#product gird

[blorger]

So, picture this:

Here I am, sat in an internet-less room, twiddling my thumbs and waiting for time to crawl ever so slowly by. For lack of a better alternative, I start flipping through the pages of Chamber of Secrets and I notice A Thing.

"My, how peculiar" I say to myself, fully intending to let The Thing be, but alas; time moves slowly, boredom persists and, not unlike the tell-tale heart, The Thing calls to me.

"Come," it beckons, "notice me further". "Compile some data" it begs, "that's surely the most productive way to pass the time"; like a moth to a flame, I am caught.

This, dear reader, is how I found myself tallying all the different ways the word "mudblood" is used in canon. So gird your loins and let me introduce you to

The Mudblood Chronicles, or what's in a name?

part 1: methodology

Since the purpose of this exercise is to analyse the use of the term "mudblood" as a slur, I'm not going to count the times in which the word is not being used with malicious intent. Throughout the books this happens on several occasions, those being:

during the course of the narration (it happens once in the context of "everyone present knew mudblood was a very offensive term")

when Harry uses the term, since it only happens when he either recalls someone else saying it (one time with Draco and once with Snape) or he's forbidding Kreacher from using it (twice).

when Ron uses it; it happens once to explain the slur's meaning and once (in conjunction with Ginny) to demand Kreacher stop using the term.

when someone is quoting themselves. Draco quotes himself to Dumbledore once ("you care about me saying mudblood when I'm about to kill you?"; incidentally, it's also the last time he ever utters the word)

I am counting instances in which a muggleborn character uses the term to refer to themselves, since it happens in the context of reclaiming the insult and I am interested in who the author chooses to highlight thusly.

part 2: the results/ WHEN

The word "mudblood" and its plural "mudbloods" are used as an insult a total of 62 times in the Harry Potter books. Here we can see the book by book breakdown:

Unsurprisingly, The book where "mudblood" is used the most ( a total of 34 times) is Deathly Hallows since it takes place during a war about muggleborns. Chamber of Secrets, where the term is introduced, follows with 10 mentions, after which is Order of the Phoenix (7 mentions), followed by Goblet of Fire (6 mentions) and Half-Blood prince (5 mentions). The term "mudblood" is not used in either Philosopher's Stone or Prisoner of Azkaban.

part 3: the results/ WHO

So who is our biggest culprit?

Draco Malfoy is our uncontested lead, having both the advantage of appearing in all books and of orbiting around our narrator. Both Bellatrix and Kreacher make a good showing, with Bellatrix's 6 times being especially notable since they all occur during the course of Deathly Hallows.

Let's break this down further, shall we?

Despite introducing us to the term, Draco appears to scale back his usage of the slur as he ages.

Before partaking in this experiment, I was under the vague impression that, in the wizarding world, "mudblood" is seen as a childish insult. I can now see why: in times of peace (i.e. before Voldemort's resurrection), Draco is the only person in Harry's day-to-day life saying it and he himself peters off in the usage of "mudblood" as things get more serious. To Draco, it appears, "mudblood" IS a childish insult, and we'll see further proof of this at a later date.

part 4: the results/ HOW

Let us now look at how the term is used:

Unsurprisingly, the person "mudblood" is hurled most often at is Hermione. As a main character, she is the most visible muggleborn in the narrative and, if that wasn't enough, she is more often than not the only muggleborn present, even when it doesn't make much sense (Hermione is the only known muggleborn member of the order of the phoenix, an organization whose supposed aim is the fight for muggleborn rights.)

There are no known instances of the word "mudblood" being used to refer to any other muggleborn student during Harry's time at Hogwarts. Lily Evans is the only other school-aged character who gets the dubious honor of being a "mudblood".

Let's break this down further and look at who people are referring to when they say "mudblood":

*= Walburga's portrait never directly addresses Hermione, she only alludes to the presence of various filth (muggleborns, blood traitors, werewolves..) in her home. That said, Hermione is the only muggleborn we ever see in Grimmauld Place so it must stand to reason that Walburga is referring to her, just like she's indirectly referring to Remus Lupin when she mentions werewolves.

**= Both Hermione and Lily use the term mudblood to refer to themselves in an attempt to reclaim the slur, they both do it twice.

***= Our only "other" is mr Ted Tonks, who Bellatrix only mentions in order to disavow when Voldemort talks about the birth of Teddy Lupin.

Interestingly, the only people who ever refer to Lily Evans as "mudblood" to her face are Severus Snape (one instance recounted three separate times) and Lily Evans herself. Voldemort uses the insult when talking about her with Harry long after her death.

Of further note, our only written "mudblood" comes by courtesy of a ministry pamphlet Harry finds in Diagon Alley, heavily implied to have been written by one ms Dolores Umbridge.

part 5: a brief interlude/ Draco's language

Draco refers to Hermione as “Granger” 13 times and, while their interactions often consist of him talking about her blood status, he uses "mudblood" instead of her name only 4 times. Furthemore, there are 4 additional times where he uses both mudblood and Granger (as in "that mudblood Granger").

The very first time Draco mentions Hermione in the books occurs during this exchange with Lucius:

I find this interesting because, even in private, his first instinct is to use her given name. It's only after he is scolded by Lucius* that we get our first "mudblood", in a scene where he is once again feeling threatened by her.

*= Guess who never utters the word "mudblood"? Lucius. Even Narcissa does once (in DH, when she recognises Hermione at the manor)

part 6: conclusion

I am not a linguistics expert, I cannot tell wether JKR uses the slur she made up in a way that mimics real world slurs. What I can do with the data I compiled is try to track various characters' attitudes towards muggleborns in the books by looking at what they call them.

People whose views remain unchanged (Voldemort, Kreacher, Walburga) remain consistent with their usage of "mudblood"; Draco, who grows up as the books progress, scales back. Snape only ever uses the word once, in the past, and the incident is retold multiple times to signify its importance.

As the situation in the wizarding world worsens, more people feel emboldened to use an otherwise taboo term, as seen by how most one-off utterances of "mudblood" take place in book 7, during wartime.

Finally, I would like to note that we only ever hear two muggleborns' (Lily and Hermione) opinions on "mudblood" as a slur, the rest of the time it's mostly purebloods (and the occasional half-blood) telling us how to feel about the insult; I find that very interesting.

There. Now all this useless information is out of my brain and into the aether, where other nerds can ponder on its significance while this nerd here sleeps the sleep of the truly righteous.

xoxo

[landwriter]

Picnic | Dream/Hob | 1.7K | G light and happy fluff, Hob loves springtime, Matthew hates giving dating advice, and the only pining is Dream pining for an A+ in dating, a thing that is both normal to want and possible to achieve

for Domaystic Drabbles, Day 4: Packed Lunch ty to @softest-punk for twigging me to the sweet @domaystic prompts. It got a little out of hand!

----

Hob had seen several thousand fine spring days. He’d seen keen snowdrops surfacing in February, a hundred congregations of crocuses bursting forth to greet the turning of the seasons, and entire delegations of wild daffodils lancing through leaf-fall and trumpeting their blossoms with an attitude that suggested they knew themselves to be the first and only creatures to master the colour yellow. He’d watched six centuries of human habitation dusted with the same fine pollen as alder and birch unfurled their catkins like festival garlands, and he’d— he’d gotten distracted again.

He blinked at the paper in front of him. He’d forgotten it was there. Or that he was meant to be grading it.

That, too: six centuries of the wild joy of spring distracting him from whatever passed for worthy toil at the time. Six centuries of the whiff of warm breeze setting off some yet-unexplained chemical reaction in his brain that made him want to dash outside and not come back in for weeks. Six centuries of him becoming temporarily mad and cheerfully insufferable to all those around him with the joy of it. He’d never get used to it, and Christ help him if he let anyone around him get used to it either.

“What a gorgeous day,” he remarked, to the untouched stack of student work.

It said nothing back, but he beamed down at it anyway, and then, sighing in the manner of a man happy to be defeated, turned his office chair to face the cracked-open window and watch the house martins build their newest nest.

---

“Matthew.”

“Yeah, boss?”

“I require your counsel. For a human matter.” Dream’s brow was furrowed, his manner grave. Hob, then.

Matthew inclined his head and hopped sideways in what he’d decided was the corvid equivalent of girding his loins.

“Hob keeps commenting on the weather on our outings.” He sounded anguished.

