#literary taxonomy

[prokopetz]

On the one hand, it's true that the way Dungeons & Dragons defines terms like "sorcerer" and "warlock" and "wizard" is really only relevant to Dungeons & Dragons and its associated media – indeed, how these terms are used isn't even consistent between editions of D&D! – and trying to apply them in other contexts is rarely productive.

On the other hand, it's not true that these sorts of fine-grained taxonomies of types of magic are strictly a D&D-ism and never occur elsewhere. That folks make this argument is typically a symptom of being unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons' source material. D&D's main inspirations are American literary sword and sorcery fantasy spanning roughly the 1930s through the early 1980s, and fine-grained taxonomies of magic users absolutely do appear in these sources; they just aren't anything like as consistent as the folks who try to cram everything into the sorcerer/warlock/wizard model would prefer.

For example, in Lyndon Hardy's "Five Magics" series, the five types of magical practitioners are:

Alchemists: Drawing forth the hidden virtues of common materials to craft magic potions; limited by the fact that the outcomes of their formulas are partially random.

Magicians: Crafting enchanted items through complex manufacturing procedures; limited by the fact that each step in the procedure must be performed perfectly with no margin for error.

Sorcerers: Speaking verbal formulas to basically hack other people's minds, permitting illusion-craft and mind control; limited by the fact that the exercise of their art eventually kills them.

Thaumaturges: Shaping matter by manipulating miniature models; limited by the need to draw on outside sources like fires or flywheels to make up the resulting kinetic energy deficit.

Wizards: Summoning and binding demons from other dimensions; limited by the fact that the binding ritual exposes them to mental domination by the summoned demon if their will is weak.

"Warlock", meanwhile, isn't a type of practitioner, but does appear as pejorative term for a wizard who's lost a contest of wills with one of their own summoned demons.

Conversely, Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Legends of Ethshar" series includes such types of magic-users as:

Sorcerers: Channelling power through metal talismans to produce fixed effects; in the time of the novels, talisman-craft is largely a lost art, and most sorcerers use found or inherited talismans.

Theurges: Summoning gods; the setting's gods have no interest in human worship, but are bound not to interfere in the mortal world unless summoned, and are thus amenable to cutting deals.

Warlocks: Wielding X-Men style psychokinesis by virtue of their attunement to the telepathic whispers emanating from the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. (They're the edgy ones!)

Witches: Producing improvisational effects mostly related to healing, telepathy, precognition, and minor telekinesis by drawing on their own internal energy.

Wizards: Drawing down the infinite power of Chaos and shaping it with complex rituals. Basically D&D wizards, albeit with a much greater propensity for exploding.

You'll note that both taxonomies include something called a "sorcerer", something called a "warlock", and something called a "wizard", but what those terms mean in their respective contexts agrees neither with the Dungeons & Dragons definitions, nor with each other.

(Admittedly, these examples are from the 1980s, and are thus not free of D&D's influence; I picked them because they both happened to use all three of the terms in question in ways that are at odds with how D&D uses them. You can find similar taxonomies of magic use in earlier works, but I would have had to use many more examples to offer multiple competing definitions of each of "sorcerer", "warlock" and "wizard", and this post is already long enough!)

So basically what I'm saying is giving people a hard time about using these terms "wrong" – particularly if your objection is that they're not using them in a way that's congruent with however D&D's flavour of the week uses them – makes you a dick, but simply having this sort of taxonomy has a rich history within the genre. Wizard phylogeny is a time-honoured tradition!

[whodoyouthinkithinkiam]

I love this. Here's my take on another category:

Magic as Inciting Incident

Notable examples: a lot of magical realism, most zombie apocalypse fiction

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. What did he do about it? I'll tell you what he didn't do: quest to find a way to change himself back. He didn't go back to sleep with the intention of returning the form to the dream from which it came, and he definitely didn't try to figure out whether he now had the proportionate strength of a cockroach.

Most characters in these stories deal with their circumstances better than Gregor Samsa did, but the distinguishing feature is that magic is something to be dealt with. It's usually not used, even by antagonists, though I can think of a couple of exceptions, mostly in the form of "protagonist made an ill-advised wish." Frankenstein probably qualifies here, too.

This sort of thing is where we got the catchall term "speculative fiction". It's not really a power fantasy, just a way for an author to write a story with a really strange premise.

A Taxonomy of Magic

This is a purely and relentlessly thematic/Doylist set of categories. 

The question is: What is the magic for, in this universe that was created to have magic?

Or, even better: What is nature of the fantasy that’s on display here?

Because it is, literally, fantasy.  It’s pretty much always someone’s secret desire.

(NOTE: “Magic” here is being used to mean “usually actual magic that is coded as such, but also, like, psionics and superhero powers and other kinds of Weird Unnatural Stuff that has been embedded in a fictional world.”)

(NOTE: These categories often commingle and intersect.  I am definitely not claiming that the boundaries between them are rigid.)

Keep reading

[reimenaashelyee]

Idk if I talked about this here, but for the past 3 years I've been quietly developing a particular kind of comics taxonomy: identifying, naming and describing the visual-literary devices used in comics. Most of them are devices appropriated and adapted from other mediums, like poetry, rhetoric, cinema, etc - but quite a few are unique to comics. My intent is to give language not just for comics creators when they need to articulate their authorial choices, but for critics, scholars and teachers to talk about comics as a visual-literary art form.

Anyway, the research has gotten to the point where it's ready for the public. My plan is for this resource to be delivered in the form of a Wikipedia, online database, basically an accessible website that contains all the information related to the devices, including working examples from other graphic novels, webcomics, etc. It's STILL not ready yet - Idk when it's gonna debut, but I've recently secured an opportunity that will make progress move faster.

This zine right here is both soft-launch promo + a fancy business card for the Comics Devices guide. It's meant to pitch my research and act as a quick reference type of thing for folks. I'm only able to sell this in person in Australia, but folks in the US might get an edition soon (related to aforementioned opportunity).

But yeah. Big comics stuff happening.

[hedgehog-moss]

Pls give recommendations for Odd books 🙏

Here we go, a list of literary oddity :) This post contains majestic spheres, alien taxonomies, cruel subway polytheism, a fourth-dimensional cat, disturbing earthworms, infinite space football, existential mussel terror, a Parisian absurdist time loop, and a picture of a telegraph-pole-man-cheetah. I'm not exactly recommending these books, in the sense that I won't take any complaints if you find them more odd than good, and some of them transcend the concepts of good and bad anyway.

• The Other City, Michal Ajvaz. It's all like this:

• Contes du demi-sommeil, Marcel Béalu ('Half-asleep tales') —is the book that prompted my post about stories that have no ambition or justification beyond being odd. I'm sad that it hasn't been translated :( One of the tales is about a strange opaline sphere that rolls on the road. It doesn't accelerate when the road becomes a steep slope but continues rolling majestically. At one point it floats away towards the sky. Someone wonders if it was the moon. Someone else says authoritatively "It was an angel's egg." Everyone is reassured by this explanation. The whole thing feels exactly like remembering a dream you had. There is also a man who reads too much and whose body atrophies so only his head is left and his wife puts it in an egg cup for better stability.

• Leonora Carrington— The Skeleton's Holiday, or maybe the Hearing Trumpet. I've read them so long ago but I think the latter is the one with the old ladies and nuns? There's also a guy who was murdered in his bath by a still-life painter because he said there was a carrot in one of his paintings, but it might not have been a carrot? It's hard to remember details from this book without feeling like I might be making them up. Bonus Leonora Carrington painting which kind of feels like a short story:

• The Codex Seraphinianus, of course. I wish there were more bizarre encyclopaedias out there.

Also I love this review:

• Sleep Has His House, Anna Kavan —I really liked the way this book used language; making life feel like a fever dream even more than in Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream (which I really liked too.)

