. “It was lovely meeting you…ah?”

“Harry.” He grins. Its only then I notice his dimples. 

“Harry.” I repeat, with a smile, testing out the name on my tongue. He looked like a Harry. 

I heard a huff followed by a tutting sound behind me which made the two of us look and see that there was a small queue starting to form behind me now. This was obviously our cue to start heading back home. I turned towards Harry again, giving him a playful eye roll which he laughed at.

“Come on, Lotts.” With Charlottes hand in mine I gently guided her towards the direction of our house. We had barely walked 4 steps when I heard Harry’s voice again. 

“I didn’t get your name!” I turned around, my walk slowing down.

“Y/N!” I yelled back, throwing him a smile before turning back around.

"See you soon Y/N!" My face hurt from smiling so much and my stomach twisted with butterflies.

“Mummy I like that man. So much nicer than Mr Peter.” Charlotte exclaimed before taking another big lick of her ice cream. 

“Yes I agree. I like him also.”

[dinoburger]

i keep thinking about your brief criticism of how australia is portrayed in tf2 and you cant imagine the feeling of comfort and reassurance that i felt. i always thought it was just me fixating on the comics too much, but no yeah australia (and also new zealand) definitely do have issues in terms of wasted potential and iffy writing. i suppose it could be from the team being more familiar with american stereotypes, but, still. it got me thinking, and i do apologize if this is a bit much, but how else would you change the australians in tf2?

(btw the comment about how the emu should've been the queen instead is one of the smartest things i've seen in a while. love that)

HEH - oh, I've been thinking about that...

I've mentioned how I think that in being a parody, TF2 becomes quite a scathing criticism of capitalism and the American war machine, I think British imperialism too if the Mann family is anything to go by

TF2's Australia could definitely form a scathing criticism of colonialism, if handled right.

So, I come from European immigrant families on both sides, my grandparents talked about how Australia had literally been described as streets "paved with gold", but you also get like, the town my paternal grandmother lived in still had a blacksmith up until the 1960s

there's a lot of clashing ideas about seeking prosperity there versus just how badly some of the first settlers struggled to actually get their footing, white colonists had great trouble growing non-native crops in a hot, desert country like ours. A lot of ships came in with passengers diseased, starved and dying.

Simultaneously, poor families could go from being impoverished to being fairly well off and eventually middle class, as with my family. By virtue of being white immigrants, of course.

to me, it IS the contradiction of Australia that makes it interesting, how it can be percieved as both an untapped resource and a hostile, barren waste just to suit the fantasies of the outsider.

maybe it's not a futuristic fantasy land, but people speculate and circulate these increasingly absurd stories. Maybe indigenous folk have always known about the presence of Australium but knew better than to fuck up the land by harvesting obscene quantities of it.

The Hales have glutted themselves on a resource that never belonged to them and thus elevated themselves to the same depravity of rich British folk, like the Manns.

I like this kind of contradiction of like, Barnabus is a wild man of the harsh Australias, but we only ever really see him in the context of posh English Zepheniah and his family. He's just one lucky bastard who survived long enough to take advantage of what was available to him.

Australium is a genuinely valuable substance, but the further it gets from its home soil the more it gets bastardized and exploited. Rather than researched for its medical properties or anything else, it's used to paint stuff, as a vanity item.

...Barnabus also being an illegitimate child to a convict and a settler is something I think I like, he's a traitor to the poorer side of his lineage. Another of his contradictions. There is struggle in his past, but a lot of it he was willing to put behind in favor of working with a man like Zepheniah, who ruthlessly exploits the working class.

Australia is supposedly a savage, wild country, but a lot of the men who claimed to have "tamed it" are in bed with the English and their ilk.

I'm sorry this partially became a rant about Barnabus but I guess like, I more have general ideas about what I would want to glean from TF2's Australia than anything concrete...

[theculturedmarxist]

Many US papers are giving front-page, above the fold treatment to university administrators going wild and calling in the cops on peaceful campus protests, first at Columbia, followed by Yale and NYU. Harvard, in a profile in courage, closed its campus to prevent a spectacle. Demonstrations are taking hold at other campuses, including MIT, Emerson, and Tufts.

This is an overly dynamic situation, so I am not sure it makes sense to engage in detailed coverage. However, some things seem noteworthy.

First, in typical US hothouse fashion, the press is treating protests as if they were a bigger deal than the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I am not the only one to notice this. From Parapraxis (hat tip  guurst; bear with the author’s leisurely set-up):

I am employed as a non-tenure-track professor in a university department dedicated to teaching and research about Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness. One day, I arrived at work to find security cameras installed in my department’s hallway. I read in an email that these cameras had been installed after an antisemitic poster was discovered affixed to a colleague’s office door. I was never shown this poster. Like the cameras, I learned of it only belatedly. Despite the fact that the poster apparently constituted so great a danger to the members of my department as to warrant increased security, nobody bothered to inform me about it. By the time I was aware that there was a threat in which I was ostensibly implicated, the decision had already been made—by whom, exactly, I don’t know—about which measures were necessary to protect me from it. My knowledge, consent, and perspective were irrelevant to the process… The prolepsis of the decision did more than protect me—if, indeed, it really did that. It interpellated my coworkers and myself as people in need of protection…. I was unwittingly transformed, literally overnight, into the type of person to whom something might happen. My employer has a campus—three, actually—meaning that it has a physical plant. I navigate one of these campuses as my workplace, but it almost never figures for me as “the campus.” In fact, the first time since beginning the job when I felt myself caught up in an affective relation, not to the particular institution where I work, but rather to “the campus” was when I looked up into that security camera and felt myself being “watched” by it. Only then did I think, a couple of months into my temporary contract, that I was not just at my workplace. Now I was on “the campus.” This incident with the poster and the camera occurred, of course, some weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the onset of Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza. Against so horrific a backdrop, and relative to the intimidation and retaliation to which those who speak out against the war (including—indeed, especially—in the academy) have been subjected, my story sounds banal. And it is. In its very ordinariness, however, the anecdote is quite representative: first, of how decisions get made at contemporary institutions of higher education (generally speaking, without the input of those whom they impact); and second, of the logic of a peculiarly American phenomenon I call campus panic…. The months since October 7 have aggravated the most extreme campus panic I have witnessed. To judge by the American mass media, the campus is the most urgent scene of political struggle in the world. What is happening “on campus” often seems of greater concern than what is happening in Gaza, where every single university campus has been razed by the IDF. When all the Palestinian dead have been counted, it seems likely that these months will be recorded as having inflamed a campus panic no less intense than the one that accompanied the Vietnam War.