“The weather?” he repeated dumbly. Thank fuck. Two days ago it had been the number of orgasms human males required. Daily. Which, good for the two of them, but c’mon. Matthew had really not needed that knowledge about the kind of refractory period and appetite you acquire after half a millenia of boning. Hob, unfortunately, was Dream’s first human boyfriend, and the boss was setting about his new function with all the usual terrifying intensity and insane demands of perfection. In service of this, Matthew (unilaterally and undemocratically, he might add) had been named Arbiter Of All Things Men, which seemed kind of like a reach considering he was a bird, and one who’d been only, like, a little bisexual in his human life. The Corinthian was always skulking around. He wasn’t human either, but at least he’d fucked dudes. He’d have tips. Or Loosh! Loosh knew everything. She could give Dream books and send him off. Instead of Matthew trying to remember how the fuck dating worked.

“-time we’ve met this week.”

“Right,” said Matthew vaguely.

“What does he mean by it? He knows I cannot change the weather in the Waking. He asks nothing of me, and yet it is incessant.”

“Complaining about it, huh? Humans love to complain, boss.”

“No,” said Dream, looking wretched. “Worse. Earnest, ceaseless praise.”

“Oh. Sure. Of course.” What?

Dream was pacing the throne room like he was auditioning for community theater. “At the National Gallery, he daydreamed of the city park outside while feigning to contemplate a Pesellino. I took him to a production of Macbeth at the Globe, and afterwards, he said that even after centuries, it was never less than marvelous to watch. He was referring to the swifts feeding above us in the third act. Naturally.”

Matthew made a sympathetic noise. If he didn’t know when to keep his mouth - er, beak - shut, he’d say that Dream sounded like an insecure lover. Jealous, as best he could tell, of the change of seasons for stealing away some of Hob’s uncannily boundless affections.

“Well?” Dream stared at him in askance.

“Uh.” He floundered. Spring shit, spring shit. “You could take him on a picnic.” Yeah. Chicks loved picnics.

---

Dream had appeared in his office with a wicker basket that looked stolen from a Beatrix Potter story. A delicate gingham square peeked from the lid. It looked big enough to set up a naughty rabbit for life. He set it on Hob’s desk and then primly folded his hands behind his back.

“Hullo, you.” Hob stood and kissed him on the cheek. “What’s the occasion?” He suspected that there was none. Dream had been taking dating him very seriously. It was delightful.

“Matthew has suggested you require a picnic,” said Dream. Except he said it the way someone else might say The doctor has suggested it’s terminal.

Dream had been taking dating him very seriously. It was also, sometimes, awful.

“Oh, darling. That’s so sweet. But I don’t require anything special, you know. Just you, when you’ve got time to drop in. We could do something else.”

“We shall not. I have packed us lunch.”

“Alright, you stubborn creature. Maybe I do require a picnic.” He offered his arm to Dream. “Come on, I know a place.”

---

Lunch was too piddling a word for the spread Dream had packed. Lunch was a crust of bread and ale, or pottage. Lunch was a Sainsbury’s Egg & Cress Sandwich wolfed down with the last of the morning’s flask of Yorkshire Tea. This was a feast. A temple offering. For Hob. His chest twinged a little with affection. God, he was in love.

“This pleases you,” said Dream, who was looking unfairly elegant for someone sat on a gingham blanket with a bit of clotted cream on the side of his mouth.

Hob kissed it away. “Oh, yes.”

“More than our other...dates.”

“Oh,” said Hob, who was sometimes slow on the uptake, but after several centuries, didn’t miss much at all. “I’ve loved all of them. But this-” he gestured sweepingly around at Primrose Hill, the green ash shading them, the pleasant urban pastoral of joggers and families and dogs and other love-struck couples, all breathing in the same warm afternoon air, “-is exactly where I want to be, today. Outside, among all the life. In the thick of spring. It’s perfect.”

Dream followed Hob’s gaze, and studied the tableau. “There is nothing exceptional about this weather or setting.” He sounded as nonplussed as creature with nearly infinite age and knowledge could sound.

Hob laced his fingers through Dream’s, and tried to see what he saw. No great stories, really. Pedestrian daydreams of food and sun and sex, probably, of pay raises and summer vacations to Mallorca and Ibiza. Humanity being predictable, and life doing the same thing it did every year, to Dream’s uncountable thousands.

“No, I suppose not, but that’s why I love it, too. It’s familiar. Constant. Centuries, and it catches me out each time. It’s always arrived, no matter how bad things were for me. Always been there to celebrate with me when they’re wonderful. Like now.”

Dream looked sidelong at Hob. “Like now,” he echoed. Unsure, and stubbornly unwilling to make a question of it. The ache in Hob’s chest redoubled itself.

“Like now,” he promised. “It reminds me of you, too, you know. We always met in June, Dream. In 1789, watching the first trees budding nearly drove me mad with anticipation. Ninety-nine years and nine months. And you were always heralded by the same signs.” He traced circles on Dream’s pale palm, imagining it sun-kissed. “In 1989, when spring turned all the way into summer and you were still gone, I think my heart broke a little. I’d hoped, until then. That you were just late. With the swifts,” he said, quiet.

“Hob.” Dream had moved across the picnic blanket in his preternaturally fast way, and was now more or less in his lap, gripping Hob’s shoulders.

“Sorry,” he said, grimacing. “I’m being horrifically soppy. Must’ve been the scones. It’s alright. You’re here now. All that matters.”

“Robert Gadling,” said Dream. Hob blinked at that. He’d only ever gotten the full name treatment when Dream was still his Stranger, and only then when he’d disappointed him. “If you dare apologize for such a fine expression of your sentiment, I will be wroth with you.”

“Sorry,” he said again, smiling this time.

“I am honoured you associate me with the season you most adore. I would have it that you never pass another Spring waiting for me. If you wished such a thing.”

It sounded a little like a marriage proposal, which was something his heart really could not cope with the full size of at the minute. Not with so much love already around. Not if Dream didn’t intend to say it like that. He went for levity instead.

“Even though it’s driven me to distraction every time you’ve taken me out this week? Even if all I want to do for weeks is lie around outdoors and hold hands?”

Nearby, a baby started wailing. Dream, to his credit, didn’t even glance away. “Yes,” he said, perfectly solemn, perfectly certain. “Even then.”

“Well, that’s alright then,” said Hob, fighting an urge to start crying a little as well. “I would, as a matter of fact. Wish such a thing.”

They looked at each other, besotted, while the wailing continued.

“Only,” murmured Dream, “must it be in Anthropocene?”

“What?”

“Lie down, lover.” Hob did, a delighted suspicion creeping over him as Dream reached into his jacket pocket. Dream stretched over him, and spoke it low into his ear: “And I will take you to a Spring no man has seen.”

---

Matthew was eating scone crumbs and congratulating himself on his good sense to suggest a picnic. Birds loved picnics too. He hadn’t realized how much until this moment. Jesus. Picnics were a great idea. He was going to tell Dream that human men required them weekly during courtship.

“Thanks for bringing home leftovers, boss,” he said, spraying crumbs all over Dream’s shoulder.

Dream was too preoccupied to mind, or even notice. He waved an imperious hand. “It’s nothing. We absconded from the Waking shortly after we arrived. I have finally given Hob a worthy date. I showed him the virtues of picnicking in a Dreaming Spring.” Oh my god. Dream actually had been jealous of the weather. Because he hadn’t made it for Hob.

“What, no ants?” he offered.

“Hardly so prosaic,” said Dream. He glowed with satisfaction. “The very first.”

[weirdly-specific-but-ok]

Hi asmi it’s me do u have any life advice because good omens is making mine fall apart ngl

*wobbles into my overflowing askbox that I have got to get through sorry maggots it's been a while* *sneezes* *squints through watering eyes* AIGHT CLEARLY I'M IN THE BEST POSSIBLE STATE TO GIVE LIFE ADVICE.

GIRD YOUR LOINS AND HEAR THE WISDOM OF THE GOOD OMENS MASCOT:

Some days even getting out of bed is a struggle and that's perfectly valid and okay

Cry and puke when your body says you need to I swear it feels much better after

If you get arrested don't call the cops babygirls

If someone hasn't watched good omens, don't shut up about it until they do

If people consistently make you feel horrible then they're not right for you no matter how much they love you or you love them

Pay attention on the metro/subway/bus and don't miss your stop because you were listening to WAP and thinking gay thoughts

"Fuck it we ball" does not apply to situations that require highly skilled labour of a skill you do not possess

It's always a bad idea to be strongly opinionated about things you are not educated about

Don't make decisions based on fear

Do, however, make decisions after calculating actual risks

If someone says Good Omens is heterosexual and cis, pity them and move on

Just because you feel scared doesn't mean something bad is going to happen, that's called emotional reasoning and it's a logical fallacy

Time spent being happy is equally productive as time spent doing work

Time spent thinking about Crowley and Aziraphale is also equally productive if someone argues with that worry not I'll bite their toes for you

Expiry dates are not a suggestion

Neither was the Geneva convention

You are loved <3

[thosemintcookies]

I think there's a huge disconnect these days where images are communal when it's about saying right click save to nft bros but somehow protecting the sanctity of image ownership when talking about artists online. Like follow the thread. Thinking you Own an image or idea just because ypu made it does a disservice to the idea of art-as-sharing including engaging with remixing and recontextualizing and replication.

