#to recent historical societies where this would be important

[elizabethrobertajones]

Good choice for an upstanding roegadyn husband for Frog to bring home to her parents to impress them: Rammbroes

Hilarious choice for bringing home an upstanding roegadyn husband to alarm and frighten her parents: Rasho the captain of the confederacy in the Ruby Sea.

[mylight-png]

The Words We Use

Jumblr, we really need to reevaluate the words we use to talk about Judaism and Jews and such. Far too long we've been rather lax about these things.

Earlier today I was talking to a friend and she used the term "Jewish Russians" which immediately rubbed me the wrong way. (She's super chill and I've known her most of my life, she meant no harm by it.) I thought about it, and what I realized is that this specific wording, though listing it first, puts the Jewish identity as secondary. By saying "Jewish Russians" the "Jewish" is used as a subcategory of Russains. In reality, this term refers to Jews whose diaspora experience was in Russia. Too long, people have used our diaspora experiences as our central identifiers, and tack on "Jewish" as a classifier within that category.

This is not accurate, not historically, scientifically, or socially.

Socially and historically, Jews were always treated as a category of our own, regardless of where in the diaspora we were located. My parents in the Soviet Union did not have "Russian" or "Moldovan" written in their passports. They had "Jew" written there. I have heard countless tales of hostility and discrimination due to them being Jewish. In Spain, during the Inquisition, Jews who converted were called "conversos", a category of their own despite the forced assimilation. In the Middle East, Jews were treated as second class citizens due to being Jewish, even if they converted. ("Yahood" or "Jew" in Arabic is still commonly used as an insult in ME communities.)

We were never Jewish Russians, Jewish Spaniards, Jewish Moroccans, etc. We were Jews in Russia, Jews in Spain, Jews in Morocco. Even the term itself, "diaspora", (according to Oxford languages: "the dispersion or spread of a people from their original homeland") indicates a separate origin.

Genetic studies confirm this, showing that Jews in whatever region they spent exile in would still be more genetically similar to Jews in other regions than goyim in the regions they lived in.

My parents are not Jews from Eastern Europe. They are Jews whose diaspora experience was in Eastern Europe. Even saying we're "from" there, gives people the wrong idea.

Next up, more commonly discussed, is calling some Jews "white". No Jew is "white" in any sense of that word. White-passing, yes. White, no. In society, being white is more social than physical. It's based on how you're treated, what your status in society is, based on ethnicity/race.

"Jewish" is an ethnicity, and has been considered a race historically. No Jew is white. Many have features commonly associated with being Jewish, and their treatment will of course vary from the experiences of more white-passing Jews. But even the most white-passing Jew will have to deal with antisemitism in some way.

We need to stop saying "white Jews" and replace it with "white-passing". Denormalize language that positions Jewishness as only religion.

To combine the previous concepts:

Replace "Jewish *blank*" with "*blank* Jews" when talking about countries of recent origin.

Instead of "Jews from *blank*" use something along the lines of "Jews with diaspora experiences in *blank*".

Instead of "white Jews" use "white-passing Jews".

It is so incredibly important that we use language that accurately reflects our identity as Jews, instead of settling on commonly used language that is inaccurate.

And finally, could we please normalize using "Judeans" instead of "Jews"? It's not as important as the other switches but it is so important to highlight our origins in Judea, and it could be a useful way to bring that fact into the spotlight.

Fellow Jews/Judeans, feel absolutely free to reblog with other language switches you'd want to see in our communities, whether in the same theme or not.

Goyim, please refrain from speaking over us on this, but I'd appreciate you amplifying this if you'd like to!

[specialagentartemis]

Inspired by @clonerightsagenda’s thoughts about the Ambiguously Brown Spacefuture trope, I kinda want to see more creativity with how Earth is treated in spacefuture sci-fi.

There are plenty of examples where Earth is the center of everything. Star Trek is the obvious one: it’s a bustling interstellar multispecies space society, and Earth is where Starfleet is headquartered and it’s often reflexively and unthinkingly treated by the narrative like it’s the most important planet in the Federation. (Most of our main viewpoint characters are Human, so it’s the most important planet to THEM because it’s their home, but even beyond that, Earth is treated as critically key to the Federation in a way that, say, Betazed is not.)

More recently, the common trope is that the centers of society and culture and economy and politics are elsewhere. Other planets are important, and Earth is either an unimportant backwater that no one really cares about, or galactic humanity has nearly forgotten about it entirely. This is explicit in Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers, strongly implied in The Murderbot Diaries, and one line in Ancillary Justice suggests that too. Ofc this isn’t entirely new—from what I understand it’s what’s going on in Dune too.

And they do this for obvious reasons: the authors are all interested in social and political worldbuilding that is not tethered to real Earth nations, politics, prejudices, and general baggage. Second-world fantasy authors are allowed to do this with no strings attached, but sci-fi authors who want to do social worldbuilding from the ground up have to justify why people don’t appear to identify as Chinese or Latino or Hopi or American anymore (and more often than not, not Jewish or Catholic or Muslim or Hindu or Baha’i or whatever either), why those identities don’t come into conflict with the new planetary identities and spacefuture religions the author wants to write about. It’s been so long that the origin of humanity is forgotten or irrelevant.

Star Wars is honestly underappreciated for the bold, creative, unique choice to have a bustling interstellar multispecies space society with lot of humans… and no Earth. At all. Where do humans come from? Irrelevant. Not Earth though.

And honestly I wish more sci-fi that wants to write in this space took more of a cue form Star Wars to just own it. (I actually thought the Imperial Radch HAD done the same thing—functionally a second-world fantasy, but in a spacefaring setting—until Kat pointed out the reference to arguing over which planet was the real origin of humanity.) If you posit your space future as our future, but Earth is no longer relevant and is generally forgotten… I guess it depends on how far out it is, but it strains my credulity that no one remembers or cares! The Jews in the spacefuture don’t know/remember/care where Jerusalem is? Muslims in the spacefuture decided that going to Mecca just kinda isn’t worth it? The spacefuture Papal seat is no longer in Rome and the future Catholics don’t know or care that it was ever anywhere else? All the Hopis left the Three Mesas and all the Navajos left Dinétah and all the Māori left Aotearoa and then just… forgot about it? Really? That isn’t true after hundreds and even thousands of years today; why would it be true hundreds or even thousands of years in The Spacefuture?

There are some works that do a little more complexity with spacefuture planetary societies and cultures vs. memory of Earth—the Vorkosigan Saga positions Old Earth as a culturally important memory even if it’s not a politically important planet, and The Locked Tomb makes Earth a holy center place that is mythicized more than it’s known or inhabited, for magic necromancy reasons.

I’d like to see more of that, Earth holding some sort of unique place in spacefuture humans’ culture in a historically informed way, even if you actually want to write about other things. Or go the Star Wars route and proudly proclaim that this takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, don’t worry about it.

[dwellordream]

Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often

By Darby Saxbe, clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California

I recently spoke with an anthropologist named Barry Hewlett who studies child-rearing in hunter-gatherer societies in Central Africa. He explained to me that children in those societies spend lots of time with their parents — they tag along throughout the day and often help with tasks like foraging — but they are rarely the main object of their parents’ attention. Sometimes bored, sometimes engaged, these kids spend much of their time observing adults doing adult things.

Parents in contemporary industrialized societies often take the opposite approach. In the precious time when we’re not working, we place our children at the center of our attention, consciously engaging and entertaining them. We drive them around to sports practice and music lessons, where they are observed and monitored by adults, rather than the other way around. We value “quality time” over quantity of time. We feel guilty when we have to drag our children along with us to take care of boring adult business.

This intensive, often frantic style of parenting requires a lot more effort than the style Professor Hewlett described. I found myself thinking about those hunter-gatherers last month when I read the advisory from the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warning that many parents are stressed to their breaking point. There are plenty of reasons for this worrisome state of affairs. One is that we don’t ignore our children often enough.

The modern style of parenting is not just exhausting for adults; it is also based on assumptions about what children need to thrive that are not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past. For most of human history, people had lots of kids, and children hung out in intergenerational social groups in which they were not heavily supervised. Your average benign-neglect day care is probably closer to the historical experience of child care than that of a kid who spends the day alone with a doting parent.

Of course, just because a parenting style is ancient doesn’t make it good. But human beings have spent about 90 percent of our collective time on Earth as hunter-gatherers, and our brains and bodies evolved and adapted to suit that lifestyle. Hunter-gatherer cultures tell us something important about how children are primed to learn.

A parenting style that took its cue from those hunter-gatherers would insist that one of the best things parents can do — for ourselves as well as for our children — is to go about our own lives and tote our children along. You might call it mindful underparenting.

Children learn not only from direct instruction, but also from watching and modeling what other people around them do, whether it’s foraging for berries, changing a tire or unwinding with friends after a long day of work. From a young age, that kind of observation begins to equip children for adulthood.

More important, following adults around gives children the tremendous gift of learning to tolerate boredom, which fosters patience, resourcefulness and creativity. There is evidence from neuroscience that a resting brain is not an idle one. The research tells us that the mind gets busy when it is left alone to do its own thing — in particular, it tends to think about other people’s minds. If you want to raise empathetic, imaginative children who can figure out how to entertain themselves, don’t keep their brains too occupied.

An excellent way to bore children is to take them to an older relative’s house and force them to listen to a long adult conversation about family members they don’t know. Quotidian excursions to the post office or the bank can create valuable opportunities for boredom, too.

Leaving kids’ screens at home on such trips can deepen the useful tedium. It also forces parents to build up their tolerance to their child’s fussiness, an essential component of underparenting. Parents too often feel the need to engage their children in “fun” activities to tempt them away from screens. But by teaching children to crave constant external stimulation and entertainment, intensive parenting can actually worsen screen dependence.

To be sure, when kids are upset, in danger or require guidance, parents can and should swoop in to help. But that is precisely the point: It is only by ignoring our children much of the time that we conserve the energy necessary to give them our full attention when they actually need it.

In recent years there has been a lot of hand-wringing about so-called helicopter parents and their hopelessly coddled children. But we rarely talk about what parents ought to do instead. In an ideal world, we would set children loose to roam free outdoors, unsupervised. As a small-town Ohio kid in the 1990s, I spent hours with my brothers playing in the creek behind our house, with plenty of time to get good and bored. When that sort of “free range” experience is not an option, however, mindful underparenting is the next best thing.

This approach can take the form of bringing children with you not just on boring errands, but also when you work, socialize or exercise. I was at my gym the other day when a father came in with his 4-year-old son. The two of them took turns working out with a trainer teaching them martial arts moves. When it wasn’t his turn, the 4-year-old scrambled around the gym and, when he got tired, lay on his belly on the mat and watched his father practice kicks. Observing the boy, his big eyes taking in a ton of social information, I thought about all the parents who say that they have no time to exercise because they’re too busy with their kids.

At the same time, I thought about all the gyms that bar small children. Even as parenting has gotten more intensive, public spaces, especially in the United States, seem to have become more hostile to the presence of children. I wrote most of my Ph.D. dissertation alongside my toddler in a coffee shop in my neighborhood that had a mini play area with stacking toys, board books and room to park a stroller. That coffee shop is gone now, replaced by a sleeker cafe where it’s hard to picture a stray plastic toy, let alone a rambunctious 2-year-old.

