#varcahs speaks

[theswordwizard]

also relevant: how many of us knew how to use anything more complex and less user friendly than a personal home computer growing up? it's kind of the equivalent of librarians complaining about students no longer knowing how to use the card catalogues because they were all using the digital database lookups until they were faced with it for the first time.

another thought about "gen z and gen alpha don't know how to use computers, just phone apps" is that this is intentionally the direction tech companies have pushed things in, they don't want users to understand anything about the underlying system, they want you to just buy a subscription to a thing and if it doesn't do what you need it to, you just upgrade to the more expensive one. users who look at configuration files are their worst nightmare

[theswordwizard]

screenshotting for use instead of forcing them to see hella tags but as someone who has a constant background of narration around special interests going on in their head which eventually will start to run out of "canon compliant" possibilities and start experimenting with crossovers: this is why I struggled for a bit to do a coherent plotty crossover between daredevil and nbc's hannibal. this is another rambling "for me and literally two other people with my interests and way too interested in meta-compliancy" post:

basically: daredevil and nbc's hannibal have conflicting main themes in ways where they don't as easily synthesize into a new coherent theme. nbc hannibal basically amounts to: what does it take for a person to become a 'monster,' or otherwise transform into a version of themselves that would be a terrifying stranger to them previously. and it sort of frames it as... not necessarily a power fantasy, but it frames trauma as something powerfully transformative. you become a version of yourself that can survive/thrive/take control in the hell you've ended up in. you will surprise yourself what you are capable of doing when it's your only option. but at the same time, its a sort of "succumbing" to your situation.

daredevil is almost antithetical to this. matt's whole thing can kinda be summed up as "even after everything, it's still you." you can go through any amount of trauma and still be able to recognize yourself after. you can stick to your principles even when pushed to the limit and come out alive, and being able to do so is important. he IS his principles, and even though he constantly falls short of himself, his struggle is a definitive trait of his. whenever he starts to abandon his principles is always tied to him losing his sense of self.

he cannot win (in the long run) if he abandons who he is, even if it's only an internal struggle. it's especially prevalent in the comics where basically whenever he abandons his principles he has a bit of a flip-out and tries to abandon "matt murdock" entirely, and then struggles to maintain whatever new identity he takes and has a whole identity crisis/mental breakdown. his strength is his stubbornness and refusal to remain fallen from his standard of self.

so obviously, one of these themes need to bend so far it breaks when put together. put matt in range of the BAU/Hannibal's house and its the big book vs thin book meme. in part because matt's biggest struggles in his narratives are against structural violence and systems (not to mention... the smells...). "there's this one evil guy causing 90% of the problems" is again basically antithetical to matt's narratives, or are at the most just his weakest plots.

ALSO, a lot of the murders in hannibal get treated as combinations of three categories (by Hannibal, who I would say has the most Thematic Influence over the show): 1) they basically deserved it and they were better off being dead in whatever form than alive (mason, mischa's killer), 2) what the killer gained from their death was more important than their life (sorta the case of melissa, her death being the photo negative so will could understand the ripper), 3) their death was important to the killed person, they were only able to ascend or transcend something in their death (many of the ripper victims and general murder victims.)

Basically "agreeing" with Hannibal, or adopting his viewpoint, (or basically being 'seduced' by the story) requires viewing deaths in those three ways. It requires a sort of dissociation with the reality of a person dying in any practical matter. any death becomes metaphor and symbolic, and the symbol is more important than the ending of life, it transcends it. this also doesn't rock with matt's themes.

even if you go serial killer AU matt's relationship with violence, and the temptation of committing murder, is based around practicality. it's that killing would technically be the most efficient way of stopping someone from hurting other people ever again. it's how he could cut through the red tape and financial security that protects fisk or fisk's stand-in, the way they've manipulated systems of supposed justice to hurt people (and specifically innocents), and just end it for good. obv in cases where that does happen (by his hand or others) it again leans into the fact that there is no single bogeyman that can be killed to stop evil or whatever. if fisk dies, there is a replacement to that power vacuum, if matt steps into that role to try and control it, he fails miserably.

hannibal approaches the seduction of murder with: and it's actually awesome? while daredevil approaches it with: it won't actually help you, and it won't fix anything. you will only destroy yourself. both of the (shows at least) fixations on catholicism also have parallel approaches with hannibal encouraging you to become your own god and daredevil reminding you that you aren't. will is basically betrayed by his friends and community while matt is consistently supported by his.

ultimately, nbc hannibal is very metaphorical and artsy and pretentious (i say lovingly) while daredevil is like. How Would Superpowers Effect The Local Law Economy.

[theswordwizard]

I bought butchverses 1 and 2 today, almost cried reading the essays and then said "fuck off" out loud after finishing the butchverse 2 puzzle.