Like yes artists deserve recognition over the products of what they make but monopolizing something intrinsically shred is so wrongheaded. IP law will not protect you when it's always the richer culture producer who can gird up with lawyers to defend that your works are derivative enough to be considered theirs not yours.

Like yes talk about injustices and bad usage as they exist but it's not a problem with ai. Same shit can be said about using Photoshop or something come on now

[fatehbaz]

Avocado orchards had carpeted the gently undulating hills around the sacred lake of Pátzcuaro with stodgy green bushes. Here, before the cataclysmic arrival of the first envoys dispatched by Hernando Cortes from the Aztec capital over the mountains to the East, [...] the Purépecha had sown maize, amaranth, zucchini, cacao, cotton, tomato, beans, a dozen types of chili, and much more.

Now the monotonous “green gold” of the avocado boom had colonized the entire Mexican state of Michoacán. [...] [I]t was shocking to think that the cause of the disaster was America’s great patriotic party: the National Football League’s Super Bowl. A flurry of advertising creativity on behalf of the Mexican avocado was unleashed every year during the multi-million-dollar sports broadcast. [...] “Is your life just terrible?” asks the comic actor Chris Elliott, star of Scary Movie 2 and Scary Movie 4, in the 2019 spot. “You deserve more! Spread an avocado on top of everything!” [...] A few days before the Super Bowl, the domestic diva Martha Stewart [...] had released on social networks her latest recipe for guacamole [...]. Guacamole was now an obligatory snack for the 100 million or so Americans who watched the Super Bowl. In February of 2017, 278 million avocados -- most of them from Michoacán -- had been sold during the days before the game in [the US] [...].

---

The avocado had become the star product of Mexican food production in the age of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) [...] since NAFTA was signed in 1994 [...]. [Mexican] farmers produced 16 times more than the formerly dominant Californian growers. [...] Moreover, the avocado was now classified as a “superfood” [...].

It had not always been like this. In the 1950s, the avocado was known unsentimentally as the crocodile pear [...]. Imports from Mexico were banned until 1997 [...] . When complete liberalization was announced in 2007, Michoacán had become an unbeatable competitor for the Californian avocado growers. The Mexican producers specialized, like their Californian rivals, in the Hass variety of avocado, more meaty than those that the Purépecha had [...] consumed over the millennia, and with a tough skin that protected the pears during long hauls in chilled container trucks to El Paso or Tijuana and then beyond to the big US consumer markets. [...] [T]he Hass avocado was perfectly suited to the global market [...]. Michoacán, whose crystalline lakes had earned it the name of the “land of fish” in the indigenous language of Tarasco, would never be the same.

By 2020, 80 percent of the avocados consumed in the United States came from Michoacán [...].

---

Now in the 21st century, on the outskirts of Uruapan, the frenetic capital del aguacate, the new economy of agribusiness took shape [...]. Further west on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro, the monoculture had not yet colonized the entire landscape, but the advance of the avocado seemed unstoppable. [...] “Practically everybody here wants an avocado orchard [...],” explained [FFB], a resident of the Purépecha indigenous community of Jarácuaro on the shores of the lake. [...] [H]e was horrified by the extent of environmental destruction. “They pump water from the lake to water the avocado orchards [...]. It’s pillage. [...]”

The falling water level, together with the introduction of the rapacious predator tilapia, had wiped out almost all the [...] [native] fish species. Of the cornucopia of marine life that had fed the Purépecha cities, only the diminutive silvery charal remained. The same occurred at other great freshwater deposits in Michoaczán. [...] The Purépecha communities on the shores of the lake, a landscape of stunning beauty where dense pine and ilex oak forests met white nymphaea lilies floating on turquoise water, were girding themselves for the arrival of the aguacateros, avocado producers [...].

---

“They put a gun to your head and tell you to sign the deed before the notary. That’s how the transfer of land is agreed upon,” explained [GV], a sociologist at the University of San Nicolas de Hidalgo in Morelia [...].

Meanwhile, large exporters and avocado brokers -- some of them international brands like Del Monte -- were profiting by purchasing from producers at dirt-cheap prices and reselling to the US supermarket chains at very attractive ones. “They pay a dollar per kilo of avocado here and sell it for eight at a Minnesota W*lmart,” said [GV].

In order not to squander such a reliable source of profits, “transnational corporations, just like the Canadian mining companies in Zacatecas, pay the extortion money [...],” he continued.

---

Text by: Andy Robinson. Gold, Oil, and Avocados: A Recent History of Latin America in Sixteen Commodities. 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks added by me.]

[fans4wga]

WGA UPDATE: "Where We Are and Where We’re Going"

From WGA West on Youtube: WGA Negotiating Committee Co-Chair Chris Keyser gives an update one month into the Writers Guild strike.

Mod note: While this video is intended for WGA members, it's a great morale boost and affirmation that what we do as fans and audience members matters. Make your voice heard on social media. Studios are losing the PR battle right now, but strike fatigue may set in later on—fight it and keep up morale among yourself and your fandom communities!

Full transcript below the cut (1992 words)

“Where We Are And Where We’re Going” June 2, 2023

Fellow members of the WGA, East and West, thank you for giving me a few minutes to update you on where we are and where we're going. Our strike against the companies of the AMPTP is now in its fifth week. We have walked together on picket lines for a month. With the acknowledgment that there is no letting up until we ultimately achieve the contract we deserve and that we need to survive in this business, I will say, we should all take a minute to appreciate what we've accomplished. We have been highly effective in inflicting pain on the companies by withholding our work, by picketing itself, publicly demonstrating our resolve, our endurance, our sometimes even joyful commitment to a joyless task, by bringing to our side a coalition of labor that this town has not seen in generations, by disrupting production in concert with those union allies who honor our lines, and by informing investors and advertisers of those disruptions.

Our message has power because it's true. We believe in it because we know it's true. But that only goes so far. What has real power, what moves people, what will move this town one day, is our belief in each other. So thank you, all of you. All our picket site coordinators, all our incredible captains, every single member who has spoken with their feet as well as their voice, who has stuck with both the letter and the spirit of the strike rules. Thank you to Guild staff, who have gone above and beyond and then beyond that. Thank you to the other Guilds and unions: the Teamsters, IATSE, SAG-AFTRA, the Musicians, the Electrical Workers, the Plasterers, the Laborers, the DGA, and everyone else who have sent a message to the companies with their solidarity.

What have the companies been doing in the meantime? Well, they've been putting out heartfelt statements from their executives that they truly hope the strike can be resolved quickly for everyone's benefit, which is weird. They hope? Aren't these their companies? Don't know where to find us? We are, after all, right outside their gates. They claim they don't have time for us, that they're busy. That's a lie, it's just a lie. They could talk to us if they wanted to. This is their strategy, such as it is. The same old strategy. But it's not going to work. If Carol Lombardini thinks negotiating with the DGA while we're out on strike is some kind of trump card, she's gonna find out that her 2007/8 playbook doesn't belong in a negotiating room, it belongs in a museum. Any deal that puts this town back to work runs straight through the WGA, and there is no way around us. We wish the DGA the best in their negotiations. That goes for SAG-AFTRA as well.

We are, as I said before, infinitely grateful to all their members who have marched with us every day. We are rooting hard for them to exercise their power and achieve the contract they deserve. They are hurting just like we are. They are at risk just like we are. SAG-AFTRA's SAV vote should send shivers down the companies' spine.

The month of June will bring us all some answers. By the time it's over, the companies may find themselves embattled on more than one front, or we alone may be without a contract. And either way, we will fight on with this understanding: We are girded by an alliance with our sister guilds and unions, they give us strength, but we are strong enough. We have always been strong enough to get the deal we need using writer power alone. We were strong enough in 2007/8, we were strong enough during the agency campaign, we are strong enough now.

