#stream the society now

[ovrrdogg]

Hfjone au where instead of kidnapping people for his reality show he accidentally discovers twitch and starts a stream and becomes the most popular twitch streamer ever. People love tuning in to watch forest man and his wacky antics. They love the “larp.” Twitch keeps trying to get him to come to cons he can never attend. People make wildly popular edits and gifs of him to share on stan twitter.

Instead of getting people to entertain him, he works to entertain people.

[deanmarywinchester]

previous years: 2022, 2021 / list of worst sf/f/horror

the bangers were BANGING this year, I kept mentally readjusting my top 5 list every time I read something good so the honorable mentions are extremely honorable this year. I hope you read anything that sounds good from this list and tell me about it!

top 5:

chain gang all stars by nana kwame adjei-brenyah: when I say that this book is like the hunger games for adults, I’m not making a glib comparison between two books about fighting to the death, I’m saying that I haven’t felt so intensely about a book since I stayed up late to tear through the hunger games and sob about it when I was thirteen. this book is satire as real and devastating as I’ve ever read, with action scenes that feel like they’re being dripped directly into my hindbrain and a unique and believable love story. put it on hold at your library literally RIGHT now.

the actual star by monica byrne: about a post-climate catastrophe utopian society built around a religion started by a teenage girl in 2012 based on mayan traditions, and also about the teenage girl, and also about the maya. this book made me crazy because the future society felt real enough to touch, with its radical openness and collectivity solving problems that exist today but causing new ones that are totally novel and meaty and interesting to dig into. read it if you’re interested in different ways of being.

the spear cuts through water by simon jiménez: really, REALLY good, fresh, original epic fantasy. jimenez picks a few perspectives to stick to but hops fluidly into bystanders’ brains to give you their perspectives, so even background characters feel fleshed-out and no one’s pain is dismissed as a side effect of heroic battles or whatever. highly recommended if you like framing narratives and stories about stories, and like epic fantasy but wish it wasn’t mostly about finding acceptable enemies to slaughter with cool swords

the dispossessed by ursula k. le guin: I love how much this book is about hope as clear-eyed commitment to the boring and difficult work of a brighter and necessary future. sometimes the work of the glorious anarcho-communist revolution is leaving your university post and romantic partner for months at a time to dig irrigation ditches so nobody starves when there’s a drought. read this book for diplomatic conniving, a clash of values between a capitalist planet and its dissident moon, and hope.

imperial radch trilogy and its spinoffs by ann leckie: what if you were built to be a weapon of the empire, a serene sentient battleship with thousands of human bodies all containing your consciousness, and you lost all bodies but one and had to figure out how to be a person, singular and alone? what if you were a 19th century british military officer and you slept for a thousand years into the decline of the empire? what if you were grown in a vat to be a facsimile of human and then told off for eating all your siblings even though eating them was SO interesting? what then. leckie’s prose is incisive and funny, her unreliable narrators are wonderful, and her stories are intimate even though the backdrops are insanely huge. 👍.

honorable mentions:

house of leaves by mark z. danielewski: guys? anyone hearda this one? anyway. Something Is Wrong With This House horror with themes of storytelling and grief. recommending that you slam this book as fast as possible like I did so you can hold all its layers in your head at once.

the lathe of heaven by ursula k le guin: i thought I didn’t like ursula k le guin, and then I read this book, went OH and immediately devoured the hainish cycle. im so sorry miss ursula. this book about a hapless pacific northwesterner whose therapist is making him dream different realities into being is so sharp and sly and funny. themes of choices, ends and means.

he who drowned the world by shelley parker-chan: I liked the prequel to this addition to the radiant emperor duology. I LOVED this book. parker-chan has invented new and exciting modes of fucked-up codependency and im obsessed. historical light-fantasy with themes of ideals vs what it takes to reach them, gender, and regret.

babel by r. f. kuang: found the didacticism of this book annoying, but i really loved the concept of this novel and the way it slowly ratchets up the stakes. this novel is for people who want to smash the fun of the magic school genre against the reality of universities’ complicity in the imperial machine.

piranesi by susannah clarke: im late to this book but it’s such a weird little gem. peaceful yet unsettling. a man takes care of an endless house with an ocean inside it until he realizes the house is stealing his memories. themes of memory and devotion.

