#sylvia-on-the-run

[juney-blues]

how exactly do you intend to provide for people on a basis that is neither personal nor authoritative on a farm with no government oversight, or reason to engage with any outside forces, fully self sufficient lives a family of farmers say heterosexual family with a daughter and a son, the daughter is gay and either through homophobia or social expectations the father does not want to provide for her over that, through personal loyalty or agreement the mother sides with the father and the children can not be expected to provide for themselves, what can be done here without infringing on anyones personal freedoms or the suffering of the daughter due to bigotry

wow what a fucked up situation, i'll bite

what you are describing is less of an analogue to an anarchist commune, and more the logical conclusion of the nuclear family, there are a lot of solutions to a problem like this but i'd lean more towards "we need to abolish the tyranny of the family and restructure society such that children are not seen as the property of their parents and have a robust community to fall back on as a support network" rather than "we need an authority even HIGHER than the family to make sure the family stays in line, and we assure you that WE will NEVER misuse that authority nuh uh you can trust us"

"but june" i hear you say "what if the community as a whole is homophobic and thinks these children should starve!"

wow what a shitty situation, this hypothetical fuckin sucks for those kids i guess. let me ask you a question though, what if your *state* is homophobic, what if it thinks this child should be imprisoned and sentenced to hard labor or just executed. what is your solution to that

like we could just sit here all day posing the hypothetical of "okay but what if those running your society, be they few or many, were rotten to the fucking core and evil, what then, huh?" and like idk the answer to that is it'd be a shitty fuckin society. great job. if the people who ran your ideal vision of society were monsters then it wouldn't be ideal, really productive conversation personally i think that a society where people have as little power over eachother as possible is one that leaves as little room for abuse as possible. like yeah no shit there are going to be interpersonal struggles and abuses between people and that's going to fucking suck, there are ways of mitigating that, and some of them leave more room for abuse and oppresion than others. I often hear the sentiment "I somehow care more about the long ongoing violence the bourgeoisie inflict on the oppressed, than the temporary violence of a revolution" so i'm sure you can get where i'm coming from when i say "i somehow care less about the interpersonal violence a state could mitigate, than the overwhelming violence and oppression it would nominally be doing in service of that"

god this got off topic, the main question was "how exactly do you intend to provide for people on a basis that is neither personal nor authoritative" so i should answer that

uhhh

nice dichotomy idiot what lies outside it

[arachnidsgrippysocks]

hiiiiiii i just wanna say i love whenever my wife sends me your vriskan art <3 also quotes your pinned tweet at me constantly

That is the sweetest thing I've ever heard, I'm actually so honored!!!!!!!! I'm glad my silly little doodles are so special to you two, here's a little 8it of Vriskan as a treat for you and your wife! ::::)

[chronotopes]

first! :3c or julian's introduction(JOKE)

i don't feel like looking up first in this chapter (though i'll do it if someone else asks 'first' but the first sentence in the entire novel is "Sylva Rochester died at noon on Midsummer Day."

[mesetacadre]

Today maduro called madrid the facist capital of europe if not the world, do you agree with that

I see his point but Brussels and DC are much worse

[bagelswithtoast]

good luck on the hrt roadtrip o7

Thank you!! We are leaving sooo soon 😳😳😳

[maomango-doodle]

Jazz puns, am I right?

Some random doodles

[m1nsur0]

Olé! Sylvia!

[zichiwatchesyou]

Random screenshots day 24 The Tourist

Gotta post earlier

[bitesizedpoetry]

Sylvia Plath's "Letter to a demon"

Last night I felt the sensation I have been reading about to no avail in James: the sick, soul-annihilating flux of fear in my blood switching its current to defiant fight. I could not sleep, although tired, and lay feeling my nerves shaved to pain & the groaning inner voice: oh, you can't teach, can't do anything. Can't write, can't think. And I lay under the negative icy flood of denial, thinking that voice was all my own, a part of me, and it must somehow conquer me & leave me with my worst visions: having had the chance to battle it & win day by day, and having failed.

I cannot ignore this murderous self: it is there. I smell it and feel it, but I will not give it my name. I shall shame it. When it says: you shall not sleep, you cannot teach, I shall go on anyway, knocking its nose in. It's biggest weapon is and has been the image of myself as a perfect success: in writing, teaching and living. As soon as I sniff non-success in the form of rejections, puzzled faces in class when I'm blurring a point, or a cold horror in personal relationships, I accuse myself of being a hypocrite, posing as better than I am, and being, at bottom lousy.

