#undercommons

[bookofshitposts]

Here, gatherings were promiscuous; there were no criteria for entrance, only that you lived anarchically, which is to say you let the space fill you up when you got there.

Marquis Bey, Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchy

[damaliabrams]

Dark Academia Altered File Folder Swap

@pinkodbird #theuncommonguild

[discoursets]

Stefano Harney on study.

[beaft]

playing as a male drow in BG3 is so funny because everyone i encounter gives me the "ah!!! scary... 😞 please don't hurt me" treatment, except for female drow who are invariably like "hey bro, how's that dick of yours? small i'm guessing. ha ha. i make little joke. now get out of here before i get bored and kill you."

[spottedenchants]

WIP Wednesday 11/27/24

Still plugging away at the first time fic and chapter 4 is coming along, so here is a fun bit from chapter 1 :3

cw: mild miscommunication, discussion of sex from a sex-averse POV

~

Even with his sticking tongue, Essek trudges through, repeats.

“I want this”-

He squeezes Caleb, comfort momentarily made man, and siphons his boundless hearth-heat.

“All of this—to be good for you.”

Caleb’s hands slip back to his back.

“This isn’t escape, Essek. It is for fun.”

Fun, yes. Inconvenient term in Common here, but Essek had dug his own grave weeks ago by botching his phrasing in the first place.

Despite his indifference presently hovering somewhere in the realm of ambivalence thinking on notions of sensitive physicality, they may as well pick apart this topic since for the moment it has Caleb stuck.

Lecture memory drones through dust: as with any partnered touch, deliberate titillation is yet another thing bodies tend to be able to do; there is no inherent significance to their actions save for that which they may create between themselves; nothing is sacred nor even special beyond that which they may deem so, if anything at all.

Then, what does this mean for them two?

After having spent so long with the world held at arm’s length, every intimacy with the Nein carries a revelatory weight to Essek. Silently sharing space whilst independently occupied—reading, writing, sketching, cooking, gardening, dining, sight-seeing, on and on—it is often perfectly satisfactory an amount of interaction, striking enough to sting his throat and prickle his eyes should he think on it too long. Resting alongside them in close quarters is similar if woven tighter, a denser ply of vulnerability: unconscious trust. But distraction indulged to an intermediary degree? So awkward and involved? He’s little metric for arousing encounters when steeped only in affection, without definitive goals or a game to steal.

But he’s already thought this through for the kissing with Caleb. Another two-body problem, perhaps Caleb’s own measure is a fair place to start here, too.

Essek presses his nose to Caleb’s neck, careful of his bruise.

“Frivolous, you think?”

“With you? Hardly.”

Oh.

Caleb’s voice gentles another degree.

“Though, I don’t mind so much. If you would care for that instead.”

So… such involvement isn’t a passing interest to Caleb, at least within this convoluted circumstance they’ve fostered thus far. Maybe it can have depth, too.

Candle in a coal mine, Essek focuses on further fleeting reflection as he’s done so well in solitude—pressure built and let, the stutter of his lungs, of heat in his ears and two pulses rocking intertwined; his own ache, accompanied- caressed, maybe even gratified—before the glare grows too bright in Caleb’s presence and snuffs itself dry.

But why? Essek rattles the concept for a futile respark. What exactly might it mean?

The lantern stays snapped shut, repulsed.

Fine. Thoughts for another time.

Regardless, that nagging notion rearing its head now, as it does- it is far broader than any sort of vague worry about concupiscent satiation; his own nose held, Essek is fairly confident he could leave Caleb an exerted mess. This present dread as he has come to know it… it is of being unfit to take care of Caleb as an entire living being. Again: a person, breathing and complete.

And it is not so much harmlessness Essek seeks, no. No, for imperfectly met souls, sharp and shorn and bound up best they can, that is impossible and he won’t delude himself otherwise despite how much he may wish it to be the case when it comes to his friends. But perhaps being of benefit is feasible. He is still trying to be kind.

They have spoken through this before. Essek can brave doing so again.

He shudders in a breath to present this jagged sliver of his heart.

“I care for you, Caleb Widogast. I would like to.”

Coasting over tender bruise and threading the last of a tremble through downsoft hair, Essek shields the back of Caleb’s neck.

“I’m unconvinced I can bear it all.”