Parents have it easier in countries such as Germany and Spain, where you can find beer gardens and tapas bars situated right next to playgrounds, or in Denmark, where parents routinely park their infants in strollers outside cafes while they socialize. In such places you can relax and catch up with friends while children romp around — a reminder of how much easier parenting gets when we enjoy the social trust born from shared investment in care.

In other words, underparenting requires structural change, and not just the obvious changes that we think of as parental stress-relievers, such as family leave and paid child care. It also requires that as a society, we build back our tolerance for children in public spaces, as annoying and distracting as they can be, and create safe environments where lightly supervised kids can roam freely. In a society that treated children as a public good, we would keep a collective eye on all our kids — which would free us of the need to hover over our own

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Fantasy World Building

BEST PRACTICES

Don’t Go Overboard

You don’t have to define every single element of the world to create a vibrant one.

Make Sense Scientifically

Suspension of disbelief can suspend only so far.

It’s important that the elements in your world are at least theoretically possible.

Verify the scientific possibility before you add it to your world.

Research answers to your scientific, geographic, and cultural questions when worldbuilding.

Draw Your Own Map

Even if you don’t show it to your readers, your map can help you figure out what’s what. Use your map to build a vision for where the characters are going throughout the story.

This is helpful in epic adventures where the landscape may change.

A relationship map can help you see clear relationships between characters.

Alternatively, you can develop a map that shows the characters or objects and their magical abilities.

WORLDBUILDING ELEMENTS

Time

Many fantasies take place in the past because of our collective bias against magical elements in the present or the future.

If you could compare the era of your story to one on earth, when would it be? In the present? In the past? In the future?

Perhaps your story is tied to an actual historical event, such as The Chronicles of Narnia.

If you choose to allude to a historical event, this will partially dictate how you describe the world.

Location

What is the setting of your world?

Does it take place in a parallel universe?

Is it on another earth-like planet?

Does it occur in another dimension?

Population

Who lives in your world?

Are they humans, aliens, animals, insects, hybrids, monsters?

What is their population?

Where do they live?

Do they live in small villages or large cities?

Do they live in houses? Tents? Communes?

Society

How does your collective population relate to each other?

What is the basis for society?

Is there a class system? Who is rich? Who is poor?

How do they relate to each other?

Can one go from poor to rich and vice versa?

What is the family structure? Are couples married?

Are they monogamous? Polygamous?

Do they have children?

How many children do they typically have?

What are people’s values? What is sacred?

What is universally accepted as right and wrong?

How do they deal with old age?

What are the gender roles?

History

History is important for your protagonist’s backstory.

So take time to develop the history of your world.

You can go as far back as the beginning of time, or as recently as a few hundred years.

There should be a series of cause and effect that creates the world in which your story shows.

What is the history of your fantasy world?

What created the current circumstances of the story?

What is the catalyst for change?

Create a timeline of key events to document how historical events led to current circumstances.

Laws and Government

What are the relevant laws in your universe that the characters must obey?

What is the political environment?

Who are the controlling parties and why?

Is there a struggle for independence? Is there growing dissent?

Very important: how does magic affect these laws?

Magic

Every fantasy contains some element of magic.

That’s what sets fantasy apart from any other literary genre.

Because magic is so central to your fantasy story, you must consider it when building your world.

Magic, just by its very nature, will shape your characters and direct their actions. So, with that in mind:

What type of magic will you include in your story?

Are there wizards? Genies?

Is it mental magic?

Science-based magic, like time-travel?

Or supernatural, like superheroes?

Who has it? Is magic only available to a select few?

If so, how do they get it?

Is magic banned? Is it revered?

What are the rules of magic in your world?

You have to create rules that make sense, based on what you know of the society and its rules.

And, just as important as creating the rules of magic are following those rules.

Daily Life

What do people do to pass the time?

What do they eat? Drink?

Do they exercise?

What type of clothing do they wear?

Does clothing reflect their values or their social class?

How are they educated? What do they learn in school and why?

Sentiment

How do your characters feel about the world in which they live?

What do people agree with? How do they differ?

Religion

The prevailing religion of the society at large will affect your characters’ actions.

Are they monotheistic? Polytheistic? Atheistic?

What is their folklore?

What do they believe? What do they value?

Physical Attributes

What does the world look like in a physical sense?

What are the natural resources?

What type of plants grows there? What type of animals?

What is the atmosphere?

How does the world smell?

What does the night’s sky look like? Is there night?

What is the climate?

Source ⚜ More: Writing Worksheets & Templates ⚜ 100 Sensory Words Writing References: Plot ⚜ Character ⚜ Worldbuilding

[tanadrin]

This series of four videos on Ukraine and the Russia-Ukraine conflict is very interesting. The first is basically just a narrative political history of Ukraine from about 2000 to 2014, talking about different political factions that were relevant in the country in the period, and how different internal and external pressures shaped politics. It's very helpful for understanding the Ukrainian political context, including just how recent and just how shallow the supposed tensions between monolingual Russian and bilingual Ukrainian-Russian speakers was in 2014.

The second video is an overview of the Donbass war from 2014-2022, which you might have been vaguely paying attention to at the time. But it's very helpful to have it all laid out in chronological order with the benefit of hindsight, especially due to the obfuscation of Russian operations at the time that made it hard to work out what, exactly, was going on. It's a combination of a good old 19th century-style filibuster (the military expedition, not the parliamentary maneuver), Fox News-style propaganda, and some (rather badly failed) attempts at astroturfing civil unrest--why Russia thought that would work becomes important in Part 4.

Part 3 is just an extended argument that NATO expansion is not relevant to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and while I already agreed with that assessment, it's nice to have it laid out in detail. The very very short version is that by NATO's own public criteria, Ukraine was simply not a candidate to join NATO, and had given up on joining NATO, and that had been painfully obvious since at least the Obama administration. Even more frustratingly, there were multiple points where Russia had an offramp to escalation, where it had gotten everything it could have possibly wanted from the conflict in Donbass, and it refused them all.

Part 4 is the author's attempt to explain why it refused them. The very short explanation is that Russia's government is led by idiots, who are very enamored of a flavor of conspiracy theory that has its origins in the LaRouche movement, and which has been bubbling in both left-wing and right-wing circles since 2000. In this worldview, the US government acting through the CIA (or the British royal family, or George Soros, or Jewish bankers, or whoever your bogeyman of choice is) has an almost supernatural ability to overthrow any government on earth by funding performance art groups (seriously), civil society NGOs, and protestors, and that almost every revolution, actual or so-called, since 1989 has been their direct work, from the post-Soviet revolutions, to Euromaidan, to the Arab Spring.

This belief, in its more overt or fragmentary forms, is incredibly popular, spurred on no doubt by historical instances of CIA malfeasance and actual aggressive wars waged by the Bush administration. But the problem is, it's bunk. During Russia's initial moves against Ukraine in 2014, they tried essentially the same playbook in the Donbass, and of course it failed miserably--you cannot actually astroturf a popular uprising. (The CIA has preferred to stage coups and assassinations, which are a different animal from color revolutions.) The separatists in the Donbass eventually had to be supported by a few thousand Russian troops and direct military aid.

But Putin, driven by his own paranoid misunderstanding of world events, the clique of yes-men he has embedded himself in, and his fear of gay Nazi Jewish CIA agents, simply got Russia in over its head. There is no offramp because Russia cannot articulate what its goals are, and because "stop trying to use George Soros to overthrow the Russian government" is not something the US can agree to, since they are not doing it. The only thing that might have prevented Putin fucking with Ukraine in the first place was maybe if rigging the parliamentary election in 2011 hadn't resulted in protests, in which Putin saw the specter of the hand of the CIA--but of course the US and NATO and the EU had nothing to do with that!

And to cap it all off, since the 2010s the LaRouche movement and its theory of color revolutions has been making inroads in China, so we have that to look forward to in coming decades.

[redflagshipwriter]

Nest Swap chapter 5 progress

In which Tim flirts with the sad thoughts but is not committed to them.

masterpost

Probably the best thing to do was to make sure everyone was happy with him. If he did everything that everybody wanted, there would be no issues. 

So, Tim finished his experiment for Miss Fox and sent her his report. The groceries arrived while he was finishing up. After he put it away, he made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and ate it one-handed while he looked up the address that Jason had told him about. 

“That's pretty far away,” Tim mused. Some grape jelly dropped onto the keyboard. He swiped it up with his sleeve. He was a little less careful about the apartment now that he knew it was Big Tim’s place and not someone important or mean. 

Huh.

Tim paused mid contemplation. Speaking of important people, where was Mom? (And also Dad.) He turned his head around looking for the most recent post card. He usually kept that on the fridge.

Apparently, Big Tim had lost the habit. The dig post card tacked to the fridge was years old. Tim took it down and read it anyway, smiling at Mom’s handwriting. It was neat and precise, just like her. 

He felt better. He'd figure it out later. Tim put a pin on the thought and went back to focusing on his- on Jason's request. He squirmed in his chair while he thought it through.

The address was in a residential neighborhood, the kind with separate houses and not apartment complexes. The suspect himself lived in a duplex. The other half of the duplex was registered to a retiree who Tim didn't find any digital trail of, other than that her Social security checks were being cashed and her bills were paid on time. Oh, neat, she had been part of Gotham’s historical recreation society. She seemed kinda cool.

She had crazy huge electric bills, though. Tim frowned at that. He wasn't absolutely sure. But he thought that most people didn't have electric bills in excess of $600 monthly. How was she even affording that off of her Social security income? 

“Maybe the neighbor killed her and is using her apartment for nefarious purposes,” Tim reasoned aloud. “He's chasing her check and concealing the death. Maybe he uses her apartment to store his industrial sausage making machines.” 

It was a bit of a reach but it seemed a little more likely than his follow-up idea: her hobby was running every appliance in her house at the same time for all the hours that she was awake.

Focus, Tim! How was he going to surveil this place?

It wasn’t like there were any nice big buildings with dramatic awnings and gargoyles to creep around. It was suburbia. 

Tim spun around on his chair miserably, hands on his head to help him think.

Were there any abandoned homes in the area that he could use as a viewpoint? He checked on that. No. No, there weren’t. Dangit. He looked up everyone who lived in the neighborhood, wondering if there might be like, a family on vacation or someone whose second floor was unoccupied. He didn’t see anything useful like that. There were just a bunch of families with little kids.

He spun faster. Maybe the centrifugal force would somehow jar his brain awake.

“There’s nothing for it,” Tim decided ruefully. “I have to go undercover as a child.”

He put on the light up sneakers that he had ordered, washed his face, and made sure he had enough money for the bus. Then he set off on an adventure with a little notepad in his pocket. When he got to the apartment lobby he realized that he probably should have brought Big Tim’s phone, but oh well. It was too far now.

He took three buses and walked twenty minutes. He arrived in the right neighborhood in the early evening, around 5 pm. He looked for rogue groups of playing kids to join in. He’d do whatever game they were playing, then subtly interrogate them.

Unfortunately, it seemed like everyone was inside eating dinner. Tim frowned at one window. He could see a table being set.

Weird.

