#other than wsms obviously

[wings-of-flying]

cursed to come up with aus that i can never write about </3

[buggdoesart]

my tags :))

this is a masterpost of my tags, for my sanity and yours! i have a lot of stories i love talking about :))

General Tags

#buggart - a general art tag. if this post has art drawn by me, its tagged with this!

#buggthoughts - textposts. no art to be found here! these are general posts, unrelated to any story content.

Story Tags

#vimg - Vailwynd Institue of the Magically Gifted. a modern fantasy magic school setting with a diverse cast of characters.

#wsms - Where the Stars Meet the Sea. a fantasy post-apocalyptic dystopia pirate x mermaid lesbian romance, with a sprinkling of found family and identity struggles. the world floods, and some humans have branched off evolutionarily into mermaids.

#Metal Eden , #ME - sci fi setting. there are kinda three stories that take place in this world. will expand on this section later.

#cbs - Clear Blue Sky. fantasy western. magic exists, but most of it exists in the environment, not in the form of casters. Lottie is a chosen one prophet from her small commune sent off on as a missionary. she meets Ester, a lone wolf bounty hunter/mercenary. a lesbian romance ensues, obviously.

#feral hearts , #FH - modern fantasy setting. there are monsters in this world, always has been and always will be. there are bigger and more prestigious monster-hunting families than the Holcomb's, but that's fine. a man in his quarter-life crisis has a terrible time and becomes an adoptive dad. lots of found family.

a slight buffer. beyond this point are stories i work with my friends on. you should check out their stuff too!

#cnd rewritten - Cowboys and Dragons Rewritten. fantasy gothic western. this used to be a dnd campaign, and it ended up getting cut short. so now, me and the other players are doing what we want with the story, the world, and the characters involved. hence, "rewritten". you may remember this campaign from my animatic!

#crime time , #ct - this story takes place in the same world as cowboys and dragons, but later on down the timeline. it's a modern fantasy story with paranormal elements.

#moonlit - my silly wolf rp. basically, when i was in middle school i had a whole world, story, and characters i would think about but never really do anything with. there's a island/supercontinent that has no humans, only these wolves. but not just any wolves. magic sentient wolves with cool powers.

[anoldfashionedlesbianlovestory]

Does scope magnification affect accuracy?

Do you love hunting? Then you must be heard about the scope magnification. By using this you can detect and find out the hidden animals that you can not see by using your nacked eyes. It shows the objects and other things too clear infront of your eyes that you can point your gun and start shooting with the accuracy. 

To get this magnification power on your scope then you need to buy a good scope for 17 caliber wsm. For your convenience in the following article, we will show you how does scope magnification affects accuracy. 

What does scope magnification mean? 

For shooting the long-distance target a scope magnification is used for. It is a magnification that multiplication measurement and makes the scenario more visible than you can see on the nacked eyes. This can detect the target at any position like moving or still in the place.

How does scope magnification affect accuracy?

If you are using a scope magnification it will obviously affect the accuracy. Because you can magnification up to 30x so that you can detect all the things which you may not view clearly by using your eyes. Not only that you can perfectly shoot with the accuracy whatever your target is moving or still. 

Most of the scope is designed with 10x for 300 yards but if you are choosing a magnification scope with 30x then you can target the long-range 600 yards. To shot the target with the proper accuracy you can choose the high magnification scope. 

Problems with High Levels of Magnification

But sometimes there are some problems if you are choosing a high-level magnification scope. Those problems are showing below. 

Poor aim

If you are using a high magnification it can reduce the light transmission level through the scope lenses. So that you can not view the clear image of your target that will affect accurate shooting. 

The scope is heavier

If you are choosing the high magnification scope it will be heavier than the other scope. When you are in a sensitive situation then it will be difficult for you to move your scope comfortably. 

Mirage distortion

The highly magnified scope can be the slightest emission of heat from your scope so that it distorted the image while your target will move. In that situation, it is hard to target anything and make a shot accurately. On the high magnification because of the breeze, you can not see properly and you will definitely miss your target.