The eye is checking a record of silence, space; a nightmare, every horror of this world in its frigid and blank neutrality. The actual scope of its orbit depends on the individual concept of desolation, but approximate symbols are suggested in long roving perspectives of ocean, black swelled, in slow undulation, each whaleback swell plated in armour-hard brilliance with the moonlight clanking along it . . .

• The second half of Michael Ende's Neverending Story, where things get stranger! I remember the hand-shaped castle with eyes and the city of amnesiac former emperors and the miserable ugly worms who cry all the time out of shame then create beautiful architecture with their tears...

• The Gray House, Mariam Petrosyan. This is the one I had in mind when I talked about a 'museum of the strange, but one you wouldn't want to be trapped in after closing time'. Another book that made me feel uncomfortable in a similar (good) way was Edward Carey's Observatory Mansions, the protagonist of which is a man who curates an odd private museum and can't stand the sight of his own hands.

• Oh, speaking of uncomfortable, and hands—He Digs A Hole, by Danger Slater. To me this book was in the more-odd-than-good category but I liked its refusal to have a coherent philosophical meaning. It's about a man who can't sleep so he goes to his garden shed and saws off his hands and replaces them with gardening tools. Then he starts digging a hole. And then it gets weird. (Read at your own discretion if you have a worm phobia; there's some body horror featuring sexually aggressive earthworms. And then it gets disturbing.)

• 17776 — Someone sent me an ask a few years back to recommend this online multimedia narrative to me and I really enjoyed it! Here's the summary, borrowed from the wiki page: Set in the distant future in which all humans have become immortal and infertile, the series follows three sapient space probes that watch humanity play an evolved form of American football in which games can be played for millennia over distances of thousands of miles. The work explores themes of consciousness, hope, despair, and why humans play sports.

• Saint-Glinglin, Raymond Queneau —the author admitted that this book presents some "internal discontinuities." I didn't like it much but I respect the talent it takes to write a novel where everything feels like a random digression, including the key suspenseful scene that matters to the plot. The one digression I loved had to do with the way the narrator is existentially horrified by various sea creatures. It's like he dreads them so much he can't help but think about them when he should be telling a story.

The oyster... This gob of phlegm, this brutal way of refusing the outside world, this absolute isolation, and this disease: the pearl... If I conceptualise them even a little, my terror starts anew. The mussel is even more significant than the oyster and even more immediately admissible in the domain of terror. Let us indeed consider that this little sticky mass whose collective stupidity haunts our piers, consider that it is alive in the same way as a cow. Because there are no degrees in life. There is no more or less. The whole of life is present in every animal. To think that the mussel, that the mussel has, not a conscience, but a certain way of transcending itself: here I am once again plunged into abysses of anxiety and insecurity.

Near the beginning he philosophises about what would happen if a man and a lobster were the only two survivors of the apocalypse. The lobster would break the man's toe and the man would say, "We are the only beings that remain on this devastated Earth, lobster! The only living beings in the universe, struggling alone against the universal disaster, don't you want to be allies?" But the lobster would disdainfully walk away towards the ocean, and "the sight of the inflexible and imperturbable lobster pierces the sky of humanity with its unintelligible claws." (I can't overstate how little this has to do with the rest of the book.)

• Autumn in Beijing, Boris Vian —needless to say the story does not take place in autumn nor in Beijing.* To the extent that it can be said to be "about" something, it's about people trying to build a train station in a desert with tracks that lead nowhere. (I just went on goodreads to check the title, and it's actually called Autumn in Peking in English. I also discovered that it was featured in a list of Books I Regret Reading. I liked this book, but I understand.)

(* French writers love doing this—like when Alphonse Allais said about his 1893 book The Squadron's Umbrella "I chose this title because there aren't any umbrellas of any sort in this volume, and the important notion of the squadron, as a unit of the armed forces, is never brought up at all; in these conditions, hesitating would have been pure madness.")

• The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins—I fear this one makes a little too much sense for this list, but you can't say it isn't weird; and I loved it and recommend it any chance I get.

• The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, Carol Hill —this book was so wacky and made me laugh. I've not yet managed to successfully recommend it to someone; its brand of odd didn't resonate with the people I know who've read it but that's okay. You could say it's about a woman astronaut whose weird cat disappears into the fourth dimension (or the quantum realm?) and she goes to space to save him—but that makes the book sound more straightforward and less messy than it is. Her cat leaves her a note before he disappears:

• The Bald Soprano, Ionesco —fun fact, there's a tiny theatre in the Latin Quarter in Paris where this absurdist play has been staged every night for nearly 70 years, with the exact same set design and costumes and everything, like the actors are stuck in a time loop. They celebrated the 20,000th performance this year! There's an actress who has been playing her character for 40 years and said joining this theatre was like joining a religion. I've been going to see this play as a New Year tradition with my best friend since we were 14, so I love it madly, though I wouldn't say it's good, necessarily—the author said it was about "absolutely nothing, but a superior nothing."

• Statuary Gardens; or Les Mers perdues (apparently not translated) by Jacques Abeille. This man is obsessed with weird statues. Unfortunately I find his writing style rather dull—I feel like he takes strange ideas and makes them feel mundane in a bad way...! But his books still have a nice, quiet, oneiric atmosphere, and images that stayed with me, like a solitary gardener trying to grow stone statues in the depleted soil of a walled garden. Here are some illustrations from the second one:

I'll look into some of the books recommended on my previous post! (and I agree with the people who brought up Cortázar, Borges, and Junji Ito. <3) Some potentially-odd books I have on my to-read list: Clive Barker's Abarat, Goran Petrović's An Atlas Traced by the Sky, Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, Jean Ray's Malpertuis; Jan Weiss's The House of a Thousand Floors; Brice Tarvel's Pierre-Fendre.

[familyabolisher]

Do you think any of the frameworks you've developed for analyzing love in TLT could be applied to Pyrrha's relationship to cam/pal? Since Nona doesn't understand it well, it's hard for me to get a handle on how those characters relate to each other, but I was wondering where it might stand on what the series considers "perfect love," what the significance of its presence/ambiguity is, etc.

I’m really locked on to this idea of illegibility, actually, and the kind of work that gets done in Nona to problematise efforts to easily name, define, & categorise a relationship or set of relationships. I’m thinking of what Muir said here:

It’s a very strange household. And they are a found family, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that in the last movement of the book Nona questions what that even means—their motives, what they all truly wanted out of each other, their pretenses: are they a family, or are they all just a psychosexual mess of roleplaying and bad meals? (The answer is yes.)

and like, her suggestion that ‘family’ can plausibly be collapsed into a ‘psychosexual mess of roleplaying’ and that the drive of Nona is less about asking whether Cam/Pal/Pyrrha/Nona ‘are’ a family as much as it’s about asking what it actually means to identify them as such; and particularly to identify them as such in a text which does very significant work elsewhere to identify ‘the family’ as a site of violence, a mechanism by which particular forms of violence can be enacted. I’m honing in on that ‘last movement of the book’ comment to say that, like—so, the two narratives in Nona (the ‘main’ narrative ie. Nona et al. on Lemuria, and the John narrative) are spliced together, right, so it makes sense to try and read them as though they’re in dialogue with one another, and the obvious entrypoint for doing so is the fact that they’re both working as an account of the ‘creation’ of Alecto; first through John literally creating her and then through Nona remembering his having done so and thus rebecoming what she had forgotten she was. What does it mean to ‘create’ Alecto?—what are the conditions that Alecto’s creation ushers in, what are the conditions that her creation does away with? The ‘last movement’ of the book is to ‘create’ Alecto for the second time—so, what does Alecto represent, and what about her ‘creation’ leads the text to ask what it means to describe something as a ‘family’ in the first place?