In all seriousness though, your work has given me a new way of looking at gender/butchness/transmasculinity that I hadn't got from reading "mainstream"/classic queer theory. So thank you <3

🥹🥹🥹 omg I'm so glad they spoke to you!! (also MWAHAHA/I'm proud of you for completing the puzzle) I feel like there really isn't as much work seriously examining butchness in the modern culture that doesn't also lend toward misunderstanding/transphobia/getting stuck in a very antiquated concept of it. Everyone has a different personal definition of what it means to them so I wanted to do my best to articulate what it means to me, which is: the world ❤️❤️. Matt and Frank are my tools of discovery 😌

[theswordwizard]

for the 'top 5' ask post: top 5 books?

HMMM I've been reading mostly nonfiction lately so I would say:

The Internet Does Not Exist (E-flux Journal) - It's a collection of essays from different people talking about technology in ways that really opened my mind a lot to how I think about systems. They also published The Wretched of the Screen by Hito Steyerl which is a collection of her essays on 'the politics of the image,' and I always love her writings.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle, which is about how we as a collection of societies haven't prepared for the radical increases in computational power we've achieved, and how they actually make it more difficult to understand the world as we're overwhelmed with data. Incredibly informative on a lot of different interweaving topics.

This is a manga but I just finished Billy Bat by Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki. It's almost a detective story? A Japanese-American comic artist in America learns that he might have copied a character from a manga in Japan and takes a trip to check. 100 or so chapters later astronaut speaks to the cartoon character drawn on the moon and chooses whether to end the world or not. I don't think it's officially released in English so I read a scanlation online somewhere (I don't think it's particularly hard to find though).

The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam, which was honestly a primary inspiration to actually making Butchverse as a semi-serious series of essays. It proposes alternatives to the mainstream, the heteropatriarchal, the accepted, and blending together high theory and low culture in a really comprehensible read. He also wrote Female Masculinity, which I reference a lot in Butchverse.

I recently finished Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, and if you liked the movie you will definitely like the book. INCREDIBLY suspenseful even after watching the movie, it's pretty different. The next two books in the series aren't as heavy-hitters IMO, but I know a lot of people that really like them so I think they're worth reading.

If you want a really great narrative that's essentially a book with some images and REALLY good music, I'm still halfway through Umineko (use the original graphics!!!) and it is possibly the GOAT.

[theswordwizard]

was just thinking that i need to start unfollowing people (i follow about 1500 blogs (this account is over 10 years old)) and someone just put attack on tltan on my dashboard... a sign

[theswordwizard]

ive honestly thought a lot about driving as a modern, alternative state of convalescence. it's a perfect mix of an extended task that requires a decent amount of awareness/focus, but as it also functions a lot on muscle memory and can be relatively easy. especially on long drives your mind is free to listen to music or enjoy the scenery or just stretch out and think, without any pressure to be more productive. you can't do whatever comes next until you reach your destination, and you can't (SHOULDN'T) really be on your phone or do much that way. You have free reign to mentally be free.

(excerpt from EXHAUSTION & EXUBERANCE: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform by Jan Verwoert)

saw my friend reblog a post about hating driving and listen. i understand you. however i love driving because i am locked in a metal box for three and a half hours on the regular where i can do nothing but focus on not dying and listening to music i love as loud as i want while i pass through gorgeous mountains in weather that could destroy me like an errant fruitfly. it enriches my warrior monkey brain to go fast at speeds no man was meant to go and try as hard as possible to fight against the constant threat of dying in the concrete arena. does this sound relaxing? perhaps not to the regular man. but a man i am not.

[theswordwizard]

that interview with fujimoto saying his goal is to make work people think about for a long time.... he nailed it. look back, goodbye eri, fire punch, chainsaw man? theyre not leaving me.

[theswordwizard]

top five fictional world endings

I really liked the ending of Snowpiercer because I do love endings where everyone dies... I think the setup of everyone stuck on a train in a frozen wasteland is very cool.

I haven't finished the third book in The Southern Reach Trilogy but I think at least so far how the sort of apocalypse is turning out is really cool.

I like Slaughterhouse Five's end of the Tralfamadorian world where they know what mistake is going to kill them all but how they view time differently they view it as already inevitable.

Devilman Crybaby........ I love that kind of ending (no spoilers)

Interstellar was just awesome all the way through.

I do really like crazy endings where its impossible to return to anything resembling the status quo. I should actually watch Evangelion all the way through.

[theswordwizard]

If you're nervous about having to buy whole vegetables you might not end up liking, I would highly recommend going somewhere like a hotpot or buffet style restaurant with others. With hotpot you pay for your base broth and then any of the vegetables or meats you order are free, and while you can share with your friends, you can also likely just ask for much smaller amounts of different veggies, and say you're trying them out. You can then stir them into your broth and they taste so much better than you'd think. Every time I come back from hotpot I always have a few new veggies I start adding to my ramen.

i mean this in the gentlest way possible: you need to eat vegetables. you need to become comfortable with doing so. i do not care if you are a picky eater because of autism (hi, i used to be this person!), you need to find at least some vegetables you can eat. find a different way to prepare them. chances are you would like a vegetable you hate if you prepared it in a stew or roasted it with seasoning or included it as an ingredient in a recipe. just. please start eating better. potatoes and corn are not sufficient vegetables for a healthy diet.