Second, many otherwise fine stories, like Columbia in crisis, again by the Columbia Journalism Review, and Columbia University protests and the lessons of “Gym Crow” by Judd at Popular Information, start off with the 1968 protests at Columbia as a point of departure. And again, consistent with the Parapraxis account and being old enough to remember the Vietnam War, I find the comparison to be overdone. Yes, there are some telling similarities, like the role of right-wing pressure in getting campus administrators to call out the cops, the device of dwelling on the earlier uprising seems to obscure more than it reveals. The Vietnam War, unlike Gaza, tore the US apart. Today’s campus students are, with only the comparatively small contingent of Palestinian students, acting to protest US support of slaughter in Gaza. In 1968, for many, the stake were more personal. The risk of young men having to serve was real.

Similarly, conservatives then supported the military and were typically proud of their or any family member’s service. Draft dodging and demonization of armed forces leaders was close to unconscionable. It took years of the major television networks and the two authoritative magazines, Time and Newsweek, showing what the war looked like, and intimating that the US was not succeeding, that shifted mass opinion.

And even the initial 1968 protests were more disruptive. The first wave at Columbia occupied some campus buildings, presumably disrputing operations. Today’s were encampments, as in outdoors. So they were more analogous to Occupy Wall Street, where the ongoing rebellion was an offense to authority even if it caused harm. But worse, the ones at Columbia and other schools now are by elites in training, and not presumed loser riff-raff.

So the aggressiveness of the crackdown looks like very insecure leadership. For instance, why escalate to calling in the NYPD immediately, as opposed to campus police, when the city’s cops reported everyone cooperated with the arrests?

This takes us to the third issues, that it isn’t just the students who oppose the stifling of protest, but also faculty. From the Popular Information article:

[President] Shafik’s actions were blasted in a statement issued on Friday by the Columbia and Barnard College chapters of the American Association of University Professors: Shafik also drew a rebuke from the Columbia student council. In a statement, the council said that “students possess the inherent right to engage in peaceful protest without fear of retribution or harm” and called for “the preservation of freedom of speech and expression among students.”

Popular Information also points out how the Biden Administration is, natch, whipping up fear about possible dangers to Jews while ignoring that Muslims have been on the receiving end. Recall that ex-IDF soldiers who attacked pro-Palestinian protestors at Columbia in January went unpunished. Again from Popular Information:

On Sunday, the White House released a statement in response to the protests at Columbia, denouncing “calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students”: What incidents prompted this statement? A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But some media outlets are interpreting it as a response to this video, in which two unidentified men promise more terrorist attacks against Israel. According to the individual who posted the video, the incident did not occur on Columbia’s campus. There is no evidence that Columbia students were involved. An NBC reporter, Antonia Hylton, who was on Columbia’s campus with protesters, reported no instances of “violence or aggression” among students.

Now we’ll turn to Rajiv Sethi, who as a professor at Barnard, has, for better or worse, a front row seat on the turmoil.

By Rajiv Sethi, professor of economics at Barnard College. Originally published at his website

My campus is in turmoil, and it’s hard to think or write about anything else. Dozens of students have been suspended, arrested, and barred from the premises. Others have been advised to leave for their own safety. Most entrances are closed altogether, and the few that remain open are guarded to prevent entry of non-affiliates. Calls for the resignation of leaders are coming from multiple quarters—some concerned about excessively punitive measures and others about inadequate enforcement and protection.

There are several reports on social media of harassment, intimidation, and the glorification of violence. Such reports often conflate what is happening outside the gates—involving people who may not be affiliates and who are on ground over which the university has no jurisdiction—with the protests on the South Lawn. Based on what I have seen personally, the latter protests have been peaceful, prayerful, and even joyful at times.1

I did see one sign directed at President Shafik that I felt was offensive and ill-advised. And there is one phrase—recently deemed anti-Semitic by an act of Congress—that has been repeated loudly and frequently within the gates. This post is about the meaning of that phrase, and about meanings and messages in general.

While on stage at a political convention in July 2015, Martin O’Malley said the following:

Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.

Taken literally, these words are entirely unobjectionable, even laudable. But O’Malley apologized for them within hours, saying: “That was a mistake on my part and I meant no disrespect.”

Why was the apology deemed necessary? O’Malley was running for the Democratic presidential nomination at the time, and to many of the voters he was courting, the words “all lives matter” had come to mean something else entirely—an expression of indifference to racial inequality at best, and perhaps even a racist dog whistle.

As phrases come to be endowed with new meanings, some people respond by carefully avoiding them, while others are motivated to adopt them with relish. This further entrenches the new meaning and reinforces the process of selective abandonment and adoption. Thus “Democrat Party” can come to be intended and perceived as an epithet, and the seemingly harmless chant “Let’s Go Brandon!” a vulgarity.