The reason I’m drawn to this reading of Cam/Pal/Pyrrha as like, ultimately illegible, incoherent in that we as audience cannot coherently put words to it and make sense of it in the language readily available to us, is because I think the text understands these processes of ordering, taxonomising, delineating, and categorising as tactics of fascism. This is a tension also at play in Lolita; Humbert ‘orders’ and constructs his narrative via the available tools of literary discourse and similarly constructs his ‘Lolita’ as a labyrinth of cultural references and taxonomies; but Dolores is a ‘Haze,’ Annabel Leigh is a ‘tangle of thorns,’ there exists a being who is able to remain indistinct and impenetrable in a narrative which enacts violence on her by trying to make taxonomical sense of her. Coherence and legibility are mechanisms of visibility; under fascism, to be easily made sense of can be dangerous. The first two books were all about coherence, legibility, interpellation, and the consequences of Living In A Society; what it means to ‘be’ or ‘become’ a cavalier, what the necromancer-cavalier relationship ‘means,’ what Lyctorhood ‘means,’ how these relations of hierarchised sexuality and the interpersonal relationships articulated within the normative language given to them exist to shore up conditions of imperialism. This question of ‘ordering’ goes right down to eg. enumeration (First, Second, Third, etc.) and pretty tightly contained and atomised cultural associations, and the fact that that enumeration can be traced back to Alecto—

D’you know why you’re really the First? Because in a very real way, you and the others are A.L.’s children … There would be none of you, if not for her.

—which cribs this passage, from Lolita:

‘[…] for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert—or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad. In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure.

—very evenly ties together ideas of reproduction as imperial sustention figured in the language of sexual assault. The point is: as far as the empire is concerned, processes of ordering and taxonomising are equivocal to the mechanical maintenance of conditions of fascism.

Conversely, Nona is a text about when John’s precise demarcation of the world starts to fail and people have to make sense of themselves between the cracks; from Pyrrha as both failed cavalier and failed Lyctor to Cam and Palamedes and then Paul as if not ‘failed’ then at least a new ordering of necromancer/cavalier-ism to the Tower Princes as John’s kind of scrambling effort to rearticulate hegemony post-losing all but one of his Lyctors. Regarding how we are to read Cam/Pal/Pyrrha, I think it’s pretty clear that the text understands the obligations, normative assumptions and expectations, and material consequences of normative kinship relations identified as ‘family’ as part and parcel with the social ordering of a fascistic imperial hegemony; Kiriona, Alecto, and Harrow make up the three key points of contact for this reading, though it’s pretty diffuse across the whole work. We see kinship relations as structuring imperialist hierarchies and we understand the currency of those hierarchies to be death/abuse/sexual violence/totalised control, articulated most profoundly through Kiriona; we also see the destruction of social formations as part and parcel with conquest—

Palamedes said mildly, “You know we’re conversant with the concept of family in the Nine Houses, right?” Pash seemed genuinely surprised. “Why the hell would it matter to you? [...] You don’t give a fuck about families when you’re carving them up—”

—this of course being in keeping with the general conditions of mixed cultures, mixed languages, variances on kinship structures, refugees seemingly thrown together on Lemuria. The bolstering of the social articulations of the conquerors and denaturing of the social articulations of the conquered is rendered as a tactic of conquest; ‘family’ here is figured as a cudgel of imperialism.

Diegetically, as I said, Cam + Pal + Pyrrha + Nona’s social arrangement is not ‘normative,’ neither in the fact that others on Lemuria can make easy sense of it (and thus attempt to do so by referring to peripheralised and marginalised social relations ie. sex work) nor in the fact that they can coherently make sense of themselves via the imperial taxonomy (is Pyrrha a Lyctor greatest thread in the history of forums). Nor is it normative on our end; relative to the nuclear family structure, it’s the ‘wrong’ number of parents, the ‘wrong’ configurations of gender, the ‘wrong’ configurations of blood relation (Nona is a ‘child’ but not an ‘heir’ to anything and not a blood relation of either; Cam and Palamedes as ‘parents’ are blood-related), even the ‘wrong’ overall kinship relations—I put ‘child’ and ‘parents’ in quotations there precisely because I don’t think they’re conditions uncritically reified by the narrative as much as they’re discursive gestures made for the sake of being problematised. Is Nona their ‘child’ in a text where to be the ‘child’ of someone means to be what Kiriona is to John? Is this a ‘family’ when ‘family’ is the mechanic of imperial refortification? Again, like—what does it mean to call them a family at all?

‘Family’ is a label we deploy to give legibility to relations that we are otherwise struggling to make sense of. Setting aside Paul for the moment because I don’t quite know what to do with them and probably won’t have a Take that I can confidently commit to until after Alecto—I think the kind of difficulty that the text has in articulating exactly what Cam + Pal + Pyrrha ‘had’ between them that we see in that final scene is intentional, and I think it’s best understood left that way rather than wrangled into a taxonomy that the rest of the text is v determined to critically unpack. So to answer your question, I think the ambiguity is key—one overarching theme of the series is how people can love each other and articulate that love when the language available for them to do so carries obligations of disparate power, hierarchy, serves a particular purpose that we come to understand as ethically unconscionable; whether that love has to be made sense of within hierarchy, or contravene it, or try and stake a place outside of it. Cam + Palamedes + Pyrrha become the next stage of development in the unravelling of such a discourse; to try and make coherent sense of them could all too easily mean falling back on the language that the text works to identify as socially constructed and thus as limited, and thus imposing those limitations.

[sapphicslaylist]

I Guess I’ll Do An Intro Post?

Hey there! It’s been a bit since I’ve gotten the hang of this site, but noticed that my fandoms are hanging out here so I might as well. I intend to mostly just lurk and post my writing here; you’re welcome to follow and interact, but know I’ll be slow! Even if this is a relatively tame blog, it is 18+ due to heavy focus on Slay the Princess. That game and it’s associated themes are NOT for children.

I post:

Slay the Princess

The Borrowers

The Owl House

Grounded (Video Game)

Disability Rights & Representation

Biology, Taxonomy, Entomology, & Wildlife Science. If it’s life science I’m interested!

Literary Depictions of Predation & Voracity (I.e Predator/prey allusions or eaten alive imagery which is NOT done with the intention or depiction of being “vore.” Will still be tagged as such for blacklist)

Vore blogs do not follow & macro/micro fetish blogs DNI (general GT is fine). While some of my themes overlap with these spaces thematically, I’ve had bad experiences within these communities and wish to avoid them.

Please be careful reading my stories, as many involve heavy depictions of feminine survival in the midst of violence, trauma, ableism, and topics surrounding lost agency. The majority of these themes are very close to home and will be written as such. I focus on recovery and representation opposed to tragedy, but intend to paint these situations in a realistic and respectful light to survivors.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

~ Sapphic

[misterrogers22]

0:00 - Introduction

Welcome to the Juras-Sick Park-Cast podcast, the Jurassic Park podcast about Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park, and also not about that, too.  Find the episode webpage at: Episode 38 - Tim. www.jurassickparkcast.blogspot.com/2022/11/episode-38-tim.html

07:25 - Interview with terrific guest Dr. Roger Lederer

In this episode, my terrific guest Dr. Roger J. Lederer joins the show to chat with me about:

16:03 - Lederer's "Role of Rictal Bristles" paper

37:30 - Paleontological papers referencing Lederer's paper on rictal bristles

47:43 - the names of birds and dinosaurs

turkeys, Thanksgiving, turkey vultures, disposing of carcasses, registering domain names, the fastest birds, ostriches, the bustard, the elephant bird, rictal bristles, flycatchers, studying birds, DNA, Watson and Crick, cloning extinct animals, Loy's procedure, reverse breeding aurochs, birds are dinosaurs!, archaeopteryx, the evolution of feathers, the feather-colour of microraptors, enantiornithines, Dr. Richard Prum and the evolution of feathers, theories on the evolution of feathered flight, herons hunting, Crichton using Lederer's name in the text!, the Hoatzin, A Reappraisal of Azhdarchid Pterosaur Functional Morphology and Paleoecology; Bristles before down: A new perspective on the functional origin of feathers; A review of the Taxonomy and Paleoecology of the Anuro-gnathidae, strange feather uses, ubirajara jubatus, "raptor" nomenclature, tyrannidae, birds being territorial and mean, cassowaries, The Gobbler!, and much more!