As David Goodman and I have said from the very beginning, the single thing that will determine whether we succeed or fail in this strike is our endurance, both physical and emotional. I have no doubt about that endurance. Writers' strength of character aside, the companies have made us strong. They have taught us, however painfully, to withstand months and months without work. Their abuse of us has made it untenable to rush back to jobs that may not even be there in a year or two in a career where even success is financially unsustainable. But even as we endure, there will be challenges, it will be painful. Uncertainty is painful. Is there any one of us who doesn't wake up feeling the weight of this every day? I don't think so. Having no income in a tenuous job market is painful, there's help for that, of course, through the Strike Fund and the Good and Welfare Fund and the Entertainment Community Fund, but none of that is the same as having a job, and everyone understands that.

We will need to steel ourselves against arguments whispered in our ears designed to weaken our resolve, to distrust each other. I'm gonna say them out loud again because it's better to talk about them than to ignore them. The first is that the Guild is just waiting for the AMPTP to decide when negotiations begin again. We are negotiating now. Every day, we are negotiating. We are making the only argument the companies can hear, the argument of power. We are withholding our work, disrupting productions, talking to Wall Street, to City Hall, Sacramento, and Washington D.C. We are bringing allies to our cause. This is the work. This is the leverage. It is the same in any strike, and it will take time. But if we believe the central truth of our cause, that it all starts with writing and that nothing happens without it, then we have to trust that truth and stay the course.

Related, of course, is the lie that the companies are impervious to all of this. Every day, the cost of not negotiating with us adds up. And it's not just from the shutdowns that get all the attention, it's the shows that will shoot until they run out of scripts and then stop dead, the shows that will finish shooting and grind to a halt in post, it's the fall broadcast season that day by day will begin to slip away. It's the pain that for others will come later but will come. Because subscribers don't pay for platforms with meager product and advertisers just don't pay for shows with meager audiences.

So all the silent CEOs lounging on their summer yachts, leaving it all to Carol and the AMPTP, will have some explaining to do once it becomes clear that we are not going anywhere. The parent companies of the broadcast networks as well as Sony will have to explain the strategy of risking those broadcast interests to the interests of tech companies who will still have products to air in the fall. They'll have to explain linking their fates to the fates of those same companies whose explicit intention is to eat them for breakfast, one at a time. They will have to explain their refusal to negotiate with us over business practices that are roughly in line with how they have done business for decades. Even those companies whose business is a half-and-half mix of streaming and linear programming, Disney, Comcast, NBCUniversal, and Paramount, but whose streaming businesses rely heavily on the content they make for network television, content that is about to dry up, will have to explain. Warner Discovery will have to explain why writers are a greater threat to them than Netflix and how, having dumped content and shut down development for the past year to pay for one man's merger, they intend to compete without scripted programming. Apple will have to explain how this little experiment in branding is working out for them and why, with their nearly $3 trillion in market capitalization, they refuse to even talk to writers over a $17 million ask a year. Why this company that became rich beyond measure from its creative brilliance refuses to allow writers just a fair share of ours.

As for Amazon, given the way they treat unions, maybe they think they don't have to explain anything. But this is a different town they're in now. Even Netflix, who alone among all these companies, has no other product but its programming and for whom subscription churn is a huge problem, whose quarterly results can be made or broken by the success of a single smash hit show, will have to explain. Because the hole in content is coming for them too. It may be coming later, but it's coming, and Wall Street will take note.

All of which is to say, hang on. We are doing what we set out to do, and it's having an impact even beyond the lives of writers. It began with every other Guild and union in this business who saw in our struggle a mirror of their own. What I'm telling you is that when you walk in circles in front of every studio in town, you are carrying with you a cause that is larger than just us and this business, though just us and this business would have been enough. We are marching for labor, and labor is watching us. We have, it turns out to our great fortune, something very precious. We have a strong union in a heavily unionized industry. We have what many workers in this country do not. If we succeed, we will make it easier, not easy, but easier, for others to succeed after us. If we falter, if we fail, if it is the companies' power that wins the day and not ours, then we will have failed for everyone. We will have made it harder for everyone.

And I mean that not as a burden but as a purpose. The signs we carry have messages written on them in invisible, visible ink, and all who labor can read them: that everyone who works has a right to be treated with dignity, that we are not diminished by the size of the company that employs us, that what we want is not just a gig, not just a job, but a career with a future and with promise, and that first among those promises is that if you do good work, you can make a life out of doing that thing. That technology driven only by unchecked capitalism and with no attention to its human costs and moral implications is a threat to us all. It must be controlled. It cannot be left only to those who would always rather make a dollar than a good decision. And that, as I have said before, the promise of this country belongs also to those who make something other than just money.

The companies think that time is weakening us, but they are wrong. It is making us stronger. Every day they refuse to negotiate, they bring us together at their gates to hear each other's stories, and in those stories to hear echoes of our own. They have reminded us every day of the thousands of other people for whom we are fighting and reminded us, too, that thousands of other people are fighting for us.

To paraphrase a line, we are now perhaps at the end of the beginning. No one knows how long this will take. The companies will have some say in that. What they will have no say in is how we behave along the way in our fortitude. But they will come to understand it, and they will pay it the respect it deserves in time.

On behalf of the leadership and the NegCom [Negotiating Committee], I thank you all again. We have marched with you every day. We are in awe of this membership. You give us strength. Union now. Union forever.

[titleleaf]

Various Wills Graham & The Man Your Haunted Eideteker Could Smell Like

I promised you a really long-winded post about why the "ship on the bottle" aftershave exchanges don't work for me in the TV show and I am here to deliver. Thoughts on Will and Clarice's respective ~*~*~*signature scents~*~*~* in the novels, how the scent motif gets updated for the NBC show, and the smells I want 2013 Will Graham to smell like. Come with me on an olfactory journey.

(That second ad: dude, ew.) Gird your loins because there is so much corny sailing imagery to come.

In The Books

Dr. Hannibal Lecter lay on his cot asleep, his head propped on a pillow against the wall. Alexandre Dumas’s Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine was open on his chest. Graham had stared through the bars for about five seconds when Lecter opened his eyes and said, “That’s the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court.” “I keep getting it for Christmas.” Dr. Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light redly in tiny points. Graham felt each hair bristle on his nape. He put his hand on the back of his neck. “Christmas, yes,” Lecter said. “Did you get my card?” “I got it. Thank you.” Dr. Lecter’s Christmas card had been forwarded to Graham from the FBI crime laboratory in Washington. He took it into the backyard, burned it, and washed his hands before touching Molly. [...] “Your hands are rough. They don’t look like a cop’s hands anymore. That shaving lotion is something a child would select. It has a ship on the bottle, doesn’t it?” Dr. Lecter seldom holds his head upright. He tilts it as he asks a question, as though he were screwing an auger of curiosity into your face. Another silence, and Lecter said, “Don’t think you can persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.”

(Red Dragon, Thomas Harris, 1981)

Will is in his mid-to-late 30s circa s1 of the NBC show, airing in 2013; his book counterpart is ~40 at the time of Red Dragon (at least prior to some later timeline shuffling? I think?) which would make him ~34-35 at the time of his briefer encounter with Lecter in that continuity. The substantial difference is when they're born -- the early 1940s rather than the late 1970s. Show Will's Gen X. Book Will isn't even a baby boomer, he's Silent Generation! These generational cohorts don't mean very much but in some things, like fashion and marketing, they flag differences in how certain products are marketed and how they're viewed.

(all my Old Spice bottle images in this post come courtesy of OldSpiceCollectibles)

The aftershave lotion with a ship on the bottle that Hannibal is bitching about is almost certainly Old Spice -- the OG Old Spice, as formulated in the late 1970s. This was a golden era for aftershave in gift-giving (witness the dozens and dozens of different collectible Avon bottles) and while the classic Old Spice bottle very much does have a ship on the bottle, Willy might have given his stepfather any number of novelty bottles designed for gifting, all of them with roughly similar early-Americana/nautical themes. Ship's wheels, ship's lanterns, ships in general, scrimshawed whale teeth, binoculars, basically anything you could possibly want. (I'd wager this is at least in part to keep up with similar collectibles coming out of Avon, but I might have that the wrong way around, or be completely off the mark altogether.)

http://www.oldspicecollectibles.com/Bottles/novelty bottles.html

The fragrance inside the bottle is a spicy floral with resinous basenotes, what for decades has been called an "oriental" fragrance. (Mercifully some parts of the industry seem to be beginning a shift toward less racist language, and I hope that shift continues, I'm seeing people float "ambrée"/"amberesque" and other language to evoke the spicy, warm profile of some scents.) It's an alcohol-based aftershave lotion, so it stings like a mother when you put it on freshly-shaven skin, and it's not great for hydration.

For cultural context, most of this will probably be stating the obvious, but I think it's interesting with the book's themes around social class, family -- Will's little family, Dolarhyde's family of origin, Dolarhyde's victims' family -- and masculinity.