This process is decentralized and largely uncoordinated, and there is little that legislation can do to enforce the attachment of meanings to messages. Of course, this hasn’t prevented our elected officials from trying. On April 16, by a vote of 377-44, the House passed Resolution 883:

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the slogan, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is antisemitic and its use must be condemned.

One day later, Columbia President Minouche Shafik was asked by Congresswoman Lisa McClain whether she agreed that such statements were indeed anti-Semitic. President Shafik answered as follows:

I hear them as such, some people don’t.

The problem with this response is that it suggests that listeners are free to assign meanings to expressions, regardless of the identities and intentions of speakers. But meanings are created jointly by speakers and listeners, and the same message can carry different meanings depending on what is known about the parties engaged in communication.

People have often appropriated and de-fanged racist, misogynistic, and homophopic insults aimed at the groups to which they belong. Even the most vile and vicious slur in the American language carries a different connotation when used by Randall Kennedy in conversation. The meanings of messages cannot be established independently of the indentities of those who use them. They cannot be established by listeners alone.

Thus the attempt by the House of Representatives to define the meaning of a phrase is likely to be futile. The meaning will evolve over time based on the process of selective avoidance and adoption. And this meaning is vigorously contested at present.

Consider, for instance, the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism. This document states clearly that “denying the right of Jews in the State of Israel to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews, in accordance with the principle of equality” is anti-Semitic. However, it also proclaims:

It is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants “between the river and the sea,” whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form.

President Shafik could have referenced the above in pushing back against the idea that meanings can be assigned by elected representatives or college administrators. I understand the pressure she was under, and it is difficult to give thoughtful responses under such circumstances. But it is important that moving forward, the use of this phrase alone not be used as a basis for disciplinary action.

One organization that I have come to admire over the past few years is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which has been admirably consistent in defending freedom of speech on and off campus. On this phrase in particular, FIRE’s position is the following:

If students at a peaceful protest chant anti-Israel slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” that speech, taken alone, is protected political expression. Even if some understand the phrase to call for the destruction of Israel, it is still—absent more—protected as political speech, advocating in general terms for violence elsewhere at an unspecified time against a broadly defined target… But context is determinative: Were the same statement to be directed at a specific Jewish student by a student or group moving threateningly towards him, during a protest that has turned violent and unstable, it may arguably constitute a true threat.

This is the right position to take and I hope that Barnard and Columbia will adopt it. The keynote by Killer Mike at the 2023 FIRE Gala explains in the clearest possible terms the value of this perspective, and it will join the Reith lecture by Chimamanda Adichie and the Stanford Memo by Jenny Martinez (along with the Kalven Report and the Chicago Principles) as a classic in the pantheon of free speech advocacy.

Among the people who have addressed the students on the South lawn are Madmood Mamdani and Norman Finkelstein; I caught the tail end of the latter’s speech but couldn’t hear much because amplification was limited and he tends to speak quite softly. I do hope that the students who invited him will read his latest book, which is as fierce a critique of identity politics as one is likely to find anywhere.

Norman Finkelstein addresses student protestors at Columbia on April 19th, 2024

I received a response to this post from Seth Weissman, whom I first met when he was a graduate student at Columbia many years ago. I remember Seth fondly, and have enormous respect for him. His message is posted (with permission) below:

Rajiv, as usual, a very thoughtful take. That said, you are missing something. I say this as someone who knows and respects you as fair-minded and as an Orthodox Jew who is: So what are you missing? I’m all for “from the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.” That could mean in a binational state alongside Jews living freely, or in two states, one Palestinian (West Bank, Gaza, and the Arab sections of Jerusalem such as Abu Dis) and the other a Jewish home where Arab citizens are accorded full rights, which is the current (albeit imperfectly realized) concept of Israel. This is in accordance with the Jerusalem Declaration. But the chant, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” explicitly and willfully denies Jewish self expression. In a context where some of the protestors (not all, and I am making no claim as to what percentage) have expressed solidarity with Hamas, it can be taken no other way. And while the majority of the protestors would denounce Hamas (I hope), they are standing shoulder to shoulder with those who empathize with Hamas. FYI, I have the scars from confronting nationalism and Islamophobia on the Jewish side. If I could pay the price for denouncing Jewish nationalists on my “side,” I can expect the protestors at Columbia and Barnard to do the same—criticize Israel without providing political support for terror and anti-Semitism.

1

After posting this I came across a credible report of significant harassment and intimidation within the Columbia gates. All classes at Barnard and Columbia are remote today, which I imagine is a prelude to clearing out of the encampment.

[sweethoneyrose83]

Vintage dialogue prompts

1940s Noir Detective:

Detective: "Listen, sweetheart, the city’s got a thousand stories, but yours? It don’t sit right. Start from the beginning, and this time, leave out the fairy tales."

Mysterious Woman: "You think you can handle the truth, detective? Most men crumble just from the weight of it."

Victorian Gothic Romance:

Lady Victoria: "Do you not feel it, Alexander? The air is thick with secrets, and this house… it whispers at night."

Lord Alexander: "I hear no whispers, only the ticking of the clock and your endless doubts, Victoria."

1920s Prohibition Era:

Flapper Girl: "Honey, the only thing flowing faster than the gin around here is trouble. You best keep your wits if you’re planning to stick around."

Bootlegger: "I’m not here for the gin, darling. I’m here to see how deep the rabbit hole goes."

1950s Small Town Mystery:

Local Sheriff: "Folks say it was the wind that knocked down the barn. But I’ve lived here too long to believe in coincidences."

Outsider: "Maybe it's not the wind you should be worried about, sheriff."

1930s Great Depression:

Drifter: "I don’t stay long anywhere, but this town… it feels like it's holding its breath, waiting for something to happen."

Local Shopkeeper: "A lot has happened already, stranger. We’re just hoping it don’t happen again."