hell follows with us by andrew joseph white: I can only read YA these days if it’s a reread or if it’s genuinely good and really really strange. this is that. weird gory fantasy about a trans teen who escapes his militarized post-apocalyptic christian cult and finds himself turning into something Different. my only gripe is that he uses 2023-perfect language to describe transness and I think he should be inventing genders weve never even thought of. such is YA.

some desperate glory by emily tesch: a rolickin’ good space opera time with terrible women <3. a thriller about how the golden child of her isolated human-supremacist space station cult deprograms and the consequences of it. this feels like a grown-up SPOP until the theoretical physics gets involved. big fan

the library of mount char by scott hawkins: this book is harrow the ninth in suburbia until it becomes a more macabre version of the absurdity of the gomens apocalypse. God raises his children, sometimes brutally, to hone their powers in a neighborhood that mysteriously keeps out outsiders. came for the dysfunctional mess of the god-children and now I can never look at a grill the same way

runners up:

bunny by mona awad: books that make you WISH you were in mona awad’s MFA program where she must have been having a terrible time. the weird one out in an MFA program accepts overtures into the unbearable rich-girls’ clique to find out what they’re Up To. themes of aimlessness and the intersection of class with the art world

camp damascus by chuck tingle: have you ever wished that you were simply too autistic to be successfully demonically brainwashed into not having gay thoughts? horror-flavored thriller that was just fun

light from uncommon stars by ryka aoki: this author put a bunch of genres in a blender and came up with something fun and surprisingly cozy. an immortal woman must sell violinists’ souls to the devil in exchange for their fame, or he’ll drag her to damnation instead. there might be aliens and coffeeshop romance involved. definitely a blender.

the fragile threads of power by v. e. schwab: if you haven’t read a darker shade of magic and you like tightly paced high fantasy and historical fantasy elements, political intrigue, and pirates, read that first. if you have, there’s more now! lila bard are you free on thursday when I am free

the library of the dead & our lady of mysterious ailments by t. l. huchu: a teenage girl provides for her family in soft-apocalypse magic edinburgh with a job carrying messages from ghosts to their living relatives. an ongoing mystery series about the intrigues she uncovers among the dead.

severance by ling ma: this books is on the list of media that is the terror to me: it's about an apocalyptic disease that makes people reenact their routines mindlessly until they collapse. intimate apocalypse novel with themes of late capitalist malaise.

ocean’s echo by everina maxwell: i didn't really like winter's orbit because i'm just not a romance guy, but this second novel stands alone and the romance is more insane and less of the entire point of the novel. (also it's between essentially Discworld's Carrot and Moist Von Lipwig, which is. really something.) in the Space Military, a buttoned-up mind controller must pretend to bend a socialite with illegal mind-reading powers to his will. what if fake relationship but the relationship they have to fake is "brain linked master/servant pair."

the murderbot diaries by martha wells: novellas about a misanthropic security android who jailbroke itself in order to watch tv. the name "murderbot" is a joke but it very much did kill people <3 themes of paranoia and outsiderhood, corporate wrongdoing, repentance, and trust

black water sister by zen cho: zen cho is good at any kind of fantasy she writes, including this, her first modern fantasy novel. a closeted lesbian has to move in with her family in malaysia after college in the US, only to discover that her dead grandmother has some unfinished business involving a local goddess and a conniving real estate developer. themes of family, gender, and place.

the way inn by will wiles: a man who’s paid to pretend he’s other people to attend conferences in their place gets trapped in an endless Marriott. has the sharp humor of a colson whitehead corporate satire until it becomes more straightforwardly horror-flavored.

[dickgreyson]

one of my essays from back when i studied philosophy is being put into a good answers guide at my university<3 not one of my good ones but

[heireign]

WHAT TAROT CARD ARE YOU ?