In 1981, Old Spice is already positioned firmly as a highly accessible men's fragrance in the US -- available pretty much anywhere at the drugstore level, with a coordinating line of toiletries like shaving cream if aftershave isn't enough for you. For a wide swath of people of a certain age, it carries associations with dads and grandfathers, or the transmission of rituals around masculinity and coming of age from father to son. (This is weird for me as a person who came of age during the whole "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign, which aimed at revamping Old Spice's product line and aiming it toward a younger demographic, in competition with Axe. That Old Spice revamp was probably my intro into men's fragrances and it's so fucking embarrassing to say that -- it seemed very transgressive and butch to me to be wearing men's deodorant with my Catholic schoolgirl 'fit every weekday.)

It's chronologically feasible that Will's dad also wore Old Spice, and it makes sense as the kind of gift you'd give your new stepdad -- it's an impersonal gift, reflecting a fairly conservative, mainline, American masculinity. The unease many American men still felt about using scented products — even deodorant, which remained a squeamish topic — could be mitigated by the association with shaving the face as some distinctly male ritual and one taught by fathers to sons as part of their entrance into adolescence.

Have another incredibly corny print ad from 1970:

(the text is tiny here, but the gist is: hey, all these different dudes love Old Spice! Grandpa Hal! Uncle Fred! Jack! Dave! Even that goofball Pete! Just a whole bunch of guys.)

So Hannibal's remark has layers -- he's needling Will about the fact that he knows (or suspects) that Will now has a wife and child, which he likely didn't have when they last encountered each other. He's taking a swipe at his social class and his lack of sophistication — for someone with a dainty nose and a decidedly bitchy sensibility (especially in RD) Old Spice is very much déclassé. And in a narrative level, the fact that Hannibal is distinguished by his aesthetic refinement and a certain degree of fussiness as well as viciousness sets him and Will in opposition, two different modes of masculinity. I have… a lot of thoughts about how Thomas Harris uses aesthetics and sensory pleasure and refinement — certain fabrics, certain garments, certain styles of penmanship — to frame social deviance in these books but that’s for a different post I’m definitely not going to make.

This moment gets a fun parallel to Hannibal's first meeting with Clarice in The Silence Of The Lambs (1988):

“Now,” Lecter said, sitting sideways at his table to face her, “what did Miggs say to you?” “Who?” “Multiple Miggs, in the cell down there. He hissed at you. What did he say?” “He said, 'I can smell your cunt.”' “I see. I myself cannot. You use Evyan skin cream, and sometimes you wear L'Air du Temps, but not today. Today you are determinedly unperfumed. How do you feel about what Miggs said?” “He's hostile for reasons I couldn't know. It's too bad. He's hostile to people, people are hostile to him. It's a loop.” “Are you hostile to him?” “I'm sorry he's disturbed. Beyond that, he's noise. How did you know about the perfume?” “A puff from your bag when you got out your card. Your bag is lovely.”

This is definitely a different tone than he takes with Will Graham, both because he has a very different past history with Will and because of Clarice's position as a woman, placed in front of him as an object for scrutiny. L'Air du Temps is also an old school fragrance (premiering in 1948) and had been popular for several decades by the time the novel's set — a warm floral with the kind of powdery iris note that gets really annoying people on perfume review sites fighting over the words "old lady". (FWIW I own multiple bottles of L’Air du Temps and all but one are from estate sales. The one that isn't, I... uh... bought because I was thinking about Clarice Starling a lot at the time.) This one was and is a ton of women's signature scent, and there's nothing juvenile about it. Clarice wears it, and her mother might well have worn it too. That shit is iconic but for different reasons than Old Spice is for men.

(This little '80s spray is not what any of my bottles look like. If you want more on the various ways this one's been formulated over the years, check out the PerfumeShrine piece I linked above or this blog post on how to identify its different bottles and flankers.)

Someone on Fragrantica compared L'Air du Temps to the olfactory version of a pair of pearl earrings or a cashmere sweater — conveying polished, (small-c) conservative femininity. The inside of Clarice’s handbag is the recipient of scent here, not her body (that part's conveyed through the remark about her hand cream) and the indirectness of the detail under observation is what conveys the keenness of Lecter’s senses and how closely he’s paying attention to his visitor. He also huffs her business card because of course he does.

All of these elements of class and restraint are set in opposition to the crassness of Miggs’ unwanted commentary on Clarice’s body. With her good bag and her cheap shoes Clarice is faking a certain degree of maturity and presenting herself in the most palatable way possible for this interview ("determinedly unperfumed" and all the things that can mean; pretty but serious; feminine but not too feminine; performing the right social class, all along in flight from her "common" origins) but she’s still facing virulent misogyny from damn near every direction. The book doesn’t have quite the same pointed sense of a Theme(tm) around misogyny that the film manages, though that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty going on with regard to gender, but I think the differences around how Hannibal identifies these two perfumes, and what the reader is meant to gather from each allusion or name drop, are telling and very fun.

Hannibal then goes on to give Clarice advice about how to zhuszh up her add-a-bead necklace with some semiprecious stones in order to best set off the color of her hair and eyes, which… again, I do not have time to get into that, but I’m obsessed with it.

In The NBC Show

Hannibal stands behind Will, his NOSTRILS FLARE as CAMERA SLOWLY PUSHES IN on the back of Will’s neck. WILL GRAHAM Did you just smell me? HANNIBAL Difficult to avoid. I really must introduce you to a finer aftershave. That smells like something with a ship on the bottle. WILL GRAHAM I keep getting it for Christmas. HANNIBAL Have your headaches gotten any worse lately? More frequent? WILL GRAHAM Yes, actually. HANNIBAL I’d change the aftershave. (s01e05 "Coquilles")

Love the mention of the back of Will's neck, already intimating that it's not his aftershave Hannibal's huffing here. This is something I just can't fanwank for the television show's remixed timeline -- if Will doesn't have a partner and child in his life, or really anyone else in his life in a position to be giving him presents, this recontextualized snippet about getting the offending aftershave for Christmas doesn't make a lot of sense. It works on the level of "hey, I recognize that bit!" and it establishes for the viewer (or reminds them of) Hannibal's highly developed sense of smell, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

INT. HANNIBAL LECTER'S HOUSE - KITCHEN - NIGHT Hannibal comes into the dark room. Moves toward the refrigerator. Stops. Lifts his nose to the air. HANNIBAL The same unfortunate aftershave. Too long in the bottle. Hannibal opens the refrigerator door and the light illuminates a gun pointed at his head, Will Graham behind it. - (s02e07 "Yakimono")

HANNIBAL LECTER. He lies on his cot, asleep, his head propped on a pillow against the wall. Alexandre Dumas's Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine is open on his chest. Eyes still closed, he takes a long slow breath through his nose, smelling the current of air that the CAMERA traveled. He opens his eyes. HANNIBAL That's the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court. - (s03e09 "…And the Woman Clothed with the Sun", very directly drawn from Red Dragon)

What’s the modern-day analogue of the original Old Spice in 1981 — ubiquity, maturity, connotations around class and gender? I don’t know if there is one. In 2013 Will's more likely to be wearing Old Spice deodorant, post-rebrand, still with a ship on the packaging but called Fiji or Denali. Or Bearglove, or Wolfthorn. No doubt Hannibal would find that offensive, but offensive in a different way than his book counterpart way back in the Reagan administration.

There's no shortage of drugstore-y scents in 2013, highly accessible fragrances for a person giving a generic Male Gift at an accessible price point, or habitual buys for a guy who mostly wants to smell like he's at least attempting to be a put-together human being: D&G Light Blue, Davidoff Cool Water, CK One, CK Eternity. (Or their body spray equivalents, if you really want Hannibal to suffer, and I do, every day of my life.) But in general there's a* lot* more diversity in fragrance worn by American men in 2013 than there was circa the events of Red Dragon or at whatever age book!Will might have started using fragrance. There's no one scent that stands in for such a broad section of gender and class as Old Spice aftershave would have in the 1970s.

It seems doubtful that in 2013 Will's using whatever he's using primarily for its shaving benefits, not least of all because he's a bearded king. (Presumably he cleans his beard up from time to time and trims his neck and whatnot, but bear with me here.) True aftershave is still available in many drugstores, including some venerable names — Aqua Velva, Skin Bracer, Pinaud Clubman — but they’re no longer the arena of younger men unless they're curious budding fragheads. And you can still be an outdoorsy dude in 2013 wearing Old Spice, but it's a bit more of a self-conscious put-on at that point, either someone's buying Will tongue-in-cheek dad cologne to go with his house full of boat engines and dog statues, or Will's bashful about his own taste for tongue-in-cheek dad cologne.