Alright, new plan. The old lady neighbor was probably dead, so he could just sneak into her half of the duplex, find a place to hide, and observe whatever sick and twisted stuff Jason’s bad guy did. Then he could tell Jason about it later, and he would like Tim.

He tried the backdoor. It was locked. Tim skulked around the house and tried windows until he found one that was open. He had to scramble a bit to climb up the siding to get into the house but he managed it. He hit the floor with a tumble.

“I have a mace!” said a female voice. “I am prepared to use it upon you!”

Tim rolled over to see the retiree. “Oh,” he said. “Hello.” He was a little disappointed that he was wrong about her being dead, though of course it’s always nice when someone isn’t murdered.

Mrs. Henderson yanked open a drawer and withdrew her mace. She pointed it at him steadily over her walker.

“Whoa,” said Tim. “That’s really cool. That’s Gothic, right?”

She looked at her mace. “...I believe so,” she said. “Get out of my home!”

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Tim said, deliberately not agreeing. He sat up and crossed his legs. “I didn’t realize that you lived here.”

Mrs. Henderson slowly lowered her Gothic mace, which was probably a replica of one from Western Europe and weighed about 2 kilograms. “...Did you mean to go next door?” she said, sounding more confused and less hostile. 

“Yeah, I got mixed up,” Tim lied like a champion. “I accidentally locked myself out and no one is home.”

Although that really wouldn’t be true for much longer. Hm. Maybe Tim should have waited until tomorrow to come by.

[writers-potion]

Hi! I just wanted to ask if you have any world building tips? I'm considering making a whole society and culture about a species that live on a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy.

Now for context, In my story, Earth doesn't know for sure that aliens exist, there are three characters that are going to be focused on in that universe are basically the first scouts that were sent after their society recently discovered Earth. Two on the planet and one stationed in a nearby celestial body which is where their "base" is, Their goal is to gather intel without alerting humans.

In terms of trying to imagine their biology, would it be good to first imagine the environment and climate of their planet and then address how their bodies adapt and deal with it or vice versa?

I'm also a bit worried about making them too humanlike in terms of their way of thinking since I thought they'd likely be very different from us without any chance of one influencing the other before the story.

Could I use certain myths and legends about non-human creatures as inspiration for the race of sentient beings I'm trying to come up with?

This is a lot so thank you so much if you do answer and I'm sorry if I asked too much of you. Have a nice day!

Inspiration for an Alien Species

For non-humanlike alien characters, look into pre-exising creatures and try tweaking them:

Take a historic/extinct animal and change it. 

Take two animals/insects/bacteria and combine their features. Tweak them until you land on something original.

You can start with a human, and add/subtract features. 

Use mythological creatures – they should offer a good source of intelligent nonhumans! Research about the kind of terrain these mythical creatures live. 

You requirements of how intelligent the aliens are, and what their primary activities are will also determine what physiological features you give them. 

Are they intelligent enough to use tools? What kind of machines? If they are to navigate complex machinery you need to give them arm-like appendages like tentacles, etc. 

What do they like doing most? What kind of sports do they play, and what kind of body parts would they need for that?

What do they eat? How do they eat? 

How do they reproduce?

Are they “pleasurable” to the typical human, or are they “disgusting” or “monstrous”?

Here are some features you could work with:

lead claws (for poison)

quil shooting

mantis arms

fire breathing (hydrogen also works as a flamable if you don't wanna use ethylene)

acid sptting (add venom sacks at the nose to squirt the acid) WARNING make sure the creature is immune to the acid, add a mucus to protect it from its acid.

multiple heads

forked tounge

electricution

bioluminesence

geovores (feeds on rocks)

whip tails

infared vision

gas (if you have seen poppy playtime chapter 3 catnap did this, if not than just imagine a creature breathing accept breathing out deadly gases on command)

Camoflouge

beaks

mandibled and/or multiple jaws

Alien First, or Planet First?

The choice between adapting your alien to the environment or adapting the environment to your alien depend on which of those your worldbuilding depends on. 

If your story is about an asteroid slamming into Earth and there happens to be life on it, the environment is more important. 

If the story is about a human girl befriending an alien, the alien is more important. 

Since you mentioned that your aliens are visiting Earth, your aliens (and how they navigate in a spaceship/Earth) seem more central to the storyline – you can think up of the alien you want, then build a planet they would thrive in. 

How to Differentiate Them 

Religion

Human religions provide (1) an origin story for the world and humans and (2) provide meaning to an essentially meaningless human existence. But what if your aliens have the ability to see far into the past and into the future? God as a Creater wouldn’t work in their world. 

Religion as a response to their physiological needs. E.g. An alien species that have to hibernate would value the God of Warmth the most. 

Religion as a response to a hostile envrionment. What elements of nature do your aliens fear the most? Are they agricultural? What’s their main source of energy? 

Language

Human language is mostly dependent on sound and vision. What if your aliens only communicated via touch, taste or smell?

Based on their habits and social organization, come up with a list of alien vocab. 

French musician Jean-François Sudre created an artificial language called “Solresol”. His language has seven syllables to match the heptatonic musical scale. However, a writer could convert the notes into the seven colors of the rainbow and use Solresol as the basis of a color-based alien language.

What body language do they have to express emotions?

History

Come up with a rough timeline of alien world history. Outline major wars, technological developments, major pandemics, artists and politicians. 

Given their history and culture, how would they view humans?

History repeats itself. 

Art

Standards of beauty are dependent on biology. Scientists say that the faces humans find the most attractive are the most likely to be healthy and fertile.

What standards of beauty would your aliens develop?

What sorts of biological advances would they look for in a mate?

What kind of art would aliens develop if they saw heat, rather than light? 

What about aliens who communicated via smell? 

What kind of art would a race of sentient trees create? Could you create art if you were immobile?

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* . ───

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[elbiotipo]

So when it comes to distance in a fictional setting, is metric king? I wrote some fantasy post-apoc recently where the protagonist measured it in Oranges and Aevums (the latter being their own name), but more generally speaking is it worth it to hash out bespoke measurement systems for fictional cultures, do you think?

Oranges as a measurement unit sounds so funny, and a measurement based in... yourself makes surprising sense, given all the measurements based on body parts. Why not YOURSELF?

Well, I would think in a real post-apoc world metric would be king indeed, scientific and technologic instruments are in metric even in the US and you could always get a ruler from a school or scales from a grocery store, so eventually you could get back on track to reforming the metric system. It would be interesting, though, if every society during isolation had slightly different measurements for the same units because of faulty equipment (say, ohms or amperes or even grays) and they had to make a congress to clear things up.

Returning to your main question. My perspective here is the same as conlangs. It's very, very fun to have them, but it's not fun to force your audience to read them. When I write something set in a fantasy or science fiction setting, in my head I'm assuming the characters are speaking different languages and I DO explain them and even give examples of them, but the story itself is written, for both the reader's and the writer convenience, in a language we can understand (Spanish in my case, and then it can be translated). Same with units of measurement. I seldom use direct units of measurement like writing "the ship was 110.3 meters long" (in science fiction, it's often a trap as they force you to stay true to them), when more descriptive language can be used...

In any case, you could do, for the kind of immersion I love, say something like "she was 14 oranges* tall, rather small for her age" and do an asterisk like "*A.N. : 1.39 meters tall". This is very fun when used sparingly, because it gives the worldbuilding obessed reader something to play with, you can do the conversion yourself and learn more about the world, without interrupting the story. Some understandably dislike this approach, but I think that if you know what you're doing, you can hide some pretty deep lore behind it. In one of my favorite retro games, The Ur-Quan Masters, there is an alien race called the Slylandro who live in a gas giant. When they tell you their ancient history, they use their own system of measurment based on the rotation of their planet with its own names like Dranhasa and Dranh. The game actually provides you with the rotation time on "Earth" time, so some dedicated fans did the conversion, and found out the dates fit with major events in the game's past. I thought that was an awesome bit.

But I digress again. Does this mean you should not talk about measurements in your story? No, it can do for very fun plots and digressions, as well as make things more realistic and beliveable. A fantasy world sharing all the same measurement units can be as unplausible as everybody speaking "Common". Let's remember that the current metric system is a modern invention which took a long time to be adopted (and some, well one, country, still resists it). Just take a look at the many, many historical systems of measurement:

This was especially prominent in places like the Holy Roman Empire, where every statelet, county, principality, free city, prince-bishopric, duchy, archduchy, etc. may and most often did have different measurements from each other. Just take a look at how measurements varied from each German region, it's crazy. The systems of weight where particularily important. Before the introduction of standarized coinage, coins also varied not only between kingdoms, but between regions, and even towns, and coins made at different times with different alloys had different values. Rather than money in our modern sense, you could think of them as some kind of 'asset' that could vary in value depending on the circumstances. What's more, those values had to be checked by people who knew what they were working with. Silver and gold content could be weighed, ah, but you need good scales and weights, and someone who knows how to work them! And these people could easily rip you off, or you could lose value accidentally if those scales weren't done just right or fiddled with on purpose. In fact, this is where the word 'Mark' comes from.

It wasn't as easy to take say a 100 something bill and get the change in 1 something coins. There is a very interesting subplot in the anime Spice and Wolf where Lawrence, the trader character, has been paid in gold coins, and he has to trade them into lesser denominations. However, he has to be REAL careful so that nobody scams him given all I told you above. Even getting 'gold' coins was a gamble before modern coinage and banking (another long topic). How much of that is REALLY gold and not an alloy with silver or other metal? Who can you trust to tell you how much your coins are worth? Are they compatible between borders or even time, is this version worth as much as the others? Things that characters in fantasy who have just plundered a dragon's hoard almost never think about. Except in Spice and Wolf.

(here is a gif of Holo to break the wall of text)

This all of course, as again you can see in Spice and Wolf, can make trade very tedious and even unstable. This was one of the reasons why the metric system was so quickly adopted in Europe and then elsewhere; consistent units just allow for easier trade. Lots of other things involving measurement can have a major impact on your story. For one, you NEED consistent and accurate measurement to create even the most basic industrial and scientific equipment. You can wing it for a time like alchemists (and even they knew their measurements) but eventually, you need to measure things to understand them. To have working steam engines, steel production, chemical industries and more, you need to know your temperature is. If you want to do electricity, you need measurements for current, resistance and charge. If you're doing engineering, you need to have lenght, weight and volume very, very clear, or people will die. They don't necessarily need to be universal like the metric system (though it has lots of advantages, being coherent between units and decimal so it doesn't jump between different denominations) but they need to be standarized and measurable.

Most of the above, unless you're writing some kind of encyclopedia about a fictional scientific revolution (BASED BASED BASED) will not affect your characters directly. But IT IS worth keeping in mind for what kind of world your characters are living in. The standarization of measurement units always means SOMETHING in the state of your society, the strenght of the state and centralized authority, the state of scientific understanding (one could say that trying to measure the world was perhaps THE scientific revolution, "Man as a measure of all things"), the capability for industry and the standarization of coinage and trade.

