hey guys, i solved it! optimistic fiction and pessimistic fiction have the same moral value! we’ve done it! we’re free

like, ok

i’ll just pass this on to kurt vonnegut and fuckin…elie wiesel shall i

lmao YES like…whether you’re fourteen and creating characters who explode the preps with their brains or you’re an adult writing existentialist french novels…there are SO many reasons to engage with those ideas and emotions that aren’t “i am a rampaging asshole who hates hope” the way apparently some people assume??

like, it’s even reductive of who is experiencing the (fictional) cruelty. “dreaming of the battlefield” in dark fiction is just as likely (or more likely??) to mean “processing feelings of despair by imagining MYSELF as a cursed foot solider in an unending war” as it is “processing feelings of helplessness by imagining myself as powerful and unaffected by emotion”

or like. “hey guys, i actually WAS a cursed foot soldier in an unending war and it sucked shit.” if those guys are pessimists, fine, they earned it

oh, i am finally old enough to know why my parents took so long to grab their coats. why they would ask us to get ready to go only to sit down for another round of coffee. what would i tell myself, at 10 years old? it’s okay. sit down with them too. take in the extra hour with your friend and her family. when you get home, write down every moment in your diary. one day you will be older and you will be waving goodbye to your best friend, and you will turn the key to start your beat up little car engine, and you will look back over your shoulder. her hair will be blowing in the wind and she will be beautiful and you will be, for a moment, struck by all of it. what you will feel is so wide and nameless that it will engulf you. and you will think of being 14 and kicking her under the table in math every time you wanted to whisper something behind the teacher’s back. you will think about how long the days felt, and how you could hold her hand whenever you wished, but you didn’t. and you will think about all of the people you could have lingered with. and you will wish, more than you have ever felt a wish, that the universe just gave you that - more time to linger. more time to say - i love you. i know i need to leave, but i don’t want to leave you. and when i go, i am leaving a piece of my heart that lingers too. 

one more round of coffee. the days are so short, and you are so lovely.

“The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.” (mikko harvey)

Fuck that post going around saying "you can have coffee in your story without justifying it :) you don't need to explain everything :)" I want, no, I DEMAND a fully researched ethnobotanical paper on every single food item in your work, if you don't explain to me where did potatoes come from in your fantasy setting or don't explain how the industry of coffee works over interstellar distances with full detail you are doing things wrong and I personally hate you and I hate your stupid story, fuck you

Why are your stupid little wizards and knights eating potato stew in your dumb European middle ages fantasy world. Where did they get potatoes from. Where is the center of domestication of potatoes, do you have a fantasy Andean civilization? What are the social and economic consequences of having such a calorie rich crop in cold climates. I don't care about "themes" or "enemies to lovers with found family", I didn't ask about that. Where does your idiot space captain gets their shitty coffee from. Is it imported from Earth? Are there coffee growing worlds? Is it an alien species replacement with the same name? What are the social consequences of that? Don't try to change the subject, I'll stop pointing the gun when I want, I'm trying to have a conversation here,

gold in them there tags

The most beautiful footage of strangers dancing in public… https://twitter.com/Thorayaaa/status/1660180658646568967

its like a real life version of that children’s song with the magic bridge that you had to dance across

Highlights: --all the old people --one dude who starts doing the Cotton-Eye Joe and has the steps on lock --quinceañera girl with a dress bigger than the circle --lots of kids but particularly the dude who's doing the helicopter with his little girl --an entire section of Millennials doing dance moves I recognize, oh the nostalgia

Dr. Gachey with foxglove, 1890

Some of Van Gogh’s best work was done during a period of his life that he spent in a hospital being treated for his mental health problems. I could be wrong but I think Starry Night was among those.

This is consistently the case. Creators tend to do their best work when they are in a healthy place and receiving proper treatment and not being self destructive in their efforts to cope. Go figure.

All our experiences, good and bad, inform what we create, but suffering is not the price of great art. Suffering is what prevents artists from completing great art.

……… different fantasy races should be impacted differently by each other’s alcohol

no more if this “fine elvin wine” shit, I am going to personally write a fantasy setting in which every human knows that elf booze tastes and feels like fantasy la croix. there’s barely even a flavor, and you’d need to drink a few to even get tipsy.

meanwhile, every human with a lick of common sense knows that you need to plan accordingly if you’re going to be drinking dwarven liquor, because it hits you hard and fast and you’ll lose feeling in your legs faster than you thought was physically possible. the hangovers are the stuff of legend.

the flip side is that elves are an entire race of (comparative) lightweights, and a whole gaggle of teenange elves can get piss drunk passing around one bottle of fruity human wine

I think there’s some compatability among drinks brewed by reptilian races (dragonborn, lizardfolk, tortles, kobolds, etc) although you run into similar translation issues as mammalians, but there is absolutely no crossover. like if a drsgonborn and a dwarf in a (very cosmopolitan) tavern were to switch drinks it would be a nonstarter.

