#selected essays

[sjnjournal]

— Virginia Woolf, from Selected Essays; “Jane Austen”

[palmettoshenanigans]

I'm not even gonna write an essay on this one, I'm tired and it's rapidly approaching the witching hour so imma just-

Neil is constantly shadow boxing with his fear of being Just Like My Father NOT because he fears that Wesninski Blood but because he fears the fragility of choice. Everything he knows how to do, all of his skills, combined with his natural disposition and temperament really do put him on par with his father - potentially even worse than his father if you think Nathan lacks Neil's ability to meticulously execute a long con.

Ruthless. Manipulative. Intelligent. Sneaky n Stealthy. Fast. Quick learner. Violent. Cut throat. Selective empathy. Observant. Skilled with weapons. Crime prodigy. Improv. Etc etc etc - Nathaniel truly is Nathan's son when you look at Capacity. Neil had very good reason to fear that - he really is a Wesninski in more than just name.

He just chooses to be kind. Chooses to care. Chooses Exy and friends and family and Andrew and Love.

But choices are both iron clad foundations and flimsy whisps in the wind

Neil isn't different from his father because of difference in Capacity. Neil is different from his father because of difference in Choices. And "Is that enough?" is such a scary question when it suddenly involves people he dared to care about.

[a-ramblinrose]

“But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company.”

― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

[chimaerakitten]

So the Temeraire series doesn’t do the Pern-derived magic/telepathic bond thing, and it’s nice to have some variety on that count since the telepathy thing is pretty widespread. But there’s this passage in crucible of gold that’s like—

Wait, my thriftbooks order arrived, let me go grab the quote

Or, Temeraire thought, he might as easily have gone alone--more easily, in fact; he had to carry Forthing cupped in his talons, and it was not at all convenient to always be looking to make sure he had not dropped out; Temeraire was not aware of him in quite the same way as of Laurence.

(Emphasis mine)

And this combined with the number of times it’s mentioned that (Russians aside) aviators just don’t seem to be capable of fearing their own dragons (and not just aviators who raised the dragons from the egg—it’s the same with inherited dragons) indicates to me that there’s something really interesting psychologically/biologically going on “under the hood,” there, so to speak.

And maybe this is just me and all those anthropology classes I took in college but that actually makes a lot of sense?

The historical record in the series dates the intentional breeding of dragons to a couple thousand years in the past, in china, but there’s a lot of evidence that there’s been a looser symbiotic relationship between humans and dragons a lot longer than that. Namely the domesticated elephants and the dragons in the Americas being the same species and of the same attitudes towards humans as dragons in Eurasia. So that’s likely at least 20 thousand years of symbiosis/mutual domestication, (if we assume they migrated together, which I do because it’s the simplest explanation) and it could well be much longer than that. That’s a long ass time. Like. The spread of IRL lactase persistence took less time than this.

And much like the benefits of being able to drink milk as an adult, the benefits of mutualism with an intelligent dinosaur-sized flying predator would absolutely have selective pressure on human populations. That’s just a given. I would talk about early hominins being third-tier scavengers here and Pleistocene megafauna and the canonical prevention of malaria via dragon proximity as compared to sickle cell anemia, but nobody wants me to regurgitate my entire biological anthropology 215 class in a tumblr post. Just trust me on this one.

Basically, the entire human species in the Temeraire universe will have been under a lot of positive selective pressure to be good symbiosis buddies to the dragons, so it’s no wonder aviator attachment is so intense.

This is likewise true for the dragons. A lot can be put down to intentional breeding in the last couple thousand years, but the foundation of dragons being prosocial with humans would have to be laid before then. Humans have domesticated predators IRL, but dragons are like 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than wolves and it took a long time to get dogs. The romans wouldn’t have had any luck if the dragons weren’t already partially on board. My theory is that this would have started way back. Australopithecus times, way back, because— [Anth 215 sneaks up behind me whilst the jaws theme plays] ANYWAY there’s a few benefits I can guess at for dragons having assistance hunting from small bands of persistence predators on occasion. I also think this would have intensified post-Pleistocene as the megafauna that would have been the dragons’ main prey went extinct and eventually agriculture would be the only way to replace— [Jaws theme intensifies] JUST TRUST ME BRO.

All this to say that humans being able to very quickly lose all instinctive fear of the dinosaur-sized flying predators they spend their time around and said predators developing not only attachment to humans but particular awareness of their humans specifically so as to prevent any possible accidental harm makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary biology perspective. It’s evidence of the same mutualistic relationship biologically shaping both species across the broader time spans that the series hints at.

[bowenoke]

the real tragedy of being 14 on the internet is that the first fanart and first fanfic you ever made ARE out there and ARE accessible to you, but that they're attached to the least cool version of yourself. i have access to baby's first princess tutu fanfic and gravity falls fanart and while they may not have been GOOD i do still love them. unfortunately i was also malding about romney losing the election

[goldensunset]

i made this post before but what’s up with paldeans and destroying the environment. the player character hops on a plane to travel between spain japan and new york whenever they feel like it to run minor errands. the area zero team went into an ancient crater and found this otherworldly paradise and started building a bunch of giant research stations. the professors thought it would be cool to use a huge machine to either bring the dinosaurs back or summon a bunch of murderous robots and let them loose upon the world. the league is using cryptocurrency. geeta please something has to be done

[eisthenameofme]

Reading the Sabbat: The Black Hand v5 book, and it is apparently impossible for me not to see the Sabbat through a Queering Vampirism lense with some of the ways they're describing it. It's very obviously not what they're Trying to do, but that's the impression I'm getting anyway.

