#on the wikipedia page for ‘it’s been a long long time’ there is a section saying how the song is used for both bucky and peggy

[cap10wilson]

sometimes letterboxd reviews are beautiful

[yourfavoritehouseplant]

I watched James Somerton's final video, and all I got was this 6 page document

As soon as I learned his final unreleased video was on Revolutionary Girl Utena, I knew I had to hate watch it. I didn't know that I'd spend the following 4 hours making a comprehensive doc on everything I hated about it. But here we are.

The TLDR (is this too long to be a TLDR?)

The intro section, as well as Part 2, are directly plagiarized from wikipedia. The rest is unclear.

He makes a “haha this show is so weird right guys” joke 10 different times

He reads Anthy as so emotionally stunted she literally has to be taught how to think for herself, and believes that being the rose bride makes her feel good

He says that his reading is ‘vastly different” from the rest of the community, before boldly stating that this is because he sees it as a “deeply allegorical and symbolic story”

He sees the sexual abuse as “not to be taken literally”

Insists that the show be separated into parts that are strictly literal and strictly allegorical for the entirety of parts 3 and 4, before making the contradictory move of analyzing characters as allegories during part 5

The only characters that get dedicated sections are Akio and Dios, who he doesn’t believe are the same person. 

He says Dios gets his powers by “deflowering women”

He calls Akio, known child predator, a chaotic bisexual

Uses 14 year old SA survivor Anthy’s passive personality to make a joke about her being a bottom

His final point is that Utena was the real prince all along

There are no citations

Anyway, full version for people who hate themselves under the cut. With time codes, because I cite my sources.

Part 1: Intro

This entire section is almost exclusively quoted from the Wikipedia article for Revolutionary Girl Utena. Words have been changed, but the order at which certain topics come up is not. Highlights include:

0:56 In his introduction of Be-Papas, lists the founding members in literally the exact same order as Wikipedia.

1:40-2:00 His list of Be-Papas previous works is lifted entirely from wikipedia, only with the words changed. This leads to a strange moment at 1:52 where he claims Be-papas ‘lent their talents to’ Neon Genesis Evangelion, a show which started production at least a year before Be-papas was founded. On the wikipedia article for Utena, this is instead referring to the previous work of Shinya Hasegawa and Yōji Enokido

4:23 he uses a quote by Yūichirō Oguro describing the production as a “tug of war”. He seems to have lifted this in its entirety from Wikipedia, as he does not cite the actual source it is from (the box set companion book, btw)

As for James Somerton originals, at 0:44 he claims that out of all magical girl series,”none to my knowledge have been more discussed and dissected than the 1997 series Revolutionary Girl Utena” He will go back on this at 5:05, where he states that “Sailor Moon takes the lion’s share of discussion” in regard to influential magical girl anime

Part 2: Part 1

(At least I know I’m not funny, unlike James Somerton)

Speaking of which. Here is every single time he makes a “wow this show is sooooo weird you guys” joke: 6:00, 8:50, 10:40, 10:58, 13:46, 17:07, 24:16, 30:34, 41:19, 48:01

Here’s every time the punchline to the joke is the existence of Nanami, a character who he otherwise completely disregards: 10:56, 12:05, 16:22, 42:40

6:16 Claims that the “Apocalypse saga” and “Akio Ohtori saga’ are two names for the same several episodes, depending on the release. This is untrue. Instead, different releases either only have the Apocalypse saga, or split the episodes into an Akio Ohtori saga and then the Apocalypse saga. 

7:58 Claims Utena intervening on Anthy’s behalf begins the first duel. While this happens in the movie, Touga intervenes in the scene he uses clips from (like literally right after the shot he uses in the video). Utena only gets drawn into the duels when Wakaba’s love note to Saionji is posted. Youtuber Noralities’ Utena video also gets this wrong, which makes me wonder if this was copied.

9:09 Claims Akio’s “End of the World” moniker is actually more closely translated to “Apocalypse”. In reality, the translation moves away from a more apocalyptic reading, with 世界の果て (Sekai no hate) apparently translating closer to “the furthest reach of a known world” or “edge of the world”. (Love the implications of this translation, but I digress)

9:10 As can be assumed from the previous point, this means I can’t find any sources that point to them not using the title “apocalypse” for religious reasons

10:10 Uses Anthy’s extreme passivity under her Rose bride persona to make a top/bottom joke. I’m gonna repeat this in case you’re just skimming. He uses a trait that likely stems from years of abuse, (possibly exaggerated by the persona Anthy uses to manipulate people), and uses it to call her a bottom. 

He also just doesn’t seem to understand how the whole point of Utena constantly telling Anthy that she's just a normal girl who should make more friends is framed as Utena imposing her will on Anthy, just as much as the previous Engaged have done. 

11:54 Apologies in advance for my most “um, actually!” point yet, but technically his statement that Anthy stops being host to the Sword of Dios is wrong. Akio literally pulls a sword out of her chest in the final duel. It's a more evil-looking sword of Dios, granted.

13:02 !!! CANTARELLA SCENE ALERT !!! He interprets it as them fighting over Akio?? Which like. I will allow people to have their own interpretations of vague and symbolic scenes. I will. I swear. This is not technically incorrect. It just makes me want to eat my own intestines.

14:44 Bad Anthy take #1: He states Anthy “is emotionally stunted to the point where she needs people to make decisions for her because she does not know how to think for herself” This ignores several moments of Anthy clearly making her own choices throughout the show, including the suicide attempt Somerton mentions about a minute prior. This also strips Anthy of what little agency she has throughout the story, usually exerted through messing with Utena or Nanami. (The fact that she repeatedly makes choices that contribute to her own abuse is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting parts of her character, and it's a shame that Summerton’s ‘reading’ of the story completely disregards that)

Additionally, he once again reads Utena ‘urging Anthy to think for herself” in the first arc as an unambiguously good move, and not as something critiqued in the show.

14:52 Summerton reads the Swords of hatred as symbolizing men’s hatred specifically. Again, I’m trying not to completely disregard differing interpretations to a show like Utena, but this feels very simplistic, especially considering the harm we see aimed towards Anthy by other women

16:42 Here he claims that his reading of the story seems to be “vastly different” from the bulk of Utena discourse. What is this reading? That the show shouldn’t be read literally. Or, in his words, “[we can interpret] Revolutionary Girl Utena as a deeply allegorical and symbolic story about the struggles of coming of age amidst widespread institutional corruption in a high school and which describes a passive culture of inaction in regard to brazen instances of domestic exploitation in which there is not only a question about the caporeality of the events transpiring but also which events can be taken for granted and which events are meant to signify abstract sociological institutions.” The idea that he believes this is in any way a new reading of the material honestly baffles me.

Part 3: Part 2

17:48 through 18:50 differently quotes the Wikipedia article for postmodernism. He even makes a joke at 17:55 about Wikipedia. Please kill me. 

The first three themes he lists at 19:11 are just the three main themes listed on the Revolutionary Girl Utena Wikipedia page. What was that about a “vastly different” reading, James?

You’re gonna have to take my word for it, but this section is so short because it's just him talking about the various ways the story can’t be taken literally. He does, ironically, call this a hot take.

Part 4: Part 3

Here’s where the reading falls apart folks

At 23:15, he states that some things in Utena are allegorically coded, while others are to be taken literally. This is true. However, he seems to take this to mean that some parts of the show are Strictly Literal, while others are Strictly Allegorical for things going on in the Literal World. 

This is apparently why he prefers the Anime to the Movie, where there basically is no separation between the Literal and Allegorical

This take is bizarre to me for several reasons, but here is my favorite. At several points, he mentions how Revolutionary Girl Utena is a work of Magical Realism. Magical Realism is literally defined by its blending of the “literal” and “allegorical”, the mix of fantastical elements in a mundane, realistic setting. This idea of the impossibility of a blurred line, that Utena must either have lore where the magic is all real and means nothing, or dedicated allegory segments quarantined from the rest of the story, is contrary to the very idea of Magical Realism.

I can’t help but wonder if Somerton took his mentions of Magical realism from a previous work, due to how little it is consistent with his final argument. Either way, this section suggests a great lack of creativity in his analysis, a shame for such a creative work.

24:36: Shiori slander, for those who care

After this he gets really worked up about people assuming symbolism in everything, even when the author ‘doesn’t make it clear something is symbolic’. He shuts down a reading of a shot in the Lord of the Rings. Miley Cyrus is there? Very The Curtains Were Blue of him. 

28:22 Claims that Wakaba is the key to telling where the Strictly Literal segments end and the Strictly Allegorical segments begin. He states that, under this lens, deeply personal moments of character suffering such as all of the sexual abuse and Anthy’s suicide attempt (which he literally cites) should be read as symbolic and be “approached with uncertainty rather than confusion”. (28:24-29:13)

This also somewhat falls apart when you consider Wakaba is the jeep in the movie's car chase

And then he rants about people not liking his Attack on Titan video for a bit. Since its potential symbolism also doesn't follow hard enough rules to be symbolism. Once again, the separation of “fact vs allegory” I haven’t watched AOT, so that's all I’ll say.

Part 5: Part 4

Thank god this part is short. Much like Dios’ on-screen presence.

32:55 Makes the extremely bold claim that Dios is not Akio. As in, never even became Akio. because Dios is Strictly Allegorical.

Just to be a pedant, this is pretty explicitly disproven in the show

Confusingly, both earlier and later he will address these two as the same character. 

33:04 he also explains the root of Akio’s name in a tone that suggests this is supplemental information and not like. Literally something he explains out loud in the show?

Part 6: Part 5

This section is nearly entirely about Akio Ohtori. I would like to note that him and Dios are the only characters with dedicated segments.

38:30 The part where he states that Dios gets his powers from deflowering women.

38:46 Claims, once again, that Akio’s abuse of Anthy “may not be literal”. 

38:59 “the instance of exploitation here is used because assault has deep roots as indicating that akio's gender is the source of his imbalance”  THE ASSAULT IS ABOUT AKIO NOW???

39:45 Bad Anthy take #2: “Anthy’s conformity to the Rose bride is based around the fact that she feels good being subservient because this is the only thing in her life that has ever brought her any kind of positive reward”. This is a direct quote. Anyway, I can’t think of any instances in the show where Anthy’s subservience gives her a positive reward, except maybe when she’s intentionally using it to manipulate others. As for her feeling good being the rose bride. She tries to commit suicide. Dude.

Side tangent, but isn’t this exactly what Akio says during the final 2 episodes? That Anthy enjoys being a witch? Is the main villain, who consistently says things during that very episode that are blatantly false, our source of information for this take? I guess so, since this is the dedicated Akio section.

At 40:20 he decides to introduce the concept of Anthy, Akio, and Utena as stand-ins for wider concepts, which is antithetical to his approach in analysis beforehand

Part 7: Part 6

42:40 he finally acknowledges that he’s been spending too much time talking about Akio, and literally no time on characters like Nanami

46:10 states that Utena’s exclusive motivation “is to protect Anthy from the predatorial intentions of the other dualists”, which disregards the fact, which she states herself, that she was largely participating in the duels and protecting Anthy to feel like a prince

48:04 The part where he says that Akio has ‘chaotic Bi vibes’ in regards to him sleeping with Touga, who is 17 and implied to be a long-term victim

Part 8: Part 7

54:01: His concluding point is that Utena was the real prince all along. 

In true Somerton fashion, the video then ends over a scrolling wall of patrons, with not a single citation in sight.

[leftneb]

There is Something Seriously Wrong with this Logo..... Chapter Two

So. Lots of you have seen this post by my dear partner ( @lailau7904 ) in which the Williams F1 design team get absolutely torn to bits. In the case you haven't read it yet I highly recommend you do because a) it's really fucking funny and b) it makes what I'm about to tell you even funnier. Though you don't have to, this post touches on entirely different things still regarding this one goddamn logo.