Edwardian High Society:

Countess: "Scandal is merely gossip's older, uglier sister. And I daresay, the two are waltzing through our parlor as we speak."

Lord Henry: "I suppose you’d be the belle of that particular ball, wouldn't you?"

1960s Mod London:

Photographer: "You're a vision, love, a walking dream. Let me capture this moment—it's a revolution, and you're right in the middle of it."

Model: "A moment is all it is. Tomorrow, someone else will be the face of the revolution."

1930s Silent Film Star:

Silent Starlet: "They loved me once, when I was the face on every screen. Now? I'm just a flicker in their memories."

Cynical Producer: "Fame’s a funny thing. One day you’re a star, the next, you’re just another name on a marquee."

1920s Speakeasy Drama "Sweetheart, in this town, your name is either on the guest list or the hit list. You better hope you're on the right one tonight."

Victorian Era Mystery "It's no coincidence the fog rolled in just as Lady Pembroke vanished. I dare say there's something far darker at play here."

1940s Noir Detective "She walked in like trouble wearing heels too high for an honest woman. I knew right then the case was going to get dirty."

Edwardian Romance "You must understand, my dear. A single misstep in this dance, and our entire reputation crumbles. We simply cannot afford scandal."

1950s Americana "You know, doll, when a guy hands you the keys to a Cadillac, he's either in love with you or running from something. In my case, it's both."

Wild West Showdown "The sun ain't even set yet, and already you got your hand on your gun. You sure you want this dance, partner?"

Gothic Horror Mansion "I’ve seen ghosts in this house before, but none so cold as the spirit that haunts your eyes."

Prohibition Era Crime Boss "Kid, in this game, you either keep your mouth shut or you learn how to talk your way out of cement shoes. There ain't no in-between."

World War II Spy Thriller "One more whisper of your name on the wrong side of this war, and they won't need a bullet to silence you. The shadows will do the job."

1920s Flapper Rebellion "The only rule around here is that there are no rules, darling. Except, maybe, don't get caught."

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Lately, I've been enjoying a little documentary called ROTTEN: BEHIND THE FOODFIGHT.

Put together by Ziggy Cashmere, who cobbled together the great book DRAWING FOR NOTHING, it's an hour-long and wild look at the making of an infamous animated travesty. A troubled production of epic proportions...

Strangely, this thing is like the anti-THIEF AND THE COBBLER. Their basic production storylines have a very similar turning point, which is all kinds of wild. They also took forever to come out in some form.

The stark difference is, of course, the sheer prowess of THIEF AND THE COBBLER director Richard Williams and the utter incompetence of FOODFIGHT! director Larry Kasanoff.

Richard Williams initially got onboard a doomed animated adaptation of Arabian Nights folklore in the late 1960s, the stories of a particular character named Nasruddin. When that all fell out in the early 1970s, Williams took the characters he came up with for that picture - such as the titular thief - and started his own Arabian Nights-inspired dream tale... And self-funded this passion project throughout the 1970s and into the mid 1980s, directing so many commercials and the occasional bigger project in-between. It was his impressive, comprehensive reel and his direction on WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT's animation that landed him a Warner Bros. gig, who were at the time trying to get more committed to making feature animation in the wake of Disney's newfound success and the rise of Don Bluth.

Williams, unfortunately, missed the deadline for completing THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER. Williams had a history of not completing films on time, such as his Oscar-winning A CHRISTMAS CAROL adaptation and the 1977 film RAGGEDY ANN AND ANDY: A MUSICAL ADVENTURE, and with THIEF, he was very deep into it. He also, unusually, didn't do any storyboards for the film. A method that he was said to have found "too controlling". When it came time to show a rough cut of the film, they had to force him to get storyboards done and fill in the 15 minutes of gaps. Another story details how he liked a particular scene, and had the crew extend it, and extend it again, regardless of runtime and pace. Williams himself likened his process to working away at a painting or a pot, like an old master craftsman. Laboriously making fine art, but as a film... which isn't the most conducive way of doing things when your animated film - with promotional deals and marketing in place - is expected to be completed within a deadline. It did, however, make for such incomprehensibly amazing visuals that continue to *floor* me to this day.

By contrast, Kasanoff didn't know anything about making animated features, and couldn't be bothered with storyboards. He thought you could just go about it as if it were a live-action film... If FOODFIGHT! was conceived this decade and was being "made" right now? Larry would absolutely have tried using AI to do it. That's more or less the attitude he had when he shifted the production to being a motion-capture film, after a few slow years of it being a CG film with Looney Tunes-esque slapstick, with squash-and-stretch movements.

Both films were made at studios founded/owned by their directors. Richard Williams Animation Ltd., and Threshold Animation... and both films were seized by insurance companies, companies in the movie industry that are meant to step in when a film misses its deadline.

In THIEF's case, it was... The Completion Bond Company. They took the film from Williams and most of his crew in May 1992 after a disastrous screening of the workprint, and with the looming release of Disney's very similar ALADDIN later that year. Handing it to TV animation veteran Fred Calvert, the company's mandate was to have the film finished quickly and cheaply... Ironically, it took Calvert til September 1993 to "finish" the film. After a year and a half of re-imagining most of it, cutting a lot of stuff, giving mute character Tack a voice, adding musical numbers, and animating a bunch of new stuff...

That version of THIEF was damaged goods, and few wanted to release it. It didn't help that ALADDIN had been out for a while at that point. It got out, as THE PRINCESS AND THE COBBLER, in Australia and South Africa. A Philippines release around this time kept the original title... Miramax, owned by Disney, acquired U.S. distribution rights at the end of 1994 and Harvey Scissorhands butchered it even further, and that was released theatrically as ARABIAN KNIGHT in summer 1995... And then on video as THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER...