JUSTICE — what would you do to ensure justice? you know full well i don’t speak of lofty ideals and courts and magistrates, dearest. what would you do to those that hurt you? if I dropped them in your lap, what would you do? what kind of pain could you possibly inflict upon them? you are right to do so. you are right to want to do so. ignore the screaming, dearest, you are the hand of justice now, and they hurt you. do not look too closely at their faces, dearest. you are within your rights. you spell out your own rights, now. are you happy about it? are you certain that this is the right person you hold by the hair? does your anger hurt less now?

tagged by: @nonpareil

tagging: @lenfear , @wulfmaed , @oflorien , @belayadeath , @sanctamater , @lcerys , and @zalarys

[taylorswiftalbummaker]

I kinda feel bad for the people that bought all the ttpd vinyls

they bought all those vinyls to listen to the songs, only for the songs to be on streaming the day the album comes out

[bo0bydrake]

i have got to emphasise on the fact that this is huge actually- gay rights in football is something that's just barely discussed. during the world cup in qatar, captains were banned from wearing a one love captain's band because it was too political (it was just a band with a rainbow heart on it), homophobia and racism is practically rooted in the songs sung during matches and there are no out players in the premier league, or more generally, there is only one (1) out player in the top leagues. having a character simply just,, be with another man and also a footballer in the premier league is a huge statement and will hopefully aid in trying to make football a better space.

[bleachbleachbleach]

All right B3 I gotta know...what concept of time do Shinigami use? How do they mark or measure the hours of the day? What kind of clocks or time-telling devices do they use? Analog or sundials?

“There are not just two times,” notes the physicist Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time. “Times are legion: a different one for every point in space.” What we think of the present, he writes, “does not extend throughout the universe.” Rather, “it is like a bubble around us.” The “well-defined now,” as he calls it, “is an illusion.”

— “The Science of the Perfect Second,” by Tom Vanderbilt in Harper’s Magazine (April 2023).

Where time is concerned, I think we have enough canon evidence to say that the standard the Gotei has chosen is “whatever best coincides with the living world,” a 24-hour day with hours and minutes and seconds.

We see this mostly in the Soul Society arc, where Rukia’s execution is timed to the hour, and Hinamori has a whole alarm clock:

This isn’t to say there aren’t other forms of time in play as well (earlier Rukia tries to direct Chad toward the “hour of the tiger,” which no one else has ever mentioned as far as I know—maybe this is Kuchiki time, maybe this is Inuzuri time). I kind of feel like Soul Society may have embraced the multiplicity of different available measurement systems even harder than we have. Like, we have the age-old battle between Imperial and metric, and countless additional Indigenous, religious, etc. systems of measure. They have madness.

At the same time, I can think of some reasons this wouldn’t be true: Their world—at least, a world they have institutional memory of—is smaller than ours, in that there were fewer generations across which things might change, and fewer population loci (or rather, a singular locus, that being the Seireitei). There is also, of course, the near-infinite variations within Rukongai—but where shinigami are concerned, it’s the Seireitei and the Seireitei. Anyone shinigami happens to be familiar with X, Y, or Z system of Rukongai measurement is still going to know what the Seiretei uses; and what the Seireitei uses is probably 1) whatever the nobles continue to assert, combined with 2) whatever the 12th is begging people to use instead (Gotei-specific standard being the latter).

Which brings us back to the Gotei usage of mainstream Living World time.

The very interesting follow-up questions, of course, are:

Why?

To what end?

Practical Reasons

Despite the fact that this conception of time is even more removed from that which it is derived than it already is for us, there are practical reasons for its usage: Shinigami understand their purpose to be mediating the balance of souls across dimensions, which means their work directly concerns the Living World. For the sake of the dangai and keeping the number of shinigami that vanish in it to a minimum, standardizing time as much as possible seems important. It gives the 12th something to work with—some worldview that can unify the worlds a little bit and make all of this interdimensional travel and tracking possible! (See the links at the end of this post for further discussion!)

Also, without standardizing time across dimensions how are you supposed to make it to your Worm TV Zoom meeting on time? (Sidebar: I’ve previously hypothesized that the pomp and circumstance of the Worm TV was about network security but let’s be real, it’s probably also how you have a conversation in [nearly] real-time across dimensions. I would not be surprised if there was a wicked delay on denreishinki messages/data. See: The Great Gentei Kaijou Debacle of 2001.

Ideological Potentials

What follows are five ideas I think are interesting potential outgrowths of the discussion on Soul Society's use of mainstream Living World time:

1. Having chosen Living World time as the standard doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the most relevant concept of time for vast swathes of non-dangai/shinigami life in Soul Society.