The original post starts like this:

Innocent enough, we made an assumption in good faith that the logo displayed on the Wikipedia page would be the same one as the official version used by Williams. Buckle the fuck up because I'm about to tell you why that was the worst mistake we could have made.

Please. Please I beg of you keep reading this took YEARS off our lifespans. Like the original post was fun and all but it was merely the top of the iceberg. If this were an hbomberguy video this would be the part where he reveals that the background was a greenscreen the whole time. More below the cut!!! :333

The Truth

Already after only a few hours after hitting "post" on the dissection, people started pointing out to us that we'd missed an absolutely crucial detail on the Wikimedia page we got the logo from, pay careful attention:

See THIS?

Yeah this means that that image is not, and never was, the official logo of Williams. All along it had been the work of a Wikipedia user by the name of Juanchocarbonero. Here you can even see the (admittedly painful) history of the file as provided by Wikimedia, this image was uploaded all the way back in 2016, it even underwent an update when the team changed their colour scheme to a lighter blue without getting fucking fixed.

But to me the absolutely most painful part about this page is the "File Usage" section. Which gives you a quick preview of just how deep the goddamn disease that is this piece of graphic design sin really spreads.

And just to clarify: the official version of the logo used by Williams on merch etc is perfectly fine. It's a nice piece of graphic design. I still quite like it. But the story doesn't end there. Not even close.

Consequences

When you look up "williams logo" on Google the image provided by Wikimedia the very first result that pops up, if you're looking for a high-quality .png of this logo that, logically, is what you'll end up using. And I mean, why wouldn't you? What reason do you have not to use it? As long as you don't look to close (oops) it's a perfectly fine, high-definition, clean and transparent image of the logo! No shit people are going to use it!

But this raises a question: Why IS it the most widespread version of the logo? That's fucking weird isn't it? Surely if the actual logo used on ex.: the official Williams F1 website (which, again, is perfectly fucking fine) was available they would've just used that, right?

Now. Small problem. If you want you can go ahead and open whatever search engine you use, if you do that I'm gonna need you to type in "Williams logo" into the search bar, and just try finding a picture that is

of the actual official logo (you can tell the bootleg from the real thing by checking if the middle segment of the W has spiky ends or flat ones. We're looking for flat ones here)

high quality (no pixels or blurring visible to the naked eye)

a transparent png (none of that chequered background bullshit)

NOT a logo with any words (such as: Williams or Racing) visible in it. those don't count.

If you didn't feel like doing any of that, I'll just tell you the answer: you fucking can't. Nothing like that EXISTS. The closest I could get are these two, both of which are mid to ass quality, so they don't count either.

No sensible individual is going to scroll google search results for 5 minutes straight just so they can use a 200x200 image, especially when they think a perfect alternative is right there.

I even found several recoloured versions of the diseased logo, including one as a sticker on Redbubble! Fuck me that's a horrible sight!

The Search

Because I wrote the previous paragrahps after we'd figured out exactly what had happened, you might be under the impression that by this point in trying to answer the question "Why the fuck is that image on Wikipedia instead of, idk, the real fucking thing?" we'd at least established the existence of said "real Williams F1 logo". You'd be wrong, because for somewhere around 24 hours after we'd made the initial, horrifying discovery of just how fucked the Wikipedia version is, we genuinely could not tell if that was the official logo or not.

The ones displayed on their website weren't at all downloadable or even copyable, a non-ass quality of the damn thing just didn't seem to exist anywhere, so we didn't dare draw any conclusions. And we were still foolishly operating on the assumption that Wikipedia wouldn't just lie to us. (this is why your teachers hate it when you use it a source btw. like this is the ONE time it's actually been reasonable)

So, in the hopes of finding the offical Williams Racing logo, the non-scuffed one because clearly it exists, somewhere, we consulted an expert on Intellectual Property: my mother!

What this "consultation" actually roughly looked like was: we went on a walk and I started rambling about the Situation from Last Night before she cut me off and pulled up the website of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, aka the place they store all the Copyright information of like, everything.

BEHOLD:

(pictured; THE ACTUAL FUCKING LOGO I CANNOT BELIEVE IT'S EXISTED THIS WHOLE TIME)

Link to the actual real official legal document because goddamn this rabbithole just kept getting deeper so I like, have that now.

For refence, here is the official copyrighted version and the Wikimedia file overlayed on top of each other. As you can tell, it's disgusting. It's a poor, eyeballed imitation at best.

The copyrighted logo is horrifically low quality because, guess what, that image also isn't downloadable or copyable from the page. I really really cannot blame Juanchocarbonero for uploading his own version to Wikimedia because there legitimately does not exist a version of this logo that is freely available to the public. Like that goddamn abomiation is all we have. It's the effort that counts I guess.

My mother suggested that a possible reason for this could be avoiding the production of knockoff merch, or at least making it recognisable in case it is sold. Think about it, when your logo Doesn't Exist online, no one can use it without a license! It's kind of genius! I'm also about 99% sure they didn't orchestrate it so, it was good luck I guess?

interlude: How the FUCK does Copyright even work

I did immediately think to myself "we should REALLY fix the wikipedia version, like, stat" because I cannot in good conscience have this information available to me and not do anything with it, for the good of the people. However, this poses an issue: was the logo really not scuffed on purpose? Could it be that that version uploaded to Wikipedia isn't a 1:1 of the official logo because of copyrighting issues? To find out I had to look deeper, by comparing the official, website-available logos of various other F1 teams I came to conclusion that: [........................]

Yeah so I wrote that paragraph before actually checking for refences, but even after probably an hour of trying very hard to make sense of the copyright documents and copyright law in general we could not make sense of any of it. According to my mother (again, the closest we have to an expert, like she actually works with copyright in the context of companies but she's not specifically an IP expert. just to clarify) it's actually a lot worse for Wikipedia to have a falsified version of the Williams logo, than it would be to use the copyrighted version. This is because they're spreading misinformation by pretending that's the actual logo. And yet.

According to the Copyright Tag (the one on the top) in the Licensing section of the Wikimedia page for the thing pretending to be the Williams F1 logo, it's fine to use it because just a bunch of shapes. The thing is however, that it says that for pretty much every F1 team's logo, most of which are sourced straight from the official website. So this doesn't really mean anything tbh. According to our local expert (still my mother) it's fucking confusing. So I've decided to leave that at that.

update October 20th: as far as the Wikimedia pages on copyrighting tell me, uploading the official logo could, potentially, get me into serious legal trouble with Williams because of copyright laws. Which is still confusing because as said, every other team's logo is sitting uncontested on their respective Wikipedia pages. So basically we still don't know.

Okay. Backtrack. We forgot to ask something very important:

HOW?

HOW does one fuck up a perfectly fine logo THAT BAD.

WHY does one make their own scuffed tracejob and HOW does it end up like THAT. Clearly something must have gone horrifically wrong for it to end up like that.

I have a theory as to what might have happened:

It was either drawn or painted by hand, for a physical paintjob it's actually sort of impressively precise, but still objectively fucked. For a while I outright refused to believe that it could have been done in a digital program with the types of mistakes that were made, but you'll see this theory (partially) disproven later on so I retract it for now.

Operating on the assumption that it wasn't done digitally, a likely theory could be one involving a picture of scan of the paintjob. If the picture was taken at an angle or the logo itself was on a curved surface that COULD potentially explain the weird sort of slide everything has to it.

From then the picture might have been inserted into a digital art program, and the area of the logo might have been automatically selected using the magic wand tool, which could explain the weird growth at the top and that odd rounded off corner.

We also drew the conclusion that the file itself had been "tampered with" (aka cropped manually) by a human, because no computer would generate a resolution of 3356x2543 (you can that this is the original resolution on the Wikimedia page)

WAIT HOLD ON IS THAT IT?

The question of how the Fuck this guy managed to mess up the logo, and even more specifically why some edges were fine and some weren't (ant colony looking thing on the top left) bothered us so much that I at one point started just looking up "WIlliams logo" with the results filtered down to pre-2017 in an attempt to find when exactly the messed up logo was created. As if that would be any help.

Now what I definitely didn't expect to find was THIS

ENHANCE

Yes, you're seeing it right, THAT is the original 'Williams logo with the fucked up arm angles and lenghts'. Which PROVES that, contrary to our previous belief, Juancocarbonero was NOT the origin of the mistakes. Instead it was [checks notes] a DeviantArt user by the name of Nerdkid56?

The original DeviantArt post, which as of 9:47pm CET on the 13th of October 2024 I am about 90% sure is the actual first appearanace of the scuffed logo, is from May of 2015, which lines up well with the original upload date of the fucked up logo onto Wikipedia (November 2016). At the time that DeviantArt post was almost the only source for the logo.

And in the case you needed any convincing that those two logos are the same, here they are overlayed. You may notice that it's one shape (excluding the rounded corner which isn't visible at this resolution.)

This discovery is essential to understanding why the current scuffed version is the way it is. You might remember our confusion about the way some edges are fine while some are attempting to leave the image, the whole thing is a weird Frankensteinian amalgamation of vectors and magic wand mistakes. With this knowledge we can now assume that the mistakes happened in 2 layers:

Nerdkid56: likely just eyeballed the proportions. I'd guess he drew one arm before the other and flipped it around without really checking the angles. Also didn't give a shit about whether the arms lined up with the base or not. Legitimately bad design made in a digital program.

Juancocarbonero: why he used the scuffed W logo instead of the normal ones that were also perfectly accessible by 1 goddamn Google search is a mistery. HOW he even got access to it is another question I do not think we'll have answers to. And I've already explained some of the things we think may be responsible for the uneveness and bumps. Point is he fucked it up even more.

My theory for why Juanchocarbonero used the scuffed version instead of any other available picture goes like this: it was the only png he could find. Practically every other search result for "Williams Logo" that predates 2017 is a jpeg or absolute ass quality (sometimes both for good measure) so, despite it's flaws, Nedkid56's trace of it could have been the best option available at the time (the quality is actually very very good since it's a vector image, and I guess our friend Juanchocarbonero doesn't have an eye for design considering he didn't notice uhm, everything that is wrong with that model.)

Conclusion

The only way to right these wrongs is to go back, to the very beggining of this saga. Wikipedia. Williams I'm so sorry for what you've had to endure. I know what I have to do now. When I eventually make a proper vector image of the official logo and upload it to Wikimedia it'll all be over. And I WILL do it (but not rn this has already robbed me of like 3 whole days of my life. soon)

All of this is, admittedly inconsequental, but also absolutely fucking hilarious. Like imagine. you. one single guy, you make ONE mistake in a silly little "tracing this logo" project because you couldn't be arsed to check the angles of a silly little W. And some other guy, who you likely don't even know, over a whole ass year later, takes your flawed piece of design, makes it even worse somehow and uploads it to a site from which your little tiny innocent mistake becomes the most widespread version of a logo used by an actual real company worth over 700 Million US Dollars. HOW. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN. WHY HAS NO ONE FIXED THIS??? IT'S BEEN 9 YEARS

Just to give you a final look on just how widespread this plague is, here are some examples of media the fucked up version of the logo is featured in:

this Mr V's Garage video (the original reason we started this conversation in the first place)

the thumbnails of these two videos by Tommo, this one by FP1Will, and this one by RicksF1Addiction

such an amount of random places. likely fanmerch and fanart, and like, pretty much any place someone wanted to use the logo. it's everywhere. if you've ever had the Williams logo displayed in anything you've made I can guarantee you 99.9% chance you used the fucked version

and late thank you to everyone ( @bumblewyn @mid-nighttiger @vro0m @lemonsgovroom @mikraas @leclerced fucking hell I kept needing to add people to this list because compiling all of this took absurdly long) who pointed out our misconception in the reblogs of the original post and contributed to us actually looking into this further. and sorry to everyone for accidentally spreading misinformation lmao (it's too funny not to have been worth it tho) (ALSO it's not really our fault is it)

and to keep the tradition of ending on a live discord reaction:

[hotvintagepoll]

Propaganda

Dolores del Río (Flying Down to Rio, Flor silvestre)—to begin with, dolores is so RADIANTLY BEAUTIFUL, even more so in action then in images, its like she emits a literal glow. marlene dietrich (a close friend and rumored lover) considered her "the most beautiful woman who ever set foot in hollywood". she was the first mexican actress to become a major success in hollywood, rising to fame in the silent era and becoming an influential icon of beauty and glamor in the art deco age, though she was not thrilled with the exoticizing parts often pushed on her. in the mid 1940s having tired of the controlling hollywood studio system she returned to mexico, saying "I wish to choose my own stories, my own director and cameraman. I can accomplish this better in mexico", and proceeded to become a pivotal figure in the golden age of mexican cinema, making a string of masterpieces with directir emilio fernández and cinematographer gabriel figueroa. i love this anecdote about the insane art deco mansion she and her then-husband cedric gibbons lived in in the 30s, as related by david niven: "Dolores had a large sunny room on the first floor containing a huge and inviting bed. Gibbons lived in comparative squalor in a small room immediately below. The only connection between these rooms was by way of a stepladder, which could be lowered only when a trapdoor in the floor of Dolores room had been raised. There was a long stick with which, we conjectured, he signaled his intention or hopes by rapping out signals on the floor of his wife’s bedchamber." heres a pinterest album with a billion hot pictures of her

Fay Wray (King Kong)— the original scream queen!! she started acting in silent comedies as a teenager and got her first big break when erich von stroheim cast her as the lead in the wedding march. her career started to take off starring in silent movies at paramount, and she survived the transition to sound smoothly - josef von sternberg’s weird proto-noir thunderbolt was one of her first sound films. she began to make horror movies in the early 1930s, such as doctor x and mystery of the wax museum, both filmed in beautiful two-strip technicolor (which looked like this if you're curious. i just think it's neat!), as well as the vampire bat, the most dangerous game, and of course the boy himself, king kong. a little on how she worked with her most famous costar: “Although Kong appeared huge, the full figure was a model covered with rabbit hair, standing only 18 inches tall, that was filmed one frame at a time by stop-motion photography artist Willis O'Brien and his crew. The 5ft 3in Wray only knew one part of the ape's body when she was grasped in an articulated 8ft long hand. Hence the title of her 1989 autobiography, On The Other Hand. ‘I would stand on the floor,’ she recalled, ‘and they would bring this arm down and cinch it around my waist, then pull me up in the air. Every time I moved, one of the fingers would loosen, so it would look like I was trying to get away. Actually, I was trying not to slip through his hand.’” (link)

This is round 2 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Dolores del Rio:

There's so much! She started in Silent films and successfully transitioned to sound, She is the first woman to wear a two piece swimsuit on screen & popularized the bikini!, She transitioned back to Mexican Cinema in the late 1940s and was a leading lady of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema including staring in Maria Candelaria--the first Mexican film to win the palm d'Or at Cannes. She was literally studied for her beauty & was considered a beauty ideal in both the USA & Mexico--there's a whole section on her Wikipedia page about how beautiful everyone thinks she was. She never actually had a feud with any of the female stars she was rumored to feud with despite the fact that press & Hollywood culture attempted to pain them in competition... She remained a leader in Mexican theater & Cinema through her own production company. Mexican painter Diego Rivera: "The most beautiful, the most gorgeous of the west, east, north and south. I'm in love with her as 40 million Mexicans and 120 million Americans who can't be wrong" (quote source: Wikipedia)

*fan self* Leading actress in silents and early Hollywood. Lover of Orson Welles until she got fed up with him, friend of Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. When she got tired of Hollywood executives typecasting her as a stereotypical spitfire (and trying to force her to feud with Lupe Velez as a publicity stunt), she ditched Hollywood and became a major star of Mexican cinema, where she got to play rounded characters

Had a career in American cinema in the 20s and 30s and considered one of the most important figures in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema (30s to 50s).

Marlene Dietrich said Dolores was the most beautiful woman to set foot in Hollywood

Joan Crawford: "Dolores became, and remains, as one of the most beautiful stars in the world."

One of the few Latin American women working in the Hollywood industry to make it big not just in hre home country but internationally. In 1931, Photoplay magazine declared that Mexican film actress Dolores del Rio had the "best figure in Hollywood." (which I know not necessarily a good barometer) but! it shows that many people looked at her for her beauty and sought to emulate her. Famous for her years-long love affair with actor and director Orson Welles, who was 10 years her junior if that's anything.

We need more hispanic representation in this!! Del Río is one of the most important actresses of her time as she was one of the first Mexican movie stars to break through to Hollywood! She’s unbelievably sexy and an absolute icon. Thank you :)

Fay Wray:

Actress prominently known for starring in horror, she was one of cinema's original "scream queens". She knocks it out of the park whenever she's with the horror genre, bringing a depth and likability to characters that would other be flat and boring characters.

An early scream queen, name me another woman who could look so beautiful while so disheveled and scared for her life

She was name-dropped not once but TWICE in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. She's arguably the original Scream Queen.

[cat-in-a-mech-suit]

Transmasculinity Throughout Time: Dr James Barry

Part 2! Here we go. James Barry was the first European doctor to successfully perform a C section where both the mother and child survived, which is cool to me because I was born via C section. He was born in 1789, but lied that he was younger on documents in order to pass - people described him as young looking and soft featured with a boyish voice, but never questioned in his gender. Despite adamantly stating he was a man for his whole adult life and only being revealed as transgender after death, he is still referred to as a “a woman ahead of her time” in the Guardian in 2016 and argued to have only presented as a man to enter the male-dominated medical field. In his wikipedia page, he is only referred to by his last name, not he/him pronouns. This is another example of the transmasculine erasure done by cis feminist historians that I mentioned in my last post in this series. Instead of doing this, cis feminists, here is what you can do: accept and include transmasculine experiences as a part of feminist narratives, not in contradiction to them, and if you can’t do that, at least actually do some research on the women who were practicing medicine at the time, and acknowledge their accomplishments instead of stealing and erasing transmasculine history! To all students of history, and especially anyone who cares about queer/trans history: stop erasing trans men (and all trans and nonbinary people) and explaining us away. Come face to face with our existence. Can you do that?

Alright.

Barry was a British imperial surgeon. When he was 19, he expressed longing to be a soldier, and he later joined the British army. Eeh, I know. His official title quickly ascended to Colonel Medical Inspector. If it wasn’t for his privilege, his gender transgression would likely have not been so easily forgiven and explained away through infantilization and feminist narratives during and after his life. However, he still faced great challenges.

In his profession, he was unlike others because he spent time around and advocated for the most marginalized in society - prisoners, mentally ill, lepers, poor people, and enslaved people. He did this even though it made him vulnerable and eccentric to those around him. His bluntness and need to make change made him extremely challenged and unpopular among his fellow officers, and he survived on his professionalism and bravado alone, enduring an accusation of “conduct unbecoming of the character of an Officer and a Gentleman” for a clash with another surgeon, of which he was acquitted thereafter. He also got into a pistol duel and won against Captain Josias Cloete of the 21st Light Dragoons. Generally, he was described as both rude and unafraid to speak his mind, as well as sometimes overly polite, with a good bedside manner. People were confused by him because he didn’t fit into society, and they constantly speculated on his life and tried to diminish him and the advocacy that he did.

He was first appointed to his position and was able to keep it despite challenges to his authority because of his “close friendship” with the Governor, Lord Charles Somerset (we all know what close friendship means when historians say it). In 1824, he was slandered, put on trial, and investigated when someone said that they “detected Lord Charles buggering Dr Barry.” James Barry is an important historical example of transhomophobia. Unlike what TEHMs and their ilk believe, queer trans men in fact have been experiencing homophobia all this time. James Barry experienced the same homophobia as a cis gay man would at the time, with the additional pressure of being a trans man who had to pass as a cis man to live as himself: transhomophobia. As a queer trans man, thinking about what he must have gone through makes my stomach hurt.

In 1857, he was appointed to be the Inspector of Hospitals in Canada, and he made significant improvements to sanitation and care for prisoners and lepers during his short time in that position. He was forcibly resigned against his will after only two years, because of his supposed poor health.

Before he died of dysentery in 1865, he asked for his person to not be examined at all. His wishes were disobeyed. He was outed as trans and subsequently, his life was either erased or stolen from him and written as that of a woman. To avoid a scandal, all army records of him were locked for 100 years, until in 1958, a biography of him was written by a cis woman historian, who wrote about him as a woman pretending to be a man and erased his transness. Barry’s own doctor said after his death that “it was none of my business whether Dr. Barry was a male or a female” and suggested that he might have been intersex.

Interestingly, he was also known for an incident in which he scolded Florence Nightingale for poor sanitary practices, which she complained about after he died, saying he was “the most hardened creature I had ever met.”

[creativitycache]

Ok so according to the news articles Anonymous Sudan isn’t actually Sudanese but actually Russian agents pretending to be Sudanese Muslims to start shit with the goal of aligning Russia as “on our side”. Astroturfing a culture war.

Tbh idk why bother since -gestures broadly at American foreign politics for decades- but sure. Yeah. Let’s go with that.

And Russia has been aiming at AO3 for months apparently since AO3 didn’t remove teenage nsfw fics in Russian.

Ok. So. Um. Apparently Roskomnadzor/The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media has a long history of doing that, including targeting Russian Wikipedia because of their cannabis page.

Alright. Let’s keep rolling I guess.

So the end goal of Roskomnadzor is to censor the internet because they want control over what information can spread. And to do that they try to gain legitimacy/legality over “think of the children” pages. If they can censor Wikipedia for weed they can censor it for how to make Molotov Cocktails.

Ok…makes sense I guess…

So just looking at the “enforcement” section of Wikipedia it looks like to do that they block and if they can’t block they throttle and if they can’t throttle they fine and if they can’t fine they sue.

So what the fuck happened; some Russian office worker saw their squick & went full anti but thought it would be more politic to pretend to be Extremist Sudanese Muslim Hackers? Some 30 year old office Harry Potter stan said “Shit we can’t take on Ukraine & AO3 at the same time”?

[idontknowreallywhy]

WIP-what-on-earth-have-I-got-myself-into-here…

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥���🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Ash had had access to both of their files for a long while… the visible parts anyway. The extensive redactions? Not so much. Well… now his new GDF rank meant he could get past those too but he hadn’t dared. Partly because he wasn’t sure it was a can of worms he was ready to face. Not now he had Scott back after so long.

The other big reason he’d resisted was because they’d know. The decryption keys were personalised… they’d know both who and when. And three weeks into the new job was a little early to risk getting fired.

Or worse. Knowing them… probably worse.

Tonight though, hours of the puffed up, clueless idiots squabbling about the new outbreak had forced him to relive so many parts of his experience ten years before that the phantom pain was almost unbearable. He rubbed at his lower leg, trying to fool his mind into thinking he was comforting the missing arm, soothing the nerves that tormented him but that he could never reach.

Scott hadn’t lost anything visible. But Ash knew they’d stolen a no less crippling part of him too. He’d watched his friend from a distance, scratching at a a similar untouchable itch in so many subtle ways. How much of his friend’s confident, controlled outward demeanour was as synthetic as the fingertips Ash realised he was rapping against the desktop? He flattened his hand, grimacing at the supposedly-unnoticeable delay between thought and movement that had rewritten his future.

Ash knew what his friend had lost. And he couldn’t help feel responsible - he should have been there. He’d spent countless sleepless nights trying to figure out how he could have prevented it all, if he’d spotted the clumsy sabotage as he should have, swapped with another jet… maybe he could have got there in time. Got him out.

Instead he’d just sat there shaking and bleeding and sobbing and helpless as first Scott and then Val’s radios had cut out. If Ash hadn’t passed out from the shock of his injury perhaps he could have got her out at least…

No. They’d got it right in her jet. She wouldn’t have known a thing.