It's quite something how PRINCESS AND THE COBBLER and ARABIAN KNIGHT flopped and sunk into obscurity, while the original Williams film - in its incomplete form - became beloved over time. I also heard somewhere that Williams, prior to his passing, made peace with the film being incomplete. The unfinished film had garnered a fitting subtitle: A MOMENT IN TIME...

FOODFIGHT! was wrenched out of Threshold's hands by The Fireman's Fund Insurance Company after several missed release dates sometime in early 2008, and it was handed to a venue that took what was - quite frankly - a very crappy skeleton of a film with the most unpolished mo-cap and visuals... and... I guess, did what they "could" with it, as cheaply as possible. It was finished in late 2008, got an MPAA rating sometime thereafter... And sat... The Fireman's Fund even tried to auction it in late 2011, but... Nothing. Until a very limited UK theatrical (!) release in summer 2012, in addition to releases in Russia and UAE. It was a direct-to-video title here in the U.S. in early 2013... Eventually, some bottom-of-the-barrel distributor picks it up, eh?

Much like FOODFIGHT!, THIEF also has a comprehensive documentary covering its lengthy production and what had happened to it, in the form of Kevin Schreck's PERSISTENCE OF VISION, an absolute must-watch.

Sometimes I think of what would've happened had both films been finished, and in FOODFIGHT!'s case, was at least competent-looking.

THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER - when it was still under Warner Bros. - was apparently aiming for theatrical release in late 1991. This would've put it up against Disney's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, and also Amblimation's AN AMERICAN TAIL sequel FIEVEL GOES WEST. Maybe it would've vacated late 1991 and got out in early 1992, much in the same way FERNGULLY and ROCK-A-DOODLE did in the states. Any place away from a big Disney movie, at least...

How would it have done circa 1991/early 1992? That remains to be a million dollar question. THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER in its unfinished state is a work of art, a narratively outre picture, in addition to being a little more "adult" in its presentation. Small little things, like the maiden from Mombasa, some war violence, and a flagpole sticking right through a warrior's chest. Probably wouldn't have gotten a G rating, for sure. Its story quality is sometimes debated amongst animation fans, usually in such a boring binary manner, from my perspective. It's a film that defies the "conventions" of good animated feature storytelling that were somehow cemented in place by the early 1990s by the Disney Renaissance favorites, thus I feel it tends to have that "well, the story meanders and it wasn't very good" nonsense slapped at it... when it's a picture operating on a dream-like, lyrical plane that puts it more in line with early Disney works than BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and ALADDIN. It's not an inferior nor superior form of storytelling, it's just not what American audiences have been used to over the last 35 years.

I think it would've gotten praise for its lovely animation, but mixed reviews for its idiosyncratic storytelling... And audiences probably would've been bored out of their minds watching, say, long and hazy stretches of the thief getting smacked about by polo players or trying to get up the minaret. Warner would've probably mishandled the release anyway, as they had flop after flop during that period. NUTCRACKER PRINCE, ROVER DANGERFIELD, THUMBELINA, etc. A film that absolutely, without fail would've garnered a cult following once it hit video.

FOODFIGHT!, had it been given to someone who actually **knew** how to direct an animated feature, but was still based off of the same script by Larry Kasanoff, Josh Wexler, and co.... Let's just say that it's the version from the late 1990s when protagonist Dex was still a human detective, and it was more PG-13 like it supposedly was aiming to be early on... And released in like 2001/2002... That probably would've also had trouble, I think.

Big-time Western PG-13 animated movies had it hard throughout the '90s and into the early 2000s, films such as BEBE'S KIDS and COOL WORLD. They were a rare breed, at that. Still are, even. One of the only exceptions was, well, a movie based on a very popular animated TV series: BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD DO AMERICA. For a more original picture, no, it wasn't easy... And I'm not sure CGI would've helped this version of FOODFIGHT! much, either. It could've done okay in that regard, maybe quite a few notches below a JIMMY NEUTRON gross... It would have to depend on how the visuals looked, too. Then again, look at how HOODWINKED! did in early 2006... Reviews probably would've questioned how FOODFIGHT!'s world works and they likely would've found fault with equating a store-band takeover of a supermarket to freakin' Nazi Germany, so I'd imagine it wouldn't have gotten SHREK or MONSTERS, INC. reception. Another movie that would've probably came and went, and then went on to be a cult DVD rotation for many kids growing up in the 2000s.

THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER and FOODFIGHT! both remain fascinating for these particular reasons, even if the results are a country kilometer from one another...

[an-aura-about-you]

ok let's see what more I can get through on Handbook for Mortals

Chapter 10 part 2:

when we last left our hero, Scheherazade was talking about how it's bullshit that she has to make a choice and not get an answer directly from her tarot cards and I flipped a table.

-time for another round of When Is This Story Set? Dela is apparently a fan of the Monkees, a band who was known and relevant back in the 1960s. this doesn't necessarily mean Dela was a teenager in the 60s, but I'm kinda guessing that she was, which could track with Zade being 25 in 2011. this is assuming Dela was in her late 20s or early 30s when Zade was born. that or it could be later if Dela got into them later, which certainly isn't unheard of.

-random anecdote related to that because if Sarem and Zade can do it so can I: when I was in high school one of my friends was the biggest fan of Elvis Presley. like she LOVED the King, had a bunch of Elvis merch, and was just unapologetic about her interest in him and his music. she was also unapologetic in the way she stood up to protect the unpopular/bullied kids and was a dear friend to my sibling as a result because she would NOT stand for anyone picking on him. sadly, she passed away young due to a health condition. shortly after, I had the opportunity to go to Graceland, and I took it thinking of her the whole time.