We get “shinigami aging makes no sense” discourse all the time, but like, there’s at least two ways of looking at that: Either shinigami aging doesn’t work with (this concept of) time, or it’s this concept of time does not work for them. "Time" not working/not applying isn’t unique to shinigami, and we have plenty of Living World examples of this: Indigenous time, crip time, Island time, &c.

Functionally relevant or not, though, I think Living time holds additional, deep-seated ideological meaning for shinigami, too.

2. The choice of Living World time as Soul Society’s standard plays an active role in making and defining the relationship between shinigami and the living.

At a basic level, the purview of shinigami is death, and “life” may be described as being in time, where “death” is being out of it. This is complicated by any number of things—namely, there being an afterlife and some version of time still operating there, lol, but also the notion that being in time the “correct” way makes you more alive (see: crip time), or the notion that life and death are dualistic opposites (religiously and culturally, not a universal truth). It's of course further complicated by the fact that even if it's not the most relevant measure of time in Soul Society, time does in fact (now) exist there. Soul Society is not out of time so much as it is in time in very strange ways that stretch the definition of what that's supposed to mean.

3. The Living World is a moving target, as far as understanding it goes.

It’s constantly changing, and even if a soul is a soul is a soul, I feel like there’s no way the relationship between shinigami and the Living World has enjoyed the same level of elemental stability. Even taking only the 20th century into account, the cultural significance of shinigami and other such folklore in Japan has had massive swings. Who’s to say the Meiji Restoration and “modernization” didn’t make shinigami work way harder? Who’s to say the re-emergence of said folklore post-WWII and through the mid-20th century didn’t similarly impact what it meant to be a shinigami, how hard it was to do your job, and how much job you had to do? (Is reishi even thinner when fewer humans believe it might exist? Is it thicker under torii gates, or in spaces of ritual?)

Going off of that:

4. If ways of knowing can impact ways of being with respect to the relationship between shinigami and the Living World, perhaps Soul Society itself feels those impacts even more strongly.

The nature of zanpakutou is all about manifesting the inner into the outer world, and given that Soul Society is reishi all the way down, maybe some version of that holds true for Soul Society as a whole: It has seasons and solar days and all of these things, in these particular ways, not just because it exists in the echo of the Living World but also because bringing this concept of time to Soul Society has effected concrete (inasmuch as anything reishi is “concrete”) change in Soul Society. Maybe, given enough time, shinigami could wake up one day and Soul Society WOULD have a molten core and a real moon.

Or maybe there are too many additional forces working against any kind of progressive trajectory (see: Soul Society anachronisms, see: the incredible stretchiness of space-time in Rukongai/traveling across Rukongai [yes I’m thinking about Renji in the Bount arc, I am never not thinking about Renji in the Bount Arc]).

The relationship between Soul Society and the Living World, in addition to being defined in terms of life and death, could also be defined in terms of the material and the spiritual. Perhaps time becomes a critical link point between the two. In the Living World, units of measurement broadly writ have gradually lost their material referents; instead of measuring every kilogram against a literal kilogram object, The Kilogram, kept in a French vault, they are now measured in terms of universal constants, or math. But time has never been material, and maybe that makes it ideologically special for Soul Society and the Living World—a point of relation, an opportunity.

5. Living World philosopher Henri Bergson suggests that the spirit is anchored in the past and the body in the present, and time is the union of the spirit and the body.

Basically, he theorizes that pure memory is within the purview of the spiritual, and in order to react with consciousness you need to perceive something and let memory impress itself on what it means to you--it requires relation with the past. Spiritual beings and the past aren't exactly the same thing in Soul Society, but the way time and memory work and the way image functions in Edo-looking Soul Society roll together in cool ways here.

And perhaps time, then, becomes a way of laying claim to the shinigami’s prime directive: To be shepherds of souls, stewards of the balance between realms. If time, and by extension, the relationship between shinigami and the living, can be defined with *increasing specificity*, then perhaps in some courts this might prove the prime directive, prove the legitimacy of the shinigami project--that is, their relationship to the Living World and what it is they think their job is.

Then time becomes both a means of relation and intimacy between these words and their denizens, and also a measure of control/claim that is as loving (six hearts beating as one) as it is violent (thousand-year blood wars).