EHZ007 was all over Scott’s file. And each time the reference was used, the following sections were blacked out. If he knew why, maybe he might get closer to finding out what had happened and why.

At the very least he might be able to reach out to his friend, to help him find closure. If he knew better what had occurred between that last desperate shout over the radio and the day that the gaunt face of his best friend had asked him to leave the ranch and never return.

It would look highly suspicious if the first Top-Secret graded file he accessed post-promotion was that of his old wingman. They were clueless in some ways, but not in all of them.

Giles, though. He looked at a lot of the TS material just for fun and bragging rights, if his boasting was to be believed. And this evening Ash had watched the man unlock his work phone with 1234. Someone that uncreative with passcodes might just have used the same one for everything…

Officer ID, rank code, personal pin, age in days. The man’s date of birth was on his Wikipedia page and so… Ash now had everything he needed.

Except the courage. He’d been staring at the encryption alert box for over an hour. His shoulder ached.

He disconnected his prosthetic and dumped it on the table before snatching up the scotch bottle and refilling his glass.

He typed in the number.

PASSCODE ERROR.

He swore and retyped it.

No! The man had clearly used another pin. Damn.

He drained the glass and dropped his head to the desk. It was probably just as well.

Out in the hallway his great grandmother’s clock chimed once.

It was later than he thought.

It was… tomorrow.

He sat up, cursing his own idiocy and typed the code again, increasing the last digit by one. The screen refreshed and the blacked out sections disappeared.

He was in.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[canmom]

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, 000-012

Or, what if that mural was the heart of a web serial.

I'm reading The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, thanks largely to the enthusiasm of @azdoine and @lukore on my dash over the last few months.

This is absolutely not gonna be a liveblog in the level of detail of the great Umineko liveblog project. Rather I'm gonna be aiming at something like the comics comints series or those occasional posts on anime. Or indeed what I wrote about Worth The Candle last year. I must create a robot whose purpose is to watch to see if I start writing detailed plot summaries and hit me with a stick labelled 'remember you have a job now'.

That outta the way, let's talk flower!

No, not that flower!

I will start with an anecdote. When I was at university, I ended up attending a talk by court alchemist senescence researcher Aubrey de Grey, who at that time did not yet have a 'sexual harassment allegations' section on his Wikipedia page. The main thing that struck me at the time was his rather spectacularly long beard. But I did listen to his talk about ending aging.

de Grey's schtick is that he, like many people in the transhumanist milieu, believes that medical technology is on the cusp of being able to prevent aging sufficiently well to prolong human lifespans more or less indefinitely. He believes that the different processes of aging can be understood in terms of various forms of accumulating cellular 'damage', and that these will begin to be addressed within present human lifespans, buying time for further advancements - so that (paraphrasing from memory) 'the first immortals have already been born'. He has some pretty graphs to demonstrate this point.

At that talk, one of the audience members asked de Grey the (in my view) very obvious question about whether access to this technology would be distributed unevenly, creating in effect an immortal ruling class. de Grey scoffed at this, saying he always gets this question, and basically he didn't think it would be a big deal. I forget his exact words, but he seemed to assume the tech would trickle down sooner or later, and this was no reason not to pursue it.

I'm sure de Grey is just as tired of being reminded of how unbalanced access to medical technology is in our current world, or the differences in average life expectancy between countries.

So, I was very strongly reminded of de Grey as The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere laid out its major thematic concerns and characters. I was also put in mind of many online arguments in the transhumanist milieu about whether it would be a good thing, in principle, to end death.

In particular, of course, comes to mind transhumanist Nick Bostrom's short story The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, in which death is likened to a huge dragon that demands to be fed trains full of humans every day. In the story, humanity's scientists secretly build a giant gun to kill the dragon. Naturally, despite all the doubters and naysayers who foolishly feel obliged to justify the existence of the dragon, the gun works. Bostrom's imagery is incredibly heavy-handed (particularly the trains à la Auschwitz), but just in case you didn't get it, he also spells out the moral explicit at the end: basically, every day not spent putting resources to abolishing death is adding up more and more bodies to the pile of people who don't get to be immortal.

So far, Flower seems to be shaping up to be a critical intervention into that milieu, with a much more grounded view of death and a much stronger model of society - admittedly not a high bar but it's going good so far!

At the time of writing this commentary, I have read the prologue and first two six-chapter arcs, namely Mankind's Shining Future (1-6) and Pilgrimage to the Deep (7-12).

the general shape of things

We are introduced - from the perspective of sardonic, introverted Su, who is going to be the protagonist of our time loop - to a group of brilliant young medical wizards, who have just been invited to visit the headquarters of a secret society whose mission is precisely to abolish death. Su's grandfather was some kind of controversial luminary who was expelled this organisation, and he also did something to her, which is giving her some kind of ulterior motive to find her way into this society.

We know pretty much from the outset that this is a time loop scenario: Su has been explicitly given the opportunity to replay the scenario in the hopes of find an alternative outcome, by some kind of presently mysterious parties. This first part is the 'control' loop, i.e. probably more or less how things went down 'originally'.

I believe Umineko is an explicit inspiration for this story, and the influence is pretty evident. But parallels with the Locked Tomb series, especially Gideon the Ninth, are also quite noticeable. @lukore spoke of it as the STEM to Locked Tomb's humanities, and I can already kinda see it, although we haven't got into the real meat of the scenario yet. This story began serialisation four years ago, making the two works roughly contemporary. The latest chapter was published in the last couple of weeks - no idea if I've arrived just in time for the ending!

Stylistically, it's generally pretty heavy on dialogue and long asides. The characters are a bunch of mega nerds who love to have big philosophical and political discussions, but their dynamics are well enough realised and their dynamics clear enough that it can double up as naturalistic characterisation. So far, the discussions have been interesting to read.

Below I'm going to make some notes and comments on various elements of the setting and story. In a followup post (because it got too long) I'm going to talk a lot about entropy. Perhaps you will find this interesting!

the world

The first few chapters are dedicated pretty hard to exposition. We find ourselves in a distant-future setting - one in which it seems reality has totally collapsed and then been rebuilt using magic, creating a somewhat oddball universe which lacks things like the element iron, and also electromagnetism. This seems like it would have pretty severe implications for just about everything!

However, the 'ironworkers' have, after producing a series of trial and error 'lower planes' that didn't quite get it right, landed on a fairly close approximation of how things used to be on the old world. Though by 'fairly close approximation' I mean like... it's a bowl-shaped world and the sun and stars are artificial lanterns. But still, there are humans, and they seem to work more or less like we're used to humans working, apart from the whole 'magic' thing.

So, an alt-physics setting. Praise Aealacreatrananda, I love that shit.

While electromagnetism might be out, the more abstract physical principles like thermodynamics still apply, and the humans of this universe have managed to find analogues to a number of things in our world. Instead of computers, they have 'logic engines' which run on magic. Horses seem to have made it in, so we get delightful blends of historical and futuristic concepts like a self-driving computer-controlled horse-drawn carriage taxi.

The biggest difference is of course that in this setting, magic - more on that in a bit - has solved most medical problems and humans routinely live to around 500. The setting is ostensibly a semi-post-scarcity one, although a form of money exists in 'luxury debt', which can be exchanged for things like taxi rides, café food and trips on the space elevator.

Politically, we are told that the world has enjoyed a few hundred years of general peace, broken in living memory by a revolution which put an end to a regime of magical secrecy. There are lots of countries, and an alliance overseeing them.

There's a few other oddities in this world. Something called a 'prosognostic event' can happen if you see someone who has the same face as you, and whatever this is, it's bad enough news that everyone is constantly reminded to veil their faces in public and there's some kind of infant 'distinction treatment' to mitigate the risk. Given that, in the regular world, nothing particularly bad would happen if you ran into a long-lost identical twin, it suggest there is probably something a little fucky about how humans work in this world!

There's evidently a fair bit of effort put into the worldbuilding of fictional countries and historical periods. The important elements seem to be roughly along the lines of:

our world is currently in what they call the 'old kingdoms' period, which is poorly remembered;

next up comes an 'imperial' period of high transhumanist shenanigans in which society was ruled by 'gerontocrats' who got exclusive access to the longevity treatment, but this all somehow led to a huge disaster which destroyed og earth;

the survivors built the Mimikos where humanity currently lives using magic and created some kind of huge iron spike that holds the universe together; there was subsequently a 'fundamentalist' period in which a strict cutoff point was put on human lifespans and a lot of the wackier magic was banned;

now we're onto a new era of openness following a small revolution, while the major political structures remain largely intact.

Writing a far-future setting is hard, because trying to deal with the weight of history without the story getting bogged down with worldbuilding details is a fiddly line to walk. The Dying Earth series of Jack Vance might be a relevant point of comparison. Vance leaves the historical details vague - there are endless old kingdoms and strange artefacts and micro-societies for Cugel and co. to stumble on. Far more important than the specifics of history is establishing the vibe of a world that's seen an unimaginable amount of events layered on top of each other and is honestly a bit tired.

Flower makes things a bit more concrete and generally manages to make this work decently well. I do appreciate the asides where Su talks about, for example, the different architectural styles that layer up to make a place, or the way a technique has been refined. It establishes both that Su is the kind of person to notice this sort of thing, and also helps the world feel lived-in.

the names

The story doesn't do a lot with language. The story is written in English, and the narration will occasionally make reference to how things are phrased (e.g. how divination predates the suffix -mancy). We can probably make the standard assumption that this is all translated from $future_language, with the notional translator making a suitable substitution of whatever linguistic forms exist in that language.

The characters are named in a variety of languages. Our main character's full name is Utsushikome of Fusai. We're told that this is "an old name from Kutuy, and means something like 'mysterious child'" - so Kutuyan is one of the languages spoken in this world. It's blatantly got the same phonotactics as Japanese, and indeed if I search up 'Utsushikome', I find an obscure historical figure called Utsushikome-no-Mikoto, wife of the Emperor Kōgen; she has no article on English Wikipedia, but she does have a brief one on Japanese wiki. Just as Su says about Kutuyan, 'Utsushikome' is written 欝色謎 in Japanese, but it relies on archaic readings of those characters and wouldn't read that way in modern Japanese. We could perhaps assume a good old translation convention is in effect where Kutuyan is replaced with Japanese.

A lot of characters have Greek names, as do various setting elements. One exception is Kamrusepa, or Kam, who is named for an ancient goddess of medicine worshipped by the Hittites and Luwians. I know basically fuck all about Hittites and Luwians but it's a cool little nod to mythology, and it won't be the only one!

I'll run down a list of characters and my comments about them in a bit. But many are named after gods or other mythological figures.

the magic

Most of the divergences come from magic existing. Certain humans are 'arcanists', who are able to use the 'Power', which is a magic system with a highly computational flavour. Thanks to Su's expositional asides, we know that an incantation is something like a short program written in cuneiform with the ability to gather information, perform maths, and manipulate particles. An example we are given is a spell called "entropy-denying", which is the following string of cuneiform:

"…(𒌍𒌷𒀭)(𒌍𒁁𒀭)𒅥𒌈𒆜𒈣𒂠, 𒋢𒀀𒅆𒌫𒃶,𒈬𒊹."

We're told that spells always start with phrases ending in 𒀭, and end in 𒊹. Beyond that, I'm not sure how far the author has actually worked out the syntax of this magic system - probably not in too much detail! Seems like the kind of thing it's better to leave vague, but also she seems like kind of nerd who would (positive). It's conceptually a reasonable magic system for a world where more or less realistic physics applies.

The use of unusual scripts for a magic system isn't that unusual - the old European occultists who wrote the [Lesser] Key of Solomon loved to write on their magic circles in Hebrew, and in modern times we could mention Yoko Taro's signature use of the Celestial Alphabet for example - but the specific use of cuneiform here seems like it might be a little more significant, because a little later in the story the characters encounter a mural depicting The Epic of Gilgamesh, which of course was recorded on cuneiform tablets. Remains to be seen exactly what these allusions will mean!