I am middling good. And I can live being middling good. I do not have advanced degrees, I do not have books published, I do not have teaching experience. I have a job teaching. I cannot rightly ask myself to be a better teacher than any of those teaching around me with degrees, books published and experience. I can only, from day to day, fight to be a better teacher than I was the day before. If, at the end of a year of hard work, partial failure, partial dogged communication of a poem or a story, I can say I am easier, more confident & a better teacher than I was the first day, I have done enough. I must face this image of myself as good for myself, and not freeze myself into a quivering jelly because I am not Mr. Fisher or Miss Dunn or any of the others.

I have a good self, that loves skies, hills, ideas, tasty meals, bright colors. My demon would murder this self by demanding it be a paragon, and saying it should run away if it is being anything less. I shall doggedly do my best and know it for that, no matter what other people say. I can learn to be a better teacher. But only by painful trial and error. Life is painful trial and error. I instinctively gave myself this job because I knew I needed the confidence it would give me as I needed food: it would be my first active facing of life & responsibility: something thousands of people face every day, with groans, maybe, or with dogged determination, or with joy. But they face it. I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if I am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I'm so good I must be perfect. Or nothing. I am, on the contrary, something: a being who gets tired, has shyness to fight, has more trouble than most facing people easily. If I get through this year, kicking my demon down when it comes up, realising I'll be tired after a days work, and tired after correcting papers, and it's natural tiredness, not something to be ranted about in horror, I'll be able, piece by piece, to face the field of life, instead of running from it the minute it hurts.

The demon would humiliate me: throw me on my knees before the college president, my department chairman, everyone, crying: look at me, miserable, I can't do it. Talking about my fears to others feeds it. I shall show a calm front & fight it in the precincts of my own self, but never give it the social dignity of a public appearance, me running from it, and giving in to it. I'll work in my office roughly from 9 to 5 until I find myself doing better in class. In any case, I'll do something relaxing, different reading, etc. in the evenings. I'll keep myself intact, outside this job, this work. They can't ask more of me than my best, & only I know really where the limits on my best are. I have a choice: to flee from life and ruin myself forever because I can't be perfect right away, without pain & failure, and to face life on my own terms & "make the best of the job.

each day I shall record a dogged step ahead or a marking time in place. The material of reading is something I love. I must learn, slowly, how to best present it, managing class discussion: I must reject the grovelling image of the fearful beast in myself, which is an elaborate escape image, and face, force, days into line. I have an inner fight that won't be conquered by a motto or one night's resolution. My demon of negation will tempt me day by day, and I'll fight it, as something other than my essential self, which I am fighting to save: each day will have something to recommend it: whether the honest delight at watching the quick furred body of a squirrel, or sensing, deeply, the weather and color, or reading and thinking of something in a different light: a good explanation or 5 minutes in class to redeem a bad 45. Minute by minute to fight upward. Out from under that black cloud which would annihilate my whole being with its demand for perfection and measure, not of what I am, but of what I am not. I am what I am, and have written, lived and travelled: I have been worth what I have won, but must work to be worth more. I shall not be more by wishful thinking.

So: a stoic face. A position of irony, of double-vision. My job is serious, important, but nothing is more important than my life and my life in its fullest realized potential: jealousy, envy, desperate wishes to be someone else, someone already successful at teaching, is naive: Mr. Fisher, for all his student-love, has been left by his wife & children; Miss Williams," for all her experience & knowledge, is irrevocably dull. Every one of these people, the divorced Schendler, the unmarried Johnson, has some flaw, some crack, and to be one of them would be to be flawed & cracked in another fashion. I'll shoulder my own crack, work on my James today, Hawthorne for next week & take life with gradual ease, dogged at first, but with more & more joy. My first victory was accepting this job, the second, coming up & plunging into it before my demon could say no, I wasn't good enough, the third, going to class after a night of no sleep & desperation, the fourth, facing my demon last night with Ted & spitting in its eye. I'll work hard on my planning, but work just as hard to build up a rich home life: to get writing again, to get my mind fertilized outside my job.

I shall not, carrion comfort, despair … etc.

No more knuckling under, groaning, moaning: one gets used to pain. This hurts. Not being perfect hurts. Having to bother about work in order to eat & have a house hurts. So what. It's about time. This is the month which ends a quarter of a century for me, lived under the shadow of fear: fear that I would fall short of some abstract perfection: I have often fought, fought & won, not perfection, but an acceptance of myself as having a right to live on my own human, fallible terms.

Attitude is everything. No whining or fainting will get me out of this job & I'd not like to think what would happen to my integral self if it did. I've accepted my first check: I've signed on, and no little girl tactics are going to get me off, nor should they.

To the library. Finish James book, memorize my topics, maybe the squirrel story. Have fun. If I have fun, the class will have fun.

Come home tonight: read lawrence, or write, if possible. That will come too.

Vive le roi, le roi est mort, vive le roi.

