#sort of an informal essay ig?

[millionmaggots]

Watcher in The Sky as a Satire of the Technofuturist "Techno Space Jesus"

idk if tobias ever explicitly ascribed a meaning to watcher in the sky, but i've always seen it as sort of a satire of technofuturism

(google results are largely about the music genre, but you might find more results under "techno utopianisn")

rather than correcting inequalities and improving our immediate surroundings and cicumstances, technofuturism seeks to advance technology with the belief that one day in the far off future, it will make our world into a utopia.

the climate crisis is now, but to the technofututist, utopia is (ostensibly) within reach, so we don't need to worry about all that.

"yeah, earth is burning, but oh well, we'll all go to mars soon."

if i had to describe technofuturism with two words, they would be apathy and hyperopia.

a rapture of sorts, with technology in place of a god. or spearheaded by what critics (sort of satirically) termed a "techno jesus" or "techno space jesus", a figure spearheading the tech they believe will bring about their utopia.

(i might be misremembering the term slightly, it's been a while since i listened to the philosophy podcast episode abt this. it was great though, so i'll try to track it down for u guys tomorrow!)

It's a philosophy primarily held by incredibly rich silicon valley types and their sycophants.

i've gone this long without mentioninf him, but you might've gathered who i'm talking about lol

elon musk with his greenwashed tin can cybertrucks and ideals of space colonialism in favor of substantial climate activism. in trying to find info about technofuturist philosophy and particularly criticisms thereof.

a couple years ago, i would've probably found some articles about it with relative ease, but today i'm greeted with a slew of ai generated images of musk AS techno space jesus instead.

i want to think it's satire, but atp honestly i sorta doubt it.

i'm pretty analytical by nature, and i'll freely admit that i sometimes read deeper into things than the artist ever intended, but with tobias forge's evident interest in philosophy, i think his music invites analysis and discussion! especially impera :)

[aropride]

i think my main problem w the video essay is going to be sorting the information in a way where i say everything i want to say without circling back to expand on topics over and over. like sorting it ig

[mossfrogpress]

Mossfrog Blog #1 - It Begins

Who would have thought I’d be so nervous to make a post on the blogging platform I’ve called home since 2013. The Mossfrog Press tumblr is not that old but I, Brooke, have thoroughly enjoyed many years formed by my relationship with Tumblr. I of course would not say that to even a therapist much less anyone outside tumblr, but it’s true. I love tumblr, but truthfully I have only ever made inconsistent, halting attempts at contributing to the massive pool of creativity and consciousness that has grown here. 

In recent years, I have to keep my blogging brief--there’s a dopamine addicted ghoul in my brain that will let me waste away looking at funny images if I let them. But I do want to use this platform more thoughtfully and actively than I have ever before.

It’s gonna be a little rocky on these first few entries I’m not gonna lie, but I hope to have fun with the experimentation!

🐸🍀 Below the read more are the details of plans going forward with this blog, but tl;dr is: I plan to share more art, sketches, and behind-the-scenes content with you, as well as engage more directly and share information on events and deals!

- Sharing sketch journal entries This is perhaps what I am excited about most at this time, even though it’s a ways off. I hope to share most if not all journal entries of the development of my personal style and brand direction. I’ve always wanted to share more behind the scenes processes, and my sketch journal is the primordial soup of Mossfrog development. I’ve always been a fan of artists who share the intimacy of their sketchbook, and I look forward to doing the same. In 6 months to a year I should have a more solid backlog of content to begin sharing!

- Sharing weekly/monthly inspiration Knowing a work contextualized by the framework of its inspirations can add so much richness to it. I hope to collect the various works that are inspiring me in the moment and share them in some sort of retrospective newsletter format. Theoretically, once my journal posts begin circulation, one would be able to follow the dates and see the trends of inspiration to execution, which I always love to see from other artists. 

If I'm feeling spicy we may just see reviews or essays on things I'm interested in. I can only keep the infodumping in for so long, so I don’t think I foresee a way out of becoming a blogger without letting my media analysis freak flag fly. I have so much to say about Dune

- Regular art posting As I currently do, I will be posting the art I create as well. I’ll work on formatting my Instagram cross-posts not to have the tags and shit lol - Community Engagement Replies, asks, fanart, customer photos, sharing cute, funny moments or additional behind the scenes. Lifestyle blogging if I have anything to share. and things of that nature

- Marketing/News Of course this is also where I will notify you of sales, deals coming up, live events, and anything else time-sensitive/salesy. (Or notifications for twitch streams, Tiktok/IG Lives, and other engaging activities I don’t actually do yet but really want to start!)

And most importantly, I hope to see this blog become whatever it’s supposed to be. These are guideposts towards a grand goal and intuition and time will ultimately determine the path  ✨

🎨 If you’ve made it this far, great! I’m shocked. Hopefully the text-dense posting will be infrequent lol. I gotta get back to feeding the ghoul that likes to look at funny images.

[malleusmaleficent]

Witch Hammer deep lore and really long personal post inbound, lol. Hiding it to spare you all from having to see the essay, but read on if you want.

The character of Gon is largely informed by someone whom I had the great privilege of dating. Absolutely brilliant person, shined brighter than any star. Warm and loving. And oh god, was he smart. And funny. AND hot. He was so affable, the sort of person that could become best friends with anyone in a matter of seconds. I had really lucked out, lol.

He was Asian, people would joke about me having "yellow fever" and I'd get so upset because it felt like it demeaned my very real love for him, like there's no words for the affection I had for him. Just the thought of anyone thinking my love for him was skin deep was deeply offensive to me, lol.

We had a chemistry that was infectious. Oh man, that shit was so real lol. He loved to get on my nerves but he'd do it in ways that made me even more mad because you could tell he was just barely holding in laughter the whole time and I'd be too busy finding that adorable for me to actually be mad at him.

He loved me in a way, and I loved him in a way, that was so new to me. It overwhelmed me, completely shattered my world. I became codependent, and long story short we broke up because I didn't know how to live without the man whom I loved very much. I had low-key become toxic because of it.

Not knowingly, I would never knowingly be toxic towards the person whom I loved so much. But I was so insecure that it was simultaneously like he could do no wrong yet also could do no right.

And so we broke up.

It's almost 4 A.M., I'll keep the rest abridged lol.

We met up again, said what we had was really special and that we should try again, but it never ended up happening.

There was no second try.

A storybook setup with a real-life payoff.

That took a lot to figure out how to feel. I'm still sort of numb on it, honestly, even though it's been a year. It's scary to dwell on for too long, that's quite a long spiral that I have to inch my way down lol.

Anyways, a teensy part of Gon as I write him is just to like. Idk, explore my ex vicariously. Like how does his brain work? Why did he fall for me? I don't know. I think that, perhaps, my difficulty in writing Gon is maybe reflective of the fact that I never really understood where our relationship stemmed from for him. I just knew that he loved me in a very real and very meaningful way, and that was enough.

Maybe there was nothing to make sense of anyways, love is often irrational.

Things ended in a way that was so bizarre, so aloof and so distant that it's left my relationship to romance super weird. Part of why I write is also to try and examine romance ig, see if I can re-spark anything inside me.

Which, honestly, I would say has been mildly helpful.

Anyways sorry for the ramble, congrats and I'm sorry if any of you actually read this lol.

[draftingteacups]

An Essay on Soni Monet

This is a thing that I'm putting out because I got an ask where someone asked about a seriously heavy spoiler on TEBF and I didn't know what to do in order to hide it in order to prevent people from getting spoiled, so yeah, this was what I could come up.

I'm not going to put what the original ask asked about (screenshotting it and pasting it under the cut) because I'm doing my best to avoid those sorts of things on my Tumblr for the sake of everyone else. I could just delete it, but this serves as a memo for those who send in spoilers in my Ask Box: Don't.

In short, gotta draw the line for spoilers and everything. It's under my rules. :D

However, this became an essay on Soni because I ramble about her so much on my own that it's scary alksdfljklj So enjoy, my deep analysis on Soni Monet ig

The short answer as to what you asked Anon is that Soni will never tell the TWST boys anything specific about what Lysandre did. Never.

It doesn't matter what the situation is or who is asking.

She will never tell anyone.

Even if Soni is starting to open up to people in TWST, her personal life is that: personal. She will set up boundaries to preserve that peace and ensures to get that, even if it makes her sound callous.

It's actually one of the defining features that Soni possesses that I love about her because most of the time, Yuu in the game gets pushed around into situations.

That's not the case with Soni.

We need to keep this in mind that Soni is not an openhearted person.

Soni's a Pokemon Champion who's had nosy paparazzi, annoying nobles who want to dig up dirt on her, and everything under the sun trying to find something to criticize about her for years. We're not even counting the years of comments made by teachers and other children towards her at a young age for her behavior because the point's been made many times over. That's not even covering the fact that it's considered government information, given how deeply involved she was in the whole situation as well as her father's occupation in the whole thing.

She, being the practical person that she is, wouldn't tell them anything because of that.

You might say that she should tell them because of friendship and shit, but should she really tell them?

Soni knows the lines of where things need to be drawn, and it is very clearly drawn to things that are personal to her as with any other person. Things like her family are one of those things, and in the semi-realistic fashion that I'm writing this story, Soni is not going to be openly chatty about that topic because of the power of friendship.

Because if you think along the lines of Twisted Wonderland, particularly the Overblot boys, they didn't suddenly change their personalities just because you beat the crap out of them and become nice. They still retain their personality, but with the new knowledge in their mind of what they can and cannot do after the fact. Why should she?

Going back to Soni, the most she could ever reveal about it is the crime syndicate, the outcome of their plans (in the team being disbanded and the leader being captured), the leader himself (he's a big businessman with a lot of money), and that's basically it.

Some things aren't meant to be shared, even among friends.

Soni, even with others being as open as they are towards her, is not one of those types of people. She is careful, painfully so that she will make stacks of plans to ensure that everything will remain standing in the wake of a disaster.

It takes so much to gain her trust because she's lost it in everything else, and even that trust in itself is painfully scarce among people.

And that is why she will never tell the TWST boys about what happened to her.

[danny-chase]

Do you think that Tim saved Dick in a way? Because we see Dick getting better as he gets closer to Tim and healing and getting back into the family, and ig it’s Tim who initiated that.

