#ontologicalsynaesthesia

[specialagentartemis]

Reverse Unpopular Opinion meme: the Time Trap series by Sean Dalton >:)

They are IMMENSELY ENTERTAINING to ME SPECIFICALLY and I have a blast reading them!

I love every time Leon appears on the page. The whole concept of Leon is so ridiculous but also so evocative and thought-provoking. He didn’t ask to be created through Time Clone Nonsense! He’s never known Noel’s future and has no connection to it nor feels any duty to preserve it! He wants to create a world he can belong in without being erased by Noel fixing the timeline! Can you blame him! The added pathos of 1) he can feel Noel’s pain 2) he is an imperfect copy, angsty because he can’t taste food, it tastes like nothing to him, is catnip to me. Also he’s psychic for no evident reason.

The fact that he’s also kind of ineffective at being Evil, mostly making trouble for himself and occasionally Noel and no one else, and Noel constantly has to rescue them both, is also endearing. Leon you are an angsty clone fuckup and I love you.

(And to actually praise something the book was trying to do, I enjoy the whump a lot. Noel gets the absolute shit kicked out of him on a regular basis and it is described in loving painful detail without being gory.)

[specialagentartemis]

Top 5 pieces of pottery!

Heck YEAH! There are so many excellent pots in the world.

This delightful Tonto Polychrome bowl from Gila Pueblo, eastern Arizona, late 1300s. It’s everybody’s favorite at the museum for a reason.

2. Late Minoan Marine Style pottery, and specifically the famous octopus flask (Palaikastro, Crete, 1500s BCE). I love how there was a whole stylistic movement to just paint sea creatures on fancy pots at this point in time.

3. This particular Mesa Verde mug, southern Colorado, 1200s. There are a LOT of mugs from the 1100s-1200s in the style, but I like the swirly pattern on this one. A friend of mine has a replica of it. I drank tea out of it when I was dog-sitting for her.

4. The Chaco Canyon cylinder jar collection from Pueblo Bonito, Central New Mexico, 900s-1000s. Makes the top five for their archaeological interest—chocolate residue was found on the inside, showing that chocolate was imported up from Mexico to New Mexico and the people in Chaco Canyon were drinking chocolate out of these jars probably in a similar ritual manner to how Maya people were doing it at the same time down in Mexico. After the 1100s cylinder jars fell out of fashion and chocolate was drunk from mugs instead. (Similar to the one above.)

5. Brithawon’s shit-ass kylikes (Pylos, Greece, 1200s BCE). Love this guy.

also special shout-out to a new love, the Hellenistic Greek eyebrow fish plates.

hmm maybe I should do a part 2 with modern/art pottery also... there are also some excellent pots that are not hundreds of years old

[specialagentartemis]

#but for real I think one of the most underexplored things in ds9 #is the impact on bajorans of getting unambiguous proof that their gods are fully literally real and they're Right There #you can hop in a shuttle and visit them #like HOW is that going to impact people's faith #there also should have been waaaaay more religious schisms (tags via @ontologicalsynaesthesia)

the religious storylines on ds9 are crazy if you really think about it. imagine being in the mall and seeing the gates of heaven open outside auntie anne's pretzels

[cavesalamander]

I feel pretty much exactly the same way about Annie, and about the Defrosting Ice Queen trope. I'm going to keep my headcanon of her as asexual unless or until the comic makes it completely impossible (because I think you can argue that that's not quite what her thing for Kamlen was), but it really does seem unlikely at this point.

Yeah! You can totally argue it's not really officially a thing yet, I totally know it's not official either way 'till it's made explicit. I just don't want to keep hanging onto the last bits of hope only to have them dashed (yet again) cause I tried to do that in Divine, and also when people first started posting pictures from the printed Annie in the Forest books. And now it's just... to me it's pretty clear that she's got pretty strong feelings of some sort towards Kamlen and personally that's enough evidence - considering the medium this is in - that Annie is more than likely going to continue being allosexual.

I mean, I'm in other fandoms that authors left the sexualities of characters more widely open for interpretation and I can extrapolate all I want about those, and I'm safe in those - I'm never going to get more canon to deny me! It's sad, I know, I know. But that's how I deal ahah

[babylon5gifs]

I just started rewatching the show and seeing all these gifs of fantastic moments all over my dash is utterly delightful. Thank you!

I’m so glad!!

