#like. i really do think the historical society is going 2 be a huge part of the setting bc i bet theres a lot of information there the gang

[toytulini]

thinking about my oc Bytte. and. her gender is Aro. her Aromanticism is inextricable from her gender experience.

[kingchad]

I havent kept up with the actors social media, I am curious - could you link to or explain how Jed Goodacre interprets Chad vs. how you interpret Chad?

oh, yes, gladly! There's an observable shift between D1 Chad and D2/3 Chad. D1 Chad is a lot more pointed and deliberately mean. D2/3 Chad is a comedy side character who is incidentally mean because he doesn't recognize when he's being insensitive.

my personal speculation is that when Sarah Jeffrey had scheduling conflicts and couldn't be on set for D2, the original intended plotline for Chad had to change, and leading to him becoming a harmless gag character for levity. It also doesn't hurt that Jedidiah Goodacre is a HUGE Jim Carrey fan and pretty clearly enjoys any opportunity to improv/be silly on set. (If you're familiar with Carrey's work at all, D2/3 Chad is definitely giving that.) I suspect that Jedidiah's affinity for comedy on set pushed the Chad character even MORE in the direction of harmless sidekick than maybe was originally intended. If Audrey had been in D2, Chad might have been more similar to his D1 self throughout the series.

Of Chad, Jedidiah gives a pretty consistent take whenever he does give one. The quotes I'll pull are "[Chad] always thinks that [he is] doing the right thing, when sometimes [he is] not smart enough to understand [he is] dead wrong"* and "I feel like the first movie, maybe Chad was a bit more standoffish and maybe came off as not such a nice guy....in the second film, you found that Chad was more of a loveable idiot. That's a very fun place to be when you're an actor because in any scene, your go-to move is to just not understand and sometimes it ends up being funny. In the third installment, you can expect much of the same." Pretty unambiguously can be interpreted that Chad is stupid and means no real harm, and Jedidiah has fun playing him that way.

PERSONALLY, I much much much prefer D1 Chad's personality, because I have historically been drawn to and have a real fondness for characters that are assholes. I do try and incorporate some of the stupidity and goofiness of D2/3 into my writing, because I recognize that's 2/3rds of the canon material we have and I don't want to be COMPLETELY making shit up, but y'know. In my view, Chad knows when he is being a dick but doesn't value the people he's treating poorly enough to care. He isn't book-smart but he is people smart, and can manipulate and exploit the people around him. He thinks he's better than other people and can use that to justify anything he does.

A really core part of this to me is that Chad has almost religiously bought into the societal rules of Auradon, namely that there are good and bad people, and fairytales go a certain way. This is part of why Chad is deeply closeted and feels like he can't come out. He feels pressured to "stick to the script", in a sense. Heteronormative fairytale society. Auradonian compulsory heterosexuality.

Adopted Chad is a new thing for me, but I think it adds another layer to the fairytale conformity thing. Like he feels an even greater pressure to do the nuclear family, white picket fence castle grounds, 2.5 kids thing because he worries he might be perceived as "not belonging" by others. He feels he needs to prove himself by throwing himself into the stereotypical prince thing as much as he can.

I personally think those traits are more interesting to write and read than D2/3 Chad's traits are. They provide a great starting point for character growth. It's way more engaging to watch someone change into a more empathetic person when they can understand that they were wrong. It's not as interesting to read about a stupid character bumbling through social interactions imo.

I don't think that I always successfully communicate those ideas in my fics because I was 15 when I started writing Descendants fic! It's been 7 years, I'm 22 now and hopefully a better and more thoughtful writer! Incorporating all of this is something I'm REALLY deliberate about in my WIPs now and I actually want to rework a lot of stuff I've already posted someday.

*this first quote is from 2014, pre-release press for Descendants 1, so honestly this kind of disproves my speculation since the whole statement seems very by-the-numbers "Disney gave me a list of character traits and it's these ones" to me. I guess Chad might have been stupid all along! but the vibe is definitely different between films so the understanding of the character definitely shifted between movies regardless.

[recurring-polynya]

Hi! I want to start off with saying I love your blog and it was this blog that introduced me to a new side of the Bleach fandom, so I owe you a huge thanks for that. My question pretains to when you mentioned that you read a lot of fics where Byakuya was there when his father died in the lines of duty, and I was wondering if you could recommend those fics and any other byakuya centric ones.

You're very welcome! I am always excited see new people in the fandom, especially here on Tumblr.

I want to preface this with saying that I have kind of a complicated relationship with Byakuya. He is an interesting, complex character and I like to read fanfic about him, but I hesitate to call myself a fan. I'm mostly interested in his character as it stands in relation to Rukia and Renji. I like stories where he is shitty and causes problems. I like reading about the long, horrible history of the Kuchiki clan, and how much it screws a person up to be raised in that mess. I also just like stories that make fun of him a bit. He's a deeply strange person, and I love his weird, dry sense of humor. Byakuya-shipping usually falls flat for me: I think he's mostly ace, except for the time he fell in love with his wife, and even then, I only really like Byahisa stories where the author has done something creative with who she is and I also need her to drag his ass a little. I would swipe left on him. So, anyway, take these recommendations (and the absence of ones I have missed) with that grain of salt.

The fanfic I was specifically referring to regarding Soujun dying after a mission he and Byakuya were on together was the Rise & Ruin series by @afinepiece, specifically part 2, An Education. It's a...little-bit-AUish precanon fic where Hisana is a thief who ends up getting tangled up in the Kuchiki family after she attempts to steal a painting from them. If you're looking for Byakuya fanfic, AFP is always going to be my first recommendation, especially her Thin Red Line series. Her works are always sprawling and genre-defying, but beautifully crafted. They've got noble/family drama, intricate world-building detail, and great character writing. The Kuchiki family deserves epics, and that is what AFP is out here doing.