I literally don't have a yes or no answer for this... like most things in the Batfam - it's complicated. (Following answer is informed by 90s-00s comics, i can't really speak for new52 because it just... has so many issues one of which being erasing the relationship between Dick and Tim for *checks note* no discernable reason other than possibly *checks note* Didio hates legacy characters and wants only bad things for them so he could have excuses to kill them off or cancel their comics... idk just a guess)

Warnings: for Bruce stans - just look away i'm about to bring up bits of canon you most likely don't like, for Dick stans - Devin Grayson's run is mentioned, for the lovely anon - i wrote an essay, hope you are prepared

Tim coming into the family gave Dick a reason to occasionally hang around Bruce and i'm not sure if this is an exaggeration or not but he did sort of save that relationship - but whether that was a good or bad thing at the time, i can't really say. For sure - it starts off good, Bruce is actually trying to be a good dad (he comes down to Blud to check on Dick, adopts him, trusts him with his own city, calls him for backup, etc.). But we also see throughout Bruce Wayne: Fugitive/Murderer how unhealthy the relationship between the two can be. Dick built his core values around Bruce - if Bruce had actually killed here it would have been devastating for Dick (he was pretty much on the verge of a mental breakdown simply because they couldn't find proof Bruce wasn't guilty). The two literally got in a fist fight during the arc because Bruce was being uncommunicative and Dick couldn't take it anymore, snapped, and punched him when Bruce said "Bruce Wayne is dead only Batman now" - this tied into Dick finally having the relief and validation of being adopted and he couldn't handle Bruce stripping himself (and by extension, his fatherhood of Dick) away. In this era of comics Bruce had gotten physical with Dick before (here's me venting like an annoyed loser), and here's a clip from Bruce Wayne Fugitive that i just, *sigh*, canon Bruce, my detested.

Now on the other hand - getting Dick involved in the batfam more doesn't just mean he was hanging out with Bruce. His relationship with Tim is pretty great and I can definitely see where it was healing for a while - but also - to give credit where credit is due, the healing he goes through during this era of comics can also be attributed to Barbara and the Titans (the fab five specifically). Wally literally joins the Titans to give Dick a "social life" (me - it's because he's gay and wants to spend more time with Dick, actually, screw you DC you know i'm right). Donna plays a major part in keeping Dick's emotional well being in check. So like everything was going fine - Dick was healing, spending more time with friends, spending a lot of time with people he loved, like Tim, except he was neglecting his health and not sleeping - but overall he was in fact, managing, and moving past the deaths of Jason and some of the other Titans. With the current Titans - he was a hardass (which like ~trauma~ so I understand), but like things were going relatively okay.

And then Donna and Lilith died. And hooof Donna dying was like really really bad for his mental health.

Teen Titans/Outsiders Secret Files (2003) #1

[Image ID: Dick sits in a room staring at a photo, the phone rings in the background, and he doesn't even acknowledge it, the voice mail plays: "I'm not here. Leave a message after the beep." The photo is shown closer in the next frame, it's of the five original Teen Titans - Roy kisses Donna on the cheek, tipping his hat his other hand making the okay sign, Donna has an arm around Roy, the other hand on Dick's shoulder, Garth proudly stands beaming with his hands on his hips, and Dick has both his arms around Wally's neck. Everyone is smiling in the photo. A voice plays over the answering machine: "Dick, it's Roy - pick up the phone... c'mon... please... I know you're there... just pick up. Dick, we need to talk... you can't just... please..." End ID]

For context - the previous page noted that this is Dick SIX WEEKS after Donna died. Usually Dick's the one who moves on quickly, but Donna dying broke him in a way nothing else had before - and that could be partly because he was still recovering from everyone else's death.

Up to this point, Dick had been healing and Tim was definitely a part of that, but then DC decided to throw the absolute book, bookshelf, and library at him. Reading Outsiders (2003) it's very clear he's very traumatized, and around the same time, Devin is literally whumping him like it's the whump Olympics, breaking him and Babs up, burning down his childhood home, blowing up his apartment complex (killing all but like two of his neighbors), he's literally sleeping on fire escapes using newspapers as covering because he has nothing, and the bad thing i don't like to think about (i'll let you know if you ask but that one needs lots of tw, but if you know where i'm going you know what it is already), Blockbuster is killed and he blames himself - and loses it over breaking Bruce's one rule, Bludhaven is nuked, and he pretty much tries to kill himself.

So basically, he was on the path to healing (with Tim as part of that) before he got absolutely destroyed (and almost killed off by Didio in one of the crisis). Tim in his own right, was also going through a lot in the meantime, his dad died, Steph died, Kon and Bart died, i don't remember what else happened and i haven't read that era of Robin yet. Things were good until they weren't anymore, and sometimes i think Dick would regret ever exposing Tim to the life they live, and questions whether he should have just sent Tim packing x2. They do get to spend a year together on a mental health cruise, but then Damian comes into the picture, Battle for the Cowl happens, and they have their falling out. But whatever happened on that cruise must have been really healing for Dick because he actually kind of rocks it in this era - he keeps things light with Damian, Alfred notes at one point how he makes things easy because he has lightness in him, and he patches things up with Tim - catching him in that panel of Red Robin - from there they kind of go back to normal, there's a lightness to the way they banter with each other (also here) and Tim returns the favor (from the Red Robin incident) by pulling Dick out of the water.

They've saved each other multiple times over (physically), and in both in the Black Mirror and Gates of Gotham, Tim helps out in a period where Dick is starting to fall apart from the pressure of holding things together for so long (something Tim might feel guilty for, because he did run away from Gotham on a wild goose chase for Bruce). In that period, it's really clear that Dick saves Tim (he reminds him in RR, that someone does actually care for him) and then Tim saves Dick from being torn apart by Gotham.

I should point out - Damian, while starting off as kind of a hinderance, does eventually start helping Dick as well. By the end of their relationship (before the New52 destroys everything i love), Dick has helped Damian grow emotionally, and through that process Dick probably finds meaning and value in their time together, probably a lot like he used to feel with Tim. And of course, physically, they've both saved each other multiple times by the end of the run.

So yeah. I think Dick finds meaning in growth in mentoring his younger brothers, and it's likely a healing process, that healing just has some twists and turns along the way, and sometimes, on bad days, he probably feels like maybe he shouldn't have intervened at all, but i think on most days, he's proud of what Tim's become.

...I hope this is coherent lmao

[tonyglowheart]

This entire thing is a rant, feel free to ignore it, but I saw your post about how destiel fans can’t win in this context, and yeah. So have some rambles.

I’ve been thinking about the fact we (current spn/destiel fans) can’t win all night... I’ve seen so many people talking about how homophobic it is - and while I would very much like to argue, as every point I’ve seen made by a non-spn fan has been wrong so far, if I did everyone inside the fandom would agree and everyone outside would either call me straight or pity me for believing it’s okay.

(Cas wasn’t even sent to hell lmao. He was sent to angel death (the empty), a place he has escaped in the past. Other points, like that meta about spn has been predicting exactly this for months, that Dean ended up sobbing on the floor because he was so upset, like that death means next to nothing on spn, like that there is two episodes left, etc etc. you feel me right? I just don’t want to post wank to other spn blogs atm, we’re getting enough frustration as it is, no need to add to it.

It’s also worth pointing out that the bar is very, very low. Spn is a prominent TV show - not a Netflix show, or indie, or whatever - and it just said “main character in gay love saved the world”. [insert gif of ghostfacers dude saying that gay love can pierce through the veil of death and save the day here]

I just saw someone saying that spn having Naomi try to brainwash Cas out of loving dean makes spn homophobic (it is a conversion therapy parallel). My first response to that is that Naomi was the villain lmao? I guess we can’t write villains doing anything homophobic because having villains do homophobic things makes, uh - checks notes - villains look homophobic, and clearly we can’t have that.

There certainly are legitimate things to criticise spn about, but this isn’t it lol.

Also now some people are unironically trying to cancel Jensen because “his acting was homophobic, and so he’s clearly homophobic”, nevermind that he’s an actor and his character struggles with understanding his emotions (which I think he played excellently, myself. That scene had a very Dean delayed emotional response), nevermind the support he’s given to us queers in the past. Like. Idek man.

We would have been laughed at if we got no destiel, too.

It would have been worse, had the writers pulled a dumbledore. At this point I also trust the writers not to pull a GoT - they have explicitly criticised that ending in spn’s canon.

Spn’s writers did that by making the main villain of this season, Chuck / God, say GoT had a good ending. To reiterate a previous point I had: villains do bad things because they’re bad. And the bad things they do make them bad. For the people out there not still following, if someone does something in a story and it makes them a villain, that is explicitly telling you the story (and probably the writers) thinks that thing is bad. In this case, Chuck likes to write things for him, and we the audience have been shown and told that is bad.

Apparently thinking a gay confession is good in 2020 makes me straight. Seems unlikely, but whatever. Sorry for the length, I guess I went overboard, I’ve been holding it in lol. Anyway, DESTIEL IS CANON 💚💙 hope you have a good night

Helloo supernatural anon I hope you are living your best life right now. Yeah I’m like..... skeptical and leery myself but having lived through some absolute garbage discourse that is general purity wank, as well as the C/QL greater fandom here and on Twitter I find myself... much more wanting to question the “general wisdom” of things esp in terms of negativity, bc a lot of the time I find.... it’s wrong? Like so wrong. Or at least presents such an incomplete picture of the whole situation and also presents it in such a removed context that words that have meaning and are operationalized in a certain way for a reason, no longer have meaningful usage.

Anyway I don’t... know too much about the specifics of Spn but someone I follow is into it and talks a lot about the Gnostic stuff and that all was very fascinating to me, and I also have been grappling a lot with cultural Christianity bc of cmedia and the way ppl just *clenches fist* unthinkingly or uncritically slap some Christian norms on it and call it a day 😩 help I’m Tired. My thing here being... I actually got tired of the uncritical “superhell”s at some pt bc I am, in fact, incredibly exhausted with cultural Christianity, and because it does seem like, even possibly(?) without the Gnostic stuff it’s different from a “hell” or other Protestant-derived afterlife concept, and also yeah that it wasn’t seeded out of nowhere, it was set up to happen, which then... lends credence to the idea that whatever the current era of Spn is doing, the current showrunners are doing it with purpose.