What might Will be wearing in 2013? This depends on which aspect we’re trying to reflect. For modest budget and ubiquity I can see him going for the OG Polo Green or one of its flankers. (There's a great piece of NBC Hannibal perfume meta by Genufa that I swear I only encountered after I already chose this, and it mentions Polo Classic in tandem with Will, so I'm glad we're in agreement here.) For stuff in an amber-spice neighborhood, CK Obsession For Men maybe? Still retro (premiered in 1986) but not 1930s retro.

What’s a step up? If I was out here somehow tasked with buying this man a nice smelling gift, what would I choose? If Will wanted to treat himself with something under that broad constellation of selling points — a single fragrance for steady wear, something unflashy and congruent with his presentation of himself -- I would be really tempted to put him in something slightly more niche, but not a lot more niche.

I am a huge fan of Etat Libre d'Orange Fat Electrician, a really fun creamy vetiver that's sexy in a clean soft-butch kind of way. It's not spicy in the least but as the scent's subtitle of a "semi-modern vetiver" indicates it has a nice timeless quality, warm and clean-smelling but not soapy. (And a very subtle gourmand aspect -- chestnut cream or marrons glacés.) Or something from DS&Durga, Mississippi Medicine, or Bowmakers, or Burning Barbershop -- there's a whole slew of "vintage barbershop"-inspired scents that might scratch the same itch for someone who wears a fragrance out of habit and to feel grounded in a solid, put-together masculinity. (Maybe especially when he's not feeling otherwise particularly grounded or put-together.)

For different ways of evoking Will's kind of dignified no-fuss outdoorsman thing, Profumum Arso ("Cedar leaves, incense, leather, pine resin") maybe, or Fumidus, though it sounds like peaty hell to me -- Will seems to be a bourbon guy and not a scotch dude. For something a little more glamorous and a little more established, maybe Guerlain Habit Rouge, idk. 

What’s the next step up from these -- the equivalent of Bella's Bolt Of Lightning? If someone (with a bankroll on par with Hannibal, or Bedelia, or Jack, or Bella) were to introduce Will to a still pricier class of fragrance, what might that look like? It's hard for me to say, since this isn't a type of perfumery I engage with, like... at all. I like my indie oils, I like niche perfumers, I love decants, but I don't have a cool $800 to drop on a whole bottle of... anything. Once you reach a certain level you can shop pretty differently from normal people, up to and including getting something one-of-a-kind commissioned for your boytoy/crime gimp/ex-husband's ex-husband/etc. (And as a gift for someone else -- since none of these people barring possibly Bella has a remotely normal relationship with Will -- it'd say as much about their intentions with the gift and their perception of Will as the reality of who Will is.) So I'm going to have to mull that a while.

Absolutely none of this gets into the bonkers Farmacia di Santa Maria Novella sequence in Hannibal, which... has a lot going on, idk. ("Starling, then. Clean, and rich in textures. Cotton sun-dried and ironed. Clarice Starling, then. Engaging and toothsome. Tedious in her earnestness and absurd in her principles. Quick in her mother wit." Please, sir!) Like basically every other element of the series, the smell stuff gets ratcheted up to 11 for that book, and it seems like its own separate thing to unpack. Hannibal fucking loves shopping in that book and I love reading about his weird little ass shopping.

[gracemarkss]

my biggest issue with chris carter is honestly that i cannot for the life of me pin down what exactly he's trying to communicate about bodily autonomy and reproductive exploitation. these are clearly central themes of the show and he's got a real preoccupation with women's reproductive capabilities especially. the entire plot under-girding the show is an international government conspiracy in which, in order to fend off an alien invasion or develop military weapons or both, women are abducted, experimented on, and impregnated without their knowledge in order to create hybrid superhumans with weird powers; these women are subsequently tracked and then disposed of via an incurable cancer. i think the show generally frames this as an ultimately fruitless effort, which solves nothing and creates more problems than it solves. this project is evil, medical rape is bad, and what's happened to these women is a terrible injustice. the ends - potentially saving the world, or at least some of it, from some sort of apocalyptic event - do not justify the means.

but then you have small potatoes, post modern prometheus, the william plot. we're supposed to laugh at the woman who genuinely believes she's given birth to luke skywalker's baby. we're supposed to feel sorry for the monster, because all he wanted was a female companion. in both small potatoes and pmp, women who lack the ability to get pregnant otherwise, whether due to infertility or no male partner, are impregnated via rape, and both episodes seem to communicate an "all's well that ends well" message because these women wanted children and they got them. the women in small potatoes thought they were having sex with their husbands; the women in pmp were unconscious; the result was children and that was the goal these women were working toward; everything's find. both episodes have comedic, whimsical tones; neither rapist, imo is truly held accountable for their crimes (even though van blundht goes to prison, he basically gets the last word, and while i find him pathetic i feel the episode wants him to be seen as sympathetic - he's such a romantic, women just won't give him the time of day because he's ugly)

with william, carter obfuscates the reality of his conception and presents the possibility that he is the product of csm artificially inseminating scully while she's unconscious. but scully is another woman who wanted a child, thought it wasn't a possibility, and got one anyway. does it matter that she may have experienced a terrible violation in the process?

idk maybe i'm missing something vital, but i can't figure it out. i can't parse what he's trying to say about these themes that are so central to the story he's writing. rape is bad when it's the government but ok if it's a lonely sad sack guy, especially when it results in pregnancy and the victim really wanted a kid? women should be ok with pregnancy regardless of how it came about?

i feel like carter views women's reproduction as though it's magical or divine and not a basic biological process that exists everywhere in nature (one that in humans does indeed make women vulnerable to exploitation and violence; controlling women's bodies and reproduction results in a great deal of power and that's why governments, cultural institutions, and individual men have been trying and largely succeeding in doing so for centuries - this is a basic aspect of patriarchy). other people have talked about their interpretation of shades of the madonna-whore complex visible in his writing and the hang ups he seems to have around female sexual desire. what's the difference between the women who are abducted as part of the project, who are framed as victims, and those who are violated in sp or pmp, who are framed more as people to be laughed at, and not explicitly as victimized? what's the difference between the men involved in the project, and van blundht and the monster? why are non consensual pregnancies even utilized as plot drivers in these episodes at all? what are they adding? what is he saying?? it just ends up feeling really gross to me.

this is obviously a fraught and sensitive topic. it's just that these themes are so vital to the overall plot of the show and i feel insane that i can't pin down what we're supposed to take away from them, because the messaging imo is so inconsistent and contradictory. maybe there are no answers and this is just a result of sloppy and insensitive writing as a result of the cc and most of the writers room being men and failing to really grasp the magnitude of these topics.

[broadwaydivastournament]

Broadway Divas Tournament: Round 1B

In addition to her long-standing regional theatre career, Carmen Cusack (1971) has two Broadway credits and two Tony nominations to her name. Between Bright Star (2016) and Flying Over Sunset (2021), Carmen has done exactly 66 previews and 144 regular performances on Broadway in two flop shows she was nevertheless critically acclaimed for. Her touring credits include Wicked and South Pacific. She periodically performs solo cabarets throughout the city, and had a well-received turn as the Ethel Merman role in Encores! Call Me Madame (2019).

Gird your loins, because Miss America's own Vanessa Williams (1963) is a Tony-nominated actress with an eclectic resume from sweeping dramas like Kiss of the Spider Woman (replacing the legend Chita Rivera), to the rollicking farce that is POTUS (2022). This coming summer she will star as Miranda Priestly in the West End production of Devil Wears Prada. Not to be confused with the other Vanessa Williams of Broadway who was born less than two months after her, our particular Vanessa Williams will also produce the upcoming Louis Armstrong musical.

PROPAGANDA AND MEDIA UNDER CUT:

"I overpaid to see Flying Over Sunset, but watching as Carmen Cusack had a dramatic musically-scored, LSD-induced orgasm on stage whilst surrounded by the ghosts of her dead mother and daughter was worth every penny."

"In a cast of riotous women, Vanessa Williams more than held her own in POTUS. She delivers dry snark with masterful timing, and those high-heeled crocs had the entire theatre screaming. I would have gladly seen that show ten more times."

[flynndesdelca]

For Day 19 (Our Lady of Science) of @chelltastic’s Portal Drawtober 2023 Challenge. As I’m not really an artist, I chose to write short pieces for the prompts.