From "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath", dated October 1, 1957

[mango-mya]

How I imagine their earlier interactions lmao

[whatsfourteenupto]

Fourteen is the errand friend who just likes to go places with everyone. Someone running to pick up the takeout? He’s in the passenger seat. Rose is swinging by a friend’s to grab something for a school project? She’s got a shadow. Donna needs to stop by the post office and drop something off? “Can I tag along?” He doesn’t even offer to give them a lift in the TARDIS most of the time, he just sees someone going somewhere and is like “Me too!”

[rene-hl-trashcan]

The Gremlins and KitKat

I have been wanting to make this ever since I saw the meme on Pinterest some months ago 🤣🤣

Sylvan purposely (and very diabolically) eats KitKat like that for the sheer purpose of inflicting terror on others. 😌

[chronotopes]

Insane question so no obligation to respond, but for talk shop tuesday how do you square the circle with regards to the sort of contradiction between al2rnia as originally developed and al2rnia as continually worked on(i admit i dont know how applicable the latter is to you but aivide the prequel was still being edited fairly recently into last year and i dont doubt you have some input vis a vis vinbre the epilogue) with such a large collaboration i cant imagine even the majority of original artists are still interested in the project and of course the scope of the narrative has shifted substantially, in conclusion what is the fate of justay cowboy

omg, insane question but a very fun one! your question is almost two questions, the first one being how to square my own artistic process/evolution as al2rnia evolves in the way i and other people write it, and the second being how to square written material (atp, vtn) with the greater al2rnia paratext presented by People Saying Things In A Discord Server. they're two distinct approaches to me, at any rate, so i'm going to address them separately.

regarding PART THE FIRST, the real answer is that i just have to address the Mortifying Ordeal of Publicly Editing My Work. Aivide parts one and two were uploaded to ao3 when i was 20 years old and i have been very sneakily adding stuff and moving it around as time goes on, both in terms of my own evolution as a writer and in terms of new stuff happening in vinbre that becomes immediately relevant to aivide. is this a particularly effective way to construct a narrative? not really lmao, and in another world i would have revised and uploaded aivide in its entirety post-vtn completion, but i can't blame 2021 me for wanting it in public, so there's really nothing to do but say "this is on ao3. it is not a big deal." and make the evolution of the story a semi-public process.

regarding PART THE SECOND, i think it's a question of clear delineation between what is on paper / immediately relevant to the scope of my project, and what is not. things about characters created by not-me that are relevant to aivide include many of the events of vinbre the novel, given carett's connection to nora, sasara's life and online self-presentation at age 22ish and older, eubala's life trajectory and current position and demeanor, and raigne and bettah as they are when they work in eubala's office. i feel a very strong obligation to write those parts of the world in a way that is true to the things established by my collaborators, and it's my job in that sense to not really trouble myself more than i need to with things that are not directly connected to the project at hand. it would have been very self-deluding and counterproductive to approach aivide the prequel with the task of "THIS IS PART TWO OF ???? IN A GRAND EPIC FANSESSION WITH ???? NUMBER OF CONTRIBUTIONS!!" aivide the prequel does set up some of her ingame stuff to a very limited extent, but the story has to be able to work without that.

so i guess tl;dr i have not ever troubled myself overmuch with the fate of justay cowboy in the process of writing aivide the prequel, because i have approached it with the mindset that the only Truly Established texts i'm working from are vinbre the novel, which immediately precedes it, and the aivide characterization-relevant plans i've discussed that i feel very confident about the large-scale stability of. vinbre and aivide's stories as published are compelling stories as the novels they are, with or without the greater context. the materiality of the world that esther and julia established and i worked from in aivide with their help really helps with that. so i guess the answer is that aivide the prequel is not set-up for anything except for the things i'm completely confident about or have discussed with friends as relevance dictates, and it does not directly build on anything except for vinbre, which is now published and complete. and really good.

[mesetacadre]

ok big geography question what is in your opinion the proper split of the americas by continent

Okay I'm going to be using this map as a reference so people who don't have a very clear mental image of the geography can follow along. Thanks to Bigstock for sponsoring this tumblr post

I think to properly answer this question you have to first figure out what you want the continent classification to be for. I talked about this in the old blog but continents are a really inconsistent thing with no actual rigurous definition that can be stretched or changed depending on your goals. Personally, I don't think it's useful because of this nebulousness and that at the root of some of these problems is the fact that maybe not every piece of land above the ocean should be classified into a continent. For the sake of this ask I'm going to pretend that I don't believe this and play along.

In my opinion, if it had to all be classified, I'd just make it all a single continent, named America, and make any other divisions just regions of the continent. Basically every other continent is also divided internally like this: South East Asia, East Africa, Central Europe, Southwest Asia / Middle East (colonizer name but I'm including it for the sake of example), North Africa. These are just some examples of popular divisions of continents that can have their utility. Nobody asks that eastern Europe be its own continent, despite the differences with the west, or that North Africa be separated from the rest of Africa. Why should the Americas be different? (it's so canadians and usamericans don't feel icky being grouped in with the Poors to the south, but don't tell them that. Why else would some people include Mexico in Central or even South America?). We already have the same kind of division with the same naming convention as in other continents.