The magic system is divided into various disciplines defined by the different ways they approach doing magic, with the disciplines breaking down broadly along the same lines as the modern scientific disciplines. For example, our protagonist is a thanatomancer ("necromancer" having become unfashionable), which is the discipline dealing with death; she's specifically an entropic thanatomancer, distinguished by their framework viewing death as the cessation of processes.

Magic relies on an energy that they refer to as 'eris' (unknown relation to the Greek goddess of strife and discord). We are told that eris must be carefully apportioned across the elements of a spell or shit blows up, that it can be stored, and it accumulates gradually enough that you don't want to be wasteful with it, but so far given little information about where it comes from.

Magic in this story generally seems to act as a kind of 'sufficiently advanced technology'. It's very rules-based, and used for a lot of mundane ends like operating computers or transport. Advancement in magic is something like a combination of basic research and software development. But the thing that makes it a magic system and not merely alt-physics is that it's at least a little bit personal: it must be invoked by an individual, and only certain people can operate the magic. We're told a little about how wizards are privileged in some societies, indoctrinated in social utility in others, and expected to be inconspicuous in the present setting. It's not clear yet if you need some kind of special innate capacity to do the magic, or if it's just a matter of skill issue.

With one exception, our main characters are a gaggle of wizards, and exceptionally skilled students at that. They're at an elite institution, carrying high expectations, even if they are themselves fairly dismissive of the pomp and ceremony. They have grandiose plans: Kamrusepa in particular is the main voice of the 'death should be abolished' current.

the cast

We're entering a cloistered environment with high political stakes hanging off of it. Even if I hadn't already heard it described as a murder mystery, it would feel like someone will probably be murdered at some point, so lets round up our future suspects.

Su (Utsushikome) is our protagonist and first-person POV. She's telling this story in the first past tense, with a style calling to mind verbal narration; she'll occasionally allude to future events so we know for sure narrator!Su knows more than present!Su. She's got a sardonic streak and she likes long depressing antijokes, especially if the punchline is suicide. She will happily tell us she's a liar - so maybe her narration isn't entirely reliable, huh.

Su is more than a little judgemental; she doesn't particularly like a lot of her classmates, or people in general, and generally the first thing she'll tell you about a character is how well she gets on with them. She introduces the theme of 'wow death sucks' in the first paragraph, but she is, at least at this point, pessimistic that anyone will manage to do anything about it for good.

Her magical specialisation is entropic thanatomancy, roughly making processes go again after they working coherently.

Her name is a reference to an obscure Japanese empress, as discussed above.

Ran is Su's bestie from the same home country. She is generally pretty on the level. She likes romance novels and she is pretty sharp at analysing them. She will cheerfully team up with Su to do a bit or bait someone else when an argument gets going.

Her magical specialisation is Divination, which is sort of a more fundamental layer of magic, about gathering information by any means. In medicine it's super advanced diagnostics.

Her name is too short to pin down to a specific allusion. Could be one of a couple of disciple of Confucius such as Ran Geng, or a Norse goddess of the sea.

Kam (Kamrusepa) is the de facto class prez and spotlight lover. She's hardcore ideological, the story's main voice of the de Grey/Bostrom death-abolishing concept so far - I think she straight up calls someone a 'deathist' at some point. She loves to tell everyone what she thinks about everything, and getting the last word.

Her magical specialisation is Chronomancy, so time magic. It's described as secretive and byzantine, but also it can do stuff like (locally?) rewind time for about five minutes. No doubt it has something to do with the time loop.

As mentioned above, she's named after a fairly obscure ancient deity of healing and magic.

Theo (Theodoros) is a fairly minor character. He's scatterbrained and easily flustered, he has a similar background to our protagonist, and he's not great with people. His name is shared with a number of ancient Greek figures, so it's hard to narrow it down to one allusion. I don't think his magic school has been mentioned.

Ptolema is a cheery outgoing one, someone who Su dismisses as an airhead. And she is at least easy to bait into saying something ill-considered. Her specialisation is applying magic to surgery. As a character, she tends to act as a bit of a foil to the others. Bit of a valley girl thing going on.

'Ptolema' is presumably a feminised version of the renowned Greek philosopher Ptolemy.

Seth is the jock to Ptolema's prep, and our goth protag Su doesn't particularly like him either. ...lol maybe that's too flippant, I may be misapplying these US high school stereotypes. To be a little more precise then, he's pretty casual in demeanour, flirty, likes to play the clown. He specialises in Assistive Biomancy, which revolves around accelerating natural healing processes.

Seth is named for either the Egyptian god (domain: deserts, violence and foreigners) or an Abrahamic figure, the third son of Adam and Eve granted by God after the whole Caim killing Abel thing.

Ophelia is someone Su describes as 'traditionally feminine' - soft-spoken, demure etc. (Gender in this world appears to be constructed along broadly similar lines to ours). Indeed we get a fairly extended description of her appearance. Her specialisation is Alienist Biomancy, which means introducing foreign elements to healing (not entirely sure how that differs from the Golemancy mentioned later).

Ophelia is of course a major character in Shakespeare's Hamlet, best known for going mad and dying in a river.

Fang is the only nonbinary member of the class, noted as the most academically successful. They're not on the expedition, but the characters discuss them a little in their absence, so maybe they'll show up later. It seems like they have a bit of a rebellious streak. Their magical specialisation is not mentioned.

Fang is a regular ol' English word, but I gave it a search all the same and found there's an ancient Chinese alchemist of that name. She is the oldest recorded woman to do an alchemy in China, said to know how to turn mercury into silver.

Lilith is the teenaged prodigy in computers logic engines, and Mehit is her mother who accompanies her on the trip. They've got a big Maria and Rosa (of Umineko) dynamic going on, with Mehit constantly scolding Lilith and trying to get her to obey social norms, though in contrast to Maria, Lilith is a lot more standoffish and condescending to the rest of the gang. Lilith specialises in 'Golemancy', which means basically medical robotics - prosthetic limbs and such. She spends most of her time fiddling with her phone logic engine, and will generally tell anyone who talks to her that they're an idiot. Sort of a zoomer stereotype.

Lilith is named for the Abrahamic figure, the disobedient first wife of Adam who was banished and, according to some Jewish traditions, subsequently became a demon who attacks women at night. There may be some connection between Lilith and the lioness-headed Mesopotamian chimeric monster Lamashtu, which I mention because Mehit is an Egyptian and Nubian lion goddess.

'Golemancy' is probably playing on the popular fantasy idea of a 'golem' as a kind of magic robot, but given the Jewish allusion in Lilith's name here, I do wonder a little bit if it's going to touch on the Jewish stories of the Golem which inspired it - a protective figure with a specific religious dimension.

There are some other characters but they're not part of the main party on their way to the function, so I won't say much about them just yet. Also it's entirely possible I went and forgot an entire classmate or something, big whoops if so.

the events

In true Umineko tradition, the beginning of the story narrates in great detail how the protagonists make their way to the place where the plot is going to happen.

To be fair, there's a lot of groundwork to be laid here, and the characters' discussions do a lot to lay out the concerns of the story and sketch out the setting, not to mention establish the major character relations. A murder mystery takes a certain amount of setup after all! There's plenty of sci-fi colour to be had in the 'aetherbridge', which is a kind of space elevator that lifts you up to a high altitude teleporter network. (It's technically not teleportation but 'transposition', since teleportation magic also exists in the story, with different restrictions! But close enough for government work.)

They go to a huge space citadel, which is kind of a transport hub; some cloak and dagger shit happens to hide the route they must take to the mysterious secret organisation. They find a strange room with a missing floor and a mural of the Epic of Gilgamesh, albeit modified to render it cyclic. What does it meeaaaan?

The idea of a secret society of rationalists is one that dates back to the dawn of ratfic, in HPMOR. It was kinda dumb then, but it works a lot better here, where we're approaching the wizard circle from outside. The phrase 'Great Work' has already been dropped. I love that kind of alchemical shit so I'm well into finding out what these wizards are plotting.

the dying

A lot of the discussions revolve around the mechanics of death. Essentially the big problem for living forever is information decay. Simple cancers can be thwarted fairly easily with the magic techniques available, but more subtle genetic slippages start to emerge after the first few hundred years; later, after roughly the 500 year mark, a form of dementia becomes inevitable. It's this dementia in particular that the characters set their sights on curing.

One thing that is interesting to me is that, contra a lot of fantasy that deals with necromancy (notably the Locked Tomb series), there appears to be no notion of a soul in this world whatsoever. The body is all that there is. Indeed, despite all the occult allusions in the character names, there is very little in the way of religion for that matter. Even the 'fundamentalism' is about an idea of human biological continuity that shouldn't be messed with too much.

Su distinguishes three schools of thought on death, namely 'traditional', 'transformative' and 'entropic'. The 'traditional' form attempts to restore limited function - classic skeleton shit. 'Transformative' sees death as a process and uses dead tissues together with living in healing. Su's 'entropic' school broadens this 'process' view to consider death as any kind of loss of order - a flame going out as much as an organism dying. At the outset of the story, Su has discovered a 'negentropic' means to restore life to an organism, which she considers promising, even if for now it only works for fifteen minutes.

This is an interesting perspective, but the devil is in the details. Because processes such as life or flames, necessarily, result in a continuous increase in the thermodynamic entropy of the universe. And yet this idea of death-as-loss-of-order does make a kind of sense, at a certain level of abstraction.

Elaborating on this got rather too long for this post, and I think it can stand alone, so I'm going to extract it to a followup post.

the comments

As is probably evident by the length of this post, I am very intrigued by The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere. The setting is compelling, and it seems like it's got the willingness to bite at the chewy questions it raises instead of acting like it has all the answers, which is I think one of the most crucial elements for this kind of scifi. I like how unabashed it is at having its characters straight-up debate shit.

Of course, this all depends where they go with it. There's so many ways it could be headed at this point. I hear where it's going is 'dark yuri' and 'Umineko-inspired murder mystery', so that should be really juicy fun, but I do end up wondering what space that will leave to address the core theme it's laid out in these first few chapters.

Overall, if this and Worth the Candle are what modern ratfic is like, the genre is honestly in pretty good shape! Of course, I am reading very selectively. But this is scratching the itch of 'the thing I want out of science fiction', so I'm excited to see where the next 133 chapters will take me.

Though all that said, I ended up writing this post all day instead of reading any other chapters or working, so I may need to rein it in a bit.

[ryin-silverfish]

Went and made a rudimentary fix to Nezha's Wikipedia page, which has been irking me for a long, long time.

Since it's my first time editing, I'm probably messing up the citations, but at least the "Story" section is now a summary of Nezha's origin story in FSYY proper instead of the Nezha Conquers the Dragon King version.

If I had time to get a proper grasp on the editor, I'll probably add in some more stuff from his entry in SJSSDQ. For now, this will do.