You can find way more neat bird data on Dr. Lederer's website www.ornithology.com.

Plus dinosaur news about:

02:14 - A new ‘duck-billed’ dinosaur(Ornithischia: Hadrosauridae) from the upper Campanian of Texas points to agreater diversity of early hadrosaurid offshoots

04:21 - The role of Avian Rictal Bristles 

00:36 - Featuring the music of Snale https://snalerock.bandcamp.com/releases 

Intro: Grow Old Or Don't. 

Outro: Centipede.

The Text: This week’s text is Tim, spanning from pages 204 – 210.

57:58 - Synopsis of the chapter Tim, from Jurassic Park

A concussed Tim Murphy awakes from the tyrannosaur attack to find himself trapped in a car, atop a tree. He climbs out of the tree, as the Land Cruiser crashes down above him. 

01:02:54 - Analyzing the literary and stylistic techniques in the chapter Tim

01:13:27 - Discussions surround Show Don't Tell, Storytelling and Tension

Corrections:

Side effects:  May cause you to totally miss the point. 

Find it on iTunes, on Spotify (click here!) or on Podbean (click here). Thank you! The Jura-Sick Park-cast is a part of the Spring Chickens banner of amateur intellectual properties including the Spring Chickens funny pages, Tomb of the Undead graphic novel, the Second Lapse graphic novelettes, The Infantry, and the worst of it all, the King St. Capers. You can find links to all that baggage in the show notes, or by visiting the schickens.blogpost.com or finding us on Facebook, at Facebook.com/SpringChickenCapers or me, I’m on twitter at @RogersRyan22 or email me at ryansrogers-at-gmail.com.  Thank you, dearly, for tuning in to the Juras-Sick Park-Cast, the Jurassic Park podcast where we talk about the novel Jurassic Park, and also not that, too. Until next time! 

[theworldrewritten]

a bit about me <3

Hi, loves! I'm Valentine, or Val - whichever you prefer. I am queer, on the aroace spectrum, and gender non-conforming (they/them pronouns, please). I am neurodivergent and dealing with several chronic illnesses (1), something that will occasionally be the focus of this blog's content.

I am college-aged, with interests surrounding art history and cultural anthropology. But, honestly? I'm interested in everything. Creative writing, digital cultures, the taxonomy of literary and music genres, graphic design, cinema, mythology and folklore, etc. You name it, this will cover it.

Fandom-wise (because, hey, I wouldn't be on here if I wasn't actively in at least one fandom) I'm primarily focused on the Marauders, at the moment. Previous fandoms include Voltron, the MCU, and AFTG. While this isn't a fandom blog, I will be talking about worldbuilding and my own writing, so fandom characters will be mentioned within those contexts. And now, a speed-run of ice-breakers:

Favourite colour? In general? A rich warm brown, like wet soil. For clothing? Burgandy.

Favourite artist? Hozier. I did my high-school senior thesis on how his 'Unreal Unearth' engages with Dante's Divine Comedy, presenting my research through both a 15,000 word essay and a poem, written in Dante's terza rima form, discussing queer love, sin, and Catholic guilt. So, yeah. Hozier is my favourite artist, and I will yap about him at any given chance.

Favourite guilty-pleasure artist? Ayesha Erotica, or maybe $uicideboys. It's a toss-up.

(1) While it wouldn't be incorrect, strictly speaking, to label myself as 'disabled', I feel that since I am relatively able-bodied and physically independent, it's best for me to leave that label to those who need it.

[all photos were taken by me.]

[cappurrccino]

@xivu-arath sgdkfgsjdhs oh my god now I desperately want a Melvillian account of the emu war

"...as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints" excuse me??

[ambyandony]

Monster AU - Monster Taxonomy [P2]

[P2: Human-Adjacent Species]

oh and please dont get me started on hybrids like . theyre like a whole different thing. ill get into it later its so complicated

First up, I want to try to tackle species that are adjacent to humans; not just species that look very human, but species that more or less actually theoretically exist near humans taxonomically.

So this includes mostly just (some) turned "vampires" and "ghosts" (I'll get to lycanthropy later), and I know that sounds fucking ridiculous because I have just listed what most consider The Undead, Like, People Who Have Died and yeah. That's kinda the idea of them being human-adjacent because they... kind of are humans. Or they were human, once. Also, like lycanthropy, being fucking undead isn't necessarily a human-only thing. This is only really for human ghosts and vampires.

It's a bit complicated; it's hard to say if, cryptoscientifically, they're actually 'species' of their own, due to the aforementioned factors; again, I know it sounds ridiculous to classify fucking GHOSTS as a different species, but the problem is that there are different kinds of ghosts and that's even just the human ones. And those need to be classified, at least to an extent. I'd say from an informal standpoint, to most people, these are theoretically just 'kinds' of 'humans', but that's because cryptosciences are insanely different than what orthoscientific[1] fields really cover and they don't have procedures in place for this shit. But documentation of this 'pseudoscience' has to start somewhere.

Taxonomically speaking, I'm gonna say my options to classify (turned human) vampires and (formerly-human) ghosts are as subspecies of humans, as a subgenus of the Homo genus, or as species in the Homo genus. Either way, we can assume this means they're in the genus Homo, and due to the need to further classify them, I'd possibly call them... "species"... but imagine I'm saying that through gritted teeth and squinting eyes to convey dubious legitimacy of my scientific study as expressed by my peers in the greater scientific community

We are also going to ignore the subspecies 'too different to just be the same species but not different enough that they can't reproduce so we can't consider them a separate species' stipulation. Again. I'll get into hybrids later. but they are great proof that when it comes to cryptians, 'similar enough to reproduce', does not apply in any meaningful way. plus theyre probably magic.

I may get every single Latin gender-tense word agreement wrong . brother i can barely speak italian in italy. but I'm trying ok. i tried looking it up also and didnt get much clarification

For human-turned-vampires, to put them as an adjacent species in the genus Homo, my instinct would be to call them Homo sanguinarius. What with the blood-drinking being the primary distinguishing factor of vampires and all. Kinda what defines the whole category, which I'd call sanguisuges or haematophages; the word 'vampire' is more common to describe the whole classification, but, like 'werewolf', it's actually probably best suited to describe just one species/subspecies denoting the traditional western Pop Culture Standard (PCS) vampire... those ones just got popular in media, so now all blood-drinkers are 'vampires'. Different kinds of sanguisuges with distinct enough traits from each other (PCS vampires, strigoi, possibly shtriga, lugat, etc.; I need to do more research) would be considered subspecies.

However, I consider even human-turned-vampires to be so different from humans enough so that I would have to consider them a Homo subgenus, Sanguinarius.

Consider a PCS vampire Sanguinarius publicaperceptius, "public perception" vampires; meanwhile, "traditional literary vampires" (Dracula) would be Sanguinarius draculus (I'd say there's a significant enough difference to separate the two in classification). DIO (Brando), Straizo and anyone else turned by the stone mask would be Sanguinarius saxeus, with saxeus referring to the stone mask. Sanguinarius infectiomorsibus, "infection fangs", could refer to a vampire turned by a bite, who can, presumably, turn someone else via a bite of their own. This is not the same as what saxeus vampires (or at least DIO) do, as the victims are less vampiric and more zombified. Pillar Men are not Sanguinarius saxeus. Pillar Men are something else.