Quality issue

High magnification does not always come with good quality and you do not think that if you are choosing the high magnification there may be some problem with its quality. While you are choosing the more than 10x the viewing image will be not so clear like 4x or 6x magnification.

The final decision

For the best hunting experience, you need scope magnification. It can affect the accuracy of shots while you are hunting. But you need to be careful to choose the right scope magnification. Do not select too much magnification because that can affect to shot accurately on the target. 

[leftpress]

Intersectionality and the identity politics of class

Automatic Writing's piece locating intersectionality as a firm and necessary component of class struggle politics, and identifying the risk many critics of intersectionality fall into of reproducing class as an identity itself.

[Source]

Mike Harman | Jan 17, 2017

The focus of much of my writing and thinking over the past year has been on bringing intersectional theory and theories of class struggle into a productive dialogue with one another in a way that neither collapses one into the other (by, for example, suggesting that intersectionality provides nothing more than a way of making the class struggle more cognizant of ‘particular’ oppressions that are thereby positioned at the periphery of political struggle; or, in the other direction, by converting class into a mere analog of gender and race, problematically rendering the three political spaces precisely isomorphic to one another) nor dismisses one on the basis of the other (intersectionality is simply the latest incarnation of middle-class/academic/liberal identity politics, class struggle is merely another colonialist metanarrative which empowers white men, etc.) but that, at the same time, does not assume that the two can be simply and unproblematically stapled together as if there were no conflicts and tensions. Rather my aim has been to treat these tensions as sites of productive inquiry which pose important challenges to our theorisations of political struggle, which so often only sustain internal coherence as the result of troublesome excisions and occlusions.

My motivation in this undertaking is partly pragmatic: intersectional discourses have displayed a vibrancy and vitality in recent times that has been largely absent from a stagnant and marginalised revolutionary left such that increasing numbers of (particularly young) activists are learning to express political ideas through the language of intersectionality (and its theoretically impoverished cousin ‘privilege’) and, indeed, evaluate political movements and organisations on the basis of their practical and theoretical engagement with intersectionality. In this context, having nothing to say about intersectionality, or worse having something trite and dismissive to say (sorry love, your oppression is the product of determinate economic forces, not “patriarchy”) is a recipe for reproducing our own irrelevance. 

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At the same time, the proliferation of identitarian and liberal theories of class through intersectional discourses risks entrenching what are, in the end, pro-capitalist political theories within the left and requires proactive but careful engagement. On a less instrumentalist level, I feel that engagement with intersectionality by the revolutionary left has the potential to open us up to important new political possibilities. At a minimum, intersectionality and privilege theory provide useful insights into the micropolitics of social movements and heuristics for minimising the reproduction of oppression and marginalisation within movements. (In this regard, privilege theory’s lack of theoretical sophistication is a double-edged sword. 

On the one hand, its simplicity makes it easily understandable and generalisable, and provides practical shortcuts which avoid messy and involved theoretical debates when dealing with specific issues. On the other hand, the tendency to treat privilege as a thing-in-itself leads to a reification which occludes the workings of power, treating manifestations of systems of domination and exploitation as if they were the systems themselves. Privilege thereby becomes its own cause and effect and undue emphasis is placed on particular privileges enjoyed by privileged groups rather than the systems which produce them.) 

However, intersectionality’s real value, in my view, is that it offers an approach to theory-formation and practice which holds the potential to recover the possibility of a collective self-emancipation of the oppressed and to escape the labyrinth of postmodern particularisms. Intersectionality insists that we theorise systems of oppression always in the light of one another, that we abandon the quest for the one ontology to rule them all and instead begin to recognise the heterogenous multiplicity of antagonisms that divide the social sphere, and therefore that we embrace tensions, contradictions and incoherences as occasions for democracy and the deepening of insight, rather than producing neat theoretical resolutions which so often are merely exercises of power.