And idk I just... refuse to believe the concept that ALL of the fans of Spn - esp the ones who have been following it still, or got back into it and are following it currently, are acting under delusion or are fooling themselves into liking it or thinking it’s good or whatever. I personally find that kinda infantilizing and patronizing and playing into issues of dismissing things women and/or other marginalized identities like.

Plus I find the concept that (from what I think I’ve been seeing Spn fans say) that the current era of the show is quite actively grappling with itself, its past, its legacy. to be very interesting and compelling; it hearkens back to like an old lore kind of feeling, of a thing that has grown into a nigh undefeatable monster and realizing that, also realizing that the only way to defeat itself is through grappling with its own nature and transforming and transmuting itself into something else. I personally find that more plausible and compelling than “Supernatural has been actively and continuously queerbaiting for 15 homophobic homophobic years., so right now we’re all very sorry for you because this maybe is no longer queerbaiting but it’s still homophobic and it can never be anything different ever.” I’ve been sort of tangentially aware of Spn thru the years and didn’t we agree, around the time of that in-universe play about Spn and with the lil Destiel shoutout, that Spn has come a ways as far as coming to terms with its fandom and working to treat its fans better? Why the sudden regression into “oh no, Supernatural is and forever will be homophobic and a hate crime”? 🤔 

The rest under a cut bc the ask is already long and then my rambling will get longer-

But yeah I mean..... I get that the legacy of Supernatural has been certifiably Rough, but I think people also forget how different of a time 2005 was? Hell, how different of a time 2015 was, even, prior to, say, Obergefell v. Hodges. Now I’m not saying that to blanket-excuse Supernatural, but like, you look at mainstream shows from the era and... there’s a lot of shit lmao. The fact that Supernatural has existed this long seems to me like.... maybe we CAN look at how it’s developed through the years vs just insisting it is what it was 15, 10, hell, 5 years ago. Especially since, to my knowledge, there’s been showrunner changes? Which seems to me like it would... affect things? I mean honestly, I remember back when I got into Spn for a hot second because of Castiel, I remember watching panel, Q&A, etc vids thru the years, and like... I thought we agreed that... it was the fans who were going a bit far pushing the shipping question like literally ALL the time to the actors, who are not in control of the show and.... like at the time.... that could have had personal implications for them? And yes homophobia bad, and people can still be allies despite that, but again like.... I do feel like - from what I’ve seen - that these guys were NOT ready to deal with a lot of that but they’ve (okay Jensen I’m talking about Jensen here) genuinely grown and learned? Also how many years ago was the essay autograph thing that people keep trotting out, like what year was it in and what year of spn was it, and what were the prevailing opinions on LGBT issues and bisexuality then.

I’ve been seeing some murmurings of identity politicsing surrounding ppl who enjoy Supernatural, and I’m sorry that that’s happening to you, it really fucking sucks and it’s also the dumbest way to “make” or “win” an argument because it shouldn’t ever be a final determiner, just factors to consider when considering what life experiences might have informed someone else’s PoV and views as well as maybe how you can better communicate with them. Instead of it being a “weapon” or “tool” to either dismiss someone or de facto validate an argument.

Also yeah I get it that you don’t want to send discourse to spn blogs bc I imagine you guys ARE actively grappling with all the bs rn and it’s a lot. Even just from like, the stuff I see around, I’m like tired of it. I’m genuinely having more fun with ppl who are having a good time with Supernatural than the ppl who are hating on it, even in this sort of backhanded “oh we’re not clowning YOU we’re clowning the writers and showrunners who think you should be satisfied with this,” when... yeah? the people who HAVE been watching the show and therefore... know what’s up.. DO seem to be? And all this based on *fake gasp* context. And that’s where the backhandedness becomes kind of poisonous to me, because it implies that it IS bad, and that you SHOULDN’T be satisfied, but poor little you are but don’t worry, we’re not making fun of YOU for liking garbage, you’re just the hapless victim who is consuming the garbage bc... idk, whatever reasons ppl are coming up with ig.

idk man it’s 2020. Fandom isn’t activism, performative or otherwise, it’s okay to let people enjoy things even if you think they’re “objectively” bad, and like... I don’t know if people can call something bad when they’re not even working with the whole context and instead are dealing with rumor and reputation. 

[combat-wombatus]

uHm if you do these and if you want to do it I’d love a bnha matchup <3?

• my name is Aubri, I’m bi but prefer MHA boys tbh. I go by she/her, too.

• I’m a very Gryffindor person. (Sorry if you don’t know Harry Potter - 😖)

• I’m a June cancer, and I have ADHD and anxiety. My anxiety can be literally crippling somedays, but it’s gotten better overtime.

• I’m a bit of a class clown and usually just a clown 🤡 but that’s irrelevant. My teachers all hate me but like school-wise I do well so we have a love and mostly hate relationship 🤧

• I’m usually the ‘entertaining’ friend, in elementary the popular kids would invite me to play games with them because, “you’re funny” and it was like the biggest achievement ever 😭👍🏻 then they’d ignore me but that’s another therapy session

• I’m usually made fun of by people for being ‘weird’ and ‘insane’. Like all through elementary everyone thought I’d be a criminal when I grew up JUST BECAUSE I HAD UNDIAGNOSED ADHD - I hate it here 😐🦶🏻

• I’ve always been super into crime stories/true crime (where my anxiety comes from, I’m always worried about a pesky serial killer just killing me. It’s usually being kidnapped tho lmao) so I knew and still know like all these murder facts and sometimes I’d just randomly be like;

“Hey did you know it takes 12 hours and 2 days to dissolve a body in acid?”

or

“If you bury a dead deer over a dead body you buried deep in the ground, when police dogs sniff it and people dig they’ll just think it was the deer and won’t dig any farther.”

• So maybe people had a reason to be scared of me and think I’ll be a criminal someday, i dunno.

• I love love love reading and writing, and also debating. The things I’ve wanted to be when I grow up are basically: Dog shelter worker, actress, FBI agent, politician, and a writer. But usually I just want to do something that makes a positive impact on people. Like i wanted to be an FBI agent to solve crimes for people. I wanted to be a politican so I could actually help a lot of people. The entertainment industry also seemed like a way to make people happy. Idk, but then I decided I couldn’t be a politican at 10 because they were all corrupt and to be one I would have to be too. 😫🤌🏻 we love some good childhood angst

• the only subjects I’ve ever excelled at are ELA and Social Studies aka History, and Math I can’t do to save my life. ELA comes easy for me and I usually don’t have to work that hard and/or get too stressed over it. But I always get the meanest teachers for some reason. For example, one time I did my final essay for like 30% of my grade in 30 minutes the day it was due and I got an A+ 🦟🦗🦟🦗

• Uhhh id describe myself as a pretty loyal friend, I’m a ride or die type of girl. A story from my childhood that summarizes it pretty well is when I was in 2nd grade my friend wet her pants and she didn’t want to go to the nurse for it alone so I peed my pants so I could go with her and she wouldn’t have to be alone. Like, you know, a professional problem solver

• and I have genuinely attacked people for fucking with my friends but don’t snitch pls 🕳🏃‍♀️💨

• But also just anyone, people at my school tend to come to me with their problems for me to either help solve them by reasoning, or just to confront the other person like the bad bleep I am 😈😈

• I also have a huge daydreaming problem, it’s literally maladaptive daydreaming. So paired with my ADHD I don’t get shit done like ever.

• I have really high empathy levels I guess, like I always say hi to everyone I see on the street, especially if they look sad 😔 I’ve done it ever since I was a little kiddo.

• My fashion sense is very much a preppy/alt style. I wear those ripped tights and fishnets, I also have the MOST BIZARRE JEWELRY- like who allowed me to buy the gummy worm glittery earrings, hmmm???????? and those Mary Janes???????

• But I love crew necks and pleated skirts so I always obide by the National “hoes dont get cold” policy 🇺🇸😫🦅

• I wanna move somewhere someday, I don’t want to stay in America for very long

• I can speak Latin, French, and my native language which is English.

• My music taste varies, but my all-time favorite artists who all of their music they’ve ever put out has been my favorites are, Billie Eilish, Melanie Martinez, and Conan Gray.

• I no-joke have a sign in my front yard that says;

In ✍️ this ✍️ house we ✍️ don’t ✍️ worship Jesus ✍️ but instead ✍️ Melanie ✍️ Martinez

• My favorite shows are MHA (duh), The Promised Neverland, and Malcolm in The Middle.

• and I’m not going to tell you what I prefer in a partner, because that ruins the fun 😤

• but I will say I cannot be friends with someone who doesn’t really make me laugh. Like I’m used to doing most of the talking in convos but if you’re just boring I’m sorry it’s nothing personal but no thanks 😐✌🏻

• About my physical appearance, I have fluffy n curly brown hair, but when it’s in the sunlight it looks sort of brown but golden yk?? It’s shoulder length :) I have bleach blonde streaks in the front. I like wearing eyeliner most days, too. I’m pretty average size/ on the skinnier side. Kinda high key inscure abt my body bc I got flat shamed in elementary EVEN THOUGH I HAVE TIDDIES NOW- whatever 😤🙄. I also have crystal type blue eyes, and I do have fairly big eyes. But, like, not weirdly big. A good big. My cheekbones are ALWAYS PRESENT so sometimes I get called a Tim Burton character but it’s cool ig ☠️☠️ oh and I’m kinda short. I’m 5’3, even though my doctor said I’d be 5’7. I feel like I was either tricked by the doctor or someone just stole my destined height while I was asleep. It’s probably cause I didn’t keep an eye out for Selener 👁 😔😔

• I’m a definite night owl, like all of my energy comes at night which really sucks cuz I can’t do much since everyone else is asleep.

• My love language is touch starved so I’ve never figured it out ✌🏻😗🔫

• but I am an attention whore so idk 😏

• I’m a huge introvert with social anxiety. It isn’t as bad as it used to be cuz I used to not be able to like go to restaurants but now I’m much better.

• I’m a huge history person, mostly like sad history LMFAO. Uh but a lot of my hyperfixations have been on history. Some examples are The Roman Empire, Julius Caesar himself, Anne Frank, The Titanic, the Black Plauge, Helen Keller, Marie Curie, Slavery in the US, Joan of Arc, and just a lot more. I always love talking about these things if someone would let me ramble to them but no one ever does 😖 it also got to a point where for all these subjects I’d go to the library and try to find a book on them but usually I’d either have already read it or I’d read it and know all the information.