[pulluppuddles]

scooby-doo thesis

sorry this took me so long to actually type up, i actually didnt expect several people to respond to that n yknow.. thesis writing takes time.. so.. yeah..

below the cut is 2700+ words of infodumping on scooby doo by urs truly 🫡🥺👉🏻👈🏻 enjoy at ur own risk..it got so long.. 😖

~background/credentials~

i grew up watching the original scooby doo where are you? series (fun blazie fact i got the complete og sd series for christmas one year as a kid but i found it under my parents bed on accident like mooooonths ahead of time when i was laying on their floor watching tv and i think i knew i shouldnt have seen it so i just managed to be quiet about until christmas and then went "ohhhh it was a christmas gift that makes sense" in my head on christmas when i got it and i dont think either of my parents know that to this day) as well as the early to mid-2000s what's new scooby doo series with everyone's favorite emo scooby band simple plan pls pay ur respects (sorry simple plan but if u didnt wanna be known as the scooby doo band u rly shouldnt have written such BANGERS SORRY !!) along with the '88-'91 series a pup named scooby doo and all of the movies we're abt to talk abt

as an older kid i've also watched the new scooby doo movies (the show lol) and the new scooby doo show and some of the scooby doo and scrappy doo show and the 13 ghosts series. the newer mystery incorporated series on cartoon network was rly cool!! way more like serious and the mystery lasted the entire series with complex storylines i thought it was really good tbh!! basically what im saying is if its animated from 1969 to 2010 ive probably seen it at least once but more likely like way more times then i could count im just a kid after all

ive seen the live action (the first two i know theres more now but i mean the ones from 2002 and 2004) but respectfully theyre irrelevant to me except that matthew lliard did such a good job playing shaggy that he took over after casey kasem and voiced shaggy in some of the newer animated movies and i think continues to voice shaggy in the animated movies to this day. pretty cool!! the reality is that i was just wayyyy too young to see the live action movies, didnt understand their humor as a literal baby and way too autistic to handle all this change. i also didnt like the implication that scooby is a cannabis fueled hallucination dont talk to me abt that ill cry. or that they made scrappy the villian i disagree, scrappy loves and admires his uncle scooby so much u take it baaaaack 33:

~defining~

im specifically talking about the animated television films and direct-to-video animated films up thru 2010 in this thesis.

~sources~

u wouldnt believe how many times ive gone to the list of scooby-doo media wikipedia page. i didnt count or anything but like ive been coming here for years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scooby-Doo_media

i dont wanna link every wikipedia page i used bc it started to get ridiculous so just know that i clicked thru on a lot of the movies from the list to their wikipedia pages for further info :pp

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iwao_Takamoto the section on iwao takamoto is all taken from this i have to include this link i essentially plagiarized :pp

~era 1~

the first era of scooby are the 4 animated tv films although the 4th is kinda in era 1.5 we'll get there. animated tv films mean that they aired on tv originally before getting any physical release, in contrast to the rest of the movies that went straight to dvd release and then also aired on tv (i think). the first three star shaggy scooby and scrappy, scooby's nephew.

the very first scooby movie is called scooby doo meets the boo brothers (n establishes shaggy as having an uncle who owned a southern plantation during the civil war HMMMM 👀 fun scooby fact there lol; he also has an uncle that owns a castle in europe in the whats new scooby doo series, the rogers family is truly diverse and extensive and also his dad is a cop in a pup named scooby doo lol) from 1987, followed almost exactly a year later by scooby doo and the ghoul school in october '88 which is followed about a month later by scooby doo and the reluctant werewolf in nov '88. these three movies are AWESOME and filled with puns so like rly i was doomed from the start raised on these movies to be a sarcastic lil shit heheh. ghoul school is my favorite from this era and is my favorite scooby ever maybe, it goes back and forth between monster of mexico. i rlyrly love ghoul school tho sibella is the biggest vibe ever i wanna be tannis getting taken care of by sibella so bad it hurts all my life annnnnnnnyway ive gotten off topic a bit.

now the 4th movie scooby doo in arabian nights in era 1.5 is different for a couple reasons that's why its sort of in its own era but it was still an animated tv film but it was released in 1994 and was an adaptation of one thousand and one nights. scrappy is also not in this one just shaggy and scooby and the humor is a little different but i actually just rewatched it yesterday and i forgot how good it is !! also shaggy dresses as a girl for the first time in movie form in this one besides the tutu scene in ghouls school i only noticed recently how often this occurs in this series i grew up with and have loved longer then anything other media and turned out to be trans HMMMM.

~era 2~

the second era also has four movies in it and were animated in japan by mook animation. frank welker is the only returning cast member voicing fred again but doesn't take over scooby yet. these movies star the traditional gang from the original series: fred, daphne, velma, shaggy and scooby. i put these in their own era bc they share characteristics from being made a unique animation studio from overseas. the gang have a style up-do and their attitudes are different. my partner puts it that they really lean into the meddling part and i have to agree. especially in zombie island they act like brats lol i'd try to suck their energy out also heh. also scooby hates cats in this era and doesnt understand that he's a dog despite these being previously established in the original series (scooby is friendly with cats and also knows hes a dog). also importantly different in this era is that the monsters are all real, not humans in masks.

the first movie from this era is scooby doo on zombie island from 1998, which is dedicated to the original voice of scooby don messick who died in 1997. this is my partners favorite scooby movie and the music is AWESOMEEEEE it ROCKS.

the witches ghost has awesome music too via the eco goth group the hex girls that DEFINITELY had nothing to do with me being a lil teenage lesbian (oh my god why r they so hot pls tell me why they made them so hot ????) and their music is fucking awesome and their pagan its p heckin cool i love the hex girls smmmm. it came out similarly like a year later in 1999.

in 2000 scooby doo and the alien invaders came out. this one is my least favorite of this era. its not bad !! its just.. not as good lol.

in 2001 scooby doo and the cyber chase came out n this one is my fav of this era, zombie island is my second and witches ghost i just want an entire movie of the hex girls im literally just watching it for the hex girls every time hahahahaha oh actually!! they brought the hex girls back in a couple episodes in the whats new scooby doo series that was a treat !! they're not quite as cool as the og movie hex girls tho but i rly dont know if u can be so i dont fault them !! dusk was always my fav with the green and the pigtails and the drums but i love them all !!

also super fun fact i learned while making sure her name is dusk (i was right btw its thorn dusk and luna ofc i was right 🥰) is that tim curry plays ben ravencroft in witches ghost which is FUNNY bc he plays the goblin king in 2008 which ive been watching recently so that means tim curry has a HISTORY with scooby and i love that SO MUCH hahaha. also mark hamill of luke skywalker fame voices snakebite scruggs in zombie island and tara strong of twilight princess from my little pony friendship is magic voices lena, she's credited with her maiden name. just some cool stuff. well i think its cool and its my thesis and ur reading it so u must be cool too 🥰

~era 3~

era 3 rly covers the rest of the movies but theres sub eras again if you'll bear with me just a lil longer.

scooby would return to movies in 2003 as the first solo animation project of joseph barbera, since william hanna died in 2001. this is the first time in the movies frank welker takes over as scooby since don messick died in '97. he starts this in the whats new scooby doo series that ran 2002-2006 and era 3's animation style, personalities and humor are all much more similar to whats new scooby doo then era 2's.

era 3.1 consists of 2003's legend of the vampire and monster of mexico, the last two movies to reunite the original series cast. monster of mexico is my other favorite scooby movie although i am forever cursed with learning at a young age that el chupacabra is "like Mexico's version of the bigfoot" from this movie and having to always remember that that's not true lol. the bad guy in this movie is the rich white man trying to steal from the Mexican family and town. good stuff. i like this one a lot. BANGERS!!!!!! if there's something that stays with scooby throughout all these years it's the MUUUUSIC !!!!! legend of the vampire is also cool and GUESS WHO'S BACK MY GIIIIRRRRLLLSSSS the hex girls are back in this one with the same VAs as witches ghost. i also found that they were in mystery incorporated when making sure they were in legend of the vampire!! truly icons i love them sm im so gaaaayyyyyy !!

era 3.2 starts with 2004's loch ness monster and has the voice cast of what's new scooby doo, with velma and daphne's original VA's retiring from scooby at this point. casey kasem and frank welker are still here. era 3 takes the gang worldwide really, with locations from australia to mexico to scotland to hawaii to egypt to the bermuda triangle to the himalayas before they go back to coolsville in 2008's goblin king!! in monster of mexico we see them on a video call in their houses so presumably this is the first time coolsville is seen again in a scooby movie since 2003!! although in goblin king they do use coolsville by name but they don't in monster of mexico so it's not actually confirmed if they're canon living in coolsville at the start of era 3 it's just my head canon. coolsville is the town that the gang is from in the original series and a pup new scooby doo (which is technically a prequel series to the og scooby doo where are you)

~era 4~

2009's samurai sword (which is the only movie i dont own of all of these although that was before i knew this was the last one with casey kasem i just remember being kinda meh on it oops) was the last scooby movie with casey kasem voicing shaggy. 2010's abracadabra doo is the first animated movie that matthew lliard voices shaggy in and the start of era 4. aside from the change from kasem to lliard, the animation style got an upgrade and they took out the "and the" part of the title, from scooby doo "and the" monster of mexico to scooby doo abracadabra doo as one example. this is in line with the release of scooby doo mystery incorporated in 2010. just as era 3's movies partnered with the series that ran in tandem, era 4 has a closer animation style to mystery incorporated and the same voice cast. abracadabra doo is rly good !! it's my partners second favorite scooby !! again guys the music is AWESOME and also velma's little sister mads is in it and rly cute 🥰 they released camp scare in 2010 also it's alright it's not bad. i got it in the set that i bought with most of my other movies otherwise i probably wouldn't have seen it. solid scooby movie, but not one of my favs.

~conclusion~

this is also the end of my eras of expertise if u will. ive seen a couple of the newer scooby movies since 2010 but its all just kinda meh to me, im too autistic n just wanna watch the same movies over and over again for the rest of my life. i have a nightstand drawer that they live in 🥺👉🏻👈🏻 someone else will have to take up the torch for scooby movie eras 2011 and later🫡 or not..theyve been retconning older properties.. like they made a "sequel" to zombie island in 2019 20 years later except did they watch the ending to zombie island ????? #notmyscooby lol 😋

this was mostly a joke but it was also kinda heart warming that multiple people asked for it anyway 🥺👉🏻👈🏻 scooby has been a part of my life as long as i can remember n is my oldest hyperfixation n is something special to me that i can talk abt forever 🥺👉🏻👈🏻💕 i worked rly hard on this n also learned some new scooby trivia in the process n it was fun !! obviously this is all just *my* opinions n preferences n im not shaming anyone who likes or thinks different, this is rly not serious, but pls do be nice to me bc this is something that is important to me that i put a lot of effort into typing out, pls dont call me dumb for making this..

one last scooby fact that i learned while writing this. ive seen iwao takamoto in scooby credits all my life in every credits roll and ive always thought that was amazing! but never looked into him until now. HE DESIGNED SCOOBY DOO GUYS WHAT !!!!! this man went to the Japanese internment camps after the bombing of pearl harbor, survived them, got out and JUST APPLIED TO DISNEY. HE WAS HIRED AT DISNEY IN 1945 GUYS THE WAR E N D E D IN 1945 WHAT A LEGEND !!!!????!!!! he worked for disney from 1945 to 1961 working on animation such as cinderella, peter pan, lady and the tramp, sleeping beauty n one hundred n one dalmatians !! then he went to work for hanna-barbera and designed scooby and astro the dog from the jetsons n others !!!! he has several notable awards but it seems like the golden award from the animation guild in 2005 was the highest honor. he has a memoir i actually wanna get that n read it !! he died in 2007 at the age of 81 but remains in the scooby credits as the character designer past his death 🥲🥹 scooby is based off of an employees great dane at hanna-barbera 🥹💕

~blazies professional opinion ranking~

s tier: ghoul school; monster of mexico;

a tier: boo brothers; reluctant werewolf; zombie island; cyber chase; loch ness monster; aloha scooby doo; where's my mummy; goblin king; abracadabra doo;

b tier: arabian nights; witches ghost; legend of the vampire; chill out scooby doo; pirates ahoy;

c tier: alien invaders; samurai sword; camp scare;

d tier: live action scooby D:< nah im just kidding 😋😋😋

if u made it this far 2700+ words later u care a lot more abt me n my silly scooby opinions then i ever wouldve expected from anyone except my wife who doesnt get a choice (i love uuuuuu 🥰🥰) n im giving u a hemkin kiss on the cheek n hugging u so hard n crying a lil 🥺👉🏻👈🏻💕 believe me that i have plenty more scooby opinions to infodump on but we'll.. i think this is good this is enough scooby infodumping for today 😋💕💕💕

SCOOBY DOOBY DOOOOOOOOOO !!!!!!!