Funnily enough, my other favorite ByaHisa writer is all the way at the other end of the writing spectrum. @thegreenfaery. She works in the AU space, and if you enjoy Byakuya Going Thru It but also being in love with his beautiful wife. I'm biased, because she wrote it for me, but The Wedding Party is my fave of her works (80's/everyone's human AU where Hisana has to rent out part of Byakuya's house for her little sister's dirtbag wedding).

If you like Byakuya in his gothic horror era, please read dogviolet by @renjirukia. It's a closer examination of some canon between-scenes during Byakuya and Rukia's Bad Times period.

I think @lucymonster is one of the best Byakuya character writers out there, and Metaesthesia is one of the best fanfics I've ever read. It's a Byakuya - Renji bodyswap, but not in a fun way. You should really only read it if you're in the mood to have your heart kicked down the stairs. I also really like Sticks and Stones and Building Bridges. Note: Most of her works are ByaRen (these are not, at least not explicitly). That's not a ship I am normally fond of, but I get, like 3 weird days a year where I can read it.

Speaking of ByaRen, if you are into it, the other ByaRen writer I like a lot is @grizmelder, who is also a very nice person. I particularly enjoyed Heart Tangled, which is a historical AU set at the end of the samurai era, where Renji is Byakuya's bodyguard.

I was just talking about Lull the other day, but it's a lovely little fanfic by Branch about the relationship between Byakuya and Rukia and sometimes Renji. It's an older fanfic and breaks off from canon after the Soul Society arc, so you can think of it as sort of an alternate idea for how Soul Society rebuilds after Aizen's betrayal.

The Journal of Kuchiki Byakuya by @saranel is a great little fic in the form of young Byakuya writing diary entries about his life, in particular, his dealings with Yoruichi and Urahara. It's really cute in general, but in particular, I love the way it portrays Byakuya's interest in photography.

I also have a soft spot for Breaking to Bridle by Vivienne Grainger, which is about how Byakuya sees Renji, both as lieutenant and eventually as suitor for his sister.

I guess I would be remiss if I didn't mention my favorite crack Byakuya fic, which is Become a Ghost by @hardlyfatal. Orihime dies and goes to Soul Society and becomes a therapist and falls in love with Byakuya. It's pretty silly but also a lot of fun, and it's chock full of Byakuya being Byakuya.

I hope you find something you like in there! Like I said, I am not the world's best Byakuya fan (probably in the top ten worst Byakuya fans tbh) but these are some that I have enjoyed and have stuck with me!

[aristocraticelegance]

Reading for February 2024. This was a Tanith Lee heavy month, because as I try to make my way through my backlog of books purchased at secondhand book stores I have been forced to confront the fact that I own far more Tanith Lee than I've actually read. This is because I don't come across her books that often, so when I do I buy them all and hoard them.

The Secret Books of Paradys I & II, Tanith Lee, 1988. I started reading this several years ago, because the first half is 2 novellas, so I would read one and then go do other things, and then come back. The second part is a novel, but it is organized in such a way that it reads similarly to a collection of novellas, but more clearly interconnected. The thing about Tanith Lee's writing is that she presents you with any number of fantastic, horrible, or fantastically horrble things and doesn't blink once. In one story a character is buried alive and then comes back a different gender. Another one starts off with sexual assault AND THEN SOMEHOW GETS WORSE. There were regularly parts throughout this collection where I had no idea where it was going next, but it was great. If a collection of horror-fantasy stories set between ancient Roman and 1920's pseudo-Paris sound like a good time to you, it's worth reading.

Cordelia's Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold, 1986-1996. Technically this is two books, Shards of Honor and Barrayar, but I had already read the first one and while I thought it was fine, I wasn't really interested in reading more. However, I've heard enough good things about the rest of the series that I decided to read the second half, and I'm glad I did. Technically sci-fi, but set on a planet that's late 18-early 1900s coded, it's an interesting look at pregnancy and motherhood through that specific lens. There's not a lot of pregnancy in sci-fi; you'd kind of think there'd be more by now. Still not my favorite of McMaster Bujold's (the Chalion books are great), but I feel motivated to read more of this series now.

3. The White Serpent, Tanith Lee, 1988. I have no idea how she published all of this in one year. I assume it was not all written in one go. Anyways, in a bold move I chose to read the third book of a trilogy without having read the previous two books. This is because I found this one at Half Price books, saw it was by Tanith Lee, and thought the cover looked cool. This wasn't a huge issue, because this seems to be a series of stories set in different generations in the same world, so events from the previous books are mentioned as historical details. I really liked this one; Lee is great at telling big, sweeping stories in a relatively small space. I also like her approach to rendering deeply sexist societies, simultaneously blunt in the way the characters are confronted with the reality of their situation and nuanced in how they manage to navigate it. Also? She can describe a sunset like no one's business. This is what's wrong with fantasy today: no one describes the sunsets or the trees. I want to know about the trees!! (Also weather plays a weirdly important part in this book. Like a major plot point hinges on some really bad weather). I realize I've said nothing about the plot, and that's because it A. doesn't matter and B. is impossible to summarize. At the core of it is a guy who is a gladiator in a kind of fantasy Rome-type city, but a lot happens before and after that. There are also some white people (literally white) who might be aliens. I'll probably go back and read the first two books, since this one was pretty weird. Modern readers might take issue with the way race is handled (see above RE: bluntness and nuance) but I can't really say much on that front.

4. Black God's Kiss, C. L. Moore, 1930s. A collection of the Jirel of Joiry stort stories from the 30s, which I only learned existed about a month ago. There was a lady protagonist in sword and sorcery! Written by a woman! Amazing. I did generally like these; the titular story was great (except for the very end, which I did not like, but the sequel story kind of made it better). I've seen these stories described as female Conan meets Alice in Wonderland, but the wonderland bits reminded me more of Arthur Machen's work. Some great descriptions overall, even if some parts felt dated in an annoying way. Also, this particular cover is ridiculous, but she is described as running around in a chain mail shirt with her thighs out, for some reason. Presumably because sword & sorcery abhors a pair of pants.