As for human ghosts, I initially considered them as moreso a subspecies and called them Homo sapiens morsareliquarium (mors ("dead") and reliquum ("remnant") so "remnants of death") while normal humans would be Homo sapiens sapiens and Danny Phantom would be some third, more mysterious thing

But I changed my mind due to, again, the need to classify further, as well as feeling like it just didn't work right that way. and I only left that last paragraph in for the Danny Phantom joke, because comedy is actually the most important thing to me

Once I'd considered and decided against 'species', I started to tentatively go with subgenus (again).

I classified human ghosts as subgenus Morsareliquarium, and, naturally, all distinct types of ghosts (wraiths, spectres, yurei, onryo, etc.) would be species.

For example, an onryo, originating from Japanese folklore and described as a vengeful spirit who became a ghost because they had, in some way, been wronged in life, could be something like Morsareliquarium vindicta. A likely candidate for the classification Sugimoto Reimi falls under, whereas a more hostile typically-'vengeful' ghost, especially if not vindictive on their own behalf, might be something like Morsareliquarium invideo.

I needed someone to represent each mentioned subgenus of the Homo genus for this post and while I could have just gone with whichever three people came to mind first I remembered that there's one of each in La Squadra! So I put them in the silly little chart and this surely wont result in misfortune for me !

Illuso, Pesci, and Risotto Nero are a ghost, a human and a vampire respectively. Also, Pesci is the only human in the entire group and he's literally just a guy. he's so confused

Illuso is specifically a 'mirror ghost' ((which is popular enough to be a ghost trope but not specific enough to have a Wikipedia page or any specific non-individual examples (sorry Bloody Mary), so I gotta freestyle a little)), a ghost that can generally only manifest in reflections, specifically mirrors, for which I'll go with Morsareliquarium captispecula ('capti' (trapped) and 'speculum' (mirror), so "trapped in a mirror").

As for Risotto Nero... um... I'm not sure. It's really hard to study him on account of him being able to go invisible and also being incredibly dangerous. I know he's a vampire of some kind, but I don't know which kind. I've taken to just using Sanguinarius sanguinarius, to sort of indicate an unspecified sanguisuge. I'm still trying to study him but have been thusly unsuccessful in my attempts to infiltrate the group. oh well!

Look, I think vampire species should probably be its own separate post anyway. Maybe I'll be able to elaborate more on Risotto then!!

Oh and then theres zombies... it's complicated. Since zombies are generally just reanimated corpses, a lot of them don't really display a higher level of sentience, which can generally just be called "zombies" or "shamblers". Cadaverus is the term I'd use were I to apply a sub-genus to the category, although it's dubious. They do not fall under the umbrella of Morsareliquarium as they are, in general, corporeal undead, whilst ghosts are, in general, incorporeal undead.

There are a few kinds of zombies that have enough of a level of sentience and enough differentiation that they would be considered their own species; revenants, in particular, are a particular kind of zombie (Carne is an example) reanimated with the intention of just generally tormenting and/or harming the living, perhaps falling under the name Cadaverus malignitas.

A draugr is another kind of higher-sentience zombie; among the distinct abilities of various kinds of draugr, the main consistency is its contagiousness, as a draugr, much like a PCS zombie, is able to spread its draugrism, such as by biting. The main difference between an infectious shambler and a draugr is typically the presence of active sentience, as draugr tend to have at least some ability to cognitively think, as well as the ability to use a number of various magical abilities. Draugr could perhaps be described with Cadaverus transmissia.

Reanimated skeletons are also undead but are usually a magical construct or the result of possession of sorts. Generally, a walking talking skeleton (ambulossa) either falls under ghost or zombie category, or they are unsentient magical constructs.

Liches are undead as well, but fall moreso under the category of a human subspecies or a zombie; I would tentatively give them the name Cadaverus voluntarium, voluntary zombie.

They are typically a magic user (often but not always a necromancer) who made themself undead in a bid to achieve immortality, typically investing their immortality (their soul) into one or more objects or phylacteries ("anchors") in such that when the body is killed, the soul does not pass on, and thus the lich does not truly die. When a lich's anchor(s) are destroyed, their soul (or the part of the soul locked into the anchor) is returned to their physical body, after which the lich can be killed. A lich typically keeps a pretty close eye on their anchor or else hides it in a very very good hiding spot. An example would be Prosciutto. If he's anything to go by, it seems ghosts tend not to get along with liches. I think I can understand why a dead guy would be pretty spiteful of a guy who's cheating death.

Finally, for the record, mummies are not undead. Let me repeat that: mummies are not undead. They're not even cryptians. They don't move around. They're just dead. They're preserved corpses. Spooky zombie mummies are a complete fabrication of pop culture media. Still wouldn't recommend fucking with ancient tombs even if you don't give a shit about being respectful, because the bodies aren't moving anytime soon, but sphinxes sure are, and if they happen to be the tomb's guardian, as many remaining sphinxes may, you better hope you're real good at trick questions or you're fucked.

[1]: orthoscience is real-life actual science aka the opposite of pseudoscience. This is not a real-life, like, pre-existing, accepted or generally known word because I made it the fuck up for my own purposes and whatnot.

(( You can always ask me and/or my sona about my Monster AU and my/his notes! ))

Monster Taxonomy Page 1

Monster Taxonomy Page 1 Subsection A

[WIP]

Monster Taxonomy Page 3

[WIP]

((I've got a few things to say myself about what happened when trying to develop Monster AU Risotto, whom I labelled as a Dhampyr on something I drew a while before the original post of this. The dhampir originates in Balkan folklore, and from my research (I mostly just looked at Wikipedia for the general outline initially), it seems that it is the offspring of a human and a vampire; however, I was classifying them as a kind of vampire as they're the offspring of vampires with very specific traits, who don't seem to have a name distinct from "vampire", but don't quite fit the description of "traditional" vampires. So while technically a hybrid, this species' nomenclature would refer to the parent.

When I first made this post, Wikipedia... and absolutely no other source I could track down (the literal source listed on Wikipedia didn't mention this anywhere, I can't find any mythological resources that say this, and my Element Encyclopaedia of Magical Creatures doesn't even mention dhampirs, the bastards)...claimed what seems to set Dhampirs aside from normal vampires most prominently is that their blood is acidic to normal vampires and can melt any part of a vampire.

But... I was unable to back this detail up because I couldn't find any source that said this (like, not even the D&D sources, just, nothing. Which sucks because I was really hoping I could confirm this because I was thinking it would be so cool with Metallica's whole blood thing), so it appears to have been completely made up by some jackass editing the page. That detail has now been removed from the Wikipedia article since I brought up the lack of a source in the talk section. Remember to check the sources on more obscure Wikipedia articles.

There's also their supposed lack of bones (noodle moment) according to some areas, which apparently contributes to a typically short lifespan and a soft body. Small problem with that. Any being without bones can't be in the genus Homo because it's... an invertebrate. If we're to believe that specific interpretation that dhampirs have no bones... they are not in the Vertabrata subphylum. Even if they have a human parent.

You know where the actual problem lies here?

If he has no bones he doesn't belong on this post because he wouldn't be in the Homo genus. On account of not having bones.))

[madtomedgar]

*yes I know some of these aren't, strictly speaking, genres, and that they can overlap. These are genres/categories that I like, not a correct genre taxonomy. This is also why romance, humor, and mystery are missing, because I don't like them.

[demi-shoggoth]

2023 Reading Log pt 12

56. Life Between the Tides by Adam Nicholson. This book really, really wants to be High Literary Art. The author writes about tide pools and coastal organisms, but is much more interested in dissecting what these have represented in art, culture and a Jungian sense of shared humanity more than he is in the actual animals, algae and other things he encounters. Throughout the book, he builds three artificial tide pools, each time devising ways to carve rock and set up filters to catch water but exclude some organisms, and I couldn’t help but think, why? Why not find natural tide pools and observe them? Why must you put your stamp on a coastline? His whole thesis seems to be something about the beauty of how the shore is a liminal place, between land and water, where ecosystems and humans alike exist in an unstable equilibrium, and yet he feels the need to attempt to control it, and does not reflect much on the contradiction. I did not care for this book, as either a work of natural history or philosophy.