[specialagentartemis]

#yeah exactly #there isn't like a secret aromantic switch hidden inside you that's flipped on or off #it's a just a word people apply to a wide range of experiences and wants and it's up to you whether it fits you or not #(ditto to literally every other gender and sexuality label) #I ID as aro because 90% of the time I have no interest in dating anyone even though I sometimes have crushes #lots of people ID as aro for the exact opposite reason #you can do whatever you want there's no queer identity bureau of queer identity cops (tags via @ontologicalsynaesthesia)

This exactly. I ended up feeling SO much better about myself and so much less stressed when I stopped interrogating every feeling, stopped going "is this attraction? Is this a crush? what kind of attraction is this? is this Real Attraction Or Not" and let myself live and define myself by what I wanted, what made me feel happy and right. Figuring out what kinds of relationships I wanted and what I didn't want.

honestly my advice for people questioning if they're aro is kind of the same as my advice for people questioning if they're trans which is do less worrying about whether or not you inherently fall into this arbitrary category and do more considering what you want in and from your life. like ultimately deconstructing societal ideals of what relationships (or gender) should be like and figuring out what you want them to look like in your life is what matters and whether or not you experience romantic attraction is kind of immaterial

[specialagentartemis]

discussing with @ontologicalsynaesthesia as we watched Return of the King: I don’t quite remember how it’s presented in the books, but in the movie, Théoden doesn’t want Éowyn to fight for the normal sexist reasons but also because he tells her that she’s needed back in Rohan, to be a leader to the people who are staying in Rohan while the men ride out to fight. And like… he has a point! That’s a very important job! Théoden the king and Éomer his nephew and now his heir are both riding out to battle in Gondor against a larger and better armed fighting force of Evil; Rohan needs a leader who’s strong, brave, and respected to stay behind with the people, and to take over and rule in the very real possibility that all the Riders of the Mark get slaughtered in battle against the Orcs. And Théoden is recognizing that Éowyn has that capacity! If Gondor falls—and it very likely may have if Aragorn hadn’t managed to recruit the Army of the Dead—Rohan is right next door and the armies of Mordor certainly won’t leave them alone. They’ll need a leader to look to in that case, and if the whole royal family is wiped out, that’s a very bad sign in a world where the Divine Right Of Kings is very real.

Éowyn rides with the army of Rohan into battle at Gondor, of course… but it makes me wonder, who did she leave in charge back in Rohan? Éowyn you are cool and brave and I love you but Éowyn your country! Your people! Who’s left in charge. (I‘m sure Éowyn has more cousins—Théoden had four sisters, one of whom was Éowyn and Éomer’s mother—but Éowyn and Éomer were adopted by Théoden after their parents died and was the main one involved in royal politics and an obvious choice for acting queen)

I totally get Éowyn, living in this culture, wanting to be recognized as a warrior and a rider and to win renown and respect with courage and strength and true-heartedness because that is what’s valued here, and to join the battle for the fate of the world because like it’s also true that if Gondor falls to Mordor what’s Rohan realistically gonna be able to do after that anyway. But also who’s looking after your people Éowyn!!

(anyway now I want a story about Éowyn’s cousin… let’s call her Eadthryd… who hasn’t really been involving herself with family royal politics because Théodred and Éomer and Éowyn were obviously the heirs… who is now left behind to defend and rally the people of Rohan and prepare for the worst if the Riders don’t come back…)

[specialagentartemis]

Once in college @ontologicalsynaesthesia and I talked about a linguistic sci-fi short story would love to see exist: a settlement on a new planet where everyone speaks Lojban. They want to start society over and do it right, and one of the attempts to Do It Right includes Lojban so there will be no ambiguity in communication.

Within one generation their kids are using slang and within two or three generations Lojban evolves to have just as much ambiguity, redundancy, and nonliteralism as any natural language.

I would love to write this but that would require learning Lojban.

[specialagentartemis]

For the ask game: Zenon, Proto Zoa, and Margie from Zenon Girl of the 21st Century, option 6

Haha oh man excellent

go clothes shopping with: ZENON. Hands down her fashion taste is impeccable and I want to have some of her style.

go to ikea with: Margie, because she’d probably mock my clothes choices or call me fat for buying snacks, but would be hilarious to judge the IKEA set room decor with.

go grocery shopping with: Proto Zoa, because I feel like he would encourage me to buy Proto Zoa branded snacks and that’s the kind of enabling I need.

[specialagentartemis]

@ontologicalsynaesthesia

Art by Lily Seika Jones

[specialagentartemis]

Major Kira for the headcanon ask game!

Aw yeah I love her <3

-

Realistic: Kira introduced the idea, and worked alongside Sisko, to negotiate Space NAGPRA to make the Cardassians return looted sacred Bajoran artifacts like the other Orbs.

While it may not be realistic it is hilarious: After meeting Commandant Mirror!Kira, Kira realized that she would, in fact... be really down for selfcest. She's considered exploring this desire in the holosuite, except for the fact that she would never, ever let Quark know about this.