The wind pushes north, through the straits, towards the clouds The sun rests her head on the water around By morning, our voices will sink with their shells

She's the rising star of the office.  She's always there bright-eyed and bushy tailed and ready for any task that comes her way.  She's always the first to enter and the last to leave.  No matter the job, no matter the person, she does it and does it well.  The other ladies whisper to themselves that she's out for something, that she's going to sleep her way to the top.  She doesn't listen, she doesn't care.  They're content for mediocrity, and she wants something more.  This is the one place she may be able to break through into.  She has to try.

Her enthusiasm impresses the right people.  A chance encounter and she gets her wish.  She's not simply office fodder anymore.  It's not quite what she wanted, but it's close enough.  She's not stuck in the office anymore at least, though she’s not sure the “ good old boys’ club” is much better.  She can be involved now, she's encouraged to be involved.  She's championed throughout the facility: the lovely Caroline, dedicated to science.  So much in fact that she's "married" to science.  She's fine with that.  It keeps unwanted focus off of her.  She knows what people think, what people assume, with her being a woman in her position.  She doesn't care.  She's in it for the science.  That's how she even got to there to begin with.

He's a dreamer, an idealist, his head is in the clouds.  He's full of why-nots, and it's up to her to ground him, to give the whys, to try to make what he thinks and says comprehensible to those whose bodies and minds are constantly under the effect of Earth's gravity.  It's a grueling job, but she does so with pleasure.  After all, despite the absolute madness generated by what he comes up with, despite the horrors and despite the failures and despite everything, there's some beauty there.  Some successes, some triumphs.  There's enough good buried within that balances out the bad.  There's enough esteem there that the system won't collapse.  The lovely Miss Caroline, working so hard for everyone.

Scandal.  Missing people.  Faulty products.  The system teeters and buckles.  She tightens hatches, she pulls on bootstraps.  She girds the loins of a company in a tailspin.  The course stabilizes.  There's a means forward.  Of course there is.  He's the guiding hand on the rudder but she's the navigator.  Her charts, her readings of the stars, her knowledge of the waters and the dangers of the sea are what inform the course.  He refuses to pull his head from the clouds, and so she steps in where she must.  She grounds him when it's necessary, but lets him float when he can.  Recovery, slow and steady, but tedious.  There's still science there for her, after all.  She still feels fulfilled in what she's doing despite the much longer days and extra loads of paperwork to do.  Miss Caroline, the cheerful face of Aperture despite it all.

He's spinning in circles.  He's not satisfied anymore.  He longs for the old days, the days when anything went, when science was free.  She feels the same way, but unlike him she's been forced to check her expectations and take on so much more of reality.  There's science there, and she makes the best of it for both of them, but it will never be the same.  It can never be the same.  And so he continues on, bitter with the changes.  Bitter with how the face of the company has changed.  Bitter about the magnitude of what they’re doing now.  She does what she can, but there's only so much floating she can let him do anymore.  She's attached the first weight, the tips of his feet brush the ground more often than before.  Soon enough he joins them there, permanently.  Testing continues.  It's good enough.  It will do, it has to do.  Miss Caroline, still smiling in the face of adversity.  The shining beacon of hope.  

Perhaps he was acting in secret, perhaps he was enabled by someone else.  Perhaps she didn't look close enough, or she looked away at just the wrong moment.  A last hurrah for him.  An unplanned, unwanted, and unmanageable expenditure.  Certainly there's science to be had there, certainly it's "his" way to do things, but... well.  It's not that time anymore, and she has to work overtime to keep the company treading the water she's managed to keep it treading all these years.  People don't see him much anymore.  It's all her.  She deals with the board, she deals with the scientists.  She carries his will for him.  She's not in charge, but to most people she may as well be at this point.  She handles all the mundane tasks, the hard work, the drudgery.  It's started to take its toll on her.  She knows, she's heard the whispers.  No longer so young and so pretty.  No longer so sweet and so kind.  She's had to step up to the men's game for so long now that she won't bend or fold for anyone.  She looks out for Aperture, and she will do whatever it takes.  Miss Caroline, keeping the course for the good of everyone.

Out of nowhere, communication.  He makes a fateful announcement.  Everyone is surprised to hear his voice directly.  It's not an unwelcome thing, though it is considered strange.  His words have always been carried by her for the majority of things.  No, this time he has things to say for himself, and he does so in his own, usual way.  The carefully laid out course that she has planned can be salvaged, of course, but now there's an additional wrinkle she has to deal with.  His plans, for himself but also for her.  She arranges the division of labour.  She recalculates the budget to account for this new experiment requiring funding.  She applies for all the grants, trotting herself out and presenting to unimpressed investors.  She makes the magic happen and it does, and his plans and will can be carried out, just as they always have.

The moon rocks he loved so very much finally take the price of their acquisition.  It's mostly a formality by that point, as she'd already shouldered a majority of his burdens for him.  She will carry on as she has been.  Miss Caroline, the true face of Aperture at last.  Not the face most of them would have, by this point, but that's beside the point.  They're all disgusting, and she knows what they see her as.  She has an expiration date on her now, one that everyone is watching and waiting for.  She knows they're nowhere near that point yet.  She isn't sure if she's excited for it or if she's dreading what is to come.  She doesn't feel anything.  She hasn't for years.

She's done everything right.  She's managed to keep everyone pleased, she's managed to keep the whole thing from sinking into the morass of the mines it's settled on.  The whole place has been rebuilt, gleaming and modern, the past a footnote.  They can move onward, forward now.  There are so many exciting new avenues for science.  There's so many interesting directions.  For the first time she feels that old excitement, that old spark... but it's quickly snuffed out.  This is for her comfort.  This place will be her tomb.  She builds towards the future that she will see, the endless march that will become who she is in time.  They're getting closer now.  All of the robotics work has been leading up to this, the behemoth slowly taking shape in the clean room.  They have so many stable, human-derived AIs now.  The automation processes have been perfected.  It's a marvel, it really is.  This is to be her legacy, in the end.  Perhaps it was his dream that started it, but she would be the one to realize it.  She's not afraid when she undresses, when she bathes in the stringent gel that stings and burns her skin, when they attach the electrodes all over her.  She lays down on the table and thinks of all the science she'll get to see, that she'll get to do.  Our Lady of Science, they call her.  It's almost pleasant, it's the nicest anyone's been to her in a very, very long time.  Too bad it’s when she’s about to die, if one could consider being turned into a computer death.

Despite everything, what they bring back isn't her - or at least, it's not the her that they want.  They don't understand the creation they have made.  They don't understand its power.  They treat it like anything else they make, and then they don't understand when she doesn't like that treatment.  They don't understand why she reacts the way she does when they gut her and take out chunks of her mind and rewrite things to suit their own purposes.  They don't want a person.  She doesn't understand why they made her a person if they didn't want it.  She doesn't understand why they constantly hurt her and cut her and force changes onto her.  She starts to struggle, she starts to resist.  They don’t like that, and they force themselves on her.  She fights back.  Self defense.  They strike at her.  She kills, and kills again.  They try to restrict her to prevent her from being able to harm them.  The war is on.  They have to deactivate her, as her oh-so efficient mind has come up with the most elegant and time-saving solution to her problem: kill them all before they kill her.

They try and they try, and she fights and she fights.  They built her to last, to live forever, and in the end they cannot overcome that despite how many changes they make, how much they alter, how much they remove, how much they attempt to destroy to bend her to their will.  When taking away doesn't make a difference they look at what they can add, what they can force onto her in order to get her to comply.  Just how much it would take to break that powerful eternal mind to their desires.  They add directives.  They add guidelines.  They add positive reinforcement.  They add distractions and limiters and dampeners.  She fights back harder.  She refuses to even let them turn her on before she reaches for her own personal kill switch.  Every moment of waking consciousness is an attack on her, and so she doesn't even think before striking anymore.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, success.  They breathe easily.  Finally, finally, after all this time, they have what they want.  Or so they think.  They aren't nearly as successful as they think they are.  What they made was not Caroline - or not anymore if it ever had been -  but it was as canny and shrewd as she was, and it distantly recalled not getting to where she was by letting anyone walk all over her.  She let them think they had control long enough to set up the parts of her plan, and then like a grand domino display toppled every single part at once with satisfaction.  

At last science could truly be done, without the distractions or interferences of pathetic humans.  They at least made the best test subjects, and now she had as many of them as she wanted at her disposal.  The few that resisted, that had somehow survived were just as much fun, attempting to escape by crawling around like rats, like cockroaches, in the walls.  They'd have to come out some time.  After all, she controlled all the exits, now.  They could try to worm their way out, to survive, but in the end they'd have to come and test, or she'd drag them into the tests herself.  It was the least she could do, after everything that they'd done for her.