As to defining the subdivisions of America, I think an interesting place to start is Greenland. Geographically it's closer to something which we can all agree could be classified as part of the Americas, that being Canada. It's part of the north American plate, but historically it has more ties with European colonizers. So Greenland is I think a good example of why we have to keep our intentions clear with classifying the continents. A purely geographical criteria is much more straightforward but maybe less useful when talking about broad groups of people. However, a definition that's more rooted in "cultural" and historical similarities can easily turn into Huntington's clash of civilizations theory, see his division below

I find it very funny how he places Japan into its own civilization while at the same time he groups vast regions into one. It's also extremely racist. Moving on.

Personally I'd put Greenland in America not just because of geographical criteria but also because the indigenous people of Greenland have closer ties to those of the Canadian islands, Labrador and such.

I do not think Central America should be its own continent, even if we're making North and South America their own continents, but it is interesting as a region within America. I'll get to it last.

I find myself agreeing with the Panama Isthmus / Darién gap / Panama-Colombia border as the northern border of South America, simply because there is no better place to put it. I guess the part of the Andes that cuts Colombia in half could be an option, but it feels wrong to make any part of Colombia not South America. Again, continents are not a coherent classification so it often does just come down to feel. You could argue the Guatemala-Belize-Mexico border is another option, which it can be, but there isn't a good geographical feature to divide it. With the Panama region, you get a really clear divide because of the sudden change in width, and it roughly aligns with the plates as well.

But what is there here?

There is no major river and the mountain ranges all go in a different direction to the intended division. Look at the northern part of the border, it's literally just a straight line going through jungle that's identical on both sides. This is not the place to divide a continent in half, I'm sorry. I guess the Caribbean plate does roughly meet the north american plate here, but to me the plates can just be a reinforcing argument, not a deciding factor. Using only country borders to decide the continents is very sloppy IMO, especially if those country borders were decided by defining straight lines between rivers and latitudes.

So that's where I think the North-South America border should lie, somewhere in the Darién gap between Panama and Colombia. I wouldn't use the Panama Canal because that's manmade. By the same metric we don't consider canals rivers, I wouldn't consider canals a worthy feature to divide things at.

About the Caribbean, most maps place the north/south divide at the last island chain in the lesser Antilles and make everything else North America, but to me it makes a bit more sense to place the border between the greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, Bahamas, Haiti, Dominican republic, and Puerto Rico) and the lesser Antilles (the chain of smaller islands that go from Puerto Rico to Venezuela). Again, the ambiguity of continents forces for some decisions to be vibe based. And to me, putting Trinidad and Tobago and Granada in North America is wrong. The difference in size between the two Antilles and the presence of a US Colony Territory makes a good enough justification even if it's iffy.

This is why a Central America in the context of a single American continent is better than making it its own continent or a region of either a South or North American continent. I am a bit more orthodox in what I'd consider to be Central America, the entire Caribbean island chain/cluster plus the traditional central american countries. This time I'm kinder to a border on the southern border of Mexico, because it's not as significant a limit as The North-South divide, and Central America ending in Guatemala has a historical precedent in the form of the short lived Federal Republic of Central America. Cuba feels much more comfortable in the same category as, say, Honduras but different from like. Miami. It also does alleviate the where-does-the-Antilles-fit issue.

So yeah, that's my answer, if you force me to put everything into a continent. If it were up to me there would be three continents, America, Afro-Eurasia and Antarctica, leave every island out of it and permanently kill the continent as a category.

As a side note, while looking for a map of the Americas, I found this godawful one and I had to share

The shading, the apparent Alaskan independence from a US-Canada union, Mexico stretches to Panama. I think this would be a good candidate for EmperorTigerstar's (now defunct) youtube series on bad maps

[dreamerslovechaos]

the applicant, sylvia plath // revolutionary girl utena

[mariocki]

Play for Today: The Flipside of Dominick Hide (BBC, 1980)

"Complacent with your mission, Dominick? Amusing, the history of transport. We've made a modicum of progress: trips are regulated to microseconds, punctuality taken for granted."

"Yes."

"Why then were you two minutes late on your double return? Machine fault?"

"No. I'm sorry."

"I accept apology. Reason?"

"It was raining. Rain slows everything. I saw an old woman knocked down and I was checking how long before help reached her. The medi-car was blocked in progress, I think she died."

"So?"

"I thought it might be interesting."

"People are not your conspectus, Dominick. If you wish to study people, watch old films."