Unsurprisingly, given the hegemony of liberal intersectionalities within the broad left and the revolutionary left’s reluctance to engage with intersectional theory, largely due to a paranoiac fear of being drawn into “identity politics”, the nature and location of class within an intersectional frame has been a recurring sticking point. Regarding class intersectionally, we are told, necessarily occludes some key metaphysical quality of class and thus effects a retreat from class struggle in some sense. Intuitively, I don’t think this is true – intersectionality as a mode of analysis doesn’t strike me particularly as imposing a particular form on the systems which it proposes to theorise together; in fact, I would argue the imposition of a universal structure on all forms of struggle is precisely not what intersectionality is supposed to be about – but the intuitions of others appear to diverge sharply from my own. I think an important and, unfortunately, often unacknowledged complicating factor in this and other debates on the left is the polysemy of ‘class’ as a signifier, which makes pinning down precisely what object this term ‘class’ refers to intensely difficult (that is, significantly beyond the inevitable failure of all signification to fully represent the signified). The signifier ‘class’ always effects multiple significations, both at the level of the subject and of discourse between subjects. Put simply: class has a variety of different meanings both to different people and coinciding within the same person, which often cannot be reconciled.

The point of this semiotic excursion is to say something important about the limitations of theory. Territorialistic* theoretical defences of particular conceptions of class, whatever their sophistication, whatever the force of their argument, and whatever productive new becomings they effect in their readers, do not collapse the semiotic constellation ‘class’ into a single meaning. (To argue otherwise is, in my view, to place an undue faith in the performative power of language and in the humanistic notion of the rational thinking-subject.)

Situating ‘class politics’ in relation to ‘identity politics’, then, requires us to consider not just what we would like the term ‘class’ to mean, or what it might theoretically mean, but how the term ‘class’ is really embedded in the discourses of the left and the full range of meanings to which it relates. Particularly, we need to recognise the specific history of class-as-identity within the revolutionary left, which situates class (at least partially) on the plane of identity politics as a competitor for the privileged status of the universal Subject of historical change. In other words, we need to recognise that it is not just pro-capitalist liberals who participate in an identity politics of class. This tendency has a clear relationship to representational modes of politics where political ideologies and movements are supposed to “represent” the aspirations and interests of some identity category or other, which, I would argue, can only operate through the the territorial ‘marking out’ of a particular set of aims, concerns, goals etc. as legitimate to that political project, and delegitimisation or deprioritisation of those which fall outside of that particular political territory. That is to say: ‘working-class politics’ can only ever secondarily be concerned with feminism or anti-racism, and only insofar as those things can be demonstrated to be the proper concern of The Working Class.

Representationalism (and, by extension, identitarianism) is quite obviously embedded in the politics of both the parliamentary and vanguardist revolutionary variants of socialism, where a particular political organisation attempts to capture state power “on behalf of the workers” and to pursue working class political interests through the state machinery. But the hegemonic nature of representational politics exerts an orienting influence even on those with a formally anti-representational politics. While anarchists might reject the representationalism of the state socialist (what we might call ’embodied representation’ – representation embodied by an actual group of people who aim to represent the working class) there remains an impetus among anarchists to develop a politics that authentically represents a working class political subjectivity (which I’m calling ‘abstract representation’ – representation through ideas that needn’t be materially embodied). The notion of class as an immanent antagonism of capital is never quite as distinct in practice from class-as-identity as it might be shown to be in theory; ‘class politics’ easily mutates to become ‘working class politics’ which then becomes ‘the politics of the workers’ movement’, and, through this kind of metonymy, we end up reproducing the same identity politics of “the workers” which we purport to have rejected. Note, for example, the central role afforded to the trade union movement in the recent online debates over the efficacy of the WSM and of anarchism as a political practice and near total absence of any discussion of pro-feminist, pro-queer or anti-racist work. How effective we have been at intervening in the trade union movement appears to be central to judging the WSM as an organisation in a way that questions of race and gender politics simply are not. What does this signify? Some ethical failure on the part of the individual contributors to the discussion? Or perhaps that we continue to be shaped by the workerist baggage of a revolutionary left centred around an exclusionary and identitarian conception of class struggle?