[controversial-blorbo-bracket]

Controversial Character Tournament Round 2: Kromer from Limbus Company vs Anders from Dragon Age 2

(remember that these characters are fictional and your fellow tumblr users are real. please be normal in the notes, i will not hesitate to block if you harass people)

Propaganda under the cut:

Kromer:

HATE: - "Nasty, scrungly, murders people for having advanced prosthetics, but yet the fandom still loves her, I will never understand that"

Anders:

LOVE: - "So Anders blew up a chantry as a symbol of mage rights. He's wild. Completely feral. I love him so much. He's canonically Bipolar (like me) but it's written in the worst possible way. He is possessed by a demon, technically. He's so unhinged. So many people hate him. He is technically a terrorist. The later game literally changed it so even if you agreed with him, no you didn't" - "hes SOOOOOO." - "He has a controversy page on wikipedia (It is not about that time he blew up a church). He likes cats. He gives poor people free magic healthcare. There is so much discourse about him all the time. His writer hated him. He escaped a cult. He's canon bipolar AND bisexual. He's possessed by a spirit of Justice (who rocks so hard.) He hates the Catholic Church. He lives in a sewer. He's really mean and petty. He was put in solitary for a solid year. He's one of two openly queer (i.e. mentioning it outside player romance) companions (the other being Isabela Dragonage) in his main game. Anders isn't even his birthname, it's a nickname given because he didn't speak for months when he got taken to the Catholic cult prison at 12. He drank long-lasting poison to fight an evil corrupting force because he wanted to not be murdered or have all his emotions lobotomied from him by the Catholic church prison guards (This is almost completely unrelated to the possession.)" - "Anders! He's a medic for those too poor to afford healthcare! He loves cats! He has a cat named Ser Pounce-a-Lot because he's a perfect man. Anders absolutely says ACAB, except in DA2 it's ATAB: All Templars Are Bastards. He's canonically bi! He runs an underground railroad-type deal for mages to escape from abusive institutions! He blew up the in-universe Catholic church for opressing his people (mages)! Some say this makes him a terrorist. I say this makes him a babe ❤️❤️❤️ He is unreasonably mean to Fenris, but imo that's just Bad Writing we can handwave away ok? ok. cool." - "there is a controversy section on his wiki page bc his bisexual ass made the straight male gamers angry by flirting with their characters. ppl in the fandom have also been arguing nonstop for 12 years abt his actions at the end of da2. do u want to go to anders discourse? too bad we're going to anders discourse."

BOTH: - "I really liked Anders in Dragon Age Awakening, I thought he was fun and funny, but he's insufferable in da2 and his fans and apologists are so annoying. He's a terrible person in that game and they have to make stuff up and ignore all the awful stuff he says and does. He's so awful I always kill him at the end of the game because I hate what he became."

[zoanzon]

Someone on a discord I'm in asked us older-uns who were adults during the 2016 election what to do. I have no fucking clue, but I still managed to dig up some thoughts. It's long as shit, barely edited, and you don't know me from Bob in terms of 'credibility', but it's my few cents.

TLDR:

Back up content you want or need off the web now, before FOSTA-SESTA or related 'authoritarian censorship' stuff rolls out. This can be that your favorite fic you'd be heartbroken to see purged for being marked as pornographic content; this is also downloading family photos from Google Drive.

Learn how to garden, or learn how you can learn to garden in a pinch of you lose money and/or supply chains get fucked.

Have you heard of OPSEC and INFOSEC? Good, that's a start. Learn more. If you haven't heard of them, learn quick. This is 'loose lips sink ships' and 'do not take phones to protests (or anything else that might get judicial crackback)' as much as its 'get a VPN and make sure its reputable'.

And the original rambling post, for anyone interested:

Is more an abstract 'thing to do', but as a historian and amateur archivist who knows history of censorship, etc: Think about what you want to back-up. What you need saved, or think needs to be saved, and what you can save. If you've got stuff online on sites you think might not survive FOSTA-SESTA or Musk and Peter Thiel types getting carte blanch, back it up. If you go through a webpage you think should be saved to look back on for 'here is how things became what they are', save it. Looking back at 2016 when 'grab em by the pussy' was the most egregious shit - when the original Unite the Right rally happened and we were aghast - compared to now, its night and day. We got here day by day. This time it might be a bit more abrupt. Still. What are the posts, the pages, the tweets you think need to be saved, for yourself or for history? Save it.

(For example: SingleFile is a firefox addon that allows you to save, Wayback-style, webpages to your personal files and keeps all embedded media from the page! If you SingleFile a wikipedia page, you have it downloaded; if you hit a reddit page, you'll have it with intact formatting; and it'll even capture stills of tumblr pages with all posts on said pages. If you are looking at this Read More? If I ever get deactivated, this Read More is lost. The first part of the post can be reblogged, but no one can get into Read More sections of posts whose OP has seen deactivated. SingleFile the page you have this post opened in, and you have it on-hand forever. Wayback also exists, but that's contingent on the Internet Archive - Wayback's parent - surviving things. If it does, it does; but if you think your personal files will survive longer (or want to access osmething sans internet), SingleFile is there for you.)

Hell, between 'what if this gets censored off the web?' and 'what if I want to have a copy of this on-hand even without internet?' is a possible approach here. What fanfics would you like to have on hand, and to not loose to a site-purge? What Youtube videos bring you joy, and which ones are records you want kept from this time? What media do you want to pirate in case a company deletes old product, and how might that get worse under a second Trump reign? Start there, and figure out what else to back up next.

Otherwise, if you don't think you're going to be able to make it out of the country and you want to prepare for if things truly do go to shit, some things to look into include:

Do you know how to grow food? Otherwise, figure out if you have easy access to ways to learn (library, downloaded how-to PDFs, your gardener friend, etc). There's been intermittent episodes about food-growing (and community gardening) on It Could Happen Here

Maybe listen to It Could Happen Here, or at least put it on your watchlist. Robert (a long-time political-extremism journalist) originally started it in 2019 as a 'here is how a second american civil war could start' thing, and transitioned it into daily discussion of how to survive 'it' happening here...such as what's happening right now. Listen to ICHH; it might be depressing, but him and his cohosts know what they're talking about.

Learn what info-security and operations-security is. Any sort of activism is likely to be more dangerous than protests in the last few years, and those have still been a shitshot. Whether its 'do not take your phone to protests' to 'download a VPN' to 'loose lips sink ships': learn about the concepts, make sure you know how you can learn more. This is especially true if you wait to do this, as the more time any theoretical authoritarian govts have time to prepare, the more they might notice what info you are searching for. Paranoid? Not pessimistic enough? I'd rather you be thinking of this now than to realize its far too late.

Beyond that, yeah: if you can get out, that's not a bad idea. You're asking us for advice on how to survive, and the horrid fact is: this time is going to be so much worse. There's been more time for things to fester, more time for the fascists to gather power, more time for them to grow bloodthirsty. Again. History major. This is going to be really fucking bad.

Whether you get out or not, people need to come together more. Last time, the fascism rippled out: Trump got in, and a lot of similar cases went masks-off (or won elections) elsewhere. The same is likely true this time. In America or not, people need to come together; and it's the only way we'll survive or hold our own.

And in the meantime: figure out what you can save, or need to save. Save it. Figure out how to garden, or how to do maintenance on stuff that might start crumbling as shit gets bad, or figure out the basics of infosec and opsec. Do multiple if you can; do individual ones if you can't, or can reasonably work with others to cover each other's weaknesses.

It's still going to suck. There's no way this doesn't suck. Frankly, there's no way there's not going to be at least some horrific atrocities; it's just a question of how many, and how quick they start up. That's the best thing I can recommend, honestly, is: it's good to hope things somehow work out, but don't stick your head in the sand. If you hope the leopards don't eat your face because you stay still and don't move, maybe you'll live? But maybe not, and maybe you'll just see someone else get eaten. Preparing won't necessarily save you anyways. But, it'll buy you better odds, and it'll make the fascists a bit more annoyed, and enough annoyances might fuck them still. Hopefully this helps in some way.

[wordsandrobots]

Apropos of half-awake thoughts this morning, I've been considering the perennial subject of people coming into fan-works and making demands of the writer or artist in regards to their creative choices. You know, 'this is wrong', 'you should change this', 'make more!!!' etc. It's been quite some years since I had to deal with that kind of behaviour but I've seen it happen to other people and it always sucks. Today my brain has decided to connect it to Humphrey Smith.

Story time: the town I come from has three breweries. The reason for this is that the limestone we're built atop filters the local water, making it 1) good and hard and 2) easy to access. Technically we're a market town but brewing is the foundation of our modern economy.

Two of these breweries, John Smith's and Sam Smith's, are the remnants of the brewing empire started by John Smith, a Victorian gentleman endowed with truly spectacular mutton-chops and also money, who bought an existing brewery in the town before building a new, much more impressive one further up the street. After his death, the business was left to his brothers, one of whom would go on to leave the old brewery to his nephew Samuel. Thus, the empire split into two. Both halves are still operating and have been successful enough that the current owner of Sam Smith's -- Humphrey -- is the biggest land-owner in the town.

Here is where the problems begin. You see Humphrey is, to put it gently, crackers. He suffers from being exceptionally wealthy and, despite some motions towards investing in local amenities, largely exists on a moral crusade against the changing social mores of the 20th Century. He won't countenance any businesses that does not contribute to the atmosphere of a sleepy market town (read: basically anything), refuses to maintain or sell off his properties, leaving the place full of the rotting shells of buildings, and he's been at war with the town council so long, they're currently planning to build on a flood plane that does indeed routinely get swamped by the river just to have somewhere to put new houses.

The man is not well-liked, is what I'm saying. And among his 'charming eccentricities' are the strict requirements he enforces on the pubs he owns. Any Sam Smith's pub must be run by people of good moral character (preferably a married man and woman), there must be no music and no phones, no swearing, no motorcyclists, no kissing, etc, etc. Basically imagine the dourest stereotype of Yorkshire grimness and that's what he's actively aiming for (no I am not kidding, just check out the 'controversies' section of the Sam Smith's wikipedia page).

Anyway, the point of all this is that there's a lovely tale shared around the town about how, one day, our Humphrey walked into a local pub and said to the bar-tender something to the effect of, 'Switch off that music, throw those people out, take down those fixtures and fittings, this is not the Victorian traditionalism I pay you for.'

Only, the bar-tender leant over the bar and replied, 'well that's nice, Mr Smith, but this isn't one of your pubs.'

Should you find yourself in the position of having some dipstick with fixed opinions swan into your work and start telling you everything you've gotten wrong, I think you could do worse than bear this heroic chap's words in mind. Your work is not their pub. They have no claim on what you make and no grounds for enforcing their vision over yours. They aren't paying you, you aren't working for them, and frankly, they have profoundly misunderstood the situation if they think they're entitled to tell you want to do.

This is true even in the face of widely accepted fanon or when you're cutting against general expectations. In fandom, every piece of art is the result of our own personal reactions to a piece of media. We can decorate our individual pubs however we want and if other people don't like it, well, they can lump it. Go forth and do what you like, music and kissing and all!

[This post brought to you by the belated 11 year anniversary of that berk on dA who spent ages arguing with my attempt at redesigning the Quarks from Doctor Who. The *bloody Quarks*, man! Sheesh.]

[codenamesazanka]

OH apropos of not meme, just remembered this attempt at making an absurd ‘mundane’ AU that follows the canon storyline (no quirks, tho heteromorphs still exists):

AFO is a 60-year old hospital chairman in *excellent* shape, although recent brain tumor surgery did leave him blind. He is also co-author of some obscure sci-fi books in his youth, but he’s much more known for being an influential community leader… though his wikipedia page would have a looooong ‘controversies’ section.