-so apparently the Monkees thing has a point because that is somehow the source of what appears to be Zade's philosophy: where there is choice, there is misery. I could not disagree more. in fact, I know the perfect literary example that serves as the antithesis to that thought, and that's Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine.

-speaking of that, now's as good a time as any to discuss who this book is for. it showed up on the NYT Bestsellers List under the Young Adult category. Sarem has flip-flopped on whether this book is YA or not with the one soundbite I've personally seen has her saying it's technically not a YA book because the protagonist is in her 20s. if that doesn't sum up how inaccurate Sarem's understanding of literature and its classification is, I don't know what will.

but, judging by the book and not what the author says, who IS this book for?

it's too juvenile for older readers with the way the author dumbs things down, explaining things that should be plain in context (like "the T's" being a nickname for the Plain White T's), explaining things that don't need to be explained because they don't enrich the story (like mentioning a Game of Thrones character and then explaining that he is a character from Game of Thrones), and even re-explaining things that she's explained before (like showblacks and the EDR).

but it's also too mature for the tiniest babies with its sexual content. aside from the innuendos, the fact that Mac had a one night stand with Clara who then broke his heart is a crucial element of the love triangle plot. there's also a weird incest vibe that comes up if you see the twist coming, which is easy to find because, and I will give this to Sarem, at least she IS building in hints to it. but the hints are on the level of that one Where's Waldo? gag in The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror III:

so the only thing I can really conclude is, in spite of what the author says, this book is most suitable for young adult readers.

-also, another random note that I'm not sure where else to fit in, allegedly the author of My Immortal spoke up to confirm they are not Lani Sarem and did not write Handbook for Mortals. I don't remember if that was the person who was going to have the memoir and it turns out they didn't write My Immortal or if it was someone else, but isn't that a wild thing to even contemplate?

-back to the book, a guy starts hitting on Zade, and she takes the time to tell us she's not the "get picked up at the bar" sort of girl. it's perfectly fine not to be but with the constant juxtaposition of this kind of attitude and how the Mean Girls behave, I'm getting really sick of this looking down on girls having fun. what are you trying to do, kill Cyndi Lauper?

-in spite of this, Zade says she likes how he's fawning over her. once again the narration indicates that the only thing Zade cares about in a relationship is being desired.

-Mac goes to intervene and the guy's like, "Is this your boyfriend?" and Mac chickens out and says, "Coworker." good job keeping up the status quo, buddy.

-Mac tries to invite Zade to join him and the others to do shots and Zade's thinking, "Doesn't look like they're waiting on me to join in." for once in this book, people are doing something absent of Zade! it's a goddamn Christmas miracle!

-oh wow, we've got a violent action tally mark but NOT for Zade this time! the guy grabs Zade's arm to try to pull her back when she tries to go with the group.

-Mac grabs the guy's arm back to force him to let Zade go, and I will let this one slide a little since it is a defensive action.

-and after a bit more escalation, the altercation ends before it even gets started in the most cartoony manner: Mac sidesteps out of the guy's way and he slams into a metal support beam.

-Zade takes the time to mention that the girls at the bar aren't paying attention to Mac and Tad's conversation about what just happened because they're too busy talking about shopping at the mall.

-Tad is of the mindset that the only reason a guy would defend a girl in that situation is if they're dating. damn, that's douchy.

-oh wow, it's possible we're about to get some actual friendly conversation between Mac and Jackson.

-Jackson says he's sure Zade appreciates Mac "defending her honor," which. yeah I guess that's the term? idk, it doesn't seem like the right way to describe what happened even if it technically is.

-so, Tad and Jackson have to be the ones to tell Mac that Zade can make her own choices instead of Zade. yeah, this tracks.

-Pearla, one of the girls near Zade, tried to get her in the conversation they've been having, but Zade was just zoning out after Mac's conversations were done. and Zade's thinking, "I'm just no good at this girl-bonding stuff." but the thing is Pearla did it by asking Zade what her favorite clothing store is. this, to me, is obviously an emotional bid. Pearla is already doing the work to try to make the connection. the ask is so small and Zade is still complaining about it.

-another girl complains about how one manufacturer only sells online now and how she wants to try on clothes before buying them, and the narration says she declares this "very passionately, as if we were talking about world peace or something." girl, you know people are allowed to care about little things too, right? you know people are allowed to get worked up about small annoyances? I know you will a bit later and will have a Totally Proportional Response to it.

not to mention wasn't there a chapter earlier when you tried on like 28 dresses to find the right one to wear to Jackson's show?

-for once Zade is glad about not being the focus, though I'm still trying to wrap my head around all of this. Lambo Girl had said that some women can't stand Zade because of her magic, but these women all seem pleasant enough to Zade. in fact, all the women seem pleasant enough to Zade except for Sofia, Mel, and the girl from Hot Dog on a Stick. Sofia has good reason to be pissed at Zade, Mel is going along with it because she's Sofia's friend, and the girl from Hot Dog on a Stick is just a kid who doesn't know any better. and that is all of the women.

-and if all of that wasn't enough, the chapter ends with Zade excusing herself from further conversation with the girls "so that I could leave before I started banging my head against the table." it is unclear if the banging her head against the table would be from her knowing she needs to decide on who or what she wants or from the girls' conversation. at this point it could be both.

it's kind of amazing watching Zade carve all these exceptions for herself. she's not the kind of girl who gets picked up in bars but revels in the attention of men there all the same. she treats the girls who talk about shopping with disdain when she had the written version of the trying on clothes montage that is totally gonna be in the movie they are definitely still making. to give you a little taste of the next chapter, it's gonna start with Zade doing her makeup and basically playing around with whatever's available to see what she likes, which MUST be for her own personal use since professional shows have, y'know, professional makeup artists who do stage makeup. I mean I'm certain there are performers who can do their own stage makeup, but there's no indication that's what Zade's doing. Generally Pooky's got this great bit about Zade's makeup in her video on the chapter in question and I definitely recommend her stuff in general and that video in particular.

but on the upside, we have just finished Chapter 10. counting starting from Chapter 0 and knowing it ends with Chapter 21, we have finished the 11th chapter out of 22 and have made it halfway through the book!