• I’m super into Greek Mythology, I have 7 books filled with the stories, I’m going to Greece maybe this summer to see it’s history, and named my hamster Aphrodite but we call her Aphie. I also will talk about this forever and ever if you let me.

• My favorite color is yellow, my favorite food is literally nothing I never have an appetite, my favorite planet is Saturn, favorite song is Tag Your It by Melanie Martinez atm but it changes like everyday.

• Music is a huge safe-space for me if I’m feeling down or having a panic attack. It calms me down n is overall my coping mechanism 💃🏻💃🏻

• Biggest fear is spiders, even looking at one gives me a panic attack and I cannot sleep at all for that night, adding to my insomniac ass 🧎🏻‍♂️🏌️‍♀️

• I’m mature for my age, I don’t exactly like hanging around kids my age and I get along better with older crowds.

• i don’t like conventional dates, (I PROMISE IM NOT TRYING TO SOUND ‘QUIRKY’ AHAHA) I kind of like having a best-friend type partner more so dates that aren’t as romantic as like the movies or a fancy restaurant suite me better. My dream date is playing Monopoly on my bedroom floor 🦧

• Also I hate getting gifts. End of story. If someone gets me a gift like awe that’s nice but never again, I’d prefer to get you one. Especially in a romantic partner 😐 i keep a journal of my friends’ interests and hobbies so I can get them the perfect gifts for their bdays and Christmas’s. Been doing this ever since 4th grade.

• Though I don’t have much actual experience with relationships🧍🏻‍♀️

• I’m a huge believer in ‘family isn’t blood, it’s who you make it’ because I have a pretty shitty family life and my childhood has been trash. My friends are my family to me.

• Also if my friends don’t like my romantic partner ✨ GOODBYE ✨. Sorry girlie, bros before hoes 🦨💨

I was going to put more but I’m so so sorry for how LONG AND COMPLICATED THIS IS- idk if this is a autobiography or a matchup at this point 🤦‍♀️ don’t feel pressured to do this and if matchups aren’t open IM SO SO SORRY LMAO uh yeah ilysm 🦎🎂🧃

OMG ASLDFKJHASLKDJH

🥺 i’m so sorry bby but matchups are closed ;-; my 100 follower event was over while ago (i guess i should’ve specified that in the asks i answered LKSAJHFLKJAHDS SORRY IT’S MY BAD) but you sound so cool?? i had a lot of the same hyperfixations interests (heLLO helen keller was badass AF and the roman empire was messed up but still v cool, anne frank was awesome too) i also may or may not have wanted to be a politician when i was younger alskdjfhalkdhj but now i’m just 🧍🏻‍♀️ lost and anyways you’re amazing >.< love u lots and don’t forget to drink water and eat a lil something hehe :p 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 02 Mar 2020 (Disasters vs dystopias, meet me in Kelowna, Cool Mules, astrosovkitsch, drug policy)

Today's links

My new podcast, "Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopia": Tired: Look for the helpers. Wired: Be the helper.

The next frontier for school censorware is spying on kids all the time: It's how we'll stop ISIS, apparently.

I'm coming to Kelowna on March 5: It's my first-ever trip to the BC interior and more than half the (free) tickets are gone. RSVP now!

Cool Mules, an investigative series on a Vice editor's cocaine-smuggling ring: From the people who brought you the stunning "Thunder Bay."

Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR.

Apple, Nike and Dell's supply chain includes enslaved Uyghurs: Xinjiang Phase II.

Drugs Without the Hot Air: The best book I've ever read on drugs and drug policy, in an expanded new edition.

This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

My new podcast, "Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopia" (permalink)

I just posted a new podcast! "Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopia" is an essay I wrote for Wired about the ways that the stories we tell ourselves make the difference between rising to meet a crisis and devolving into catastrophe.

The podcast is here:

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/01/disasters-dont-have-to-end-in-dystopias/

The Wired essay is here:

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/cory-doctorow-walkaway/

Though I wrote it in 2017, it really applies today. Our beliefs about whether we can trust our neighbors to have our back in times of crisis informs whether we behave in a way that shows THEY can trust US in times of crisis.

And since every crisis is (eventually) overcome by people pitching in to get things fixed, the belief that our fellow humans are untrustworthy means that crises are more likely to turn into disasters – and the stories we write can instil or dispel that belief.

I know that there's some controversy about Mr Rogers' famous "Look for the helpers" speech – that it's advice for children, not adults.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/look-for-the-helpers-mr-rogers-is-bad-for-adults/574210/

But the adult version is "BE the helper." That is, prepared to run towards the emergency, not to cower in a luxury bunker while better people than you get the machine started again.

The next frontier for school censorware is spying on kids all the time (permalink)

We spend a lot of time bemoaning the lack of privacy-consciousness among kids, and then we spy on them at school with censorware and punish them for taking any action that might protect their privacy from us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGjNe1YhMA

Meanwhile, censorware companies – whose primary customers have always been oppressive regimes seeking to control political oppositions – have morphed into full-on student surveillance companies, and their sales pitch is a terrifying slurry of war-on-terror/active shooter FUD.

When companies like Gaggle and Securely pitch school-boards on their products, they claim that they can detect incipient in-school ISIS attacks and the like, and use that as justification to spy on kids in-school and out-of-school online activities. These companies are mini-NSAs-for-hire, tracking social media usage and every keystroke and click on school networks and devices, storing it (insecurely) for years, if not decades.

https://www.thegazette.com/subject/opinion/staff-columnist/iowa-city-schools-student-social-media-monitoring-surveillance-gaggle-securly-20200302

They make bizarre claims ("the average 7th grader has 6 Instagram accounts" – which would make 7th graders 25% of the entire IG user-base). And they find terrified parents to endorse spying ("If it's going to protect my child, I don't care how you get the info, just get it"). People who sell security need to sell fear. If we want our kids to care about their privacy, we can't make them "safe" by spying on them all the time and banning any steps they take to make us stop.

I'm coming to Kelowna on March 5 (permalink)

I'm coming to the BC interior for the first time ever, talking about my book Radicalized at the Kelowna library as part of Canada Reads. I'm being hosted by the CBC's Sarah Penton from 6-8PM! It's free to attend but it's ticketed, and the majority of tickets are already gone — if you want to come, now's the time to RSVP.

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

(and if you can't make it, it's OK! The CBC will broadcast the audio and I'll put it my podcast, too)

Cool Mules, an investigative series on a Vice editor's cocaine-smuggling ring (permalink)

Back in 2015, Slava Pastuk was an editor at Vice, and he abused his position there to pressure young, desperate would-be journalists into smuggling suitcases full of millions of dollars' worth of cocaine into Australia.

https://nationalpost.com/news/former-vice-editor-gets-nine-year-sentence-for-recruiting-young-drug-mules-for-massive-cocaine-smuggling-ring

Five of them went to prison, but Slava Pastuk did not (at first). When Pastuk's role in the affair became public and he was indicted and tried, he refused to talk to the press at all, making the whole thing something of a non-story cipher (despite its spectacular details).

Incredibly, though, Canadaland got Slava to talk. At length. And they got the other side of the story, too, both from Slava's victims and those who risked career suicide by turning him down. The result is a new, six-part investigative series called Cool Mules, hosted by Kasia Mychajlowycz, whose work I discovered through the spectacular On The Media.

https://www.canadalandshow.com/shows/cool-mules/

It's modeled on Canadaland's last, spectacular miniseries, Thunder Bay, easily the best investigative series I ever listened to.

https://www.canadalandshow.com/shows/thunder-bay/

This morning's Canadaland features an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the making of the series between Mychajlowycz and Jesse Brown, and it has me licking my chops for the series itself.

https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/315-the-cocaine-smuggling-ring-at-vice/

Soviet Space Graphics (permalink)

When my grandmother was 12, she was inducted into the Leningrad civil defense corps during the 900 day siege of Leningrad (I wrote a science fiction novella about this called "After the Siege").

http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/after-the-siege.html

The story is also available as a five-part audiobook reading by Mary Robinette Kowal:

http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege1.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege2.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege3.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege4.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege5.mp3

Eventually (years later) my grandmother was evacuated with the women and children across the winter ice and ended up in Siberia, where she met my grandfather, got pregnant, fled to Azerbaijan and birthed my father. They made their way to Canada over six years, through a series of refugee adventures and crises that could each be a novella of its own (the part where she married my grandfather's one-armed partisan fighter brother, for example, and got caught in a pogrom).

My grandmother completely lost contact with her family in Leningrad, for years. More than a decade. My father vividly recounts how he, as a little boy, heard his mother in Toronto answer the phone and say, "Mama, mama" and begin to cry for the family she thought was dead.

Over the years that followed, my grandmother and grandfather traveled to the USSR several times to see her family, and my Leningrad family came often to visit us in Toronto. Whenever they came, the brought Soviet space-program memoribilia.

There was SO MUCH of this stuff (in the early 90s, Russian sf fans used to pay their way to US conventions by shlepping suitcases full of astrosovkitsch to sell at the event), and it was gorgeous and magical. Some of the best art of the Soviet era was produced to celebrate the space program, and my most cherished toys and knickkacks growing up featured Sputnik, Gagarin, and Valentina Tereshkova. Today, much of that stuff is in our home, thanks in part to Ukrainian Ebay sellers who've taken over the astrosovkitsch market from Russian sf fans.

I'm awfully excited, therefore, by the news that Phaidon is bringing out "Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR." It's a lavishly illustrated volume, produced in collaboration with the Moscow Design Museum.

https://www.phaidon.com/store/design/soviet-space-graphics-9781838660536/

If you're ever in St Petersburg and you want to see some amazing historical examples of Soviet space and tech materials, visit the Popov Museum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.S._Popov_Central_Museum_of_Communications

Incidentally, my grandmother's baby brother Bora, who stayed behind in Leningrad, grew up to be curator of the Popov. I last saw Uncle Bora in 2005, shortly before his death, and he gave us a curator's behind-the-scenes tour of the museum. You can see my photos from the visit here:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=37996580417%40N01&sort=date-taken-desc&text=popov&view_all=1

Apple, Nike and Dell's supply chain includes enslaved Uyghurs (permalink)

Phase II of China's Xinjiang concentration camps for ethno-religious minorities (mostly Uyghurs but also other Muslim minorities) is creating slave-labor factories that serve major US brands.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51697800

Nike, Apple and Dell's supply chains are all implicated.