Even if you don't have your characters interact directly with those things, they will interact with them. It's also, like I've said in the examples, fun to imagine characters having to learn or deal with different units of measurement, just as it is fun to imagine them learning new languages or cultural quirks. It's something I've done in the past, in my space opera setting, the worlds descended from the United States STILL use the imperial system, much to the frustration of the rest of the metric human sphere. There is also an alien character who has a hard time to learn human measurements, and that makes her melancholic about her past, as they can't intuitively see the now-extinct measurements she does. Again, man as a measure of all things... this does include other thinking beings...

There's more I could talk about here regarding time, but I did a post about that, though I'm not satisfied with it and will probably redo it in some time at the future. In any case, there's lot to talk about why every calendar in science fiction has 365 days and 24 hours.

As always, if you found this interesting and helpful, I would be very thankful if you gave a tip to my ko-fi! And feel free to ask about anything you'd like!

[lurking-latinist]

I just saw this awesome post about including mobility aids in fantasy writing, and I do not want to create a tangent but I *do* want to share some things I learned about disability in ancient Greece when I was researching that paper I wrote on the Philoctetes, so I am making my own post.

Philoctetes is a mythical figure who was one of the Greek heroes going to the Trojan war. Before they got there, he suffered a wound in the foot which would not heal. The other Greek leaders were unwilling to have the noise of his screams and the stench of the infected wound in their camp, so they abandoned him on a deserted island with only his famous weapon, the Bow of Heracles. He survived there for ten years. Now the war is almost over, Troy has almost fallen, but the Greeks have heard a prophecy: they cannot win until they have the Bow of Heracles. So wily Odysseus and young Neoptolemus (the son of the recently dead Achilles) go to the island where Philoctetes is still living, still dealing with his injury. Philoctetes is eager to escape the island, but can he trust the community that abandoned him ten years ago? Can they ever make right what they did to him?

Now that’s the type of story that someone might very well point to who was arguing that disabled people have to be neglected and excluded in a “historically accurate” story. And it’s definitely not an example of casual inclusion. But what that person would be missing is that Philoctetes’ abandonment and isolation in this play was intended to be shocking to its Athenian audience. The audience is invited to identify with Philoctetes and to be horrified at how he does not receive the support from his community that real-world people with similar disabilities did receive, as we can tell from both textual and archaeological evidence.

Martha L. Rose’s book The Staff of Oedipus: Transforming Disability in Ancient Greece emphasizes this. Look, here’s what I wrote in my paper, why should I rewrite it:

Rose approaches her material “though the lens of disability studies, which approaches the phenomenon of disability by assuming that there is nothing inherently wrong with the disabled body and that the reaction of a society to the disabled body is neither predictable nor immutable” (1). In other words, it is necessary to see what attitudes and assumptions about disabilities are actually recorded, rather than projecting any of our own assumptions. ...

Also unlike today, Greek concepts of disability were not medicalized. “Permanent physical disability,” writes Rose, “was not the concern of doctors in antiquity beyond recognition of incurability” (11). This does not mean that disabled people had no resources or were simply left to perish, of course. Rather, they were often cared for within their households and their communities (28), which means that both Philoctetes’ abandonment and isolation form a shocking exception to the norm. The importance of community support suggests that Philoctetes’ joy at being reunited with humanity comes from practical as well as emotional needs. At the same time, the wide range of tasks and trades in the Greek economy meant that many disabled people were far from economically dependent (think of [the god] Hephaestus the lame smith), so that “[a] physically handicapped person earning a living would not have been a remarkable sight” (39). People unable to walk at all rode donkeys or were carried in litters, while those who walked with difficulty used a staff or a crutch (24-26).

So for writers: the ancient Greeks didn’t invent the wheelchair--but they had the wheel technology (I suspect the issue may have been with roads and pavements instead), so your Greek-inspired fantasy world totally can (which was the point of that earlier post). Or maybe your protagonist goes on their adventures with a faithful donkey sidekick that helps them get around. Maybe they are respected for their skill in a craft, making their home and workshop a lively meeting-place for customers. If you’re writing fantasy, you could be inspired by one of the myths of Hephaestus, in which he creates metal automatons--basically, magic robots--that not only support him as he walks, they also act as assistants in his workshop!

Anyway, the point of this post is basically just that I agree with the other post about including mobility aids in fantasy and I had some relevant knowledge in the back of my head. And also that you should read the Philoctetes. Look, here’s a recent free modern English verse translation: https://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/sophocles/philocteteshtml.html

Oh, and if you would like to see my term paper or the relevant section from The Staff of Oedipus, message me, I will share them.

[intersexbookclub]

Summary: Chapter 4 of Critical Intersex

For many of us, Chapter 4 of Critical Intersex (2009) turned out to be a particularly rich source of information about intersex history. So I (Elizabeth) have decided to give a fairly detailed summary of the chapter because I think it’s important to get that info out there. I’m gonna give a little bit of commentary as I go, and then a summary of our book club discussion of the chapter.

The chapter is titled “(Un)Queering identity: the biosocial production of intersex/DSD” by Alyson K. Spurgas. It is a history of ISNA, the Intersex Society of North America, and how it went from being a force for intersex liberation to selling out the movement in favour of medicalization. (See here for summary of the other chapters we read of the book!)

Our high level reactions:

Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): Until I read chapter 4, I didn't really realise how reactionary “DSD” was. It hadn't been clear to me how much it was a response to the beginning of an organized intersex advocacy movement in the United States.

Michelle (@scifimagpie): I could feel the fury in the writer's tone. It was a real barn burner.

Also Michelle: the fuckin' respectability politics of DSD really got under my skin, as a term! I know the importance, as a queer person, of not forcing people to ID as queer, but this was a lot.

Introducing the chapter

The introduction sets the tone by talking about how in the Victorian era there was a historical shift from intersex being a religious/juridical issue to a pathology, and how this was intensified in the 1950s with John Money’s invention of the optimal gender rearing model. 

Spurgas briefly discusses how the OGR model is harmful to intersex people, and how it iatrogenically produces sexual dysfunction and gender dysphoria. “Iatrogenic” means caused by medicine; iatrogenesis is the production of disease or other side-effects as a result of medical intervention.

This sets scene for why in the early 1990s, Cheryl Chase and other intersex activists founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA). It had started as a support group, and morphed significantly over its lifetime. ISNA closed up shop in 2008.

Initially, ISNA was what we’d now call interliberationist. They were anti-pathologization. Their stance was that intersexuality is not itself pathological and the wellbeing of intersex people is endangered by medical intervention. They organized around the abolition of surgical intervention. They also created fora like Hermaphrodites With Attitude for the deconstruction of bodies/sexes/genders and development of an intersex identity that was inherently queer. 

The early ISNA activists explicitly aligned intersexuality in solidarity with LGB and transgender organizing. There was a belief that similar to LGBT organizing, once intersex people got enough visibility and consciousness-raising, people would “come out” in greater numbers (p100).

By the end of the 90s, however, many intersex people were actively rejecting being seen as queer and as political subjects/actors. The organization had become instead aligned with surgeons and clinicians, had replaced “intersex” with “DSD” in their language.

By the time ISNA disbanded in 2008 they had leaned in hard on a so-called “pragmatic” / “harm reduction” model / “children’s rights perspective”. The view was that since infants in Western countries are “born medical subjects as it is” (p100)

Where did DSD come from? 

In 2005, the term “disorders of sexual differentiation” had been recently coined in an article by Alice Dreger, Cheryl Chase, “and three other clinicians associated with the ISNA… [so as] to ‘label the condition rather than the person’” (p101). Dreger et al thought that intersex was “not medically accurate” (p101) and that the goal should be effective nomenclature to “sort patients into diagnostically meaningful groups” (p101).

Dreger et al argued that the term intersex “attracts the interest of a large number of people whose interest is based on a sexual fetish and people who suffer from delusions about their own medical histories” (Dreger et al quoted on p101)

Per Spurgas, Dreger et al had an explicit agenda of “distancing intersex activism from queer and transgressive sex/gender politics and instead in supporting Western medical productions of intersexuality” (p102). In other words: they were intermedicalists.

According to Dreger et al, an alignment with medicine is strategically important because intersex people often require medical attention, and hence need to be legible to clinicians. “For those in favor of the transition to DSD, intersex is first and foremost a disorder requiring medical treatment” (p102)

Later in 2005 there was a “Intersex Consensus Meeting” organized by a society of paediatricians and endocrinologists. Fifty “experts” were assembled from ten countries (p101)... with a grand total of two actually intersex people in attendance (Cheryl Chase and Barbara Thomas, from XY-Frauen). 

At the meeting, they agreed to adopt the term DSD along with a “‘patient-centred’ and ‘evidence-based’ treatment protocol” to replace the OGR treatment model (p101)

In 2006, a consortium of American clinicians and bioethicists was formed and created clinical guidelines for treating DSDs. They defined DSD quite narrowly: if your gonads or genitals don’t match your gender, or you have a sex chromosome anomaly. So no hormonal variations like hyperandrogenism allowed.

The pro-DSD movement: it was mostly doctors

Spurgas quotes the consortium: “note that the term ‘intersex’ is avoided here because of its imprecision” (p102) - our highlight. There’s a lot of doctors hating on intersex for being a category of political organizing that gets encoded as the category is “imprecise” 👀

Spurgas gets into how the doctors dressed up their re-pathologization of intersex as “patient centred” (p103) - remember this is being led by doctors, not patients, and any intersex inclusion was tokenistic. (Elizabeth: it was amazing how much bs this was.)

As Spurgas puts it, the pro-DSD movement “represents an abandonment of the desire for a pan-intersexual/queer identity and an embrace of the complete medicalization of intersex… the intersex individual is now to be understood fundamentally as a patient” (p103)

Around the same time some paediatricians almost came close to publicly advocating against infant genital mutilation by denouoncing some infant surgeries. Spurgas notes they recommended “that intersex individuals be subjected (or self-subject) to extensive psychological/psychiatric, hormonal, steroidal and other medical” interventions for the rest of their lives (p103).

This call to instead focus on non-surgical medical interventions then got amplified by other clinicians and intermedicalist intersex advocacy organizations.

The push for non-surgical pathologization hence wound up as a sort of “compromise” path - it satisfied the intermedicalists and anti-queer intersex activists, and had the allure of collaborating with doctors to end infant surgeries. (Note: It is 2024 and infant surgeries are still a thing 😡.)

The pro-DSD camp within the intersex community

Spurgas then goes on to get into the discursive politics of DSD. There’s some definite transphobia in the push for “people with DSDs are simply men and women who happen to have congenital birth conditions” (p104). (Summarizer’s note: this language is still employed by anti-trans activists.)

The pro-DSD camp claimed that it was “a logical step in the ‘evolution in thinking’” 💩 and that it would be a more “humane” treatment model (p105) 💩

Also that “parents and doctors are not going to want to give a child a label with a politicized meaning” (p104) which really gives the game away doesn’t it? Intersex people have started raising consciousness, demanding their rights, and asserting they are not broken, so now the poor doctors can’t use the label as a diagnosis. 🤮

Spurgas quotes Emi Koyama, an intermedicalist who emphasized how “most intersex people identify as ‘perfectly ordinary, heterosexual, non-trans men and women’” (p104) along with a whole bunch of other quotes that are obviously queerphobic. Note from Elizabeth: I’m not gonna repeat it all because it’s gross. In my kindest reading of this section, it reads like gender dysphoria for being mistaken as genderqueer, but instead of that being a source of solidarity with genderqueers it is used as a form of dual closure (when a minority group goes out of its way to oppress a more marginalized group in order to try and get acceptance with the majority group).