Like they start by saying the Purpose of the Sabbat is fundamentally to challenge the status quo, right before calling them fundamentally evil/monstrous antagonists and right after describing how scared all the other kindred are of them and how inscrutible they find their motivations. And then they go right into talking about the philosophy of embracing the Beast and fundamentally Cainite traits and inhumanity/monstrosity (what they are and what seperates them from the rest of society, the Other, which in this reading is also Queerness), to the horror of everyone else, and it's considered fundamentally an aspect of self destruction (see: how people act about trans surgeries). Also, treating something otherwise extremely taboo (ex. diablerie) as a "sacrament", like treating what is normally taboo/reviled as divine isn't also incredibly queer. Also alienation from society and difficulty forming connections.

You couldn't create a queer allegory more like catnip to me if you tried, is what I'm saying

[theygender]

It doesn't need to be perfect it just needs to be done it doesn't need to be perfect it just needs to be done it doesn't need to be perfect it just needs to be done

[prolibytherium]

I think "media analysis with the goal of proving something you want to be canon is canon" is usually not good quality analysis because 9 times out of 10 it involves picking and choosing and stringing together bits of information that agree with you and discarding or explaining away the rest. You can make a compelling (or at least coherent) argument out of almost any scraps of information but it doesn't make it good analysis.

[incomingalbatross]

I have now. FINALLY. Read Beowulf.

[flockrest]

found my to-do list on metas to write again and are you guys ready for the unhinged-about-rito mutual to be unhinged about rito again

[re-re-redline]

Let’s Fucking Goooooooo!!!!!!!!!

Ehrbffuegverfgyvisz∂fhgvuyeg

His CE does look pretty enticing for solo comps…I’ll have to try it some time. …But I also don’t want him to die…

“It's okay to lose a fistfight. It's okay to lose a duel. But this right here? This is what happens when you lose a war. People killed...slaves dragged through the streets...everything we worked so hard to build disappearing.

Was there no other way? Was there no different path we could have taken, however small? This is all the meaningless drivel that inevitably fills my head in the wake of all this. I know you're still here. But...you alone don't make any difference. Not when everything else we were supposed to protect is gone.

Ahh, my towering ramparts, my indomitable three-layer bulwark. Do not cry; tears are the sole right of the civilians I should have protected. You...you may only rage. Rage like a demon. Rage like chaos itself. That is the only right left to you.”

Ow, my kokoro.

I read the translation on the wiki and even used google translate for fun and I noticed that that last line includes Constantine too, and not just the Theodosian Walls. I wonder why the official translation left that out… Anywho, it makes me want for a Constantine XI Alter who is based off that last paragraph. A Constantine who’s solely composed of his anger and regrets from that final day. He has no past before then and he has no future after then, just that one final day makes up his entire being. Hell, you can even have him also be made of the grief and anger of the people who perished during the three-day sacking. He’ll bear the weight of everyone’s misery and use it to fill the gaps in himself because he has nothing else to fill them with. Bonus points if he resembles a marble statue in appearance. Ugh, WHY? Why can’t my boi be more relevant??? There’s so much you could do with him story wise!

My lamentations aside, my draft (the Tumblr one) kinda wigged out while I was ironing out spelling & grammar errors and I had to delete it after porting the paragraphs I know I changed in there onto a separate document. …So that was great. But everything’s okay now! I’ve hit 9k and something tells me that the rest of the section is going to take another 3k. Yaaaay. But yeah, I’m chugging along! Don’t worry.

That’s all on my end. Have a good day everyone.

—Redline, over and out!

[the-smiling-doodler]

We talkin about ships? Hoppy x kickin. What do ya think

Ship It

What made you ship it? SPORTS DUO 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥this was actually one of the first ships i warmed up to aside from sleepyday. instantly loved their vibes

What are your favorite things about the ship? love their dumbass x dumbass dynamic. they're the kind of idiots who'd walk through a dark stormy forest together as a 'test of courage', get lost, then get super terrified and start crying at the slightest sound, only for someone else to find them and we find out that they aren't even that far away from their houses at all. they're such a dynamic duo i love them ❤️

Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

idk if this is an unpopular opinion but they are NOT the kind of lovers who are sweet and cuddly with each other. at least not in the traditional sense. everything they do has to be a competition, i like to think they do this thing called 'competitive kissing' where they see who can kiss the other the hardest until the other gets too flustered to kiss back. but they'd mostly wrestle and push each other into the mud and just be little shits to each other and everyone around them most annoying couple ever <3

[a-ramblinrose]

It's lovely to revisit old favorites!

[accioepiphany]

01. Impossible Germany by Wilco || 02. Port of Call by Beirut || 03. Short and Sweet by Brittany Howard || 04. Into The Red by James Blake ||05. Love Language by SZA || 06. Where's My Love by SYML || 07. Like A Star by Corinne Bailey Rae || 08. Tell Me You Love Me by Sufjan Stevens || 09. Coming Back by James Blake ft. SZA || 10. Couldn't Love You More by John Martyn || 11. Love and Happiness by Al Green || 12. Come Back by Pearl Jam

[starbuck]

my manager was trying to explain the “home depot music” to me today and i was like “what?” and she was like “from the commercials!” and i was like “i don’t WATCH commercials,” and i feel like getting to say that out loud was one of my greatest achievements.