As a reminder, the Xinjiang concentration camps used torture, punitive rape, brainwashing, forced medical experimentation and other tactics to "retrain" a disfavored minority.

"Between 2017 and 2019, the ASPI think tank estimates that more than 80,000 Uighurs were transferred out of the far western Xinjiang autonomous region to work in factories across China. It said some were sent directly from detention camps."

The revelations come from a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute:

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale

The workers enslaved in these factories spend their off-hours in brainwashing sessions, living "in segregated dormitories, with Mandarin lessons and 'ideological training', subjected to constant surveillance and banned from observing religious practices."

Drugs Without the Hot Air (permalink)

I first read "Drugs Without the Hot Air," David Nutt's astoundingly good book about drug policy back in 2012; in the eight years since, hardly a month has gone by without my thinking about it. Now, there's a new, updated edition, extensively revised, and it's an absolute must-read.

Nutt came to fame when he served as the UK "Drugs Czar" under the Labour Government in the late 2000s; especially when Home Secretary Jacqui Smith fired him for his refusal to lie and say that marijuana was more harmful than alcohol, despite the extensive evidence to the contrary (Smith also threatened Nutt for publishing a paper in Nature that compared the neurological harms of recreational horseback riding to harms from recreational MDMA use, a paper that concluded that if horses came in pill form we might call them "Equasy").

Since then, Nutt — an eminent psychopharmacologist researcher and practioner — has continued to campaign, research, and write about evidence-based drugs policy that takes as its central mission to reduce harm and preserve therapeutic benefits from drugs.

Like the first edition of Drugs Without the Hot Air, the new edition serves three missions:

First, to describe how a wide variety of drugs — benzos, cocaine, opoiods, cannabis, etc, but also alcohol, caffeine and nicotine — work in the body, in clear, nontechnical language that anyone can follow.

Next, to describe the harms and benefits of drugs, considered both on individual and societal levels — and also to describe what the best medical evidence tells us about maximizing those benefits and minimizing those harms.

Finally, to recount how governments — mainly in the UK but also in the USA and elsewhere — have responded to the evidence on drug mechanisms, harms and benefits.

Inevitably, part 3 becomes an indictment, as Nutt describes in eye-watering, frustrating, brutal detail how harmful, incoherent, self-serving and cowardly government responses to drugs have been, and how many lives they have ruined — through criminalizing harmless conduct, through treating medical problems as criminal ones, and through badly thought-through policies that caused relatively benign substances to be replaced with far more harmful ones (for example, Nutt traces the lethal rise in fentanyl partly to the successful global interdiction of opium poppies).

One important difference between the new edition and the original is visible progress on this last. In the years since Nutt was fired for refusing to lie about science, he has founded Drugscience, a research and advocacy nonprofit that has scored significant policy wins and made real therapeutic breakthroughs through hard work and rigour.

I don't think you could ask for a more sensible, clear-eyed, and useful book about drugs, from the ones your doctor prescribes to the ones your bartender serves you to the ones you can go to jail for possessing. Nutt is not just a great and principled campaigner, nor merely a talented and dedicated scientist — he's also a superb communicator.

Drugs Without the Hot Air is part of an outstanding series of technical books — mostly about climate change — that have greatly influenced my thinking. The publisher, UIT Cambridge, has several more that I recommend.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Media professors' SCOTUS brief on why P2P should be legal https://web.archive.org/web/20050910210056/http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/mediagrokster.pdf

#15yrsago Study: Used hard-drives full of juicy blackmail material https://web.archive.org/web/20051223054039/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1487674,00.html

#15yrsago Revolved: Beatles mashup album https://web.archive.org/web/20050221212052/http://www.hearingdouble.co.uk/ccc/

#15yrsago 1121 phrases you can't put on personalized jerseys at nfl.com https://web.archive.org/web/20050304035349/https://www.outsports.com/nfl/2005/0301nflshopnaughtywords.htm

#10yrsago Brits: tell the LibDem Peers not to bring web-censorship to Britain! https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/lib-dems-seek-web-blocking

#10yrsago If chess were redesigned by MMORPG developers https://akma.disseminary.org/2010/03/if-chess-were-invented-by-mmog-developers/

#5yrsago America's growing gangs of armed, arrest-making, untrained rent-a-cops https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/private-police-carry-guns-and-make-arrests-and-their-ranks-are-swelling/2015/02/28/29f6e02e-8f79-11e4-a900-9960214d4cd7_story.html

#5yrsago Bruce Schneier's Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World https://boingboing.net/2015/03/02/bruce-schneiers-data-and-gol.html

#1yrago Man-Eaters: Handmaid's Tale meets Cat People in a comic where girls turn into man-eating were-panthers when they get their periods https://boingboing.net/2019/03/02/lycanthropes-v-patriarchy.html

#1yrago Massive study finds strong correlation between "early affluence" and "faster cognitive drop" in old age https://www.pnas.org/content/116/12/5478

#1yrago Comcast assigned every mobile customer the same unchangeable PIN to protect against SIM hijack attacks: 0000 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/a-comcast-security-flub-helped-attackers-steal-mobile-phone-numbers/

#1yrago Improbably, a Black activist is now the owner and leader of the "National Socialist Movement," which he is turning into an anti-racist group https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/03/01/how-black-man-outsmarted-neo-nazi-group-became-their-new-leader/?utm_term=.e5eb80c543cb

#1yrago Study that claimed majority of Copyright Directive opposition came from the US assumed all English-language tweets came from Washington, DC https://webschauder.de/wer-zwitschert-zum-eu-urheberrecht/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org), Dark Roasted Blend (https://www.darkroastedblend.com/) and Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis Street, with CBC's Sarah Penton https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

Currently writing: I just finished a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel now, though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I've been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world's prehistory.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopias: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/01/disasters-dont-have-to-end-in-dystopias/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

[jaqcarrw]

❝ Here are the women with ancient anger in their veins and the cruelty of a goddess in their hearts. You will beg before her, you will scream; but Hera never flinched from the words of a mortal, so why would she? Do not stand in her way. She will burn down your kingdoms, herself with it, if it meant your ruin. ❞

JACQUELINE CARROW really is the spitting image of PRISCILLA QUINTANA, right? For someone only TWENTY-FIVE years old, JAC has been forced to endure so much. Yeah, that MUGGLEBORN has been scraping by at the sanctuary since JUNE, 2028, working as a LEADER/COMBAT MEDIC AND UNSPEAKABLE in the DIVISION OF HEALING. SHE is a CIS WOMAN and is known to be HARSH and DISTANT but also RELIABLE and PROTECTIVE. Best of luck surviving through this. ⊰ JO, 26, EST, SHE/HER ⊱

Stat Sheet.

Pinterest.

Trigger Warnings: kidnapping, emotional, physical and verbal abuse, manipulation, stillborn mention, parental death ( all within the first set of bullets in *history* )

History:

[ TW: KIDNAPPING AND MANIPULATION ] Jacqueline was born to a happy muggle couple who had the unfortunate luck in running into the pair of death eaters while they were in ‘hiding’ after the war had ended. Alecto was taken with the idea of having a child and while they tried for one, she hadn’t been able to conceive. If she couldn’t get what she wanted that way, Alecto had decided to take it. The death eater caught eye of Jac, a bright-eyed one year old, and her accidental magic– and set her target. Alecto and her husband spent a few months getting close to the family before the other shoe dropped and their daughter was taken right from under their nose. As a toddler, Jacqueline wasn’t the type to whine or cry. She was quiet…confused and though she still asked for her mother and father she was met with ‘we are your parents’. The next three years had gone by with only a few snaps on Alecto’s part and eventually they grew tired of just playing with Jacqueline when she grew into a child.

[ TW: STILLBORN MENTION, ABUSE MENTION, KIDNAPPING ] The pregnancy had been a surprise to the Carrows after failing to conceive before, however that happiness was soon diminished when the infant was brought into the world lifeless. Distraught and angry, Alecto took it out on Jacqueline because some how she was responsible for the out come. It was the first time for her to see such anger out of her mother and though she was left with bruises to match– jac attempted to console her only to be pushed aside. It took them an entire week to find a replacement for their lost child and they’d left four year old jac to fend for herself – when they came back they brought their new daughter who was red in the face from wailing. Jacqueline grew extremely protective and found herself trying to calm the infant’s, who was named valeria, tears to save her from their parents anger. Though this would last their entire life as Jacqueline became a shield for her little sister and took punishment which she didn’t deserve just to keep her safe.

[ TW: ALLUDING TO KIDNAPPING, ABUSE MENTION ] Jacqueline doesn’t know her origins ( like where she was born, who her parents were, etc ) but she had her suspicions since she was young that something wasn’t right and that she was missing something. The connection of child and parent was nonexistent and it was made clear when the slur ‘mudblood’ was hissed in her direction when things didn’t go her parents way but they’d praised her for being pureblood all along. Her mother’s hatred and anger only burned hotter as the girls grew up and jac took the brunt of it– not fighting back for Valeria’s sake. She would bide her time until she would get her vengeance. [ TW END ]

Growing Up:

She was a smart girl and she focused on her studies while her sister lived as carefree as she could ( which jac found smart just as well ). Hogwarts was a breeze. Jac soaked in information probably too quickly and aced her essays and exams which eventually lead into her career as an unspeakable. Even within her first year, in the love/sacrificial magic dept, she made many discoveries and invented spells that eventually helped save the lives of wixen.

Once the whispers of the dark lord and death eaters stirred around, Jac knew it was trouble. Her mother was hellbent on having her ‘most intelligent daughter’ help with their project as she was an unspeakable with knowledge they believed was important.  There wasn’t no room for a ‘no’, so went along with it. She attended the meetings, listened to the schemes, offered advice when she was asked to speak however– she hadn’t realized that they were actually serious in raising inferi along with the Dark Lord. Jac was dragged along to the cave, the cold wind whipping at her cheeks as she stood outside of the cave ( as a look out ) once they began. And when they ended and realized that they had made a mistake-- that she’d made a mistake. jacqueline watched passively as the death eaters fought for their lives-- failing one after the other including her mother. Turning a cold shoulder she apparated away leaving her mother at the mercy of the inferi without hesitation. Jacqueline’s survival was much more important....