57. Spirit Beings in European Folklore 1 by Benjamin Adamah. A birthday gift from my girlfriend, @abominationimperatrix. This is one of a four part encyclopedia of European monsters—this volume focuses on Scandinavia and the British Islands. The decision to edit it into multiple volumes was made relatively late in the book’s development, and it shows—there are cross references to entries that do not appear in this book, but are in other volumes. The author is an occultist, and so plays somewhat coy with whether or not he believes in the literal existence of supernatural entities; near as I can tell from this volume, he’s a believer in the idea that they have material reality as thoughtforms created by human imagination. Putting aside that quirk (which is fairly easy to do), this is a pretty good compendium of monsters, especially but not limited to the sorts of things that would be called “fey” and “undead” in RPG terms. I do have the whole set, and am looking forward to reading the rest of them.

58. If It Sounds Like a Quack… by Matthew Hongolz-Hetling. This book is a look into “alternative medicine” grifts and cranks, following the stories of six quacks from their origins to the modern day. This modern day is the COVID era, where even the most reasonable-sounding of them goes off the deep end into conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant hysteria. The author does an excellent job of using alternative medicine as a lens to look at how consensus reality has been damaged in the United States, and there are a surprising amount of connections, both direct and indirect, between these frauds and perhaps the most successful con artist of the modern era, Donald Trump (who the book refers to exclusively as “the game show host”). The book has a light touch and is very funny throughout, which makes the ending, where he discusses how people are committing real murders in the belief that COVID vaccines are turning people into zombies, hit all the harder.

59. Remnants of Ancient Life by Dale E. Greenwalt. This is a book about biomolecules found in fossils, from the famous (like pigments found in dinosaur feathers) to the rather more obscure (using trace elements to pinpoint the affinities of conodonts and Tullimonstrum). The author is an entomologist by trade, and so is a little bit unclear about the appropriate taxonomy for other groups—an editing pass over the chapters about dinosaurs would have been useful. Perhaps the most interesting chapter is on the supposed discovery of dinosaur proteins, such as collagen and even intact blood vessels, which have been almost entirely done by the lab of Mary Schwietzer, and thus are the subject of a lot of debate and skepticism.

60. Strange Bedfellows by Ina Park. This is a book about sexually transmitted infections. It can be divided roughly in half—the first half is chapter long looks at particular topics, like the stigmatization of herpes and the possible health risks of vigorous pubic hair removal. The second half is a historical survey of the history of government investigation of sexual health, including both unethical human experiments such as at Tuskegee and Guatemala, as well as the history of contract tracing in public health offices. The author’s voice comes through strongly—she’s funny and opinionated and not at all ashamed at working in a sex related field. Mary Roach wrote one of the blurbs on the back of the book, and that seems like a pretty apt comparison.

[enthusedbambi-jjba-au]

Monster AU - Monster Taxonomy [P2]

[P2: Human-Adjacent Species]

oh and please dont get me started on hybrids like . theyre like a whole different thing. ill get into it later its so complicated

First up, I want to try to start with species that are "adjacent" to humans; not just species that look very human, but species that more or less actually theoretically exist near humans taxonomically.

So this includes mostly just (some) turned "vampires" and "ghosts" (I'll get to lycanthropy later), and I know that sounds fucking ridiculous because I have just listed what most consider The Undead, Like, People Who Have Died and yeah. That's kinda the idea of them being human-adjacent because they... kind of are humans. Or they were human, once. Also, like lycanthropy, being fucking undead isn't necessarily a human-only thing. This is only really for human ghosts and vampires.

It's a bit complicated; it's hard to say if, cryptoscientifically, they're actually 'species' of their own, due to the aforementioned factors; again, I know it sounds ridiculous to classify fucking GHOSTS as a different species, but the problem is that there are different kinds of ghosts and that's even just the human ones. And those need to be classified, at least to an extent. I'd say from an informal standpoint, to most people, these are theoretically just 'kinds' of 'humans', but that's because cryptosciences are insanely different than what orthoscientific[1] fields really cover and they don't have procedures in place for this shit. But documentation of this 'pseudoscience' has to start somewhere.

Taxonomically speaking, I'm gonna say my options to classify (human-turned-) vampires and (formerly-human) ghosts are as subspecies of humans, as a subgenus of the Homo genus, or as species in the Homo genus. Either way, we can assume this means they're in the genus Homo, and due to the need to further classify them, I'd possibly call them... "species"... but imagine I'm saying that through gritted teeth and squinting eyes to convey dubious legitimacy of my scientific study as expressed by my peers in the greater scientific community

We are also going to ignore the subspecies 'too different to just be the same species but not different enough that they can't reproduce so we can't consider them a separate species' stipulation. Again. I'll get into hybrids later. but they are great proof that when it comes to cryptians, 'similar enough to reproduce', does not apply in any meaningful way. plus theyre probably magic.

For human-turned-vampires, to put them as an adjacent species in the genus Homo, my instinct would be to call them Homo sanguinarius. What with the blood-drinking being the primary distinguishing factor of vampires and all. Kinda what defines the whole category, which I'd call sanguisuges or haematophages; the word 'vampire' is more common to describe the whole classification, but, like 'werewolf', it's actually probably best suited to describe just one species/subspecies denoting the traditional western Pop Culture Standard (PCS) vampire... those ones just got popular in media, so now all blood-drinkers are 'vampires'. Different kinds of sanguisuges with distinct enough traits from each other (PCS vampires, strigoi, possibly shtriga, lugat, etc.; I need to do more research) would be considered subspecies.

However, I consider even human-turned-vampires to be so different from humans enough so that I would have to consider them a Homo subgenus, Sanguinarius.

Consider a PCS vampire Sanguinarius publicaperceptius, "public perception" vampires; meanwhile, "traditional literary vampires" (Dracula) would be Sanguinarius draculus (I'd say there's a significant enough difference to separate the two in classification). DIO (Brando), Straizo and anyone else turned by the stone mask would be Sanguinarius saxeus, with saxeus referring to the stone mask. Do NOT ask me how I know about that.

Sanguinarius infectiomorsibus, "infection fangs", could refer to a vampire turned by a bite, who can, presumably, turn someone else via a bite of their own. This is not the same as what saxeus vampires (or at least DIO) do, as the victims are less vampiric and more zombified. Pillar Men are not Sanguinarius saxeus. Pillar Men are something else. Again. Don't ask how I know about that.

As for human ghosts, I initially considered them as moreso a subspecies and called them Homo sapiens morsareliquarium (mors ("dead") and reliquum ("remnant") so "remnants of death") while normal humans would be Homo sapiens sapiens and Danny Phantom would be some third, more mysterious thing

But I changed my mind due to, again, the need to classify further, as well as feeling like it just didn't work right that way. and I only left that last paragraph in for the Danny Phantom joke (is that reference relevant yet?), because comedy is actually the most important thing to me

Once I'd considered and decided against 'species', I started to tentatively go with subgenus (again).

I classified human ghosts as subgenus Morsareliquarium, and, naturally, all distinct types of ghosts (wraiths, spectres, yurei, onryo, etc.) would be species.

For example, an onryo, originating from Japanese folklore and described as a vengeful spirit who became a ghost because they had, in some way, been wronged in life, could be something like Morsareliquarium vindicta. A likely candidate for the classification Sugimoto Reimi falls under, whereas a more hostile typically-'vengeful' ghost, especially if not vindictive on their own behalf, might be something like Morsareliquarium invideo.

I needed someone to represent each mentioned subgenus of the Homo genus for this post and while I could have just gone with whichever three people came to mind first I remembered that there's one of each in La Squadra! So I put a few quick drawings in the silly little chart and this surely wont result in misfortune for me !