[fjorests-of-wildemount]

Imagining Caleb in the aftermath of the last episode, freed of the collar and shunted across Exandria with one of the halves of Bell's Hells, pulling a silvery grey Sending Stone out of his pocket. The rest of the group watches while he speaks into it in a language none of them understand. His eyes go soft when he receives a reply in the same language, before pressing it briefly to his forehead and tucking it safely into his pocket.

[1000rh]

I think Fanon is always trying to move against the grain of this itinerary of return, this reversal of image or standpoint. […] Fanon understands that the very taking of an anti-colonial stance looks crazy, from a normative perspective. For me, first of all, that’s good. That’s something that’s worthwhile. In other words, what it’s about is, “I’m gonna claim this thing that looks crazy from your perspective.” But, of course, the problem, I think, with Fanon in Black Skin, is you can do this thing that looks crazy from the normative perspective, but of course in some complicated way there is no non-normative perspective. The non-normative is precisely the absence of a point of view […]. Eventually, I believe, he comes to believe in the world, which is to say the other world, where we inhabit and maybe even cultivate this absence, this place which shows up here and now, in the sovereign’s space and time, as absence, darkness, death, things which are not.

– Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons (2013)

[miodiodavinci]

anyway probably my favorite thing about fafnir is the ever present gap moe of this incredibly sad and tired looking corpse man acting and behaving like a nervous little creature in a shopping mall, or perhaps a teenager who has been miraculously hired onto their first job despite having None of the qualifications w

my other favorite thing is the fact that he can do this w

[utilitycaster]

The canonical word for "no" in under common is "nau." House Baenre just like naur... Drizzt Do'Urden can't escape...we need to throw him on the barbie

[aeoris4lovers]

texts from the mighty nein part two: thelyss brothers boogaloo

[more texts from the xhorhoes groupchat]

[archivestarlyht]

very silly goose to me how the ttrpg doesn’t distinguish surface elvish and drowic. 😒 esp when they went thru with making an entire drow dictionary and make it clear common is completely different from undercommon.

[caretaker-au]

username-roulette submitted to caretaker-au:

I created a stat block for Chara to be used in Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition.

[romdocitizen]

The rise of logistics is rapid. Indeed, to read today in the field of logistics is to read a booming field, a conquering field. In military science and in engineering of course, but also in business studies, in management research, logistics is everywhere. And beyond these classic capitalist sciences, its ascent is echoed ahistorically in the emerging fields of object-oriented philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, where the logistical conditions of knowledge production go unnoticed, but not the effects. In military science the world has been turned upside down. Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans dictated supply lines. No more. Strategy, traditional ally and partner of logisitics, is today increasingly reduced to collateral damage in the drive of logistics for dominance. In war without end, war without battles, only the ability to keep fighting, only logistics, matters.

And so too business innovation has become logistical and no longer strategic. Business innovation of course does not come from business. It is more often derived from military strategies of resistance to its own armies, transferred free to business. Once this consisted in transferring innovations like the line and the formation and the chain of command from military science to the factory and the office, or transferring psychological and propaganda warfare to human relations and marketing. These were free transfers of strategic innovation, requiring managers to instantiate and maintain them. No more. As everything from the internet to the shipping container testify, in keeping with cold wars and wars on terror that lead always to the failure of strategy, it is logistical free transfers that matter. Containerisation was failing as a business innovation until the American government used containers to try to supply its troops in South East Asia with enough weapons, booze, and drugs to keep them from killing their own officers, to keep a war going that could not be won strategically. Those who dreamt of the internet, if not those who built it, were precisely worried about the corruption of intelligence that the outbreak of democracy, as the Trilateral Commission thought of it, made possible in the 1970s. ARPANET as an intelligence gathering network could not have its head turned by sex or ideology, much less the powerful combination of the two. It would not be confused by the outbreak of democracy. And it assumed a never-ending accumulation of intelligence for a never-ending war that many would not want to fight. To Toni Negri’s challenge, show me a business innovation and I will show you a worker’s rebellion, we could add a pre-history the state fearing its own workforce.

-Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, "Fantasy In The Hold," The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

[talentforlying]

oh yeah. it's all coming together.

[deepdrearn]

The university and the undercommons - Fred Moten & Stefano Harney

[mindsmade]

had my first actual dnd session with aerendyl and i'm sprinting over to my carrd to tweak it rn 🏃🏻‍♂️