She stayed put until she couldn’t any longer, only to see if her parents survived and unfortunately her father did as he was too much of a coward ( they always said one needed to be a little cowardly to survive anyhow ) to step inside. She joined her sister three months later at the strong hold where she poured her talents in keeping those who fought the battles safe as a combat healer and became a leader in no time. Her father is currently locked in the Chamber of Secrets and she gives a whopping zero fucks lmfao

After a recent scuffle ( a month ago ) with the inferi on a mission as a combat medic, Jacqueline went through a checkup with the healers back at Hogwarts and though she had some minor injury during the scuffle-- the most surprising result was that she was pregnant. ( I’d actually would love if the healer that performed the checkup, initially to make sure she was fine and not scratched/bitten, is pretty adamant on her taking care of herself/baby yeno probably wanting her to STOP as she should but she wont because she’s a dumb. BUT HEY potential friend connection please and ty <3 )

As of right now, she is a little over 17 weeks pregnant ( around 4 months ) and she’s still attempting to keep it a secret for as long as she can as she knows that is grounds to take her out of the action where she is needed the most ( and she needs to help put that guilt to rest over unknowingly help the de’s bring this mess into the world ) but girl is showing andddd…walp time is running out..  

Personality:

a no nonsense type of person and is pretty black and white when judging if something is right or wrong ( her standards on right and wrong i mean )

she can’t stand betrayal or disrespect of any kind and isn’t the type to let things slide. meaning u screw her over, she’s going to mess you up big time.

very smart, very clever, quick with her wand and pretty much anyone who stands in front of it will take a beating when dueling/fighting. and talented in healing which is why she took on the position of a combat medic instead of going into the research division like the other unspeakables.

her family is the most important to her- or well her sister. she’s very self sacrificing for them and shields her little sister from any sort of harm. which means she takes the brunt of their parents abuse or really any abuse because she loves her baby sister okayyyyowhigowihegowiheg.

outside of her fam its hard to get close to her outside of her being polite. if you do manage to become friends with her she’s extremely loyal and protective. SHE TAKES EVERYONE UNDER HER WING TBH the mom friendTM but like good luck? she’s like a block of ice.

jacqueline quite realistic and doesn’t dwell on things ( ha. ig inferi is different ) as she see it more as a hindrance to react emotionally to situations rather than take it at face value on with a levelhead. ( which she finds valeria annoyingly NOT doing ) but don’t let her fool you, she might not react outwardly but she is just as explosive as her little sister – perhaps even more so. you talk about blazing a path through their enemies when she finds the opportunity. she bides her time before she strikes tbh

and she isn’t phased a single bit by being ostracized because of her mother and uncle’s actions. she’d much rather just be left alone anyways LMAO. HOWEVER please do try and be frands with her lol eventually she will grow fond ioeghwoeihgwie she’s as soft as she is seemingly cold. haha

[princessamericachavez]

Do you have any tips on starting a blog of ur own writing? I’m an English major who likes writing nonfiction but I’m hella out of practice but also need to start producing content and I’m kinda scared tbh. Not super confident w anything besides research papers and def not. Just spouting my opinion into the void. I wanna write articles but also feel like no one cares what if say or that I don’t have anything importNt to say

That’s a very good question because I’m sort of in the same boat as you?

I’ve had my tumblr for a while but my yelling about fictional characters and dumb memes is not exactly curriculum-building material, you know?

I did give the blog thing a try (still kinda do though I haven’t posted much in it lately). I used Wordpress because it’s a pretty standard, free and easy to use site that I’m familiar with. I also tried to write about what I know and what I liked. I considered the fact that I’d already built a more or less good base here on Tumblr and tried to stay on brand while writing a little more in-depth about certain subjects. I also recommend having social media platforms (like this, twitter and IG) where you can move those links around to get more views. 

I think research papers are definitely a good place to start. If you think about them in publishing terms and give the writing a little more of your own voice rather than an academic style, a good essay can be the equivalent of an Informative Article. Write about things you find interesting or love, and I’m sure the passion will shine through, and as you go you’ll develop your own style away from the “research” part (though informative shit is super cool and useful). 

OR think about a particular project. If you like non-fiction, figure out a subject you love and make the blog specifically about that. Certain kind of historical figures, or fun facts, or science, or a particular historical period. Giving yourself a defined range of writing subjects might make it easier to choose than just “write whatever”, you know?

Also, big tip for blogs, DON’T FORGET TO USE LINKS. If you are doing research-like articles, for example, you can link the text itself to the source rather than adding it on a parenthesis or at the end of the text. Or you can add links to other articles in your own blog that had discussed that same subject. That will make your piece far more interactive for the audience and linking to different sites will bring your blog further up in the google search, which is always great for your traffic stats!

On that note, images, videos, and anything that can add to your written piece is an amazing tool too! Explore all of the rich internet writing possibilities my friend!

Other than that, I don’t know what else to say —since, like I said, I’m pretty much in the same boat as you right now. I’ll drop my own blog’s link here, in case you wanna check it out for further reference.

Good luck!

[hieranarchy]

A copywriter’s rant

It’s easy to assume that copywriters are shakespearean poets and essay-spewers or some likeness of your pedantic and long-winded English teacher back in school, or even the ones who approve copyright patents (don’t talk to me pls). But copywriting is a complete different ballgame and breed of linguist experts altogether.

Though yes, we are expected to stretch to long-form writing when the need arises, fancy prose is a galaxy away from copywriting.

The main pillars of our work are: efficacy, brevity and creativity. In that order. Key useful secondary characteristics include but are not limited to: understanding the assignment fast, agile flexibility, ability for empathy, and eloquent verbal defence. Copywriters are the one half of the creative duo (copy+art) who needs to always THINK AND CONCEPTUALISE and ensure that pretty ideas still make SENSE. Creative executions can come from copywriters as much as they can come from art directors. WORDS DO NOT ALWAYS NEED TO BE INVOLVED. I cannot stress this enough.

I get really tilted when people remark (jokingly or otherwise) that they think they can take over our roles just because they have social-caption writing experience from running their no doubt flourishing personal IG pages, or believe they have a moderately good grasp of english.

Or dismiss copywriting as the less important twin to art directing, just because art direction appears more tangible and copy appears more skeletal. It’s only a matter of filling up the poster with ‘a simple one or two liner’, after the art part is done, right?

No. Fuck no. Everything develops first from concept, including art. And if you can’t articulate what your art is trying to express in a clear message, only like it for the ‘vibes’ and ‘aesthetics’ or it possesses only a tenuous link to the bigger idea, then please be a gallery artist instead. It’s easier to smoke your way through.

I get almost murderous when people (and clients, sadly) readily destroy the copy structure in terms of repetition, or alliteration, or puns, or rhyme, or irony, or symmetry, or any sort of conceptual patterns because they didn’t catch the nuance or realised the significance of it or quite simply (quite usually, actually) are just unable to appreciate words and semantism as easily as images. Evolutionary wiring. I get. But then they have the cheek to come up with and insist on awkward and hackneyed substitutes that they are merrily proud of. When i say ‘it’s ok...’, I really mean it’s meh, bruh.

Because the only way that consistently good copywriting comes about is hours and days of practicing interesting and effective communication with minimum use of language PLUS re-editing your shit over and over to solve issues of information lack, wrong tonality and even your bosses’ subjective preferences.

But it’s worth it to fight for the the ones who will get it. It’s worth it to keep on refining the craft, because there’s always someone out there who’s horribly better and faster at it, who saves the industry from mediocrity, whose work truly inspires the rest of us.

[angryfeministworkouts]

Happy Birthday James Baldwin.

Is it weird to say you identify with someone who is of a different race, a different gender, a different sexuality, a different time period -- who probably wouldn’t like you if he met you?

Haha. I first opened “Go Tell It On the Mountain” when I was about 13. It was so angry, I didn’t understand it. I quickly put it down and wouldn’t look at it for weeks. 

Anger scared me back then. When I could get a better hold of it, I would look more into James Baldwin’s life. I forget which Atlantic essay drove me to take a deeper and closer look - but I saw some parallels that I wanted to hold close.

Anyone moving into Harlem has to somehow get a grasp of James Baldwin’s life - and as I was moving in there in my late 20s, I wanted to explore my new neighborhood and take in the history of all the political figures there. Yuri Kochiyama & Malcolm X’s friendship first, with a photo of the mural they were putting up as I was getting ready to move there. The Apollo Theater. Sylvia’s. Red Rooster. Riverside Church where Martin Luther King Jr would speak. And of course, James Baldwin. 

But what I held the most close in the histories of myself and James (ha) is not actually our shared neighborhood. It is actually in the leaving of America altogether, to find some better sense of identity in a country across the globe. James Baldwin went to France and I went to China and I think in the leaving of a country, sometimes you can better grapple with who you are as a person in the context of a global entity such as America. Can a country be a safe space? Maybe any place outside of one’s home country is a safe space. 

James Baldwin left in a bad place, as he mentions in his Paris Review interview. He had $40 and was going to a dark place and end up like his friend. I left in the height of the Obama administration, where globalism could not look any better for an American - and of course, I left to a country where I could finally blend in and look the same as everyone around me. We leave and we get a sense of invisibility - but in this invisibility we are allowed to breathe. Baldwin would say that 

I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac. I’m sure that my life in France would have been very different had I not met Balzac. Even though I hadn’t experienced it yet, I understood something about the concierge, all the French institutions and personalities. The way that country and its society works. How to find my way around in it, not get lost in it, and not feel rejected by it. The French gave me what I could not get in America, which was a sense of “If I can do it, I may do it.” I won’t generalize, but in the years I grew up in the U.S., I could not do that. I’d already been defined.

In China at a multinational company, I learned how to find my way around it, not get lost in it and not feel rejected by it. I was coming off of a stark change that year - having graduated, then attended such an elite program at Dartmouth I felt swallowed up by the richness in white arrogance, white wealth, white elitism. I almost completely shut down. I had never before ever felt so alone - and I had come from 4 years at a white elite college so that just tells you this was on a whole other level. I made it out but probably shaken in a way that made me determined to get a better sense of self before I stepped back into elite white spaces ever again.