[y2klostandfound]

Preview - K-Project (aka Rez) on Страна игр #6 (Strana Igr)(Russian video game magazine) (2001-03)

Translation in English:

The ways of game design are inscrutable. Some talents find a successful formula once and spend their whole life working on it, trying to make one more, albeit small, step to perfection. Some try to develop within a single genre. Some are tempted to work with more than one. There are people who never go back to ideas already thought up and implemented once. Not Tetsuya Mitzuguchi, creator of Sega Rally and Space Channel 5, and leader of United Game Artists (formerly Sega RD#9 Shibuya), the most independent, self-imposed and liberated development studio.

It is hard to say what kind of games this man likes to make, for one of the leaders of modern game design looking, by the way, too young. His games are a celebration of style over substance. And at the same time a source of very deep gameplay. Realistic cars and wild Ulala. Competent skid physics and dancing aliens. Perhaps you will not find in the entire industry such a variety of taste, style, visual solutions. Space Channel 5, for all its innovative game structure and fiery 1960s beats, is a classic in every way. The designer's new project is so unique that it's hard to call it a game in the literal sense of the word. Mitzuguchi started to talk about the new project a long time ago, just a few days after the release of Space Channel 5. Mitzuguchi started to talk about the new project a long time ago, just a few days after the release of Space Channel 5. When it became known that the second series of SC5 UGA seemingly is not going to make (which turned out to be not at all true), the interest in the person of Mitzuguzhi increased incredibly again. By the way, even after the disclosure of K-Project details, many analysts believe that the UGA leader has one or even two more secret projects in stock.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi is his own person. Many journalists agree that he is the geekiest person on the Japanese gaming scene.

K-Project is a psychedelic musical shooter that brings together the genres of musical games and ordinary shooters, which, at least in Japan, have the same level of cult status as turn-based strategy and FPS. By combining such iconic genres Mitzuguchi intends to get a result that is completely free from genre frameworks and prejudices of ordinary players. Never mind that ninety percent of modern gamers won't understand this creation and will never even hear about it, but K-Project will be a real work of art.

The essence of the gameplay is extremely simple, although it is almost impossible to figure out how it all works in K-Project. The game is a set of minimalist levels without any plot connection to each other. Each level stands out with its own graphic style. Complex labyrinths, open space, all kinds of aquariums, even a tropical forest - all this has nothing to do with the essence of the game. In general, Mitzuguchi admits that his main idea is to create a game analogue of the famous Disney cartoon project Fantasia. Hence the inconceivable graphic forms, and a strange musical design. And it's strange because you will be creating it yourself. Singing out the traditional Treasure's frame of enemies and rhythmically firing them off, you will create your own melodies, which will be in many ways superimposed on the general musical background of the game. This, they say, is where the fun of the game lurks. Tying everything together in your brain is impossible. Apparently, this is what is called "intuitive gameplay. That is, even a minute before you sit down for the game, you have no idea how to play it, but as soon as you take the joypad in your hands, everything immediately becomes clear. Such a strange thing this K-Project is. However, even with all that, it's no less strange than its creator.

Platform: Dreamcast Genre: musical shooter Publisher: Sega Developer: United Game Artists Designer: Tetsuya Mitzuguchi Number of players: 1 Online: www.sega.co.jp Release date: summer 2001

[holodexmachina]

Listen. I wrote a thing.

Part of me still can't believe I've done this, but, okay, here we go: I wrote some Star Trek fanfic! And while posting fanfic is a pretty banal activity in tumblrland, it was kind of A Whole Thing for me. I’ve never written fanfic before! I haven’t even written fiction of any sort since, good lord, my sophomore creative writing class, which was *checks watch* twenty years ago. And it’s been way too long since I wrote anything just for fun. So it’s been kind of a wild practice, and now it’s out there, and I want to tell you about it.

The fic is called “A Woman of Your Century,” and it is a rewrite of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Space Seed,” but imagines Khan as a woman. [You don’t need to have seen the episode to get the story, but here’s a quick synopsis: the Enterprise encounters a ship full of sleeping humans and wakes one—Khan Noonien-Singh, played by Ricardo Montalban. The crew soon realizes that Khan is an “augment”—one of a group of genetically engineered superhuman despots who took over Earth in the 1990s, causing the disastrous Eugenics Wars. Khan tries to take over the Enterprise so that he can conquer the galaxy. Khan nearly kills Kirk; fist fights ensue; Khan loses, and Kirk ditches the augments on an abandoned planet (thus setting the scene for Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan twenty years later).] 

“Space Seed” is my favorite Trek episode, hands down. Khan is a pretty interesting villain—ruthless, narcissistic, ambitious—and the augment storyline has always been incredibly compelling to me, especially as it gets picked up and developed further in several other series. That said, the episode isn’t without its flaws; like many TOS episodes, the premise didn’t need to be thought through any more than was required of its 50 minutes, and later attempts to explain the augments’ history tended to introduce more questions and canonical conflicts. And then there’s the squick-inducing relationship between Khan and the ship’s historian, Marla McGivers—a relationship that provides plot devices, but has a deeply fucked dynamic. I mean, he negs her over her hair, and she decides, yeah, I’d engineer a mutiny for this man. You can tell the writers really respected women. 

Then a friend said: could you imagine how this story would have gone if Khan had been a woman?

Oh. Oh—

Yes. Yes, I can imagine that. 