Koyama and Dreger were explicitly anti-trans, and viewed intergender type stuff as “a ‘trans co-optation’ of intersex identity” (p105) 🤮

Most intersex people resisted “DSD” from its creation

On page 106, Spurgas shifts to talking about how a lot intersex people were resistant to the DSD shift. Organization Intersex International (OII) and Bodies Like Ours (BLO) were highly critical of the shift! 💛 BLO in particular noted that 80-90% of their website users were against the DSD term. Note from Elizabeth: indeed, every survey I’ve seen on the subject has been overwhelmingly against DSD - a 2015 IHRA survey found only 3% of intersex Australians favoured the DSD term.

Proponents of “intersex” over “DSD” testified to it being depathologizing. They called out the medicalization as such: that it serves to reinforce that “intersex people don’t exist” (David Cameron, p107), that it is damaging to be “told they have a disorder” (Esther Leidolf, p107), that there is “a purposeful conflation of treatment for ‘health reasons’ and ‘cosmetic reasons’ (Curtis Hinkle, p107), and that it’s being pushed mainly by perisex people as a reactionary, assimilationist endeavour (ibid).

Interliberationism never went away - intersex people kept pushing for 🌈 queer solidarity 🌈 and depathologization - even though ISNA, the largest intersex advocacy organization, had abandoned this position.

Spurgas describes how a lot of criticism of DSD came from non-Anglophone intersex groups, that the term is even worse in a lot of languages - it connotes “disturbed” in German and has an ambiguity with pedophilia and fetishism in French (p111).

The DSD push was basically entirely USA-based, with little international consultation (p111). Spurgas briefly addresses the imperialism inherent in the “DSD” term on pages 118/119.

Other noteworthy positions in the DSD debate

Spurgas gives a well-deserved shout out to the doctors who opposed the push to DSD, who mostly came from psychiatry and opposed it on the grounds that the pathologization would be psychologically damaging and that intersex patients “have taken comfort (and in many cases, pride) in their (pan-)intersex identity” (p108) 🌈 - Elizabeth: yay, psychiatrists doing their job! 

Interestingly, both sides of the DSD issue apparently have invoked disability studies/rights for their side: Koyama claimed DSD would herald the beginning of a disability rights based era of intersex activism (p109) while anti-DSDers noted the importance in disability rights in moving away from pathologization (p109).

Those who didn’t like DSD but who saw a strategic purpose for it argued it would “preser[ve] the psychic comfort of parents”, that there is basically a necessity to coddle the parents of intersex children in order to protect the children from their parents. (p110) 

Some proposed less pathologizing alternatives like “variations of sex development” and “divergence of sex development” (p110)

The DSD treatment model and the intersex treadmill

Remember all intersex groups were united that sex assignment surgery on infants needs to be abolished. The DSD framework that was sold as a shift away from surgical intervention, but it never actually eradicated it as an option (p112).  Indeed, it keeps ambiguous the difference between medically necessary surgical intervention and culturally desired cosmetic surgery (p112). (Note from Elizabeth: funny how *this* ambiguity is acceptable to doctors.)

What DSD really changed was a shift from “fixing” the child with surgery to instead providing “lifelong ‘management’ to continue passing” (p112), resulting in more medical intervention, such as through hormonal and behavioural therapies to “[keep] it in remission” (p113).

Cheryl Chase coined the “intersex treadmill’: the never-ending drive to fit within a normative sex category (p113), which Spurgas deploys to talk about the proliferation of “lifelong treatments” and how it creates the need for constant surveillance of intersex bodies (p114). Medical specialization adds to the proliferation, as one needs increasingly more specialists who have increasingly narrow specialties.

There’s a cruel irony in how the DSD model pushes for lifelong psychiatric and psychological care of intersex patients so as to attend to the PTSD that is caused by medical intervention. (p115) It pushes a capitalistic model where as much money can be milked as possible out of intersex patients (p116).

The DSD treatment model, if it encourages patients to find community at all, hence pushes condition-specific medical support groups rather than pan-intersex advocacy groups (p115)

Other stuff in the chapter

Spurgas does more Foucault-ing at the end of the chapter. Highlight: “The intersex/DSD body is a site of biosocial contestation over which ways of knowing not only truth of sex, but the truth of the self, are fought. Both intelligibility and tangible resources are the prizes accorded to the winner(s) of the battle over truth of sex” (p117)

There’s some stuff on the patient-as-consumer that didn’t really land with anybody at the book club meeting - we’re mostly Canadians and the idea of patient-as-consumer isn’t relatable. Ei noted it isn’t even that relatable from their position as an American.

***

Having now summarized the chapter, here's a summary of our discussion at book club...

Opening reactions

Michelle (M): the way the main lady involved became medicalized really made my heart sink, reading that.

Elizabeth (E): I do remember some discussion of intersex people in the 90s, and it never really grew in the way that other queer identities did! This has kind of helped for me to understand what the fuck happened here.

E: It was definitely a very insightful reading on that part, while being absolutely outraging. I didn't know, but I guess I wasn't surprised at how pivotal US-centrism was. The author was talking about "North American centric" though but always meant the United States!!! Canada was just not part of this! They even make mention of Quebec as separate and one of the opposing regions. I was like, What are you doing here, America? You are not the entirety of our continent!!!

E: The feedback from non-Anglophone intersex advocates that DSD does not translate was something that I was like, "Yes!" For me, when I read the French term - that sounded like something that would include vaginismus, erectile dysfunction - it sounds far more general and negative.

M: the fuckin' respectability politics of DSD really got under my skin, as a term! I know the importance, as a queer person, of not forcing people to ID as queer, but this was a lot.

E: it was very assimilationist in a way that was very upsetting. I knew intellectually that this was going on. There was such a distinct advocacy push for that. The coddling of parents and doctors at the expense of intersex people was such a theme of this chapter, in a way that was very upsetting. They started out with this goal of intersex liberation, and instead, wound up coddling parents and doctors.

Solidarities

M: I feel like there's a real ableist parallel to the autism movement here… It dovetails with how the autism movement was like, "Aww, we're sorry about your emotionless monster baby! This must be so hard for you [parents]!" And it felt like "aw, it's okay, we'll fix your baby so they can interface with heterosexuality!" [Note: both of us are neurodivergent]

E: A lot of intersexism is a fear that you're going to have a queer child, both in terms of orientation and gender.

E: You cannot have intersex liberation without putting an end to homophobia and transphobia.

M: We're such natural allies there!

E: I understand that there are these very dysphoric ipsogender or cisgender people, who don't want to be mistaken as trans, but like it or not, their rights are linked to trans people! When I encounter these people, I don't know how to convey, "whether you like it or not, you're not going to get more rights by doing everything you can to be as distant as possible."

M: it reminds me of the movements by some younger queers to adhere to respectability politics.

E: Oh no. There are younger queers who want respectability politics????

M: well, some younger queers are very reactionary about neopronouns and kink at pride. they don't always know the difference between representation and "imposing" kinks on others. In a way, it reminds me of the more intentional rejection of queer weirdos, or queerdos, if you will, by republican gays.

E: I feel like a lot of anti-queerdom that comes out of the ipso and cisgender intersex community reads as very dysphoric to me. That needs to be acknowledged as gender dysphoria.

M: That resonates to me. When I heard about my own androgen imbalance, I was like, "does that mean I'm not a real woman?" And now I would happily say "fuck that question," but we do need an empathy and sensitivity for that experience. Though not tolerance for people who invalidate others, to be honest.

E: The term "iatrogensis" was new to me. The term refers to a disease caused or aggravated by medical intervention.

M: So like a surgical complication, or gender dysphoria caused by improper medical counselling!

The DSD debate

ei: i think the "disorder" discussion is really interesting. in my opinion, if someone feels their intersex condition is a disorder they have every right to label it that way, but if someone does not feel the same they have every right to reject the disorder label. personally i use the label "condition". i don't agree with forcing labels on anyone or stripping them away from anyone either.

M: for me, it felt like a cautionary tale about which labels to accept.

ei: i'm all around very tired of people label policing others and making blanket statements such as "all people who are this have to use this label”... i also use variation sometimes, i tend to go back and forth between variation and condition. I think it's a delicate balance between being sensitive to people's label preferences vs making space for other definitions/communities.

We then spoke about language for a bunch of communities (Black people, non-binary people) for a while

E: one thing that was very harrowing for me about this chapter is that while there was this push to end coercive infant surgery, they basically ceded all of the ground on "interventions" happening from puberty onward. And as someone who has had to fight off coercive medical interventions in puberty, I have a lot of trauma about violent enforcement of femininity and the medical establishment.

ei: i completely agree that it's psychologically harmful tbh…. i was assigned male at birth and my doctors want me to start testosterone to make me more like a perisex male. which is extremely counterproductive because i'm literally transfem and have expressed this many times

Doctors Doing Harm

M: for me, the validation of how doctors can be harmful in this chapter meant a lot.

E: something that surprised me and made me happy was that there were some psychiatrists who spoke out against the DSD label. As someone who routinely hears a lot of anti-psychiatry stuff - because there's a lot of good reason to be skeptical of psychiatry, as a discipline - it was just nice to see some psychiatrists on the right side of things, doing right by their patients. Psychiatrists were making the argument that DSD would be psychologically harmful to a lot of intersex people.

ei: like. being told that something so inherently you, so inherently linked to your identity and sense of self, is a disorder of sexual development, something to be fixed and corrected. that has to be so harmful

ei: like i won't lie i do have a lot of severe trauma surrounding the way i've been treated due to being intersex. but so much of my negative experiences are repetitive smaller things. Like the way people treat me like my only purpose is to teach them about intersex people …. either that or they get really creepy and gross. I’m lucky in that i'm not visibly intersex, so i do have the privilege of choosing who knows. but there's a reason why i usually don't tell people irl.

M: intersex and autism have overlap again about how like, minor presentation can be? As opposed to the sort of monstrous presentation [Carnival barker impression] "Come see the sensational half-man, half-woman! Behold the h-------dite!" And like - the way nonverbal people are also treated feels relevant to that, because that's how autism is often treated, like a freakshow and a pity party for the parents? And it's so dehumanizing. And as someone who might potentially have a nonverbal child, because my wife is expecting and my husband and she both have ADHD - I'm just very fed up with ableism and the perception of monstrosity.

Overall, this was a chapter that had a lot to talk about! See here for our discussion of Chapters 5-7 from the same volume.

[ad-ciu]

What are sources+resources available for the mythological cycle / the tuatha de danann?

Good question! And, it is really good to ask about this sort of thing, so good on you!

While normally I would recommend reading the primary sources first and then delving into secondary discussions, the Mythological Cycle is probably one of a few areas where I would actually recommend people read discussions of the material first.

Why would I recommend this? Well, while all of medieval Irish literature has issues with widespread misconceptions, the Mythological Cycle is a big danger zone with these misconceptions, and I think it is best to go well-armed into the sources.