Link to January's books

[transmalewife]

does anyone have any leftist reading on the subject of tourism to recommend? Specifically about how travel for fun, education, sport, friendship or whatever might work in a communist or anarchist or socialist society. Because like yeah, open borders or no borders whatever, cool. But that usually only gets discussed in the context of permanent immigration

Idk I guess I just find it hard to imagine how it could be organized since where I live the most obvious ways capitalism has made things worse over my lifetime have all happened because of and through the lens of tourism. Rents literally doubling over the last five years, while the standard of living falls because apartments are bought, split into tiny pieces and renovated to accomodate a couple days of living at most. The specific kind of gentrification that is NOT being pushed out by richer people moving in permanently, who might cause more expensive shops and services to replace the affordable ones, but do still need the basic necessities everyone does to live. Instead, all hairdressers, repair shops, clothing stores (especially thrift shops), pharmacies, post offices etc etc close and are replaced by luxury boutiques, clubs and stores whre you can only buy snacks, alcohol and microwave meals. Restaurants and bars hiking up prices because most of their clients come from places with stronger currencies etc etc.

At the same time though I believe travel is a crucial part of a fulfilling life for most if not all people. I believe people have the right to see and appreciate the culture and history of other places and also like... maybe go somewhere warmer and lay on the beach sometimes, even if they prefer to live and work somewhere colder. Or go skiing even if they chose to live somewhere warm and without mountains. Or even just like... vacation in a big city if they live in the countryside and vice versa. Or pop over to another continent to visit an online friend maybe. Although obviously intercontinental travel would have to be hugely limited until and unless we find ways to do it that don't destroy our planet.

At the same time some precautions do have to be taken to protect historical and especially sacred sites. Like, I don't think endless crowds should be allowed to trample through historical buildings and also open borders obviously doesn't mean white tourists get to go camping on Uluru. But on some level I do believe everyone who wants to should get to see Venice at least once in their life. But that's probably not feasible so like... who gets to decide? On what merit? Are historians, artists, journalists privileged? Or should it be a lottery?

Also I think there's a significant amount of tourism that would simply die out if going to that place wasn't a status symbol. Like you cannot convince me that if you spend 2 weeks by the pool in an enclosed luxury resort it makes a difference that it's on Hawaii rather than like... in florida. And then theres places like the Hamptons. What the fuck is the point of the Hamptons, other than bragging rights?

Obviously I know none of this is even remotely the main pressing issue to solve about a potential communist society, but then again, that's why I'm asking for reading materials, because it so rarely gets discussed. I mean I bet Marx wrote about it, which, great, point me to the relevant fragments please and I'll have a look but also this is an issue where a modern perspective would be really important. I don't think Marx, for all his wisdom, really has a solution to "what are the ethics of taking an 8 hour flight to visit a tumblr mutual".

Or maybe this whole thing is me being cynical and this is another place where things would sort of just regulate themselves. Anyway. Send me reading recs and let's very unscientifically try to check if it could work. Do try to be honest, like I've been several times as a kid and I would still go again in a heartbeat.

btw the goal of the poll is to get some kind of percentage that can be compared with the world population and how many tourists venice can support per year, though I obviously know tumblr skews mainly american and european

[random-thought-depository]

I think one major potential weakness of the bonobo-like human social system is it might be less effective at preventing inbreeding.

A major Homo sapiens inbreeding-avoidance strategy is communities exchanging people through marriage. Historically, this was often gender-asymmetric, with women being exchanged more than men. I suspect this gender-asymmetrical exogamy pattern was a major contributor to the development of patriarchy; it meant women got their social connections disrupted more. One of my major worldbuilding challenges for bonobo-like humans is giving them features that would either prevent this gender-asymmetric exogamy pattern from emerging, mitigate its disruptive effects on female-female and male-female solidarity, or some combination of both.

@who-canceled-roger-rabbit some of this is kind of relevant re: that conversation we had a while back about matriarchies.

I suspect the causes of this gender-asymmetry in Homo sapiens exogamy are 1) male solidarity was more important to military power, 2) the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimps, and humans had silverback-centered social groups in which a single dominant male was the nucleus of the group and chimps and humans inherited a tendency toward females changing social groups at maturity from them. I'm not really worried about 2), human behavior is pretty flexible, but 1) seems like a probable huge obstacle to the emergence of a female-privilege society (which I suspect is a big part of the reason unambiguously female-privilege societies were rare to nonexistent in Earth history if the known historical record is anything to go by).

IIRC actual bonobos seem to have kept the social pattern inherited through 2) and went the mitigation route; female bonobos change social groups more than male bonobos, and the key to female power in bonobo society is strong solidarity between non-kin females reinforced through sexual bonding. It would be intensely on-brand if bonobo-like human women also use sexual bonding between women to build strong female solidarity between unrelated women and thus mitigate the disruptive effects of females changing communities as an inbreeding-avoidance strategy.

I don't think I'll make that the whole picture with them though, because my ideas on how they got a low-key female privilege society hinge on matrilineal kinship solidarity between mothers and their adult children being important. Importantly, that model would make matrilineal kinship solidarity between women and matrilineal kinship solidarity between women and males both important for maintaining the bonobo-like human social order, which would tend to discourage exogamy of any kind.

Regarding the second thing, I think one big leg-up bonobo-like human women might have over bonobo females there is being smarter. Bonobo-like women are smart and (through language) communicative enough to observe the deleterious effects of inbreeding, realize they are consequences of mating with relatives, and do deliberate and coordinated inbreeding-avoidance. I suspect actual bonobos do inbreeding-avoidance behaviors without realizing that's what they're doing, in an "adaptation executor, not fitness maximizer" way. Deliberate planning is much more flexible and optimizable than "adaptation executor, not fitness maximizer" behavior. A bonobo-like woman can conceptualize the social benefits of remaining in her natal social group while also conceptualizing the risks of mating with close relatives and then imagine a strategy for exploiting her capacity to track her menstruation/ovulation cycle to simultaneously have the former and avoid the latter; wait until she's near ovulation, then travel to another group and submit to a consensual gang-bang, then travel back to her natal group and rejoin them. That sort of "having their cake and eating it too" reproductive strategy would have big potential social benefits for women compared to changing groups, so once they got the idea I expect it'd become very popular - and older bonobo-like women would start encouraging their daughters and nieces to plan their futures around following it, so their daughters and nieces would stay in their natal group and keep contributing labor to their natal group.