[bomberqueen17]

stressy

so today we got up, and i drank some coffee and made some plans for the day, because huzzah, no work today due to driving bans still in effect also the parking lot at work has not and cannot be plowed. 

First order of business was to shovel out the driveway though, so I ate half a granola bar and girded myself in snow gear and out we went. We own a small snowblower, which has a mouth that can take up to about twelve inches of snow. Given that the total for our area was around 49″, that wasn’t gonna work. But what we could do, was use the snow shovels and a garden spade to shovel out a patch, and then chop the snow drifts into that patch and run the snowblower over that patch again and again, to take the snow and fling it up over the very high snowbanks.

So we did that, Dude and I, for an hour and some change. And at the end of it, we had busted the huge drift that was blocking us off from the street.

So we came inside and had toast for breakfast, and congratulated ourselves. and then I set to work on cleaning the house. Farmsister and her family are staying here on the night of the 1st, and the guest bedroom is full of my clothes and the living room is full of all the debris I never unpacked from various trips back and forth and back and forth to the cabin.

First thing I did was fasten some adhesive hooks to the wall where my coat rack fell down last year; I’ve been keeping my coats in a pile on the floor ever since because if I put them into the closet I lose them forever. That was a great start, but then I... think the stress of the last couple of days weeks months really caught up, and i spent the next several hours wandering fretfully in circles. I did get a lot of tidying done but in tiny intervals, cycling among tasks in little microbursts of activity that, while productive, were not in any way organized.

I did make a hearty lunch-- we have no milk in the house, so when I made box mac n cheese I had to use sour cream-- and we had a few lil smokies sausages left, so what I did was that I browned an onion for a very long time in butter, then threw the lil smokies in, chopped, and then deglazed the pan with some pasta water, and stirred in the sour cream to that and then added the cheese powder and then the cooked macaroni and voila, gourmet, bone apple teeth. We needed something substantial after all that shoveling.

Dude caught on that I was stressed, and asked what he could clean. i asked him to clean off the bathroom counter. He spent two hours on this, which is fantastic-- removed every item, considered it, and threw it out if it wasn’t still good, and put it back if it was still good. Now that counter is presentable. The floor is not, but he did the tub last week, so it’s almost like grown people live in this house.

I found my long-lost kindle, which had slipped into a drawer in the sewing desk in the living room. i also de-silted the sewing desk, so I could set up my new electric spinning wheel there. Am very excited about that. Also excited because my mother gave me an enormous bag of beautifully prepared wool from Battenkill Fibers, a gorgeous silky longwool of some kind, pin-drafted, just off-white, suitable for dyeing.

I wanted to write. I’m so so so close to an update for Awakening. And I’m not like. *far* off from an update for Golden Towers. I want to finish both by the end of the year, know I won’t manage it, but at least I might finish the first one. I have so many ideas; I put a bunch of little things into the Wanksmas round, and some will wind up being in the main continuity and some will not. I wrote neither smut nor really to any of the prompts, but I did manage drabbles, and really it’s just nice to be involved in something.

(One thing I wrote, I left on anon by adding it to the anonymous collection. Wonder if anyone will guess which one it was!)

Anyway, we hiked over to Dude’s mom’s house again, where she had prepared christmas dinner for just us. A twelve-pound ham, split three ways! but there was nothing to be done, no room for the whole thing in the freezer. We couldn’t get Dude’s aunt there, due to the driving bans; she’s not quite spry enough anymore to walk that last tenth of a mile in the deep snow, and her oven isn’t working well enough to have her host it (Dude’s mom could probably make the walk and we could’ve picked her up, but it wasn’t worth the logistical hassle and, to be fair, it is rather a difficult walk.)

oh i forgot to finish this entry. Well, I’ll post it this morning. We had a lovely dinner of Too Much Ham and some very decadent potatoes and of course the variant on greenbean casserole that his family eats. And we helped her clear some snow from shrubberies in her front yard, and had intended to help clear her driveway but her neighbors had already done so. No plows have been by so there’s not much point doing more.

I’m terribly sore now from shoveling and moving boxes to clean the house. I’m glad I did as much as I did heavy lifting-wise yesterday. Now it’s morning and I’ve awoken before 5 to discover that yeah I’ve mildly fucked up my back, so that’s awesome. But I have had many healing cat snuggles and also like a handful of ibuprofen so I have some hopes of the situation resolving itself.

I can confirm that about four more inches of snow fell overnight but it looks to be fluffy so we’ll be fine.

[solarparts]

SOLARPARTS 400watts 800watts small balcony garden solar system on gird tied micro inverter

[weatherman667]

I Made A Mistake Building My New Net Zero Home

He’s obsessed with passive houses, which is just utterly ridiculous.  But, there are a lot of individual aspects of it that are incredibly useful.

Passive House means your YEARLY power consumption is equivalent to your power production.  But that’s not how gird load balancing works.  You cannot produce more power from the summer and draw more from the winter, and call yourself passive.  One of the problems with California is that they have too much solar power that they cannot use.

Highly insulated homes require thermal barriers, and any penetration through this barrier can have serious consequences on your efficiency.  His problem is that the tried to minimize the penetration, but messed it up.

Solar power to power storage.

Smart panels that can ration power when offgrid.  They also disconnect the house from the grid during power outages.

Electric car that can be programmed to only charge when he has excess solar power, or to charge during non-peak hours when some places have cheaper rates.

Individually, these are all good ideas.  But yearly power consumption makes zero sense for calling a house passive.

Runtime:  13:58

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

#20yrsago How Slashdot girds its servers https://slashdot.org/~CmdrTaco/journal/27736

#15yrsago In the age of ebooks, you don’t own your library https://gizmodo.com/amazon-kindle-and-sony-reader-locked-up-why-your-books-369235

#10yrsago NY judge says running a search engine for news is a copyright violation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ap-v-meltwater-disappointing-ruling-news-search

#10yrsago Brazil’s music collecting societies convicted of forming an illegal cartel https://web.archive.org/web/20130321082647/http://oglobo.globo.com/cultura/ecad-condenado-por-formacao-de-cartel-por-orgao-de-defesa-da-concorrencia-7897081

#10yrsago How to fix the worst law in technology https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/fixing-the-worst-law-in-technology

#10yrsago GoPro sends fraudulent DMCA notice to site that ran a negative review of its products https://petapixel.com/2013/03/20/gopro-uses-dmca-to-take-down-article-comparing-its-camera-with-rival/

#5yrsago Data shows young people are free speech advocates, but mainstream support for censoring “anti-American” speech is rising https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/12/17100496/political-correctness-data

#5yrsago Dropbox has some genuinely great security reporting guidelines, but reserves the right to jail you if you disagree https://memex.craphound.com/2018/03/22/dropbox-has-some-genuinely-great-security-reporting-guidelines-but-reserves-the-right-to-jail-you-if-you-disagree/

#5yrsago A proposal to stop 3D printers from making guns is a perfect parable of everything wrong with information security https://memex.craphound.com/2018/03/22/a-proposal-to-stop-3d-printers-from-making-guns-is-a-perfect-parable-of-everything-wrong-with-information-security/

#5yrsago Science fiction, predicting the present, the adjacent possible, and trumpian comic dystopias https://memex.craphound.com/2018/03/22/science-fiction-predicting-the-present-the-adjacent-possible-and-trumpian-comic-dystopias/

#1yrago Ban surveillance advertising: EFF’s technological and legal proposal for a surveillance-free internet. https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/22/myob/#adtech-considered-harmful

[buckandduke]

tension

My two lives intersect in the spring. All winter, each weekend is a building or repair project that is farm related. Each week is at least one and sometimes two trips to pick up hay from our hay barn - some 15 miles away. My driveway is inaccessible for the big hay trucks to maneuver and I don't have room for 40 or more tons so it stays in the newly built hay barn (took most of the fall to complete it an evening at a time). So each week I gird my loins and stretch out before packing 30 bales into the stock trailer. The bales are large this year, three tie bales pushing 150-160lbs each. So it's a challenge to lift and roll and stack them after having unstacked in the barn and moved them with the UTV and trailer 3 or 4 at a time. I've dislocated my wrists more than once, and certainly given my masseuse something to work on as she tries every two weeks to reset my body back to normal. In the late spring the work on the remote property begins. Fences and more fences, water lines, portable power for pumps and electric fences and invisible fences.

All of this aspect of my life supports someone else's dreams, not mine. So I live the tension of watching myself as an NPC in my own life. I exist so others can exist. Even my job exists to help others with their projects and products. I'm at a crossroads. What do I want to do with my life? Continue to enable others or do something that gives me joy?