With this in mind, I have two 'introduction' level texts to suggest:

(A) The Mythological Cycle by John Carey, which is accessible, inexpensive, short, and written by the unquestioned world expert on the topic of the question of mythology in early Ireland.

(B) Ireland's Immortals by Mark Williams, which is more expensive and longer, but delves into the modern reception and relationship these texts have with modern revivalist faiths some of which diverge quite significantly from historic sources.

Having checked these out, at that point I would recommend digging into the stories. For some recommendations for these, I would point you to a post a colleague of mine made on the Association of Celtic Students blog which discusses notable texts with links to where to read them online. (Warning: links relying on the Internet Archive are currently broke'd because, you know, the Internet Archive is broken, but it should be up soon-ish?)

To build off that blog post, you can listen to me reading three texts from the Mythological Cycle if audiobooks/podcasts are your sort of thing. You can check out Dé Gabáil in t-Shída ('The Taking of the Hollow Hill'), Aislinge Óenguso ('The Dream of Óengus'), and part 1 and part 2 of Cath Maige Tuired ('The Battle of Mag Tuired').

After you have read some of those sources, I would then recommend checking out some more specific scholarly publications. For instance, I am a big fan of the recent piece: John Carey, 'Ireland: the Tribes of the Gods and the People of the Hills', in The Exeter Companion to Fairies, Nereids, Trolls and Other Social Supernatural Beings: European Traditions (University of Exeter Press, 2024). Here, John does that ever-so-important thing of actually bothering to put ink to page and provide evidence for the passively widely assumed stance of 'Oh, the people of the Otherworld have a society obviously structured similarly if not exactly the same as the people of medieval Ireland'.

I hope that helps, and if you have any further questions, feel free to reach out.

[gallifreyinstituteforlearning]

what kind of sex-ed is taught on Gallifrey? (and does it include physical reproduction, looming, and telepathic intimacy?)

How is sexual education taught on Gallifrey?

It won't surprise anyone at all to learn that details on Gallifreyan sex education are a bit sparse, so the below info is mostly speculative.

🖨️ Looming

Regardless of your opinion of the necessity of Looming, during the time Looming was the sole method of reproduction, the concepts of physical intimacy and sexual relationships would have been largely irrelevant. Gallifreyans during this period typically exhibited a lack of sexual drive, embracing a norm of celibacy that aligned with their asexual nature. It's from this point we start to explore just what they're teaching those kids.

📚 Educating Time Tots

1:🧬 Genetic Heritage and Responsibility

Young Gallifreyans would learn about their ancestral lines and the genetic legacies of their Houses. The emphasis would likely be on understanding the contributions each member is expected to make to their House and society.

House Pride and Legacy: Lessons on the importance of maintaining the genetic integrity and uniqueness of each House.

Genetic Contributions: How and why individuals contribute genetic material to their House's Loom, including the ethics and expectations involved.

Role in Society: The significance of each member's role in preserving and enhancing the House's standing within Gallifreyan society.

2:🏺 Sex as an Antiquated Curiosity

In a society deeply intertwined with the non-biological creation of life, the concept of sex for reproduction may be taught as an archaic and somewhat curious historical practice. Think of it like how humans now regard trepanation or bloodletting. Lessons might include:

Historical Context: An exploration of how earlier Gallifreyans might have engaged in physical reproduction before the advent of Looming, discussing it as a part of their ancient heritage.

Cultural Shifts: How and why Gallifrey moved away from physical sex to a more genetically controlled form of reproduction, with homage to Rassilon and the societal reforms that followed.

3:🧠 Telepathic Intimacy and Connectivity

Gallifreyans possess inherent telepathic abilities, making telepathic intimacy a critical part of their interactions. Education in this area would be robust, focusing not only on how to establish and maintain these connections but also on the ethics of mind-touch. Lessons would likely cover:

Consent and Mental Boundaries: Understanding and respecting the private mental spaces of others.

Emotional Exchange: How to safely and ethically share emotions and thoughts.

Telepathic Etiquette: The do’s and don’ts of entering another's mind, especially in a society where such interactions can have profound personal and political implications.

4:🏛️ Relationships as Political Alliances

With many Gallifreyan relationships influenced by political motives, education would also encompass the strategic aspects of forming alliances. This would involve training in:

Political Acumen: How to navigate the political landscape of Gallifrey, where alliances and familial ties can determine one’s social standing.

Strategic Partnerships: The role of personal relationships in political strategies and how these can influence House dynamics.

🔮 The Future of Gallifreyan Reproduction

With all that's happened recently, there's been a revival of physical reproduction, and we stand in a sort of limbo state. New curricula might be forced to emerge, covering:

Physical Reproduction: Basics of biologically-based reproduction, contrasting it with Looming.

Modern Ethics and Implications: How these changes affect the societal fabric and individual identity within Gallifreyan culture.

🏫 So ...

Gallifreyan 'sex ed' is probably less about sex in the human sense and more about understanding the broader implications of how Time Lords come into being, interact, and handle socio-political life.

For now.

Related:

What are young Gallifreyans/Time Tots taught?: Detailing what the kids of Gallifrey are taught.

What happens with 'gifted kids' on Gallifrey?: How Gallifrey deals with particularly talented children.

Do Gallifreyans have recreational sex?: Describing potential biological and cultural factors of sex.

Hope that helped! 😃

More content ... →📫Got a question? | 📚Complete list of Q+A and factoids →😆Jokes |🩻Biology |🗨️Language |🕰️Throwbacks |🤓Facts →🫀Gallifreyan Anatomy and Physiology Guide (pending) →⚕️Gallifreyan Emergency Medicine Guides →📝Source list (WIP) →📜Masterpost If you're finding your happy place in this part of the internet, feel free to buy a coffee to help keep our exhausted human conscious. She works full-time in medicine and is so very tired 😴

[max1461]

I have said this before, and also gestured at it in a lot of my recent posts, but every time I think about it I am increasing convinced that the explanation for the Great Divergence is basically "there's nothing to explain".

Ok, maybe that's a little unfair: there is something to explain. Western European states and the US saw a series of remarkable technological leaps during roughly the period from 1600 to 1900, which allowed them to achieve astonishing wealth and global political power. There is an explanandum here.

But what I mean when I say there's nothing to be explained is the following. We already have good reason to believe that technological growth is approximately exponential. Technology is self-compounding: the more of it you have, the more of it you can develop. And very many metrics that we would expect to correlate with technology, like agricultural yield and life expectancy, seem to grow exponentially. So I think the idea that technological growth is more-or-less exponential is well evidenced. When something grows exponentially, there is necessarily going to be a point of rapid take-off, a "foom". This is also something we see with technology, and life expectancy, and so on, particularly around the time of the industrial revolution.

This is fairly uncontroversial.

Another fact that I think is uncontroversial is that technological and scientific growth are subject to network effects, and subject to local material conditions. Societies that are generally wealthier may have more time and resources to spend on science, etc., and once you have a bunch of scientists working together in a specific place and sharing ideas, you get more rapid advancement. This seems true even in today's highly interconnected world, which is presumably related to why a small number of universities produce so much cutting edge research—they have the funding and the networks of top people. And I think there really is a sense in which you have many more opportunities for fruitful research and collaboration at e.g. an R1 university than an R2 university. The network effects still matter a lot. In the world before the twentieth century, when information traveled much slower, network effects would presumably have been much more important.

This is, again, a conclusion that I think is independently obvious and uncontroversial. If there was some sense in which it was not true, that would deeply surprise me.

But, look: the conclusion of these too facts taken together is basically that the observed course of history was (in a sense) inevitable. The second fact predicts that you'll get localized "scientific booms" through history, where a bunch of progress is being made in one area. We see this multiple times, with "golden ages" of science and philosophy in the Bronze Age Near East, in the Greco-Roman world, in ancient India, Tang China, the medieval Islamic world, and so on. Obviously I think in some sense "golden ages" are post hoc constructions by historians, but I think there's likely at least some reality behind them. So you have these localized scientific booms that slowly contribute to the exponential increase in global scientific knowledge. And it follows, if scientific growth is exponential, that there's going to be a foom. And it follows that whoever's having a boom when there's a foom is going to benefit a lot—in fact, exponentially more than anyone has before!

I am tempted to call this the "boom and foom theory" of the scientific and industrial revolution.

But it's not really a theory. It's a prediction of two existing theories about technological growth generally, taken together.

And it seems consistent with observation to simply say that Western Europe got lucky, to be having a boom when the foom happened. This is what I mean when I say "there's nothing to explain". I am not really sure we need anything extra to explain why this happened where it did geographically. I mean obviously you can dig in to the historical particulars, but ultimately... it was bound to happen somewhere.

Maybe there's something I'm missing here, or maybe I'm being excessively deterministic. But I think probably that any more particular theory of why the Great Divergence happened needs to justify itself against this one; it needs to explain why it adds anything to the picture that this does not already account for. But I don't know.

[racefortheironthrone]

Please innumerate for us the specialized problems of the library sciences.

Let me start with the caveat that my information is based on my experiences at the National Archives more than a decade ago, and policy has definitely changed on this front as we can see from this graph of recent digitization - apparently NARA wants to get to 85% digitization by 2026. (Even still, I'd note that the records of the WPA are <0.001% digitized.)

However, back when I was doing the research that would eventually become my first book, I remember being at the National Archives II building in College Park, Maryland (Go Terps!) and getting really frustrated that all the records of the WPA were only available in their original physical form and that all the guides and indexes were also in paper only and were all from the 1970s, and I asked the archivist why the hell the National Archives hadn't been digitized already.

This is what they told me: if it's handled correctly and stored in the right environmental circumstances, paper can last a thousand years. Carbon copies can last even longer, if they don't rip. (Seriously, the bastard things are like onion skins, they'll split if you look at them funny.) Microfilm is slightly more technologically advanced than paper, but it only lasts 500 years in the right conditions.

We've only had computers en masse since the 1980s, and already there's a huge amount of records (especially from the early years) that we don't have any more, because the hard drives got re-formatted due to higher costs of storage space back in the day, or because old computers got thrown out when they were replaced by newer models and the hard drives are all rotting in landfills somewhere, or because backwards compatibility broke down and we just can't read those file types on our modern computers, or because the actual data got corrupted on the disc, or because some legacy company is asserting copyright against a video game museum, or because some political hack and/or president of the United States decided to violate the Presidential Records Act.

While we thought that the internet would cause an explosion of written records from ordinary people on the scale of the advent of mass literacy, there are vast swathes of the early internet that simply do not exist any more because the servers got switched off when Geocities et al. folded in the dot-com bubble burst or when everyone migrated to Web 2.0, and the Internet Archive tries its best (bless its heart, affectionately) but it can't be everywhere and save everything.

As a result, the archivist told me, digitization is a fraught question: what file format do we use? How do we know that file format will still be compatible and backwards-compatible in 50 years? 100? Longer? Do we keep everything locally or store it on the cloud, and how do we ensure that the storage mechanisms won't fail if there's a blackout or a virus or whatever? Do we digitize everything now, or do we wait until optical character recognition improves enough to the point where digitized records can be searched for words and phrases? Etc.