China allowed me to become invisible. From my family, from the social status and comparisons of life among my friends, from all of the whiteness I had just endured. Asian Americans were all over YouTube, gaining larger followings for their antics as people and entertainers, not as the butt of jokes or terrible words from white Hollywood. Online, they were getting into some ridiculous conversations though - I would sift through Facebook groups of all sorts trying to learn and gain a better sense of understanding of cultural shift. I felt myself shifting differently than my friends - even my boyfriend at the time - further and further apart. I wanted more solidarity with the black community, I wanted Asian Americans to be more indignant and participatory in race communications instead of obsessed with representation in minor Hollywood feats and food, instead. I leaned into feminism via these threads and Facebook messages. While I lived a great life in China, I started to feel my idealism mutate though, and it started to lead me back to the States. And with the “expat” title under my belt, I had more than enough self-determination to walk back into white spaces with ease. 

James Baldwin escaped growing racism and tension in the States. Yes, France was (is) racist too, but it was different. In America, racism was still young and supremely ugly. In France, as they had banned slavery for a much longer time, there was a more subtle racism there that he could live with. And while James was friends with many leaders of the civil rights movement, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and MLK Jr, he still felt that in order to live, he would have to leave. It was in this safe space of his in a country not his own that he was able to develop. 

He wrote his novels, he wrote about being black, but he was not there in the protests, he was not there in many of these strategic fights - he was not in the midst of these things. He was away. But it seems, after he was able to get a better hold of his identity, not just as an Angry Young Man (his words), as a gay man, as a writer, as a unique talent with his powers of observation solidified with wit --- it too brought him back to the States during the Civil Rights movement to do his series of tours that we all see well preserved in the I Am Not Your Negro documentary. 

 Some folks are still writing about his legacy and grappling with similar stories to his --- I attended an IG live from @theglobalblackgirl on how she too had to leave America to feel she could actually get to a place to help it. Sometimes being here can bring you down. During the pandemic, I know many Americans will not be able to leave the country to sit and dwell with their privilege, their race, their places in this global society and look at this with a further distance. But maybe we can also do these things now in the comfort of our own home. With all of the information and ability to “travel” via books, the Internet → maybe we don’t have to leave the country or even our own homes. Maybe we can all build up our tiny revolutions of self-knowledge and self-sanctity in safe spaces. That’s my wish for tonight - for you a safe space from my home tonight. 

[margiehasson]

Hijab Resources and Foundational Supports are Just a Click, Email or Message Away!

Editorial note: This month we are running a series focusing on foundations – how we can build solid foundations across all areas of our life to help ground us so that we can embrace all that our deen (religion) and dunya (the world) have to offer us. We will be covering foundations of marriage, faith, your morning routine, relationships, mental health/self care, technology, hijab and other areas. Each focus could really be a book, but we will try and break it down into the most useful, attainable and basic things we can do to build critical foundations in our lives.

Establishing strong foundations and building blocks across our lives (and ones that we adjust as we move through different stages of life) are key to helping us stay grounded and, well, solid in whatever we are trying to do. Thus far on the blog, we’ve talked about creating strong foundations for one’s marriage, for our morning routines, with familial relationships, for high-tech and low-tech living and more. At Haute Hijab, we are also about foundations – those strong bases for wearing hijab and feeling supported in doing so to help us in feeling strong, confident, powerful and beautiful.

We’ve been putting together products to be the foundational basis for how you wear your hijab (Shaping Scrunchies, Ultimate Underscarves, beautiful hijabs and more to come), but we also have a litany of resources in place on our site and throughout our various platforms to support you on your hijab and faith journey.

You may be surrounded by family, friends and community to support you in wearing hijab. Or, you may be the first in your circle to wear hijab, and in turn may not know where to go or who to turn to in order to become comfortable in this new life and type of attire. This process is as much about feeling supported and confident as it is about searching for a hijab style that is modest and comfortable for you — a way for you to be you in hijab.

The good news is, you’re definitely in the right place, Alhamdullilah! Our first brand pillar at Haute Hijab is community — and we take it very seriously. Since we started in 2010, HH has worked hard to support and build the most amazing and genuine community through a variety of ways, including this blog, our videos and tutorials and different support systems, which we hope will help serve as the building blocks of modest dressing living for you:

The Haute Hijab Blog

If you’re here reading this post, you already know that the HH blog is a terrific hub and resource for our communities! The blog has been around nearly as long as Haute Hijab has, and in the past ten years we’ve amassed quite the library of articles, posts, how-to’s and stories to help you with nearly every step of your hijab journey, from "is the hijab fard (mandatory?)?" to "do I need to be perfect in my Islam to wear hijab?" to every sort of style post imaginable.

We also explore the lives of Muslim women (those who wear the hijab and those who don’t), different issues facing our communities, news and current events and personal essays exploring all facets of Muslim living. You can subscribe to the blog to receive all our articles as they are published, search our large archives for whatever you’re looking for or find our posts all over our various social media platforms.

Haute Hijab on Instagram

If you are seeking to ask HH’s own Melanie any type of question regarding hijab, modest dressing, faith or anything, really, our @hautehijab account on Instagram is one of the best ways. Melanie handles that account and is extremely in tune with responding to comments and DMs. Besides the beautiful photos she posts, she features information about our product drops and exciting launches as well as sharing her own life with our community. We also have a second account on IG, @hhspottedclub, helmed by our Social Media Specialist Mona Mostafa. This is where we feature beautiful photos of women spotted in their HHs, and Mona personally keeps up with the comments, questions and DMs to this account.

Haute Hijab Community on Facebook

When people reach out to us with hijab-related questions and seek advice, we’re more than happy to help! We created the Haute Hijab Community Facebook group to share hijab tips, tutorials, outfit advice and so much more! Our #HHFam has even started their own Buy-Sell-Trade on the page to buy, sell or trade Haute Hijab prints or colors they’ve had for a while and would like to switch up!

We invite you to join the group and join the conversation there as well! (Just search for "Haute Hijab Community" on Facebook and send us a request to join!) The best part about our community is that whenever you need a helping hand, all the ladies in the group are more than happy to assist!

Haute Hijab YouTube Channel

From countless hijab styling videos to Melanie herself answering all your questions, our HH YouTube channel is a powerful resource of how-to tutorials, fun videos, advice, round-table discussions and more. There is all sorts of resources available through our video library to answer your questions and help you wear your hijab in different fabrics and styles.

Haute Hijab Support Email

Some women and girls reach out to us for more serious or more personal hijab matters, and we’re happy to help in that way as well! We’ve created a support email, support@hautehijab.com, where you can contact us if you need an extra hand, and one of our HH team members will respond and try their best to assist you Insha’Allah!

We do want to point out that we are not therapists, but we do have our own personal hijab experiences and will do our best to assist or refer you to someone else who can.

The Definitive Hijab Style Guide

Figuring out what kind of hijab style suits you is a process, sometimes over the course of your lifetime as you change and grow. We've put together our Definitive Hijab Style Guide to show you how to wrap your hijab in different styles based on your face shape, how much coverage you want and even if you wear glasses or not. If you've been styling your hijab a certain way for a long time, maybe try some of the other styles suggested in our guide! Have fun with it!

We hope you’ll avail these resources and reach out to us for any and all support needs and questions you may have. Having good foundations in place to help you with your hijab, modest dressing and faith journey is so crucial. Together we can all uplift and empower each other!

Hijab Resources and Foundational Supports are Just a Click, Email or Message Away! published first on https://lenacharms.tumblr.com/

[va-faen-culo]

Jonas x Noora pt. 2

((S/o to everyone who gave my first post so much love back in January!! It was literally just a random idea that popped into my head and I was expecting like 2 notes, and I suggest you read that first if you haven’t already!.))

•So a few people have mentioned how it might be kind of weird for Noora to date yet another one of her best friends exes

•But in actuality it wouldn’t be weird at all. In fact Eva is one of their number one supporters. Being close to both of them, she realizes more than anyone that they are perfect for eachother. She’s always going to have some lingering feelings toward Jonas but she has her own boyfriend now and she’s just happy that Noora is over that dickhead William.

•Also I live for Eva being their go to for any problems! “What should I get Noora for her birthday?” “Do you think Jonas’ parents will like me?” “Do you think Noora would get mad if I send a dick pic?” “How do I get Jonas to cut his hair?”


As for the rest of their friends:

•Jonas and Noora are a force to be reckoned with. When both of them get fired up it gets a little bit scary. 


•Magnus and Vilde are probably the most intimidated. It’s one thing to get called out by one of them, but when both of them get on you it’s terrifying. And let’s be real the two of them can make some pretty ignorant comments. 


•They are THE power couple. Evak is that gross domestic couple that are probably going to adopt like 3 kids and rescue a dog, but Joora are that world domination type.


•But that doesn’t stop them from constant couple competitions, because Isak and Jonas are typical bros and proud boyfriends and can’t help it. “Nooras article was just featured in the news.” “Even’s painting is going to be in that new art exhibit.” “Guess who got laid last night!” “Guess who got laid last night…twice!”


•Everyone in the group would refer to them as mom and dad (it started as a joke but let’s be real, they are totally the parentals)


•Jonas, Noora, Sana and Mahdi. Do I need to explain?


•They debate a lot, but they rarely fight. But when they do fight it’s like World War IV. Everyone around them feels it. (You know it’s bad when Linn is asking you what crawled up your ass).


Some more Random HCs:


•They lowkey have pet names.Jonas calls her “Red” and Noora calls him “Curly” (and sometimes Jonas is a brat and calls her “Palída” and then she calls him “Cabezal” or “Pendejo” because my favorite hispanoblantes are sassy as fuck)


•They support the hell out of eachother. Jonas sends her articles for her feminist fashion blog, and Noora makes occasional appearances on the new YouTube channel Jonas starts. Even though Noora doesn’t use most the articles (because “Jooooonas complimenting a girl’s ass is NOT empowerment!”) and they usually just end up bickering on his channel (it was actually going to be a couple channel but 3 videos in they realized that was not going to work) {s/o to @shadeandadidas for helping me sort out the blog v. YouTube thing}


•They are super competitive but it’s always passive aggressive. Noora will casually mention she got a 6 on the essay that she heard Jonas telling Isak he got a 5 on. Jonas then casually mentioning the article he sent her for the blog got more notes than the other ones she had posted over the week.


•Jonas and Noora trying to be #fitnessgoals, but it’s not exactly working. Neither of them are that great at sports (they tried to play basketball once with Sana and it was a disaster). They tried running for a while, but running sucks so that ends pretty quickly. They try going to the gym, because dammit Evak cannot be in better shape than them and they are running out of options.