Heart-crushing and awful, but fun to inflict on friends: There are ways in which Kira was actually happier during her time in the Resistance, during the occupation. It hurts her to admit, but the clarity, the drive, the purity of her anger and the purity of her comradeship with other Bajorans, made it... simple, in a way. She feels awful for missing it, but sometimes, she does miss it. Things were clear, things made sense, she had a goal and the goal was righteous. Now? Now she has to not rebel but govern. Now other Bajorans are her enemies. Now the Kai is her enemy. Now sometimes she has to make decisions that are detrimental to other Bajorans. She hates that she misses the time under Cardassian rule because like, of course she doesn't... but she misses the feeling of simplicity and clarity that rebelling against it gave her. She is terrified of becoming the kind of leadership she would have rebelled against.

Unrealistic, but I will disregard canon about it because I reject canon reality and substitute my own: KIRA/MILES/KEIKO OT3 POLYCULE REAL

[specialagentartemis]

@ontologicalsynaesthesia said:

I feel like there were a lot of genderless AIs in sf lit of the 70s or so like in the Culture series maybe? But it sure does seem like everyone has been gendering their robots for at least the last 30 years

Yeah, for all that it’s supposedly such a thing, it feels hard to think of many prominent AI characters who aren’t gendered.  (I’ve still never read the Culture series...)  But for real, Breq and Murderbot are the only ones I’m coming up with, and Breq comes from a culture where no one, humans included, have a gender anyway.

Is it the idea that if you’re treating an AI like a full-fledged person and not “just” a robot, gender comes part and parcel with personhood?  You’d think you’d see more pushback in recent years on that.

Is it because Data was played by Brent Spiner and was thus *obviously* a man and no one on TNG was allowed the imagination to be queer because it was 80s/90s tv and run by Rick Berman, and Data just set the template for AI personhood in sci-fi for the next three decades?

Is it because of Siri and Alexa?

(I find the same thing with aromanticism.  Where are all these aromantic robots that you (general you) insist exist.  Again, Murderbot and Breq are the only ones coming to mind!  And the personhood thing is absolutely a big part of why)

[specialagentartemis]

@ontologicalsynaesthesia said: Perhaps relevant: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vffl7NWmso

(regarding a Going Postal musical)

Ahahaha I had no idea this existed but it’s a Delight and is exactly what Going Postal and also The Greatest Showman should be

[ferusaurelius]

@ontologicalsynaesthesia​ Local idiot deranged professor of Izzy Hands studies here: I think he’d have left for real! 

Weirdly, insulting Ed’s competence is one area where Izzy understands how he’s been the asshole. I think he’d have gone off to think about what he’d done and waited for Edward to decide on the next appropriate move.

But Edward tells him: “I need you here.” So Izzy stays. That’s all it takes. There’s no real apology from either of them until Izzy feels compelled to acknowledge his misstep (”You’ve still got it.”/”I know.”). It’s not really an apology, when you come down to it? Just an acknowledgement of the state of the world and a shared understanding.

In some ways, Episode 04 almost sets up Izzy’s “what the fuck Edward” reaction to the outcome of the duel in Episode 06! It’s possible Izzy didn’t expect Edward to allow him to banish himself because of that “I need you here” in Episode 04.

What’s also fascinating to me is that Izzy further makes the mistake of underestimating just how pissed off Edward is going to be about the English showing up to murder Stede in Ep 08/09.

Anyway these two are fascinating! When they’re being good to each other, they’re really good (and like weirdly on the same page with shared history), and when they’re awful they’re REALLY awful. It never gets old on a rewatch tbh.

So I wonder: if Ed hadn't stopped Izzy from leaving at the end of episode 4, would Izzy have just... left? Actually resigned? Noped out of Ed's life and not brought the British down on them all?

I don't know! But I think it's not impossible. At the end of episode 6, Izzy is forced to leave in humiliation, after he had decided to literally fight for his place at Blackbeard's side over Stede. He was in a very different emotional place at the end of episode 4, though it's hard to tell what that place was, before Ed started talking to him. The last time we see him before that is when he corrects Ed about the date and Ed gives up and says they're all going to die, and there Izzy just looks quietly devastated.

[specialagentartemis]

ontologicalsynaesthesia said: What Does It Mean my eyes just slid off that like it's a skating 

Fuck if I know!  Math things, supposedly!  I read it multiple times and by the time I finish the sentence I already forget where the sentence started!

[specialagentartemis]

ontologicalsynaesthesia replied to your post: I like the Gunnerkrigg Court fandom, they’re...

The Seed Bismuth puts out Gay Waves that influence the brain waves of humans and non-humans alike and increase exponentially over time. Eventually everyone will be gay. It’s part of Coyote’s secret master plan

The Seed Bismuth is funky and rainbow... I think you’re onto something here