Also, re: bonobo-like strategy of using sexual bonding to recruit unrelated women into strong female solidarity networks...

... An idea I like is bonobo-like women eventually got good enough at that to turn that strategy on males and assimilate outsider males into female-centered solidarity networks in the same way. Basically, male kinship solidarity was less important to the military power of small communities in bonobo-like humans because in their species the community's women could totally take some wandering mercenary, go to work on him, and turn him into a fiercely loyal ride-or-die human guard dog for their community in a few years. Actually, when I put it that way, I suspect Homo sapiens women have a social strategy like this too and it's part of what went into the knight/damsel thing and this and that whole women as civilizers/domesticators of dangerous wild men concept (Enkidu and Shamhat might be allegorically about this!) and a nontrivial amount of male misogyny is rooted in the fear that a woman might rewire your brain in ways your present self wouldn't like by doing this to you. But I guess the bonobo-like human version would be more powerful (when used on bonobo-like human males, at least) and less monogamish (sapiens versions of this kind of male domestication narrative seem to heavily emphasize couples, but that might be culture-specific). Ability to do that might have made ancient bonobo-like human communities much more gender-balanced in terms of bringing in new genes by assimilating outsider women vs. bringing in new genes by assimilating outsider males.

A lot of this wouldn't be directly relevant to bonobo-like human society today, when it's pretty peaceful, but bonobo-like human typical neurotype and culture would be influenced by the social conditions and physical conditions their ancestors lived in, just like our typical neurotype and culture are influenced by the social conditions and physical conditions our ancestors lived in.

Also, I like the idea that bonobo-like humans are a more genetically diverse species than us because they missed Toba and maybe a few other genetic bottlenecks that badly depleted our genetic diversity, so inbreeding would be less damaging to them. So that might help.

[starsciencees]

Hey, while we're talking auroras - let's talk space weather!

Many people probably got their Aurora predictions from SWPC, which stands for space weather prediction center. This is a center run by NOAA to predict space weather. But what is space weather?

When people talk about space weather, they're primarily talking about things like the solar wind and solar flares. The sun puts out streams of particles and radiation all the time, with occasional larger bursts. The Earth's magnetic field is the primary shield for protecting the Earth from these harmful particles and radiation. Without the magnetic field, life on Earth would not be possible. Mars lost its atmosphere millions of years ago, which is why it can no longer support any kind of life. Scientists think that this happened because Mars's magnetic field is not strong enough to protect it from the solar wind because it doesn't have a large, rotating iron core like Earth does.

Even though the magnetic field of Earth protects us from space weather in most cases, during particularly large events such as what happened this week, we are still strongly affected by the Sun. Which makes sense! The sun is hugely influential on the earth in a lot of ways, and one of those ways is with space weather.

However, solar flares and CMEs have a much larger effect than just causing Aurora. during solar storms, there are regularly GPS and communications blackouts and damage to satellites (including this week!). During a solar storm in the last year, in fact, multiple starlink satellites were pushed out of orbit by the force of the solar wind and destroyed. Of course GPS and communications blackouts cause a lot of problems for people who depend on those systems. And there have been examples of particularly large CMEs which have the potential to do a lot more damage. During a solar storm of similar magnitude, some power transformers in Canada, I believe, were destroyed about 10 years ago.

Space weather is also particularly difficult to predict. The sun is very far away and we don't actually have very much information about it, although we have many satellites monitoring it. Right now a lot of the data comes from ACE, GOES, and SDO satellites, but it's still impossible to predict solar flares with any kind of accuracy. The best we can do is seeing it when it happens, which gives us about 2 to 3 days of warning. There are some systems going up in the near future which should increase our capacity for seeing space weather quickly, including one mission that I work on called IMAP. But unless something significantly changes in the flare prediction field, it's still going to be a few days of warning at most.

Space weather prediction is a really important part of NOAA and NASA that is not well known by the average person. Recently, Congress has pretty significantly cut funding to NASA and there is a lot of uncertainty right now. This is unfortunate for a lot of reasons, but space weather will have bigger and bigger effects on our society, the more that we depend on satellites and GPS communication.

If you are American, and you think this is something that's important for us to be able to to understand more fully, I would ask you to please call your Congresspeople and express the importance of NASA funding to them. If you aren't American, I know ESA is also working on some space weather projects, and it's possible other space agencies are working on similar things as well.

If you would like to learn more about space weather, spaceweather.com is a great resource, as well as SWPC. You can also read about historical events such as the Carrington event, which is the largest recorded solar flare. It was so powerful that you could send a telegraph over the wire without power - a similar event could be devastating to our society.