Keep in mind, I am a public policy historian who studies the 20th century U.S - I work primarily with the official records and the central archives of the richest government in the world. From a library sciences perspectives, this is kind of an ideal scenario, and it's still kind of fucked up. (Let me tell you, the rage and grief I felt when I learned that most of the General File of the Public Works Administration was thrown away by the National fucking Archives and Records Administration in the mid-1950s because they were running out of shelf space in the D.C location and didn't think these records were important...)

Now imagine what it's like at a local historical society or a small liberal arts college, or the national museum of a developing nation for that matter, who do not have the resources for the kind of grand digitization project that NARA started doing five years ago. Think of the sheer scale of historical records that sleep, unseen and untouched perhaps for decades and perhaps for ever, in little cubbyholes all across the world. Among professionals, historical records are measured in linear and cubic feet - think about that for a second, how many pages of paper there are in a foot when you stack them up, and how many hundreds and thousands and millions of feet there are across the face of the world. Think of all the millions of feet of pieces of paper that have been lost to us because of fire or rot or war or time itself.

This is why Peter Turchin is a quack. Historical records are not a standardized little database for social scientists to plug their fucking spreadsheets into; historians don't play that kind of bullshit t-ball, with all our data neatly packaged and handed to us on a silver platter. Our profession is not a social science, it's a goddamn treasure hunt through boxes that were never catalogued or categorized (or that were re-catalogued so many times no one remembers how they were put together in the first place) to find writing that no one has read since the authors died. All of us know that our work, our understanding, will always be partial and limited, because memory is infinitely fragile and the very idea of historical preservation is a mad existential defiance of entropy itself. These records are real, they are fragile - to hell with the Library of Alexandria, remember the National Museum of Brazil? - and they are all that is left to us of the dead.

[detroit-grand-prix]

letzte rose - bittere erinnrungen

Toto Wolff x Susie Wolff Royal/Historical AU

Chapter Summary: During breakfast, Toto's mother brings up the possibility of remarriage, and a list of potential brides. Toto refuses to look at it, but spends an afternoon reflecting on the state of his personal life.

Weekends meant that Toto’s rigorous schedule was relaxed, albeit only a bit.

He let himself sleep in a bit later, getting up at 5am instead of 3:30, and he had breakfast with his children and his mother instead of taking it alone in his study.

As he arrived for breakfast on Saturday — at 7:00am sharp — though, the only other person at the table was his mother.

— Where are the children? — he said, sitting down at the chair at the head of the table, as the attendant pulled it out for him. 

— Benedict said that he would be on the piste for an early fencing lesson, so he is with his trainer. Rosi, I think, said she would be dining with your sister this morning — Johanna said, her voice a little vacant. Her eyes were glued to a copy of some newspaper, likely the Wiener Zeitung, but Toto couldn’t see the masthead. A prickle of annoyance traveled down the back of his neck. How many times had he been told off for trying to read at the dining table, even in recent years?

— Something interesting in the papers this morning? — he said, as an attendant placed a tea tray in front of him.

— What? — Johanna said, startled — No, I mean… just the…

— Maybe something in the society pages caught your eye?

Toto smirked as Johanna became visibly flustered, tossing aside the hastily-folded volume and turning attention to her plate.

 — Never mind that, I wanted to talk to you about something important, and it’s just as well that Bene and Rosi aren’t here — Johanna said, making Toto look up from his cup of tea, furrowing his eyebrows.

— It has been a while since we talked about it, but I think you need to give remarriage some more consideration again — she ignored Toto as he opened his mouth to immediately protest, pressing on — it’s been years since Stephanie’s passing, and you need someone other than me to perform the Empress’ duties.

— Why not Rosi? — Toto asked cooly, recalling his conversation with Niki.

— Because Rosi needs to put serious consideration into her own marriage and future. Both of your children do! Don’t think I won’t be speaking to them later on about this, either — She speared a piece of tomato with her fork and Toto felt that she was somehow eating it at him. 

— Mama, I’ve told you before, I am not interested in marrying again.

— You’ve no good reason to refuse, my son.

— I just can’t, mama. It feels wrong — Toto pushed his eggs around his plate with his fork. 

— What do you mean? There’s no sin in it. Father Strossmayer and I have spoken about this, and he agrees with me, and the Bible even encourages…

Toto took a deep breath, trying to calm himself down before giving in to his urge to stand up and start yelling. The calm, quiet, even way his voice came out surprised him. 

— I know what the church says, but I loved Stephanie. When I was younger, I thought marriage was simply my duty, but I ended up being blessed enough to fall in love with the woman I married, a privilege I thought I’d never be afforded. I’ve discharged that particular duty to the crown and laid my heart to rest with her. It doesn’t feel right for me to dig it up again and give someone the rotted remains. Besides, I will remind you that you never remarried after papa died.

Toto and Lili’s father, Sven, was the Duke of Norrbotten and a Prince of Sweden. He and Johanna got along quite well, and Toto remembered his father as a kind, gentle man, but not long after the birth of Toto’s sister, something changed. 

He started experiencing frequent nosebleeds and headaches that would make it difficult for him to leave his bed. He would frequently become too dizzy to walk, almost as if he was drunk, but he was never much of a drinker. He started showing fits of delirium, agitation, and hallucinations. 

The court doctor was called, and theorized that it might be some sort of neurological issue. The court chaplain came to say some prayers at his bedside — Johanna refused to call it an “exorcism” — but it was all for naught. He eventually refused all food and drink, and slept at all hours, until his body and spirit just seemed to give up.

An autopsy was performed after Sven’s death, and it was found that his brain was riddled with tumors, which explained all of the horrid symptoms he had been experiencing.

It was not a time that Toto really cared to remember. 

Johanna’s expression turned sour, and she shifted uncomfortably in her chair once more.

— No, I did not, because I had two children to take care of. Not to mention, it is far easier for a widowed man to find a spouse than a widowed woman, especially one that already has the future secured. Your grandfather agreed that it was best for me to remain single, as there was no material benefit to any potential suitors.

— And what benefit would there be to me remarrying now?

— Well, for one thing, it would afford you the opportunity to have another son, to insure that you have a successor — Johanna saw Toto open his mouth to argue, but ignored it and continued on — While you’ve done well to secure your line of succession, it would present an opportunity to ensure there’s a spare, in case something happens to Benedict. It is not as if I wish for it, but, we do not know God’s will for any of us. For another thing, there needs to be someone to manage the royal household and the social duties that you have been neglecting for the past few years, to your own detriment. Now, I’ve got a list of names of ladies that would be perfectly suitable…

Johanna slipped her hand into the small reticule she always carried, extracting a slip of paper from within. 

— There’s Princess Francisca of Brazil… I believe she just turned twenty-four, I’ve heard she’s rather striking. And then there’s Princess Maria Carolina of Bourbon Two-Sicilies, you’ve met her, I believe. She was born here in Vienna, and she’s the daughter of my cousin Clementina… and then Luisa Fernanda of Spain… she’s young, but that would be a handsome match; she’s the heir presumptive until Isabella has a child, you know. And that’s just the Catholic houses! It’s not ideal, but an especially good match from a Protestant family may be willing to convert…

Johanna had stopped looking at Toto, her eyes locked on the list of names in her hand. No doubt she was already planning the next great state wedding, and Toto could feel the anger rising within him as his mother continued to talk. It felt like a hot bile creeping up his throat, twisting his insides, making him clench his fists until he could feel his fingernails digging into the meat of his palms.

— That’s enough! — he said, pounding his fist on the tabletop. The flatware and cutlery clattered. One of the attendants in the room yelped slightly in surprise, immediately covering her mouth and blushing. Johanna stopped, mid-sentence, gaping at her son in shock. — I tell you this every time you bring it up, mother, but I do not wish to be remarried. If you must spend all of your spare time worrying about the security of my line of succession, I implore you to focus these efforts on your grandchildren instead. I am telling you, as a grown man and the emperor of this nation, that we shall not speak about remarriage again, and that is final.

Johanna’s eyes had narrowed, and her expression hardened. 

— And I am your mother — she hissed, venom dripping from her every syllable — I am simply doing what is best for you, for this nation, and for your happiness.

— My happiness?! — Toto said, raising his voice almost to a shout — Mama, we both know you have never given a damn about my happiness!

He was now on his feet, his chair pushed back and his breakfast long-abandoned and likely ice-cold. The dishes continued to rattle on the tabletop as he jabbed his finger into the cloth-covered wood. 

— You didn’t give a single thought to my happiness when you arranged my marriage to Stephanie, and it was only by the grace of God that we came to love each other. Of course, our marriage was happy before she passed, but as you’ve told me yourself, my happiness was secondary to ensuring the future of our family’s dynasty.

Toto stepped away from the table, breezing past the pair of servants that were frozen in shock. He pulled on the handle to the door into the dining room a bit harder than necessary, stopping halfway over the threshold to turn around and face his mother once more. 

— If you truly have any concern for my happiness, you will not bring this up again!

Toto retreated into his study, pacing around the small room as he tried to calm himself down.

He hadn’t lost his temper that badly in years, that he could remember, possibly decades. When he was younger, in the earlier days of his reign, he had been quicker to anger. He was desperate to prove himself and his authority in the days right after his grandfather died, not trusting that anybody saw him as anything more than a child pretending to be a ruler and a statesman. Him being short, sometimes even brutal, with his advisors was the norm, but a combination of time and the perspective that came with wisdom and experience mellowed him greatly, as did his desire to be a good husband and father. 

Normally after Saturday’s breakfast, he would review any paperwork or important matters that had come across overnight until the early afternoon. He did not work on Sundays, wishing to keep the Sabbath as a holy day of rest. Most of the royal household had the day off as well.

— I will never be able to focus like this — he mumbled to himself as he sat down at his desk. He buried his face in his hands, pressing his palms into his eyes until he could see stars, as if it would push the memory of the last hour out of his head by force.

He blinked as he lifted his head, trying to clear the blurriness from his vision, and the portrait of Stephanie resolved into focus from its place on the wall.

He knew exactly what would help.

Toto smirked, and opened the topmost drawer in his desk — the one right under the top, and fished out a ring of small brass keys. Then, he opened one of the lower drawers, extracting a small wooden box from within. 

He set the box on his desk, running a finger over the inlaid brass lettering on the top, the word “MIZPAH” in large capital letters. It had been a while since he had seen it, and there was a thin coating of dust on its glossy lacquered surface. The box was unassuming by the standards of everything else in the palace, belying the value of its contents to Toto. True, what was inside the box did not have much — if any — monetary value, but was priceless in Toto’s eyes.

He put the key in the lock and sprang the latches, revealing a thick stack of papers — letters, envelopes, postcards. It was all of the letters he and Stephanie had exchanged through the years, the earliest ones having been written before they had even met, after their marriage arrangement had been finalized and before she arrived in Vienna. There were letters and postcards from the separate travels they had taken through the years. Toto often had to travel for functions of state, and Stephanie had always enjoyed seeing new places, even as a child. They had taken many trips together, but Toto was not always able to join her because of the demands of his schedule, so they resolved to write to each other often when they had to be apart. 

Engraved on the underside of the lid was a Bible verse, the one referenced by the word on the lid’s inlay. A verse of Genesis, telling of the covenant made between Jacob and Laban, he remembered. It was written in the Latin vulgate — intueatur Dominus et iudicet inter nos quando recesserimus a nobis. 