All Might is a 58-year old local celebrity as a retired bodybuilder and actor, who now runs a local community service center. Also an influential community leader, with much higher public approval.

AFO and All Might have been at each other’s throat for years for various reasons, among them a long, drawn out custody battle over shared distant nephew Tomura. Tomura’s 20 years old now and a legal adult, but the feud lives on.

Meanwhile, Tomura has now grown up to be a lackluster truant college student with a penchant for stirring up trouble with his eclectic gang of friends he made from hanging out at an arcade and the dive bar next door (henceforth dubbed ‘the League’).

But the drama really starts when AFO and All Might get in a fight one night at a local high school charity event. Just really going at it. All Might threw the first punch, but All For One revealed his custom cane to have a hidden blade and was a bit too reckless with it.

So AFO is arrested; thanks to his lawyer, he avoids jail but only because the lawyer has been able to convince the courts that AFO is mildly senile. So he is entered into a nursing home. (I don’t know how courts work and I don’t care.)

Ujiko - AFO’s life partner, hospital’s chief medical director, and Tomura’s foster stepdad - takes this opportunity to cut off Tomura’s allowance to force Tomura to grow up a little (and to start attending his classes.)

This does not work. While trying to scrounge up cash, Tomura and his gang make enemies with the local shogi club (an open secret among everyone that it’s a front for growing weed). Conflict ends with a police raid and the League running over the club president/leader with a car. Don’t worry - Chisaki is alive, but both his arms are broken. Along with his spirit.

(Around this time, Kurogiri - AFO’s driver and Tomura’s old babysitter - is discovered to be a man with amnesia whose family has been looking for him for years, so he has to leave for a while.)

Hoping to instill some discipline in the boy, AFO’s friend and personal trainer Machia drags Tomura (and friends) on an extended mountain camping trip. During a hike, they become lost, end up trespassing on a cult intentional community’s property, and get hunted down (the intentional community is a survivalist group). However, Tomura’s newfound wilderness skills impress the survivalists leader so much that ReDestro decides to welcome them as guest fellow preppers. The League freeloads off them for the rest of winter.

Come early spring, Tomura wants to make good with Ujiko again, so he and everyone goes to a fundraising event Ujiko is hosting at the park…

…Unfortunately, someone messed up the scheduling, and booked a high school community service field trip at the same time and place. One thing leads to another and the day ends with:

several arrests and minor hospitalizations due to multiple brawls;

things set on fire;

one of the police chief’s sons exposed as an arsonist;

the park’s prized butterfly garden trampled beyond repair;

several people pushed into the lake and getting hypothermia;

the high school’s home ec teacher choked a local magician, who is hospitalized but for entirely different complications (accidentally stabbing himself);

Tomura’s friend Jin arrested after being tazed by a cop;

the intentional community banned from the park;

phone videos going viral;

high school students traumatized;

teachers under disciplinary review;

and Tomura sent to the emergency room for minor injuries and a concussion with overnight stay for observance.

Also Ujiko is now under investigation for embezzling charity funds for his and AFO’s side Neapolitan Mastiffs breeding business.

After being notified by his lawyer of the incident, AFO breaks out of the nursing home that night to kidnap Tomura from hospital and retreat to his beach house. His foster son is grounded. An American private tutor is also hired to force Tomura to make up his missed semester of classwork.

This now gives AFO the opportunity to spend some quality time getting to know Tomura’s awkwardly cute friend Spinner. For Spinner, this consists of guiding his friend’s 60-but-looks-40 blind foster dad who’s really into tactile communication, and having to read drafts of weird sci-fi because AFO has recently gotten back into writing. Meanwhile, AFO is making a dinner reservation for two at a beachside bistro.

[anashins]

hi! can i request a jaehyun fic where it’s like a “meet cute” at a record store or museum? thank you <3

Pairing: Jaehyun x Reader

Genre: fluff

Word Count: 1k

Summary: You glue yourself to a group in the museum where a guy seemingly knows everything about the exhibition - until he's left by his friends and you get a private tour.

A/N: Why are the Jaehyun requests so wholesome? 🥺 Hope you like it 💗

“This museum’s collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than thirty thousand works!”

You didn’t know for how long you had been following this group around already - all while maintaining a low profile, you hoped. But ever since you spotted this guy and his friends in the previous section of the museum, you were glued to them, counting yourself lucky for being such a cheapskate and not having paid for a tour guide like you knew beforehand you could just blend in with an already existing group.

“And they range from the Neolithic period to the time of the Roman emperor Contantine’s conversion to Christianity,” the guy continued speaking as you entered the new section of the building, “so from circa 4500 B.C. to 312 A.D.”

You lingered around one of the other exhibits close to them so as to not get counted to his group, but still close enough to overhear every word he said. He was the one who stood out the most, and not only because he was the only person speaking nonstop and the tallest among them, but also the most attractive. 

But you were more interested in the facts he spouted out as he surely wasn’t an official guide like you had quickly found out when they had all started joking around and speaking about what they had done prior to their visit. 

Since the guy seemingly talked like he had memorized entire wikipedia pages about every section and exhibit in the museum, you were naturally stunned and just couldn’t stop listening to him - and not only because it had saved you quite a few bucks.

“And here, we see-” he started, but got interrupted by one of his girl friends.

“This is only rows and rows of ceramics,” she sighed. “Are we really going to walk through every aisle and see the same, boring things?”

From the corner of your eyes, as you feigned interest in this certain statue, you saw the other friends slightly nodding and agreeing with the girl as another guy chimed in, “Yeah, it’s only this aisle with statues that are somehow interesting. I’m not really eager to see broken plates and tinged spoons.”

The two remaining friends now gave more eager nods, murmuring something like, “True.”

You just couldn’t believe what they had dared to say. Had they held back their true opinion all along? How could they? What the tall guy explained were the most intriguing things you had heard in a long time, and the fact that his expression now entirely fell as he was just taken aback by his friends’ true perception as you, made your heart hurt a little.

“I’m sorry,” the girl said.

Immediately, the tall guy had a smile on his face again, but the sparks had entirely vanished from his eyes as he waved it aside. “It’s okay. You can go ahead and eat at a restaurant or something. I really want to finish this part of the exhibition, then I’ll catch up.” 

“Are you sure?” the girl frowned, apparently only now realizing the damage she had done. “We can-”

“I’m sure. It truly is okay. I’ll catch up with you later.”

If she or another one in the friend group had been worried about his feelings, they weren't anymore now as it didn’t take them long after to decide on a restaurant and say goodbye to the tall guy.

You observed him for only a little longer, and he strutted along, stopping by every exhibit, reading and taking the entire impressions in. Seldomly had you seen someone so attentive in a museum, and you were dying to get to know more about him.

With a few low breathers and an encouraging mantra you told yourself over and over again, you walked up to where he was currently standing and piped up, “Interesting, isn’t it?”

He looked up, then aside to you. “What is?”

“How they can exhibit so many similar works, but each of them still has its own beauty that you just want to unravel.”

He fell into silence, and for a moment, as you locked your eyes, you were worried that you might have scared him away. But as his features softened and a sincere smile spread across his face, tugging the corners of his lips up and returning the sparks to his eyes, you knew you had done everything right.

“My name is Jaehyun,” he introduced himself.

“Nice to meet you, Jaehyun,” you answered and told him your name as well. “Actually, I don’t know much about the Greek or Roman period, and it’s my first time in this museum too, but everything here is so intriguing.”

“Actually, I happen to know a lot about these things,” Jaehyun told you proudly.

“Oh?” You raised a brow. “How come?”

“My parents are both history professors. So at home, there is not much else to talk about.” He shrugged. “But I find it very interesting, so naturally, I grew up knowing these kinds of things. I understand it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I thought since I’m here already, I can pay attention to everything I only know from my parents’ sayings.”

“Well, Jaehyun,” you looked around, then back at him, “I have time.”

He tilted his head. “For what?”

You chuckled inwardly over his cluelessness. “For you to tell me everything you know about the Greek and Roman works.”

“Do you even have that much time?” he asked sincerely.

You shrugged, folded your hands behind your back and strutted to the next statue already, but not without looking over your shoulder back at him. “Even if not, tomorrow I’m free too.”

The grin that then replaced his innocent smile after your invitation sank into him was all worth the boldness that you usually didn’t show and had taken you much courage to move forward with.

Jaehyun caught up to you with a few steps, settling close next to you, and you inspected the next exhibit together. 

With the deep, soft voice that he then used to explain to you in all detail from which period the work sprung, he could read from the telephone book and you wouldn’t have minded at this point if only you could hear him talk in that voice for just a bit longer.

[longsightmyth]

Honestly one of the biggest problems here is that everyone has the same bland, stilted dialogue, and it's all designed to hit every beat of every tortured romance ever without giving us the tortured romance. There did not used to be anything getting in the way of Kelsey and Ren banging outside of my own deep conviction that he was gross, but the characters don't share that view.

So when all the characters speak exactly the same way, it makes them all blend together. When they all speak like wikipedia pages or like a ten year old wrote a conversation they think adults would have, it just adds to the bland and emotionless effect.

Observe.

“Hmm, maybe you have PTSD.”

“What’s that?”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a condition you get when you’ve been exposed to terrible trauma and high stress levels. Soldiers in combat usually have it. Remember when you told Kishan that when you heard my name, all you could picture was Lokesh torturing you, questioning you?”

“Right. There’s still some of that, I guess. But now that I know you better I don’t associate you with him as much anymore. I can distance that from you now. It wasn’t because of you that it happened.”

“Part of your symptoms with me might still be related to that. Maybe you need a therapist.”

Ren chuckled, “Kelsey, first of all, a therapist would put me in an asylum for claiming I was a tiger. Second, I’m no stranger to bloody battles or pain. It wasn’t the first time Lokesh has tortured me. It was definitely an experience I wouldn’t want to go through again, but I know that you are not to blame.”

This is by no means the Wikipediaest of sections, but bear with me.

(Also the Tiger question could be resolved by simply turning into a tiger, and even if the therapist did think you were hallucinating or having delusions and good therapist would still try to help you with your ptsd)

(How does Ren know about asylums but not shellshock/ptsd)

(Undergoing similar traumas does not mean you can't have ptsd from one or both)

ANYWAY BEAR WITH ME.

"Maybe you have PTSD," I said, almost to myself.

"PTSD?" Ren asked, sounding out the letters clearly and individually rather than running them all together.

I winced. "Post-traumatic stress disorder. It's a thing a lot of soldiers get, from combat and all the other trauma."

Since I didn't have a whole lot of expert knowledge on the specifics of PTSD, I added quickly, "You told Kishan that when you heard my name, all you could think about was Lokesh torturing you. That's a thing, I think? A flashback."

"Oh, shellshock." Off my look he pointed out, "I was alive during the Great War, Kelsey."

"Right."

"Anyway, that doesn't happen anymore," Ren assured me a little too quickly, and when I frowned at him clarified, "Not often. I know it wasn't your fault. I can tell myself that and it works sometimes."

"I think it's pretty clear you're going to deal with that for a long time," I said, trying not to sound as hurt as I was. "You probably need a therapist."

Ren cracked a laugh. "I'm sure a therapist would believe me about the curse. I'll recover. This isn't the first time I've fought for my life, or even the first time I've been tortured."

I didn't think how many times somebody was tortured mattered much in the grand scheme, but I also didn't think I was going to convince an ancient Indian prince who's been living as a tiger for more than a hundred years to go to therapy in one night.

Even in a linear conversation there's going to be give and take outside of specific circumstances. In a first person narration, you get to add an internal monologue to circle in and around for more fun hijinks. Since this specific conversation is a slow one happening without particular urgency, breaking up the dialogue can convey a thoughtful or slow discussion. Giving the characters specific knowledge or different knowledge or the same kind of knowledge under different terms because the characters have different backgrounds informs the characters and makes them distinguishable from the others.

Anyway. This isn't the only way to rework this bit, but it's A way.