[thatweirdtranny]

what does it mean to be an American to you? what does your perfect america look like?

i don’t really have a concept of a perfect america or what it is to be an american beyond “person who lives in the usa” but i’ll give it a shot.

what it is to be an ideal american:

open to new ideas and different perspectives, we are a huge and diverse nation that’s honestly incredibly polarized at the moment politically and my favorite flavor of fellow citizen is one who can disagree while still respecting the other side

understanding of different cultural backgrounds because most of us come from immigrant backgrounds at some point (obviously excluding ppl who are first nations), we are a melting pot culture

progressive, always looking to the future while remembering/honoring the past, we have a relatively short history as a country compared to many but we’re a people who are always looking for new possibilities while remembering both the good and bad parts of our past (good would be our dedication to innovation, bad would be…. well that’s a long list, this country has fucked up a lot)

caring about human rights, equality/equity, most of us are descended from people who came to america to escape something going on in our ancestors’ home countries so i believe it’s our job to create a society where we don’t have to worry about oppression no matter where it comes from

cares about the land and its history — what did your area look like before european settlers colonized it? who lived there and what was their language/culture/general mode of existing? was the land taken care of or maintained a certain way by the local tribes/nations before it was colonized?

what is my idea of a perfect america:

native communities have the resources they need to live happy healthy lives in their homelands, with their languages maintained and the land maintained the way it has been historically and with science in mind (controlled burns, cultivated forests and natural habitat intermixed with holistically farmed land, wildlife corridors, etc)

education is entirely secular and well funded so that people don’t need to resort to private schools to educate their kids well

less funding for the military generally speaking, redirect those funds towards socialized healthcare and higher education

less funding for police, redirect that funding towards community services

in fact completely overhaul the police system, require psychological evals to root out the bullies and corrupt people, give them a minimum of 2-4 years of schooling specifically for law enforcement, require unconscious bias training, and make it so that every lawsuit for police misconduct comes out of the police’s pension funds

NO MORE ELECTORAL COLLEGE, implement ranked choice voting, do anything to end the two party system

progressive tax, better labor laws, let’s make america the land of people who don’t have to exist from paycheck to paycheck like most of us do now

restoration of native habitats and species. when there’s 20 million bison roaming the plains and wolves in most of the lower 48 again and the wetlands are wetlanding and the forests are foresting and the deserts not expanding and the amphibians and insects and fish are all at healthy population levels i will be happy

let’s talk “american freedom” for a second. i HATE the wet dream conservatives have about a very militaristic ideal of freedom. to me when i envision what i wish “american freedom” meant i yearn for a future where everyone has opportunity, can participate in democracy (our democracy isn’t perfect, we have to strengthen it), can do/be anything they want, etc

to achieve these ideals i think i most like the term “social democracy” with a mixed economy — i like the ideal of other more complete types of socialism but believe that a mixed economy is a more reasonable goal. healthcare and education would be socialized, housing and other things would be at least partially socialized, and social services would have more resources.

look i really just want everyone to be healthy, happy, without giving assholes the opportunities they currently have to hurt others, to oppress minorities/the poor/homeless, etc

ok i’m running out of spoons so i’m done for now

[reiverreturns]

Rules: list eight shows for your followers to get to know you better.

Tagged by @aeide and @forsty, thank you! ❤️

1. Parks and Recreation. this is my failsafe, go to, never lets me down comfort show. beyond its genuine humour and charm, i’ve always loved p&r because, at it’s core, it’s about one women doggedly refusing to give up on her dreams and her desire to do good in the world. its tropey and silly and self referential without ever being mean or so over the top with the characters that they don’t feel tangible and fully formed in the world they live in. i love this show. the first season doesn’t exist tho. 

2. Fleabag. genuinely one of the best tv shows ever made and i will fight anyone who says otherwise. it is just SO GOOD as a rumination on love and loss and grief and what the fuck do you do if you don’t really like the person you are. fleabag and claire’s relationship is so special to me (because deep down i am claire.) idk i’ve seen this marketed as a comedy show and while it has jokes its so, so, so much deeper than that. and it doesn’t overstay its welcome either. please watch fleabag i beg.  

3. Black Sails. LOOK. i am not immune to filthy emotionally complex sometimes-horny pirates pushing against a society and a system that they never had a place in. i cannot be blind to the rich historical setting and love that always sits on the line of hate. people willing to die for things that were so fucking real to them, and things that never were to anyone else. man titties. A+ no notes.

4. Arcane. i’m a sucker for good animation and this show is so b e a u t i f u l. i’m also so soft for fucked up father relationships and BOY does this show have ‘em in spades. also sevika and her big beefy arms (arm technically i guess?)

5. Top Gear. don’t really advertise the fact that i’m a motorsports/car fan on here but top gear played a huge part in that growing up. the old series with the og three is another comfort show, particularly the specials. i do watch new TG with chris/paddy/freddie but it isn’t the same.

6. Ted Lasso. hate football, love this show with a burning passion. a gaggle of himbos, bad puns, and hannah waddingham. it’s perfection. 

7. The Orville. i watched a lot of star trek growing up and i’ve found myself really loving the orville for capturing some of that classic sci-fi, episodic adventure magic. its a weird show to watch from the first series (it starts very much like seth macfarlane wrote it as a seth macfarlane show to get it greenlit) before the reins loosen a bit and it really hits its stride. the last series was just so fucking good with how it used common sci-fi tropes to look at modern day issues like trans acceptance and self identity. it’s a gem of a show and i wish more people would watch it honestly.

8. Santa Clarita Diet. STILL SO MAD NETFLIX CANCELLED THIS WHAT THE FUCK MAN. it was so absurd and so funny, a show i didn’t think i’d like at all reading the premise and was instantly hooked. timothy olyphant as a man who really loves his wife but desperately need to smoke some weed is just such perfect casting. man i need to rewatch this show.

Omitting the tags bc the social anxiety has me gripped today but don’t let me stop you from having a good time beloveds.

[irisewinnow]

i saw that u had read babel by r.f kuang and do u recommend it?? cause ive been thinking of reading it and i just want to know ur opinion on it!!

˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆ cynthia reviews: babel by rf kuang !

hi anon!! thank u sm for sending this first of all im honoured that you trust my opinion of it 😭 first of all, i'd like to preface this review with three things: 1) i read this early in the year (started late dec 2023 finished early jan 2024) so my memory of it is hazy 😣 2) i am a woman of colour so i do understand the struggles kuang is tackling in her book 3) i know i rated it 5 stars originally but after you sent this ask i thought about it a little more and may change that because of the reasons i'm about to discuss below!

ok so i would like to start with the good things about this book since i rated it five stars originally for a reason

first of all, this is SUCH a fun book to read in the winter months!! the vibes are immaculate when reading during colder weather and i think thats def part of the reason why i rated it so high (i fear i'm a huge vibe reader and this results in me changing my star rating of books MONTHS after ive read them LMAO)

i really liked the footnotes kuang included to tell us extra info about the latin/other languages thats used and things about the time and anything basically that the modern reader may not understand 😣 a lot of people disliked these for some reason but idk i personally really enjoyed reading them LOL (i have to admit some of the footnotes were pretty unnecessary common sense type things but idk it didnt bother me v much!! other people did say it sounded pretty condescending tho)

despite being a super long and heavy book, it was a pretty easy read!! as in i could get through a lot of it in one sitting :) its def the kind of book i'd pick up when i'm in a slump just because its pretty quick to get through

at surface level, kuang does portray the struggles of both women and people of colour pretty accurately!! (makes sense considering she's a woc too)

the last couple chapters were PHENOMENAL!!! def the highlight of the book

now for my criticisms

it's pretty hard to get into i cant lie 😣 it took me a little bit to understand what was going on in terms of the fantasy bit of the world 😭 this is something that bothers me a lot when it happens esp when a book is good later on cz then i have to keep telling ppl "just get thru this first bit!!" however no one does this worse than leigh bardugo with the shadow and bone trilogy omfg the grisha lore is a NIGHTMARE to understand i'll never forgive her for it

kuang's characters lowk don't have personalities 😣 i feel like she has characters in this book just for the sake of getting her point across about the struggles of women and people of colour, but part of showing us these struggles is humanising them and treating them like actual people instead of just spokespeople for the issues you wanna tackle!! as im thinking right now, i gen cannot remember what they were like as people all i can remember is that the three poc struggled and the white girl was a racist. they feel very 1d and i think this makes it hard for readers, esp those who are more privileged in society, to fully understand the struggles less privileged people face!!

she (kuang) desperately needs to show and not tell 😭 so much of the book was just her directly telling us things instead of showing them to us through the events that happen!! also she just kept repeating a lot of the same things 🙁 like i get your point i promise! a lot of ppl on goodreads have said that the political and social debates read like a twitter debate and lowk i agree 😣 at times i tended to forget we were in the 1800s because the chars would act pretty 21st century LOL

the fantasy bit of this book is super weak 😭 her idea w it was super cool but idk i feel like it didn't add much and it was super hard to understand in the beginning 🙁 i think this would've been better if it were just marketed as a historical fiction or wtv since the history bit she does well!! but it didn't feel very fantasy it just felt like our world w a bit of magic sprinkled in it and i tended to forget they had the whole magic bit as well

the middle bit was very hard to get thru tbh i dont remember much of it but it was just super repetitive and monotonous LOL genuinely all i remember of this book was the beginning cz i was super focus n trying to grasp the world and then the end because it was really good i cant remember what happens in between AT ALL except for one major plot point

okay so i think i’m def gonna take it down a couple stars LMAOOO SORRY ANON 😭😭😭😭 i tend to rate books really high in the moment and then when i think about it more i realise they weren’t acc that good 😣 idk to me it wasn’t awful but the cons are pretty prominent and not like minor pet peeves LOL idk if i’d recommend it … i think if you want a dark academia type book to read i’d go w the secret history by donna tartt! (however please search up trigger warnings)

ALSO id highly recommend you read reviews from goodreads because i’m so so bad at wording my thoughts and feelings it lit took me an hour to answer this ask just because i didn’t know how to explain it all 😭

[cacowhistle]

the owl house spoilers ahead!

i wanna talk about a few things, namely: jacob hopkins, belos, and chekhov’s gun.

i’ve seen this theory floating around a bit already, but i wanted to expand on it--i think that belos and jacob hopkins are going to somehow work together as the villain for the shortened season 3. whether it’s via belos possessing the guy, or hopkins working with belos of his own volition, i don’t know--but i think it’s pretty much guaranteed that they’ll be working together for a few reasons.

1. jacob hopkins was set up as a minor antagonist. he was given a name--he’s a character we’re going to remember because of this. that being said, he never had a solid conclusion to his antagonist role.

camila essentially told him to “sit and think about what you’ve done,” and in guys like jacob, that can easily serve to make him more angry, and believe he’s even more in the right. he’s still out there. his story is unresolved, and therefore, i think he’s gonna come back to bite the protagonists in the ass.

it’s the rule of chekhov’s gun--if you mention something by name, it will come back later.

2. belos and jacob have very similar mindsets. obviously there is a difference between “tyrant who wants to cause a mass genocide” and “weird guy who believes aliens are real and out to get us” but both of them believe they are protecting humanity from the “unnatural.”

it would be very easy for belos to manipulate jacob into helping him. jacob likely still has a vendetta against vee and the demon realm as a whole, and i think it’s the perfect setup for him to come back for a more major antagonistic role in season 3.

3. literally what else could happen in the human realm. there are like. no other established antagonists, and with the shortened timeframe it would not only be easier to use jacob in the story, but it would still make sense writing-wise and could honestly end up being a really cool twist if they play it off right.

4. i wanna see jacob get his ass beat lol. that’s it that’s the last point. yesterday’s lie wasn’t enough for me i want him to get beaten up by a group of teenagers.