-One day they head off to the gym, but are informed that the space is being used for a yoga class. But it took way too much effort for them to get here and they’ll be damned it they leave now, so they end up taking the class! And that’s how Joora become yogis. They start posting couple poses on IG much to the dismay of Evak (“Faen Even! Why didn’t we think of that??”) Sometimes before class Jonas pops an edible, but Noora doesn’t mind turning a blind eye (and if she tried it once no one has to know).


•And to answer the question from earlier Jonas’ parents fucking adore Noora

[ezatluba]

The Mysteries of Animal Movement

A scientist’s unfettered curiosity leads him to investigate the physics at work in some very odd corners of the natural world.

By James Gorman

Nov. 5, 2018

David Hu was changing his infant son’s diaper when he got the idea for a study that eventually won him the Ig Nobel prize. No, not the Nobel Prize — the Ig Nobel prize, which bills itself as a reward for “achievements that make people laugh, then think.”

As male infants will do, his son urinated all over the front of Dr. Hu’s shirt, for a full 21 seconds. Yes, he counted off the time, because for him curiosity trumps irritation.

That was a long time for a small baby, he thought. How long did it take an adult to empty his bladder? He timed himself. Twenty-three seconds. “Wow, I thought, my son urinates like a real man already.”

He recounts all of this without a trace of embarrassment, in person and in “How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls: Animal Movements and the Robotics of the Future,” just published, in which he describes both the silliness and profundity of his brand of research.

No one who knows Dr. Hu, 39, would be surprised by this story. His family, friends, the animals around him — all inspire research questions.

His wife, Jia Fan, is a marketing researcher and senior data scientist at U.P.S. When they met, she had a dog, and he became intrigued by how it shook itself dry. So he set out to understand that process.

Now, he and his son and daughter sometimes bring home some sort of dead animal from a walk or a run. The roadkill goes into the freezer, where he used to keep frozen rats for his several snakes. (The legless lizard ate dog food). “My first reaction is not, oh, it’s gross. It’s ‘Do we have space in our freezer,’” Dr. Fan said.

He also saves earwax and teeth from his children, and lice and lice eggs from the inevitable schoolchild hair infestations. “We have separate vials for lice and lice eggs,” he pointed out.

“I would describe him as an iconoclast,” Dr. Fan said, laughing. “He doesn’t follow the social norms.”

Dr. Hu with his 2015 Ig Nobel Prize, for showing that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in 21 seconds.

He does, however, follow in the footsteps of his father, a chemist who also loved collecting dead things. Once, on a family camping trip, his father brought home a road-killed deer that he sneaked into the garage under cover of night.

The butchering, a first time event for everyone in the family, he wrote once in a father’s day essay for his dad, “was an intense learning and sensory experience. There were a lot of organs in an animal, I learned.”

His own curiosity has led him to investigations of eyelashes and fire ants, water striders and horse tails, frog tongues and snakes.

Dr. Hu is a mathematician in the Georgia Tech engineering department who studies animals. His seemingly oddball work has drawn both the ire of grandstanding senators and the full-throated support of at least one person in charge of awarding grants from that bastion of frivolity, the United States Army.

Long before his role in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, put three of Dr. Hu’s research projects on a list of the 20 most wasteful federally funded scientific studies. The television show, “Fox and Friends,” featured Sen. Flake’s critique.

Naturally, Dr. Hu made the attack on his work the basis for a TEDx talk at Emory University, in which he took a bow for being “the country’s most wasteful scientist” and went on to argue that Sen. Flake completely misunderstood the nature of basic science.

Dr. Hu was tickled to think that one scientist could be responsible for such supposed squandering of the public’s money. Neither he nor his supporters were deterred.

Among those supporters is Samuel C. Stanton, a program manager at the Army Research Office in Durham, N.C., which funded Dr. Hu’s research on whether fire ants were a fluid or a solid. (More on that and the urination findings later.)

Dr. Stanton does not share Dr. Hu’s flippant irreverence. He speaks earnestly of the areas of science to which he directs Army money, including “nonequilibrium information physics, embodied learning and control, and nonlinear waves and lattices.”

So he is completely serious when he describes Dr. Hu as a scientist of “profound courage and integrity” who “goes where his curiosity leads him.”

Dr. Hu has “an uncanny ability to identify and follow through on scientific questions that are hidden in plain sight,” Dr. Stanton said.

When it comes to physics, the Army and Dr. Hu have a deep affinity. They both operate at human scale in the world outside the lab, where conditions are often wet, muddy or otherwise difficult.

In understanding how physics operates in such conditions, Dr. Stanton explained, “the vagaries of the real world really come to play in an interesting way.”

Besides, Dr. Stanton said, the Army is not, as some people might imagine, always “looking for a widget or something to go on a tank.” It is interested in fundamental insights and original thinkers. And the strictures of the hunt for grants and tenure in science can sometimes act against creativity.

Sometimes, Dr. Stanton said, part of his job is convincing academic scientists “to lower their inhibitions.”

Needless to say, with Dr. Hu that’s not really been an issue.

Dr. Hu has shown that the ideal eyelash length for mammals, like this sheep, is one-third the width of an eyeball.CreditGuillermo Amador

An aspiring doctor is led astray

“Applied mathematicians have always been kind of playful,” Dr. Hu said recently while talking about his academic background — although they are perhaps not quite as playful as he can be. A few years ago he did gymnastic flips onto the stage of a Chinese game show that sometimes showcases scientists.

He grew up in Bethesda, Md., and while he was still in high school, he did his first published work on the strength of metals that had been made porous. He was a semifinalist for the Westinghouse Science Prize (the forerunner of the Regeneron Science Search) and won several other awards.

That work helped him get into M.I.T., which he entered as a pre-med student planning to get an M.D./Ph.D.

He was soon led astray.

Dr. Hu’s undergraduate adviser at M.I.T. was Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, a mathematician who works to describe real life processes in rigorous mathematical terms.

Dr. Mahadevan, known to students and colleagues as Maha, investigated wrinkling, for example. Naturally he won an Ig Nobel for that work.

“Maha lit the fire,” Dr. Hu said. Before he encountered his adviser’s research, he said, “It didn’t really make sense that you could make a living just playing with things.”

But he came to see the possibilities.

He stayed at M.I.T. for graduate work, in the lab of his adviser, John Bush, a geophysicist. Dr. Bush remembers him as very enthusiastic.

Asked by email about some of Dr. Hu’s wilder forays into the physics of everyday life, he said, “A sense of playfulness is certainly a good thing in science, especially for reaching a broader audience.” But, he said, “targeting silly problems is not a good strategy, and I know that David has taken considerable flack for it.”

Dr. Hu may be the first third-generation (in terms of scientific pedigree) Ig Nobel winner, because Dr. Mahadevan studied under the late Joseph Keller, a mathematician at Stanford University. Dr. Keller won two Ig Nobels. One was for studying why ponytails swing from side-to-side, rather than up and down, when the ponytail owner is jogging. The other was an examination of why teapots dribble.

After M.I.T., Dr. Hu did research at the Courant Institute at New York University, another hotbed of real-world mathematics. He moved to Georgia Tech, after Jeannette Yen, a biologist there, told the university they ought to take a look at him.

From ants to self-assembling robots

Dr. Hu’s research may seem like pure fun, but much of it is built on the idea that how animals move and function can provide inspiration for engineers designing human-made objects or systems.

The title of Dr. Hu’s book refers to the “robots of the future,” and he emphasizes the way animal motion offers insights that can be applied to engineering — Bio-inspired design.

When Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands flood, for instance, fire ants form rafts so tightly interlaced that water doesn’t penetrate their mass. When he picked up such a mass in the lab, Dr. Hu writes, it felt like a pile of salad greens.

“The raft was springy, and if I squeezed it down to a fraction of its height, it recoiled back to its original shape. If I pulled it apart, it stretched like cheese on a pizza.”

He found out that the ants were constantly moving even though the shape of the mass stayed more or less the same. They were breaking and making connections all the time, and they became, in essence, a “self-healing” material.

The idea is appealing for many engineering applications, including concrete that mends itself and robots that self-assemble into large, complex structures. Depending on the force applied to them, a mass of a hundred thousand ants or so can form a ball or a tower, or flow like a liquid.

He and students in his lab also showed that the reason mosquitoes don’t get bombed out of the air by water droplets in a rainstorm is that they are so light that the air disturbed by a falling drop of water blows the mosquitoes aside. The finding could have applications for tiny drones.

They also showed that the ideal length for a row of mammalian eyelashes is one-third the width of an eyeball. That gives just the right windbreak to keep blowing air from drying out the surface of the eye. Artificial membranes could use some kind of artificial eyelashes.

And what about urination? It didn’t make sense to Dr. Hu that a grown man and an infant would have roughly the same urination time.

After he sent out undergraduates, under the guidance of Patricia Yang, a graduate student, to time urination in all the animals at the Atlanta Zoo, the situation became even more puzzling. Most mammals took between 10 and 30 seconds, with an average of 21 seconds. (Small animals do things differently.)

The key was the urethra, essentially a pipe out of the bladder, that enhanced the effect of gravity. Even a small amount of fluid in a narrow pipe can develop high pressure, with astonishing effects.

Water poured through a narrow pipe into a large wooden barrel can split the barrel. Dr. Hu said the experiment, known as Pascal’s barrel, can be replicated nowadays with Tupperware.

“Applied mathematicians have always been kind of playful.”

What is interesting about the urethra biologically is that its proportions, length to diameter, stay roughly the same no matter the size of the animal (as long as it weighs more than about six and a half pounds).

The 21-second average urination time must be evolutionarily important. Perhaps any longer would attract predators? But then predators are subject to the same rule. In any case, the principle of how to effectively drain a container of fluid could be useful, Dr. Hu wrote in the original studies, to designers of “water towers, water backpacks and storage containers.”

As usual, in his book Dr. Hu does not neglect the human side of his work, or treat it too seriously. He refers to the urethra as a pee-pee pipe. And he corrects his son when he brags that only he, not his sister, has a pee-pee pipe.

Not so, Dr. Hu insists. The urethra is present in males and females.

Once older, his children may never forgive him for this book. But middle school science teachers and nerds everywhere will thank him.