Further Food for Thought:

-> “In Search of Lost Time,” by Tom Vanderbilt in Harper’s Magazine (2023), which inspired a lot of my thinking here and offers an absolutely beautiful rumination on time, systems of measurement and their dematerialization, and different elemental clocks. I’ve read this three separate times this year because I liked it that much!

-> “The Tyranny of Time,” by Joe Zadeh in Noēma (2021), which is also about the standarization of time and the ways our minds and bodies might be out of sync with this standard; and is also about the historical muddiness of time and timezones and time in scatters of English villages.

-> More on the "Hour of the Tiger" thing:

-> More about different conceptions/measurement systems of time, and its wimeyness in historical Japan and also Soul Society (see "info" tab for our response tags):

-> Thinking about time at an existential timescale (primordial ooze shinigami):

-> Followed up by more about Universal Time and the Dangai:

[everyones-internet-little-sis]

hi

disney + removed the mysterious benedict society to save money

the company that is worth, as of making this post, 167.98 billion dollars just cut a show that hasn't even been done for a full year yet to *checks notes* save money.

i am about to go feral

[stormcloudsandshadows]

No one:

Me at 230 am: hm…… Nedzu.

[andromeda3116]

you know i wonder where the essay is, i certainly don't have it prepared, what it reflects about society, that the '99 trigun was a fun action western-sci-fi anime with a plot that wove itself out slowly and had plenty of heart that got serious eventually but was also a quirky romp through most of its run

and the '23 trigun stampede is a dystopian sci-fi set in a crumbling desert that can barely support life with a dark plot that drags you under immediately and also does have a lot of heart but ultimately appears to have the theme of scavenging that heart from a place that gives you no reason to believe it exists

like, as time capsules i feel like it's unintentionally saying something about us, about where we've come to and come from, that the same basic story is told in two such wildly different ways, after less than a quarter-century

[iamonlyhereforthefreefood]

I think if you're a queer/neurodivergent/gender non-conforming girl then there was a high chance you had a "not like other girls" phase. And obviously there is a problem with the not like other girls thing because it demonizes girls/women who are more traditionally feminine which obviously there is nothing wrong with, however I do think when you're a queer not traditionally feminine woman or girl you start to feel disconnected from what allegedly is the typical female experience. I see so many posts and memes on Instagram that will be like "men won't get this" or "all women have had this experience" and it's something you don't get or something you've never experienced. And now as an adult I tend to ignore those memes because I'm older I'm aware that women aren't a monolith and every woman experiences life differently. But when you're 15 and see things like that you start to think "well if this is the typical experience girls have then clearly I'm not like other girls". A lot of "not like other girls" memes to have this sense of superiority "other girls are sluts, I'm not" "other girls are vain, I'm not" but at the same time I've seen plenty of memes that seem self deprecating and almost like they come from this place of isolation. I think a lot of girls who had a not like other girls phase really felt disconnected from their peers and those memes were a coping mechanism. I think most people outgrew the not like other girls phase because they grew up and met other women who were neurodivergent and/or queer, grew up and met other women with similar interests and hobbies, grew up and met other women who also had "not like other girls" phases as a result of feeling isolated in high school.

I'm not like other girls, because women aren't a monolith and I'm my unique own person, just like every other woman. I'm also similar to so many other women. I have so many hobbies and experiences that other women share, including the experience of being 15 and thinking you're broken for not fitting into society's idea of what it means to be a girl.

[solarpunkani]

How much am I allowed to post/ramble about the solarpunk zombie apocalypse story I'm working on before it gets annoying.

Bonus points: I haven't actually gotten to the solarpunk part of it.

[thefabelmans2022]

want to rewatch dps but afraid it will bring up Emotions and perhaps even Thoughts that i don't want to feel and think.

[cosmicrhetoric]

how hot girl summer is treating me rn

[warriorprincesstramp]

we have GOT to do something about ugly movie posters I can't be telling people these are two of my fav movies and then when they google it this is what they see

[luulapants]

25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025

Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality

Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway

Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups

Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay

Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward

Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient

Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative

Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!

Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community

DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!

Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?

Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.

Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability

Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough

Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing

Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work

Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market

Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question

Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them

Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area

Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...

Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable

Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact

Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive

Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people