(Illuso, Pesci, and Risotto Nero are a ghost, a human and a vampire respectively. Also, Pesci is the only human in the entire group and aside from his Stand he's literally just some guy)

Illuso is specifically a 'mirror ghost' ((which is popular enough to be a ghost trope but not specific enough to have a Wikipedia page or any specific non-individual examples (sorry Bloody Mary), so I gotta freestyle a little)), a ghost that can generally only manifest in reflections, specifically mirrors, for which I'll go with Morsareliquarium captispecula ('capti' (trapped) and 'speculum' (mirror), so "trapped in a mirror").

As for Risotto Nero... um... I'm not sure. It's really hard to study him on account of him being able to go invisible and also being incredibly dangerous. Anyways, I know he's a vampire/sanguisuge of some kind, but I don't know which kind. I've taken to just using Sanguinarius sanguinarius, to sort of indicate an unspecified sanguisuge. I'm still trying to study him but have been thusly unsuccessful in my attempts to infiltrate the group. I ougha publish my injury log at this point. I haven't even been here that long! oh well!

Look, I think vampire species should probably be its own separate post anyway. Maybe I'll be able to elaborate more on Risotto then!!

Oh and then there's zombies... it's complicated. Since zombies are generally just reanimated corpses, a lot of them don't really display a higher level of sentience, which can generally just be called "zombies" or "shamblers". Cadaverus is the term I'd use were I to apply a sub-genus to the category, although it's dubious. They do not fall under the umbrella of Morsareliquarium as they are, in general, corporeal undead, whilst ghosts are, in general, incorporeal undead.

There are a few kinds of zombies that have enough of a level of sentience and enough differentiation that they would be considered their own species; revenants, in particular, are a particular kind of zombie ((Carne is an example)) reanimated with the intention of just generally tormenting and/or harming the living, perhaps falling under the name Cadaverus malignitas.

A draugr is another kind of higher-sentience zombie; among the distinct abilities of various kinds of draugr, the main consistency is its contagiousness, as a draugr, much like a PCS zombie, is able to spread its draugrism, such as by biting. The main difference between an infectious shambler and a draugr is typically the presence of active sentience, as draugr tend to have at least some ability to cognitively think, as well as the ability to use a number of various magical abilities. Draugr could perhaps be described with Cadaverus transmissia.

Reanimated skeletons are also undead but are usually a magical construct or the result of possession of sorts. Generally, a walking talking skeleton (ambulossa) either falls under ghost or zombie category, or they are unsentient magical constructs.

Liches are undead as well, but fall moreso under the category of a human subspecies or a zombie; I would tentatively give them the name Cadaverus voluntarium, voluntary zombie.

They are typically a magic user (often but not always a necromancer) who made themself undead in a bid to achieve immortality, typically investing their immortality (their soul) into one or more objects or amulets ("anchors") in such that when the body is killed, the soul does not pass on, and thus the lich does not truly die. When a lich's anchor(s) are destroyed, their soul (or the part of the soul locked into the anchor) is returned to their physical body, after which the lich can be killed. A lich typically keeps a pretty close eye on their anchor or else hides it in a very very good hiding spot. An example would be Prosciutto. If he's anything to go by, it seems ghosts tend not to get along with liches. I think I can understand why a dead guy would be pretty spiteful of a guy who's cheating death.

Finally, for the record, mummies are not undead. Let me repeat that: mummies are not undead. They're not even cryptians. They don't move around. They're just dead. They're preserved corpses. Spooky zombie mummies are a complete fabrication of pop culture media. Still wouldn't recommend fucking with ancient tombs even if you don't give a shit about being respectful, because the bodies aren't moving anytime soon, but sphinxes sure are, and if they happen to be the tomb's guardian, as many remaining sphinxes may, you better hope you're real good at trick questions or you're fucked.

[1]: orthoscience is "real" actual science aka the opposite of pseudoscience. This is not a real-life, like, pre-existing, accepted or generally known word because I made it the fuck up for my own purposes and whatnot.

Monster Taxonomy Page 1

Monster Taxonomy Page 1 Subsection A

Monster Taxonomy Page 3

[WIP]

((OOC: I've got a few things to say myself about what happened when trying to develop Monster AU Risotto, whom I labelled as a Dhampyr on something I drew a while before the original post of this. The dhampir originates in Balkan folklore, and from my research (I mostly just looked at Wikipedia for the general outline initially), it seems that it is the offspring of a human and a vampire; however, I was classifying them as a kind of vampire as they're the offspring of vampires with very specific traits, who don't seem to have a name distinct from "vampire", but don't quite fit the description of "traditional" vampires. So while technically a hybrid, this species' nomenclature would refer to the parent.

When I first made this post, Wikipedia... and absolutely no other source I could track down (the literal source listed on Wikipedia didn't mention this anywhere, I can't find any mythological resources that say this, and my Element Encyclopaedia of Magical Creatures doesn't even mention dhampirs, the bastards)...claimed what seems to set Dhampirs aside from normal vampires most prominently is that their blood is acidic to normal vampires and can melt any part of a vampire.

But... I was unable to back this detail up because I couldn't find any source that said this (like, not even the D&D sources, just, nothing. Which sucks because I was really hoping I could confirm this because I was thinking it would be so cool with Metallica's whole blood thing), so it appears to have been completely made up by some jackass editing the page. That detail has now been removed from the Wikipedia article since I brought up the lack of a source in the talk section. Remember to check the sources on more obscure Wikipedia articles.

There's also their supposed lack of bones (noodle moment) according to some areas, which apparently contributes to a typically short lifespan and a soft body. Small problem with that. Any being without bones can't be in the genus Homo because it's... an invertebrate. If we're to believe that specific interpretation that dhampirs have no bones... they are not in the Vertabrata subphylum. Even if they have a human parent.

You know where the actual problem lies here?

If he has no bones he doesn't belong on this post because he wouldn't be in the Homo genus. On account of not having bones.))

[nedlittle]

genuine question: what is wrong with the peyton beachdeath lma trans thread? I know…too much about peyton himself so we don’t need to revisit that, but i’d love to see you rip into some shoddy scholarship and ways to (mis)understand historical queerness

oh god...

i mean aside from people taking the word of a notorious clout-chasing liar and conspiracy theorist at face value...peyton just doesn't understand or even really care about history when it does not directly benefit him. full disclosure i have not read the thread since it was first posted but it is burned into my memory unfortunately, i also don't know a lot about lma as a historical figure

aside from cherry picking quotes from lma's diaries there were no actual sources. nothing from her biographers, no secondary scholarship at all. it was just peyton presenting quotes purposefully stripped of their context in order to further a point that he wanted to be right.

this should be like. queer history for pre-schoolers but people in the past who were or may have been queer understood themselves and their queerness differently than people do today. peyton is incapable of looking at queerness outside of his very specific 21st century lens. could louisa may alcott have been a trans man? possibly! could she have also been cis and/or gnc? sure! could she have simply been writing in both her private and personal lives about how suffocating the experience of being a woman in the 19th century was? yeah. we have no way of knowing which of this could be true, and whether they overlapped at all. queer history exists in shades of possibility. in some cases (and we're going to use trans men contemporary to lma), like those of albert cashier and charley pankhurst, we can pretty definitely say that they were both men; that being a man was essential to their continued survival, that they would have wanted to be remembered as men. in other cases, it's more slippery because the taxonomy we use nowadays to classify ourselves and especially our differentiation of gender identity vs sexual acts is SO recent that it does a disservice to classify all historical queerness with it.

it's insane that there are MULTIPLE notable 19th century trans men in american history at the time lma was living and he still was like no this is not good enough for me i can only emotionally relate to something if i can force my own image onto it. that's really the problem here, not the shoddy history and the deliberately misleading language, but the fact that peyton is seemingly incapable of enjoying or relating to a piece of media or a person if he cannot find a direct comparison to his own life. he did the same oh "(x) was 100% absolutely a trans man if you tell me wrong you're transphobic" thing with katharine hepburn (iirc??) a few years back and this is a personal gripe but having read a 600+ page bio of hepburn that was very generous to several queer readings of her life: lol. lmao even. his insistence of flatting the experience of anyone with a moderately fucky gender into "you're either Like Me or your not" is so purposefully stupid.