I started thinking about what would change if Khan were a woman. How would the crew of the Enterprise react to such a powerful female villain? How would it unfuck Marla’s interactions (or not)? What kind of rivalry would develop between Kirk and Khan? TOS doesn’t skip female villainy, but does tend to keep it squarely in the realm of “seductress acting on behalf of a male.” The limitations of midcentury masculinity make it hard to imagine Kirk seeing a woman as a true threat—as a mind on par with his own (let alone far beyond it). 

Thinking through the gender-bent implications also led me to considering the story from Khan’s point of view. It’s a tricky balance—Khan is a genocidal sociopath with the blood of millions on his hands. Let’s not defend that, maybe! At the same time, there’s a reason the best villains are humanized: we need to be able to see ourselves in the monstrous, and the monstrous in ourselves. Cartoon evil is boring and unrealistic. But finding ways to create sympathy for a villain—without condoning them!—is very interesting. 

Rewriting “Space Seed” let me not only explore material I adored, not only fill in minor plot holes, not only build out augment backstory—it also let me highlight the current of sexism and misogyny that has always been part of Trek, and blow it up real good. Marla’s treatment in the original—and the crew’s reverence for Khan’s aggression—both speak volumes about gender attitudes in the 1960s (and, uh, beyond). But swapping genders—Khan for Khana and Marla for Marlow—forces (I hope) a reexamination of character, of narrative, of values. Which is what science fiction is for, after all.

Also: it was just fucking fun to do. Which makes me wonder if I should…write more fic? (I’m open to ideas! What should I try next?) Either way: thanks, friends, and happy reading!

[gaykarstaagforever]

The 1990s comics "Rob Liefeld Revolution", along with the speculation boom that created AND immediately destroyed it, produced a lot of poorly-aged comic book jank. We know this.

What many of us do not know is that it also inspired a similar sea-change in that market that is always eager to rip off whatever is currently making the most money: Christian book stores.

Which brings us to Eternal Studios 1993 Archangels: The Saga.

(Just a note: this ENTIRE book is printed on slippy magazine-cover paper. I took these pictures in a room barely lit by a distant lightbulb and STILL couldn't get rid of the glare. Never before have I worked so hard on something so utterly pointless, and I post comics content on Tumblr dot com. God bless my phone for doing its best to make any of these even bearable.)

This "saga" apparently lastest exactly 9 issues, before the company, Eternal Studios of Houston, Texas (because of course) went bust. Or so I assume. I haven't found any information on them online, and I Googled for way longer than I'm willing to admit.

Archangels: The Short Saga is the story of a group of men who are given metal armor and vague superpowers by God to fight demons, or something. This is just the first issue and I've never seen any of the others, and this is just the origin story of one of the guys, so I don't know. And I won't be finding out, because a) the Internet doesn't know what this is, and 2) any of the physical copies of these cost between $30 and $60 online. Because Evangelical Christianity is an eternal grift, ever since it was started by an unemployed man who claimed to be a wizard, but then suspiciously didn't use any of his powers to stop himself from getting tortured to death. And then his 12 unemployed friends decided they REALLY didn't want to go back to work.

This comic fits well into the religion invented by those people, in that whatever their God is doing here, it doesn't make a lot of sense. He already has an army of angels who battle demons. Why does He need to empower human men to do it, too?

The art here is...well. Given the era, it is fine. It is a step above the typical Liefeld, in that basic human anatomy is understood and replicated. The most distracting thing is the mid-90s digital coloring, which absolutely loves that lensflare.

See?

Also, and I want to be clear here, "good" and "bad" assessments of art are, to me, vaguely technical determinations. Like, art can be good, but a book can still be stupid and boring. Conversely, art can be bad, but can still be used in a way that is rad as hell:

And if the 90s - in comics, and in general - are notable for one thing besides Nirvana and Friends, it is how radical to the MAX everything was. We were not doing subtle nuance in 1993.

I got this book as a gift in like 1997 (it is a 1996 "second printing"), and I loved these splash pages. I was about 5 years into comics at that point, but with limited access in my area and under the yoke of the Assemblies of God church, so this was edgy and cool to me at 15. I had many bad Christian comics at that time, and this wasn't one of them. So kudos on that...?

It isn't even badly written. It is vaguely preachy, but specifically about how drunk driving is bad, and I'm not about to argue that point, even if you're only saying that because JESUS.

The blue-and-orange metal suit man from the above screamy splash page becomes that because he is the shotgun passenger in this car (I think). He gets killed in this crash, and the Angel of Death harvests all the souls except his, because God needs him to be Metal Angel Superman. Because of...protests? And gang crime?

Evangelical Christians who live in the suburbs conceive of evil as exactly two things, icky hippie protests and urban gang violence. This was true in 1993, and is true now.

They also only know about "wild parties" from tracts Jack Chick published in the 1960s. Note how these cool 90s young people are smoking cigars and drinking brandy from Old Fashioned glasses.

Overall, as an intro to a series, this is fine. Weird metal He-Men are fighting the Devil in the name of God, and there have certainly been worse ideas, and worse introductions to them. But it also hardly encourages anyone to want more of whatever this is. Like, it's an American Evangelical Christian comic: even if there ARE any fight scenes, everything will end with some speech about how Jesus is better than pills and gangs, and some brawny white man in a polo shirt will do the Sinner's Prayer, then probably marry his best (blonde) girl. They all have one note, even if they're playing that note during the heady days of the 90s comics wasteland.

There is exactly one short video on YouTube about this book, and the guy is way too generous. Have you ever read this? Are you, along with me and that guy, one of the 10 people who remember this comic?

Those ten people include the three guys who made it.

God, that fucking slippy paper.

Paying premium prices for this shit is probably why they went bust.