It is here that we must recognise the necessity of intersectionality (even in its most reductively identitarian form) to the rebuilding of any kind of effective left. Intersectionality, by insisting that systems of power are always theorised together, and, what’s more, by insisting that this be an embodied practice and not merely a theoretical outcome, forces us repeatedly into the difficult and “divisive” discussions which we must have if we are ever to afford issues of gender and race the respect and significance they deserve.

* The notion of ‘territory’ is used in this piece to convey both the notion of a space with borders, and a proprietary relation to a space, with an associated attack-and-defence mindset, which I think describes a common and problematic approach to political/theoretical questions. I intend to write a fuller account of this in a subsequent piece.

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[wander-lustier]

14.03.17

WELCOME TO WEST VIRGINIA!

Well, our only stop in West Virginia was the New River Gorge Bridge which was an hour and half from our cabin.  Jake was poking fun at me the whole way there about wanting to see a bridge that was so far out of the way.  He shut up when we got there though.  It was an epic view over the gorge from the visitor center, with a little walk down to an outdoor overlook with an awesome viewpoint of both the gorge and the bridge.  The bridge was impressively big.  It was the largest single arch bridge in the US!  

We stopped in South Charleston for dinner at a Korean BBQ restaurant called Red Fire.  We were seated at a large Hibachi table (the middle section of this table acts as a flat stove top with a vent in front of the chef).  We were seated at the opposite end to an old couple and made jokes about how it was as though we were watching the future us!  After placing our orders a chef came to our table and performed a bunch of tricks with his utensils, before cooking our rice, vegetables, teriyaki chicken and shrimp.  He also gave us a white sauce that he called “yum yum” (I think?) which was super yummy as the name suggests!  Our chef also performed a couple of tricks with fire.  The first made me jump back as a huge flame burst up into the air right in front of us!  His second trick involved creating a volcano from onion rings, flames rising from the middle.  It was a very entertaining dinner!

Our KOA cabin was in a town called Huntington.  It was a super cute set up but we ran into some unfortunate circumstances.  Whoever had been staying in the cabin before us had obviously spilt alcohol somewhere as the stench was very strong.  That combined with the cigarette smoke we smelt in the room was a big let down.  We knew they had been smoking in there because they had covered the smoke detector with a plastic bag and forgotten to take it down! Blatantly ignoring the NO SMOKING sign!  Still no internet - and also way too busy to get my blog completed!!  I’ve been getting as far as I can while sitting as a passenger in the car but there’s only so much I can handle before getting car sick!  The lengths I go to just to keep you all informed!

WELCOME TO KENTUCKY!

Next up was Williamstown, Kentucky where we had tickets to see the life-size Ark Encounter.  It was pretty amazing to see the huge ark as we were approaching on the shuttle bus.  The ark was made of timber and was 510 feet long, 85 feet wide and 81 feet high!  This is supposed to show the actual size that the ark was believed to be.  The inside of the ark was a museum which talked all about the different views people have of things such as how Noah could fit all the animals on the ark, what those animals were, and the systems they had in place for feeding them all.  Neither of us are religious, but I think it was incredibly interesting either way! Before continuing our drive to Nashville, we thought it was more than necessary to have Kentucky fried chicken for lunch, from KFC of course.  Basically it tasted the same as anywhere else, and the service was actually crappy!  Nevertheless, KFC is always a good idea and our big bucket filled our sandwiches with delicious fried chicken for the next few days!

WELCOME TO TENNESSEE!

Nashville was definitely one of the favourites out of all the places we’ve been so far.  We stayed in another KOA cabin.  Thankfully we’ve been happy with all of our accommodations so far!  We’re both pretty low maintenance so I guess that’s easy to achieve.