[baeddel]

what did you think of nick land?

you asked this in past tense as though i just met him at a dinner party. why, he was loud and he used all the gravy. what a rude man!

here’s my real, very long answer: [2.4k words]

obviously today he is a miserable racist toad who goes on and on about the blockchain and woke capital. and after he moved to China he worked as an actual CCP propagandist. so he's not my hero. but thats the late era. early era: his earliest stuff is really good. i have mostly handled his first paper, Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest (1988). the thing is, his scholarship in this essay isn't very good. he makes a huge argument about the development of capitalism, the situation in South Africa, the development of the family and so forth, yet it has only 11 citations, all to Kant, Levi-Strauss, Nietzche, Marx, Luce Iriguay and Monique Wittig. none of his historical or economic argument interacts with history or economics (the Marx citation is just for the page number for the quoted phrase "so-called primitive accumulation", which he uses without operationalizing), and his anthropological claims rest on the already yellowing pages of Levi-Strauss's 1947 book on kinship structures. further, in handling Levi-Strauss he makes, i believe, two errors: 1. he grounds the entire discussion in the 'dual-organization' which is, correct me if i'm wrong, just the first part of the book, and if you included the rest of the material it'd work a lot less as a just-so story (the highest page number citation to Levi-Strauss is 88, the whole book is over 500 pages—you can literally see where he gave up reading), and 2. he assumes that Levi-Strauss’s theories about contemporary non-industrial societies are equally true about prehistoric societies. he doesn’t even mention that he’s doing that, he just implicitly treats the book as a description of the arbitrarily distant ontogenesis of whatever genealogy is under discussion. take the duplicity in the first paragraph that he cites Levi-Strauss:

In The Elementary Structures of Kinship Claude Levi-Strauss notes the frequent distinction made by various societies between normal and 'rich food' (op. cit. pg 8; all page numbers correspond to the pdf)

which is that normal food is produced within the moiety and ‘rich food’ is imported from outside the moiety through gifting or exchange. that this is a ‘frequent’ distinction in ‘various’ societies is as much background as we get; from now on we act like it’s an essential feature of all societies. skip to the end of the paragraph,

If 'rich food' is the primordial element of trade its metamorphosis into the modern 'commodity' can be seen as... [he uses this to scaffold an argument about Enlightenment philosophy] (ibid.)

this distinction Levi-Strauss ‘noted’ in ‘various’ contemporary nonindustrial societies has quietly become the PRIMORDIAL source of the commodity form. if you’re going to project Levi-Strauss’s observations into the past like that you’re really going to need to make the argument that you can. but the truth is that you can’t. this has been a pernicious trend in virtually every field, from anthropology to biology to philosophy, discussed in (for example) this 1978 paper (that’s ten years, we remind the reader—and feeling a little good about ourselves while we do it—before Land’s article was publsihed) Myths About Hunter-Gatherers by anthropologist Carol R. Ember,

I take issue wtth the belief that we are entitled to infer from [information about contemporary hunter-gatherers] what cultural patterns must have been typical in the distant past. We know, for example, that there is substantial variation among recent hunter-gatherers in residence, subsistence, division of labor, and warfare. If these variations are the result of different causal conditions, then what has been "typical" in recent times may only be a statistical artifact of the recent prevalence of certain causal conditions.

in a 2001 review of an unlikely book called Hierarchy in the Forest by Christopher Boehm, which makes a similar assumption about the historical utility of information from contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, she reflects on her argument in this paper, writing “I have argued such an assumption is problematic, especially since extant foragers live in very marginal enviornments” while historical foragers occupied optimal enviornments. so if there is such a widespread distinction between normal and ‘rich’ food, that’s certainly interesting, but we’re very far from saying it’s a primordial distinction emanating from prehistory, as opposed to one resulting from the interaction of similar societies in marginal enviornments, if we can’t specify the causal conditions of that cultural distinction. all of this is a lot of ink to spend on one claim, which is not even the most outrageous claim in that paragraph. in the middle he writes that,

The difference between rich food and normal food maps onto the difference between filiation (relation by blood) and alliance (relation by marriage). This is because rich food occupies the position of women within a marriage system regulated by patrilineal exogamy, with its producer renouncing it for himself, and thus echoing the prohibition of incest.

this one cultural distinction ‘maps onto’ this other cultural distinction. why? because one part ‘occupies the position’ of something else in the other one. and that ‘echoes’ still a third cultural practice. huh? why? nevermind—it’s time to talk about Kant instead. it’s remarkable that this passed peer review at all. in fact, that’s probably why it was published in the miscellany section of Third Text (vol 2 no 5, 1988), a journal of art criticism, which in those early days published more articles by sculptors and designers than academics. the issue before this one contains a glowing review of Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. you get the idea—Nick Land was always a bit of a crank.

wait a minute, didn’t i start off saying it was really good? yeah. i still think so. the reason its so frustrating is the overall argument in this paper is really good. Land’s case is that capitalism relies on a continuous process of primitive accumulation (the aggregation of wealth through enclosure, robbery, slavery and so forth), but that this economic process creates political conditions—mutiny, revolt, unrest—which place capitalism in danger. thus, to handle this threat primitive accumulation was outsourced goegraphically to colonies, and internally to ghettos and bantustans, which quarantine the political consequences of accumulation (“I say that these colonies are not costly, they are more faithful, they injure less, and the injured, as has been said, being poor and scattered, cannot hurt”—Machiavelli). this quarantining creates a racial 'other’ which makes and continually renews the opportunity for cultural exogamy, the kind that ruled the world pre-captialism because of the incest taboo. but capitalist society, and capitalist thought, in fact rejects this exogamous exchange, and retreats to a kind of endogamy—anti-miscegnation, militarized borders, and so on, except that, due to capitalism’s dependence on a primitive accumulation quarantined to the racial other, the racial other can never be fully excluded, and this endogamy is always in trouble. racism is, therefore, patriarchy’s nervous, unsuccessful self-transvaluation in response to the demands capitalism places on it, and this triggers a meltdown of the incest taboo (’inhibited synthesis’) which appears twice, once in the economic sphere—as the commodity form—and again in philosophy—as the synthetic a prori, an ‘alterity already inscribed within the system’ (paraphrase; op. cit. pg 9). the revolutionary solution Land proposes is (taking the opposite side to Shulmith Firestone, who also read the oppression of women through Levi-Strauss’s dual-organization, until she decided women’s liberation was bound up with the abolition of the incest taboo) a radical exogamy, an embrace of alterity even at the cost of self-dissolution. xenophilia. lesbian vampires. jungle. meltdown has a place for you . . .