like, do all the trans readings of little women you want! i myself made a deranged little women trans post a few weeks ago. but lma isn't a fictional character who you can apply different literary lenses to! she was a real human person whose relationship with her gender we will never fully understand because we were not there. at some point you just have to accept that it is not your business. why are you so desperate for any shred of historical representation that you are willing to exhume the dead in order to out them?

peyton relates to jo march, so he insists that reading jo as a trans man is the only (morally) correct reading. he likes little women but has to make it fit the public view of transness that he is made his personal brand. i actually followed him for longer than i'd care to admit, and it's a trend with any piece of media that he is publicly into that he has to make a character a trans man in order to relate to them.

he also has this deranged idea that any author writing with emotional depth about the """opposite sex""" must have been trans. see the article he wrote for the niche about how must have been a trans man because he gave dido's emotions and the collapse of her marriage to aeneas the same "dignified treatment as any sprawling, epic battlefield scenes." [direct quote] the article is literally called " vergil had a pussy and i'll prove it." no further comment.

one of his "proofs" is that lma was called "lou" by her family, which he then proceeds to call her for the rest of the thread. lou is....a very normal nickname for louisa both now and then. you know what else was a 19th century nickname for louisa? wheezy. imagine that same thread but he calls her wheezy alcott. thank you, good day.

[elektramouthed]

 In contrast to Baldessari’s emotionally detached alphabet performance that foregrounds the sound of words and the arbitrariness of meaning, Rosler performs a feminist kitchen alphabet by displaying exaggerated emotions that shift between boredom and aggression, “hack[ing] out the inventory of women’s repetitive domestic slavery” (Elwes 2005, 42). The artist-performer uncovers the violent potential inherent in these kitchen tools as well as the sexism of television programming and thus forcefully decodes their semiotics. The performative correlation of ‘alphabet’ and ‘semiotics’ makes clear that the production of meaning, sign processes, and communication are not neutral. The presentation uses the alphabet as a “pseudo-scientific ordering” (Westgeest 2016, 39), and thus emphasizes that the alphabet is not a natural given but a taxonomy based on habitualized and therefore unnoticed conventions.  Similarly, genres rely on the reiteration of specific formulas. The ‘cookery show’ genre is based on a set of rules that enforce and therefore produce gender norms; it is a site of gender performativity. “Performativity is a matter of reiterating or repeating the norms by which one is constituted: it is not a radical fabrication of a gendered self,” Judith Butler noted: “It is a compulsory repetition of prior and subjectivating norms […]. The practice by which gendering occurs, the embodiment of norms, is a compulsory practice, a forcible production” (Butler 1993, 22). In this context, (re-)iteration is not simply an aesthetic device. Rosler is bound to perform gender according to a discourse that precedes her, yet her performance attempts to expose that discourse by rebelling within it.

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

[chaotic-practice]

Testing NotebookLM

Okay... I'm back, and I'm testing NotebookLM by adding more resources. On top of the summary of Espen Aarseth's Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) I uploaded a Janet H Murray keynote speech on Ludology vs Narratology from 2005, a research essay on the competing/complimentary fields of ludology and narratology by McManus and Feinstein (2006), a challenging of cybertextuality and literary theory by Markuu Eskelinen (2004), and Eskelinen's foundational The Gaming Situation (2001), which seeks to separate ludology from narratology.

First, I listened to the podcast episode to get the summarised, conversational take on this material. I was most excited for this, given the novelty of it all, but I was let down. It turns out, when asking the AI to do more than just summarise single text, it struggles to find the shared key points or read between the lines (or between the references!) to see how each text talks to the other, or suggests conflict within/between fields. It also failed to address that none of these references are contemporary, and in fact suggested that some of the ideas were "new", despite the most recent resource provided being 18 years old.

As before, it introduced key language and described modes of ergodicity. However, it did so in less detail than when it simply had the one resource to draw from, which I found strange. Almost as though it was wary to suggest anything which was perhaps queried or contradicted in another resource (much is the case with Aarseth, Murray and Eskelinen) and rather than lay this out, dismissed it all and only provided what it found to be uncontested fact. Which greatly diminishes the shine this program initially had as a research assistant. Can it provide research guides, summaries, suggest prompts, and list key language? Absolutely, and it does a great job of this. But can it think critically, and provide insight into complicated, contested fields of knowledge? Unfortunately not.

I'll link the podcast episode below, as well as share the glossary of key terms it generated as part of the study guide - something I alternatively think it did quite well at. Moving forward, I would probably only upload one article/resource at a time, and summarise that way, unless the topic being explored was pretty clear cut.

It's also worth noting, that you are capped at 50 references (I imagine the content generation would be quite vague, however, as it attempts to summarise such a large amount of information. The podcast 'hosts' even comment in this episode that I sent a "mountain" of resources, despite there only being five articles uploaded.

Glossary of Key Terms

Architextuality: A concept expanded in cybertext theory to include not only traditional genres but also a broader taxonomy of media positions that describe the functional and behavioral aspects of a literary work.

Cybertext: A text that incorporates an information feedback loop, often involving dynamic and interactive elements, where the reader's actions influence the text's unfolding.

Determinability: The degree to which a text's system responds consistently to user actions. Indeterminability implies that identical user inputs may not produce identical outputs.

Dynamic Autotextuality: The internal relationships between different parts and phases within a cybertext, where these elements can imitate, transform, and influence each other, creating internal transtextual dynamics.

Ergodic Literature: Literature that requires non-trivial effort from the reader to traverse the text. This effort often involves interactive choices or manipulations that affect the text's presentation and meaning.

Focalisation: The perspective or point of view from which the narrative is presented. In cybertexts, focalisation can be dynamically shifted and manipulated.

Game Essentialism (GE): An ideology that argues that games should be interpreted solely as members of their own class, focusing on their defining abstract formal qualities.

Computer Game Formalism (CGF): A methodology in game studies that emphasizes the formal properties unique to video games, analyzing and classifying games based on their structural elements.

Ludology: The study of games as games, distinct from narratives, drama, or other media. Ludologists argue for analyzing games based on their own unique rules and mechanics.

Mood: In cybertext narratology, 'mood' is expanded to consider the diverse delivery channels of information, including bots, avatars, and non-player characters, which impact the distribution of knowledge and reader perception.

Narrating: The act or process of producing a narrative.

Narrative: The signifier, the text itself, or the discourse through which a story is communicated.

Narratology: The study of narrative structure, including elements like plot, character, setting, and point of view.

Narrativist: A scholar who approaches games primarily through the lens of narrative, analyzing them as interactive stories or extensions of traditional storytelling forms.

Reading Time: The time available to a reader to engage with a text. In cybertexts, reading time can be limited, affecting the reader's experience and understanding of the narrative.

Rotation Scheme: A model in cybertext narratology that allows for the dynamic manipulation of narrative elements, including the position, identity, and characteristics of narrators, resulting in fluid and evolving narrative structures.

Story: The signified, the narrative content, or the sequence of events that are recounted.

System Time: The duration and permanence of a cybertext, considering how elements within the text may appear, disappear, or reappear.

Tense: In cybertext narratology, 'tense' is complicated by system time and reading time, requiring analysis of temporal relations between story time, narrative time, and the dynamic unfolding of the text.

Textual Instrument: A system designed to analyze and interact with a variety of external texts, often offering tools for manipulating, rearranging, or generating textual content.

Transtextuality: The relationships between texts, encompassing concepts like intertextuality, hypertextuality, and paratextuality. In cybertexts, transtextuality is expanded to account for the dynamic interplay and potential influence between digital works.