We spent our first night in Nashville at the Grand Ole Opry.  If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s basically where country music was made famous.  We’re both big fans of country music so we were super excited to see what all the buzz was about!  Grand Ole Opry is a weekly country concert which began in 1925 as a one-hour radio “barn dance” on the WSM channel.  It’s where Johnny Cash fell in love with June, and all the most famous country music stars have played.  The original Opry House was damaged in a flood but a circle of the original stage was preserved and placed in the new Opry House.  We thought this was pretty incredible - imagine how many country music stars have stood there singing on that circle!?  I’m sure my Grandma Arnott would be excited to know that Elvis once played there too!  

We only knew one of the artists who played - Chris Jensen.  He sings a song called “Buy Me A Boat”.  It’s a very catchy song, you should look it up!  He closed for the show, so it ended on a high note, and so did he.  He told the audience at the beginning “I’ve had 4 Mountain Dews, 2 packs of Sour Patch Kids and 4 packs of Mike & Ike’s, so you could say I’m pretty excited for the show!”  FYI Sour Patch Kids and Mike & Ike’s are lollies (candy) over here.  He was super hyper and basically bouncing off the walls, he also had a super goofy laugh and played the harmonica like an absolute champ!  Another group who stood out for us was a group of 4 old men dressed in old school Nudie style cowboy suits and hats.  Nudie was a designer who made all the glitzy colourful cowboy suits back in the day.  They were a comedy country group so all of their songs made us laugh.  Especially their closing act where they had a “face playing” battle!  Making their mouths into an ‘O’ shape and then slapping their cheeks into the microphone.  They had us in tears!

The KOA had a cheap downtown shuttle which we caught at 10pm after getting home from the Opry.  We had to seriously push ourselves to stay awake, but it was our one opportunity to see Nashville nightlife since we needed to get to bed early the following night.  We were dropped off out front of the Country Hall of Fame and walked a couple blocks up to the main street lit with neon lights.  After grabbing a burger and dog (not the pet kind) at the first place we saw serving food, which were seriously goooood, we moved on to a place called Nudie’s Honky Tonk which I’m guessing was named after the cowboy suit designer.  There was a pretty sweet band playing there so we ordered a couple beers and grooved along for a few songs.  Literally every bar on this street has a live band of some sort.  Eventually we were both struggling to keep our eyes open and made the decision to call it a night.

We were able to sleep in the next morning which was BLISS!  After getting some laundry underway, for 8 BLOODY DOLLARS, we made our way to Boot Barn.  It was a MUST for me to buy a pair of authentic cowboy boots in Nashville.  Jake insisted that I stop looking at prices and ended up buying me a gorgeous pair of boots that I’m so in love with.  They are super comfy and look great with literally everything.  My husband sure knows the meaning of happy wife, happy life!  It was a very quick boot shopping trip because I had hunger pains like never before and needed to eat BADLY.  Thankfully my husband also knows hangry Kelly all too well and we wandered over to Burger King for a couple of Rodeo burgers (sticking to the cowboy theme).  Next we visited the Ryman Auditorium.  This is where the original Opry House was.  They’ve kept it pretty well intact and it’s now a museum, which still constantly hosts performances from famous artists on a weekly basis.  Throughout my reading I learnt that even people such as Carlie Chaplin and Houdini used to perform their acts there!!  To finish off our day in downtown Nashville, we went to a dive bar called Piranha’s which we’d seen a glimpse of on our way in.  The thing that caught our eye had been there sign announcing the famous “donut burger”.  Of course being the burger connoisseurs that we are - we had to try it!  Boy was it delicious, and all sorts of other goodness.  A meat patty, cheese, egg and bacon stacked in between two glazed donuts!  YUM!  Well worth the heart attack.  Finally to close our final night in Nashville we had a silver bullet (Coors Light beer) and roasted marshmallows in a campfire out front of our cabin.

We have just arrived in Kansas and finished a huge feed of Mexican food!  We’re driving to Colorado tomorrow after a couple of activities!  Stay posted!

With love from KANSAS! xx

P.S. I’m hoping to put together another video from the GoPro in a couple of weeks, of our US travels… but I must warn you, it will mostly consist of Jake and I rocking out to the best tunes in the car!