“The Lord watch between me and thee, while we are absent, one from another.” 

The priest that performed Stephanie’s funeral rites had referenced the verse in his sermon, inspiring Toto to have one of the court’s artisans, a particularly talented furniture maker, make the box to contain the letters for safekeeping. He had meticulously paired each and every one together, the letters he sent and the ones she sent in response, and vice versa. 

He felt his anger with his mother dissipating as he thumbed through the letters, admiring Stephanie’s elegant looping handwriting. Some of the pages had little mementos stuck to the pages — flowers she had pressed, little doodles she had made in the margins and footers. He skimmed through the contents, remembering trips she had taken with the children; home to Bavaria to visit her family once, trips to the seaside in France, to Paris via the Rhine, even to London. 

Letting all of the memories flood back in left Toto feeling almost relaxed, until he came upon the last letter in the pile. 

“How had I forgotten about this?”, he wondered, turning the pages over in his fingers.

For the last two years of her life, Stephanie had not been well. It started with her experiencing night sweats and fatigue. Before long, she was unable to keep weight on, no matter how much she ate. The doctors at court diagnosed her with consumption, but were optimistic about her recovery. It was recommended she leave Vienna and spend some time at the seaside, that the sea air would help. 

The children went with her as she departed to a castle the family owned — Castelo di Miramare — just outside of Trieste, on the shore of the Adriatic Sea. The three of them spent many months there, and it seemed for a while that Stephanie was on the road to recovery. She planned to be in Trieste until the summer, when the family would reunite in Bad Ischl, at the summer villa. 

Toto wrote letters every few days to her, and was reading one he had sent her while she was in Trieste. In it, he was telling her about a dilemma he was facing with the State Council. He had constantly been butting heads with Chancellor Metternich, even then, but the question had come up about one of Metternich’s staunchest allies, Count Karl Clam-Martinic. He was pushing for reforms that would make the government more conservative, practically relegating Toto’s role to merely a symbolic one, and would promote Chancellor Metternich to something akin to an autocrat, like the Shogunate of Japan allowing the emperor to remain in a ceremonial role with almost no power.

Niki, and another councilor, Count Franz Anton von Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky, were pushing Toto to replace him with someone more moderate, but Toto thought removing him would destabilize the government, resolving to find other ways to keep him in check. His letter described the dilemma to his wife, hoping for some of her insight. Stephanie was very intelligent, and had an uncanny ability to see things objectively. Niki joked that she was the unofficial fifth member of the State Council.

She had written back within days, encouraging him to go forward with Count Karl’s dismissal. 

“I know this is a difficult decision, my darling,” she wrote. Toto’s eyes hovered over the last line of the letter. “But, fortunately, spring is coming soon no matter how difficult the winter has been, and, like the flowers, you will need to bloom”.

Toto felt a tear streaming down his cheek as he reached the end of the letter. He did not know it when he had received it, but it would be the last one she had written. Her condition rapidly deteriorated for a week after months of steady improvement, until she passed away from pleurisy that February.

He sniffed, wiping the tears away that were forming in the corner of his eyes. He glanced up at the portrait once more.

“I suppose I still have a way to go before I bloom, meine geliebte”.

He sat in silence for a few moments before he neatly tucked away the letters, placing the box back in its compartment. 

As he was doing so, a knock came from the door to his bedroom, and Phillip, his Kammerdiener, stuck his head through.

— I have your riding clothes ready for you, Your Imperial Majesty, if you were planning to go to the Stallburg today after lunch.

“How is it noon already?” Toto thought. After working for a few hours on Saturdays after breakfast, he would have a light lunch and go to the imperial stables for a few hours to ride. 

While the indoor sand arena — the Stallburg — that Toto’s great-great-great-grandfather had built was more than adequate in size to get a decent ride in, he wished, more than anything, that he could go for a hack around the countryside, or even through the city, like he could when he was younger, before he himself was saddled with the burden of his duties. He liked to race the horses against his friends, and had started taking riding lessons at an early age. When he was young, he had aspired to attend the Spanish Riding School, but his accession at age 15 left no time for regular training. 

Despite being confined to the arena most of the year — with the exception of the summer holidays — Toto looked forward to his time at the stables all week, because he felt like it was the only time where the mantle of his office didn’t sit so heavily on his shoulders, and around the arena always did a great deal to lift his spirits. The students of the riding school finished before lunch on Saturdays, and he made sure that nobody else could come in to ride in the afternoons. Even if he didn’t have time to ride very long before having to dash off to another appointment, he fit in time in the saddle where he could.

While the grooms at the stable took excellent care of the animals in their charge, and other people in his family had their horses prepared and waiting when they came riding, Toto always insisted on doing the preparation work himself; brushing down the horse, picking its hooves, and putting on tack. He even preferred to groom the horse after his ride, talking sweetly to it all the while, and feeding it peppermints from the pockets of his riding coat — probably more than the stablemaster would prefer.

His favorite was a stallion named Conversano Comtessa, but went by Campione. Campione was nearing twenty years old; very nearly an old man, and had always been especially sweet and gentle, especially with Toto’s children when they were young. 

He was of exceptional beauty, too. All of the horses in the Stallburg were white-haired Lippizans, but Campione’s hair looked like spun silver, especially in his mane and tail. He was extraordinarily well-muscled, and Toto had heard that he had been a favorite of each student of the Spanish Riding School that had been assigned to him since he started under saddle. He was not used regularly for lessons now, as he was getting on in years, but the trainers still exercised him. 

— Good afternoon, Campione — he said, as he reached the stall of his prized stallion. The horse perked its ears up, bringing his head over the door of the stall. Toto reached out and patted his velvety nose. The horse pushed his nose past Toto’s hand, sniffing at his pockets.

— Yes, I know, we have an agreement — Toto said, chuckling. He pulled out one of the candies from his pocket, which Campione snatched near immediately before backing up a bit, allowing Toto to open the door to the stall to enter. It was a routine by now. As he brushed and tacked up the horse, his mind was elsewhere, thinking about the conversation with his mother and reading his wife’s letters. 

It had been eleven years since he was widowed, and that morning was not the first time that his mother had brought up remarriage, but he had never considered it on his own, and bristled whenever someone else brought it up. 

“But why…?” he wondered, guiding Campione smoothly around the arena in a walk. He was letting the animal warm up, keeping the reins long and loose. 

It certainly wouldn’t be out of the norm to remarry as a widower, and as his mother said, it was encouraged by the church. But whenever the thought crossed his mind, he swiftly dismissed it, telling himself that he needed more time.

Before he had even realized it, more time had turned into eleven years. 

He and Stephanie had always talked about the things they would do together when they had grown old. He never aspired to stay on the throne until his death; it was not something he discussed with anyone but Stephanie, but he had planned on abdicating when Benedict had been sufficiently prepared for the job of running the empire. He and his wife had plans to renovate Ambras Castle in Innsbruck to use as a winter home, and they would spend their summers in Trieste. They would travel around Europe, of course, and they both wanted to see the United States. 

But then, once she passed, Toto stopped making plans. He felt like a tree that dropped its leaves for the winter. Still standing, somehow, but dormant, maybe even dead from afar. He sank himself into his work, living by his routine and barely registering his own existence outside of it. He tried putting on a brave face for his children, but even they seemed to notice, asking occasionally if he was okay.

Toto pulled the reins a bit, directing Campione into a trot, making sure that his topline was long enough and low enough for the more strenuous exercises. 

He let his thoughts skirt the idea he had long forbidden himself from thinking about — would it be the worst thing in the world to have some companionship again? It was not as if anyone would replace Stephanie in his memories or his heart, but he did miss having someone around who knew him as more than The Emperor, someone to share little jokes and knowing looks, someone to share his deepest worries, to share meals, someone to join him for ballets and concerts, on walks around the garden, on summers in Bad Ischl…

“Sure, take a new wife, fall in love again. But what if she leaves you in the same way? What if you die before her? Everybody dies sometime, after all”, asked a cruel voice in the back of his mind. 

Suddenly, Campione stopped sharply, jerking Toto forward. He managed to keep himself in the saddle, but only just. He briefly wondered what could have spooked a normally superbly disciplined horse, but he was simply standing at rest in the arena, flicking his ears about as if he was waiting for the next command. Toto realized that the error was his — he had tightened the reins too much without even realizing it, giving the horse the signal to stop. He hadn’t meant to. It was a product of being startled by his own revelation.

— Sorry, boy — he said, sheepishly patting the beast’s neck. Campione snorted and pawed at the dirt a bit with his forelegs, before responding to Toto’s command to continue in a canter.

His fears were now plain as day; he never cared to live through the weeks following Stephanie’s death again, but… 

The way he was now could hardly be called “living”. He was dormant, like the trees in winter. He was standing, sure, but from far away, he may as well be rotting upright. 

The situation was different, but Stephanie’s advice in her letter was right — he needed to bloom. 

He felt a strange calm as he finished up his ride, and felt a sense of clarity that he hadn’t had for a while. It carried him the rest of the way through the evening.

The next morning, as he kneeled and prayed before Sunday Mass with his family in — the Hofkapelle — the court chapel, the prayer he said was not the usual ones he did by rote each week. It was an earnest plea, less so to God or Christ or the Blessed Virgin, but to Stephanie. 

“You will always be my first love, but it has been a very hard winter without you, meine geliebte, and I cannot join you yet. I’ve denied myself the comfort of another while I still live in this world, but I cannot continue in this loneliness. You told me I need to bloom, so please, send me a sign that it is time and continue to keep me in your prayers as you are always in mine”.

The next morning, while Toto was doing his morning work, there was a knock on the door of his study once again.

— Come in — he said, not looking up from the military dispatches he was in the middle of reading.

The door opened to reveal Phillip, holding a singular white rose. 

— Sorry to interrupt, Your Imperial Majesty, but the head gardener thought you might like to have this — Phillip crossed the room and extended the flower to Toto. 

Toto took the rose, glancing at it in his hand. It certainly wasn’t an ideal specimen. Its stem and leaves looked a bit ragged — damaged by frost, no doubt — but the petals looked like they were in decent shape, somehow, showing only the slightest discoloration around the edges. 

— The garden staff was working on getting the rose bushes covered, but it seems that one of the blooms wasn’t pruned with the rest of them a few weeks ago, or just decided to come late. The last one, in any case — Phillip said — The gardener gave it to me to give to you, he said that the white ones were the Empress’ favorites.

Toto had stopped paying attention to what Phillip was saying, and was staring aghast at the flower. Stephanie did love white roses, often saying that they were the most beautiful ones of all, even if the petals lacked in color.

“They also signify purity and new love, you know,” he remembered her telling him once, after she had snipped a particularly large bloom from the palace garden. “I know you weren’t there for it, but my wedding dress had little white roses embroidered into it”.

He stared at the bloom for a moment aghast, before regaining his focus.

— Thank you, Phillip. Tell the gardener I appreciate it very much.

— I will, your Imperial Majesty — he bowed deeply and retreated, closing the door behind him, and Toto fixed his gaze on his wife’s portrait.

— I suppose this is your answer, meine geliebte. Thank you.