[theswordwizard]

its such an exercise of failure to try and have any serious discussion about homestuck's weaknesses or discuss anything that happened around the 2019 era outside of close friend groups because a majority of what I see posted is

rumor, based off something that did happen but completely misconstrued and important details missing/ignored

straight up lie

claims of "character assassination"

[theswordwizard]

was wondering if youd be at galaxycon this year ! bought vrisrezi & dr kasukabe prints from you last time.for sure 2 of my favorite things i got:]

omgggg im so glad you like them, thank you!! I will be at Galaxycon Richmond again this year (as well as Awesomecon!) though I Have to warn you the only new thing I'll have is Butchverse 2 and maybe another print or so 😭 I've been busy

[theswordwizard]

this might be finicky but i really prefer paperback books to hardcover, especially when it comes to nonfiction/informational genres. hardcover just feels like the clickbait of books.

[theswordwizard]

I'll have a ton of old and never-before shown art for sale starting this weekend and until the 26th at GalaxyCon Richmond! Charlie Cox will also be doing autographs and photos on Saturday if you like signed art - but come by and say hi!

[theswordwizard]

sorry ahead of time if this is a weird Q, i've been a follower for some time! i went to VCUarts but i dropped out when covid hit and for personal reasons i'm probably not going to go back even though i'd really like to, so i've been piecing together my own art education. were there any subjects/projects you were exposed to in the program that changed the way you approach art? one of the last classes i was able to take was a typography class and it opened my eyes to a design world i hadn't considered. you have such strong graphic design skills and it'd be really cool to hear what helped you develop!

Hey, thank you! and not at all - i totally get that, and i love talking about design lol. i rly enjoyed the gdes program but i kinda wish i could take it again now, i dont think i appreciated it as much as i could have when i was there 😭. as is life ig. i think def the biggest thing that i learned was about using typography and trying to develop an eye for it. im bad at the math parts of it but usually i can eyeball the negative space well enough. basically getting used to considering typography as graphic parts of a composition as opposed to just placing text on top of a graphic.

i think whats honestly most helpfully informed my own design work is honestly just trying to look at and collect as much "cool stuff" as possible. i follow a lot of random design instagram accounts (tbh u can just look thru the graphic design tags on insta and pinterest) even if i dont necessarily respect the artist (LMAO) even if they just do one thing rly interesting. also following some more experimental and a lot of art book/publication/zine accounts because theyre def gonna have some of the cooler graphic design work for print format especially.

one thing about insta (and tiktok tbh) thats both annoying and helpful is that with all the promoted posts you end up seeing a lot of whats currently "trending" for design, if ur following enough design accounts. like the truck sticker i just did on twitter is actually using an effect i learned from an insta reel that popped up on my feed lol.

one assignment from a class i rly appreciated was doing "make-a-days" where you basically made an image every day. didnt matter the quality or what it was but you just had to make something. it was good for experimenting and trying new things. also just picking a theme and making fake graphics/posters for my friends comics or something i liked.

i would also say that my personal biggest strength is that im just rly good at the programs, so i can ideate really quickly and its easier to figure out how to get a certain effect i want, and specifically how to copy a style I saw from something cool i saw somewhere :) outside my more bolder lines and compositional style (i dont have enough patience for rendering 99% of the time) i have a pretty flexible style because i usually have an end product or look in mind. also im usually inspired by other artists i follow online a lot too. but honestly just take the time to rly get used to ur program of choice and what effects settings and filters it has.

biggest advice is collect as many cool images as you can find and figure out what you like across them and how you can copy it for whatever ur making.

[theswordwizard]

as much as i love being a marvel hater I have decided if we get a Yamashita bishoujo figure of daredevil from it somehow I'll never say a bad word about it again

[theswordwizard]

i think this is a little bit reductive in how we consider "genderbends." I talk about it a bit in butchverse but there are the majority of genderbends where a big butch/masculine man, after being genderbent, is suddenly a petite and hourglass shaped girl with long hair and makeup. its not about being uncomfortable but its just exhausting how gender essentialist, boring, and frankly disregarding of character they are. Not to mention how many ethnic features that are considered "too masculine" get shaved down into european "feminine" features.

so, this is something i've noticed in fandom spaces and want to see how people ~generally~ feel regarding genderbends & genderswaps, especially if they are transgender themselves!

if there's a reason for why you like/dislike genderbends please share in the tags, this is something that genuinely interests me