you get the picture. its a beautiful theory. the relationship he describes between economics, politics and culture is very convincing to me, even if the particulars can’t be the way he says, since he’s using old, outdated sources—and using them badly. and the connection with philosophy he supposes is too clumsy to me—of course there must be some relationship, but the way he wants to approach it is pretty unclear. and yeah, its still a just-so story, that conveniently ties women’s liberation, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism all together into one program, all while conserving a role for philosophers like him. i don’t know where the argument that primitive acculumation is a continuous feature of capitalism started. i know it was a big part of Federici’s thought after a certain stage, and it gets a completely explicit statement in Anti-Oedipus: “So true is it that primitive accumulation is not produced just once at the dawn of capitalism, but is continually reproducing itself” (pg 251). the chapter is the Civilized Capitalist Machine, the same one we get the name ‘accelerationism’ from. they get there by engaging with a bunch of economics papers and marxist writers. and if you thumb a few pages back in the book you’ll get to the chapter called Barbarian or Imperial Representation (pg 220), which is about incest, which also introduces the idea of a relationship between the incest taboo and alliances. and for a piece of writing that contains the spontaneous utterance “O Caligula, O Heliogaba-lus, O mad memory of vanished emperors!” in the middle of a paragraph (pg 222), the scholarship is a lot more serious than in Land’s essay, connecting ethnographic work with information about writing systems and other data, criticisms of psychoanalytic theories, and even finding time for Nietzsche—who’s also in Land’s essay. so perhaps there are some of Land’s fingerprints on a copy somewhere. but all of this is a bit unfair, because we’re holding Land to certain academic standards, certain styles of reasoning and methods for handling (or, indeed, providing) evidence, which are, for Nick Land, the very thing at stake.

look here, if i thought the only worthwhile way to write nonfiction was to make 15 pages of inductive reasoning, with every ‘t’ crossed and every citation sourced, and send it off to Mind i wouldn’t be writing stream-of-consciousness rants on tumblr every day. there are other things to write, other impulses writing can capture, and other audiences waiting with other methods of reading. over the course of the 90s Land and his buddies would build a bit of a walled garden, not just the actual CCRU, but a subculture of ‘para-academic’ writers, speakers, and artists who very rarely reference anyone outside their hermeneutic circle, and who no one outside of their hermeneutic circle ever references. this is the attack on Reza Negarestani made by goodreads user Paul (a former Heidegger scholar, Nazi history revisionist, conservative Chrsitian and race realist) in his review and comments, who remarks that continental philosophy has “fringes full of charlatans who cite/publish each other”, before he types up a long angry rant to one critic, questioning his credentials: “Seriously, can you give me a list of the books you've read by Kant and about Kant (in the original languages if possible), and who you studied with? Have you passed doctoral comps on any of these figures or taught them to others?” to him, Negarestani & Land are charlatans who create a cult around themselves in order to sell the books they print on their own vanity presses. and i am, i admit, a little suspicious of them myself—Reza and Land both founded this online school where you pay thousands of dollars to get an MFA in ‘Post-Planetary Universal Design’ over Google Hangouts and Google Classroom, or you can pay a few hundred dollars to attend seminars on Bahktain (this institution is apparently accredited). Land was fired for being racist btw. are those things worth going to? for a quarter of that price i could get a whole course on the astrological significance of the newly discovered dwarf planets from A Bigger Picture Astrology. IMAGINE A YOD

IN THE ASTROLOGICAL SKY FOR

SEVEN YEARS. . .

anyway, rightfully or wrongfully suspicious—you can’t just say all that and forget that there was this thing called the CCRU, there was this thing people believed in called Accelerationism, and so on, as though writing is just writing and books are just books. the small minded world that Paul comes from—this is something they were trying to outrun. it has something of the character of the Surrealist Bureau of Research, or the Acéphale Society, and things like that. why make a walled garden out of your philosophy? why cultivate a non-academic audience? why meet in secret, play jungle music, hallucinate? the writing only affirms the milieu. like a manifesto. and today the milieu around those people isn’t worth being part of. discussion hovers around announcing in-group affiliation: this is deterritorialized and based, that is striated and cringe. another review of Reza’s book, this time from one of the faithful, says it “could do with more embodiment and affect and libido altho an interesting read regardless.” if this is the image of thought the CCRU was able to achieve then it wasn’t worth doing. but maybe there is something else, deep in there, still running free. idk.

i want to compare it with the anarchist milieu. sometimes anarchist writing is quite rigorous; Endnotes, Chuang, even Desert pay careful attention to the bibliography. but if you go and read anything on the anarchist library, the scholarship might not get better than Land’s, and it might even get worse. Aragorn! was prone to unargued proclamations like this: “The Russian Revolution was not won with an army; the Bolsheviks filled a power vacuum created by the handling of the German war and missteps of the Provisional Government” (Anarchy & Strategy). is that true? how do you know? well, those sound like provocative questions when i write them like that. but Aragorn! could count on a literate audience, since anarchists debate those events and theories day after day in our practical lives. we have an oral tradition, a shared intellectual context, a way of spreading and innovating on information. this platform can interact with academic literature, but it doesn’t become academic. anarchist pamphlets are written in the imperative mood, or the interrogative. they advise, excite, provoke, challenge a reader who is assumed to be engaged in anarchy. orientation. navigation. songspirals.

conversely, who was Land writing to in the 80s and 90s? the people that read some little journal? people who buy scary books? i understand trying to outrun academia, but why stay an academic? isn’t it just that they all were academics, since they took philosophy when they were 18, and we’re back to facing Nietzsche's prognosis in We Philologists, “A man chooses his calling before he is fitted to exercise his faculty of choice.” or was there some good reason, and something potentially very exciting about the space they had, the milieu, the audience, that made it worth doing? i don’t know, i’d have to read a lot more, or speak to someone who was invovled. things like that. but those are the things i’m thinking about when it comes handling to Nick Land.