“this is basically just a capri sun,” the dragonborn says, disappointed.

“cool, I’m pretty sure I just drank actual paint thinner,” the dwarf says. “get me to a hospital.”

humans and halflings are probably the most compatible drinkers of any two races, although halflings find most human wines, beers, ciders, etc, a little too dry and bland for their liking. halfling alternatives are very sweet, which makes them a huge hit among the ‘I like alcohol but I don’t want it to taste like alcohol’ crowd

I think it would be very funny if being drunk was like… a relatively new cultural development for gnomes? there’s just something about their wacky gnomish constitution that prevented them coming by it naturally (traditionally they’re more into a variety of mushrooms and other recreational plants) but once they started mingling more with more alcohol-happy races they learned VERY quickly and started opening, basically, turbo-breweries that are basically one part distillery and one part wizard tower. VERY popular job for young alchemists trying to make some good money, and the reason why gnomes are known (among other things) for operating the craziest night clubs

here’s who I think should be able to get drunk but become sober at will:

1.) sufficiently powerful paladins and clerics

2.) aasimar [all of them]

2.) very very few tieflings. it’s not universal at all, but few tiefling traits are. I know 5e has really solidified them as horns + tails + inhuman skin color but we need to be making them weirder 

nimona the webcomic and nimona the netflix movie are so thematically different and come from such different periods in the artist's (nd stevenson) life and our lives and I love that?? I love the bitterness and angst and how morally gray the graphic novel was, just as much as I love the hopefulness and compassion and how unapologetically trans the netflix film is. watching his work grow as he grew older and I grew older and more secure in my sexuality, is just - so special. it's a rare thing to grow in parallel with the work of an artist you love, especially a queer artist, and I'm so fucking happy this film got made, especially with all its differences to the original work. something something to be loved is to be changed idk lmao.

Sharing the secrets of your hearth with strangers who will never be able to meet or thank you. Honoring the dead through learning their traditions of the home; emulation and exaltation. A good carrot cake.

Also while we’re here I want everyone to appreciate that This

This wild, wonderful, beautifully animated and heartfelt queer story started here

Here, on tumblr, by an art student who was wrestling with his identity, mental health, and religious trauma

Tell your stories, kids, you never know how many people will thank you for it

you gotta stop classifying everyone as either above or below you, better or worse than you at things, and sewing that tightly into your sense of self and self-esteem. imagining up a hierarchy that can make you feel arbitrarily good or bad based on the context of the qualities of people around you, not worth it even for the times when you do get to feel superior, not good for you or them, not stable or secure.  calm down everyone’s normal.  everyone’s just people.

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

"Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard." - Brennan Lee Mulligan

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s credits have almost exclusively Japanese people in them; but one name sticks out:

By searching around, people have found this forum post from 2007:

Follow your dreams.

reblog if ur proud of corey

He got a promotion for Tears of the Kingdom!!

Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.

a study i did because i realized idk how to draw environments at all LMAO

STOP SCROLLING THIS IS A PAINTING

the white suit tho

Great thought, but for those unaware, Kate Mulgrew’s gorgeous tux from The Killing Game was 100% a reference to Dietrich’s suit in Blonde Venus (1932) with Cary Grant, a pre-Code film directed by Josef von Sternberg. It’s hard to tell in Killing Game, but Mulgrew’s lapels are also sequined. So is the stripe in the trousers. It is basically a replica of Dietrich’s suit, no question.

Okay, so I have a PhD in queer fashion and media. So this is something I happen to know a lot about. So let me explain a few things.

For starters, You cannot get a more explicitly queer-coded woman than Marlene Dietrich.

Cary Grant (another closeted Queer in Hollywood) is also in Blonde Venus, and although their chemistry is great, their romance is unbelievable because it’s very clear that they are both absolutely queer. Hattie McDaniel appears in this film, another Queer in Hollywood (and the first Black person ever to win an Oscar). In both Blonde Venus and Morocco (1930), Dietrich flirts with both men and women. Dietrich was considered a Drag King in her day. She famously proclaimed, ‘I am a gentleman at heart.’

Dietrich often refused to wear trousers, and openly declared that she had plenty of women lovers. She is an iconic staple for queer sexuality even today. She famously kissed a woman in Morocco whilst wearing a tuxedo- with an audience watching and cheering. She then kisses a man, the audience applauds, and she exits. This scene (below) was added at Dietrich’s own behest. The scene was extremely controversial, and they had to defend it against the censors for months.

This very scene is one of the many reasons The Hays Code was enacted (rules from a super-Catholic man who bribed his way into Hollywood and forced the religious ideologies onto the screen), and this scene was one that The Hays Code often pointed to as ‘immoral’ and ‘perverted’ and ‘sexually explicit.’ You can thank the Hays Code for the split beds Lucy and Ricky had, for rules that a kiss must not last longer than a certain amount of time, that, absolutely, NO queer ANYTHING could be acknowledged to exist. Everything had to be subtext, and that’s why so many old black and white films feel really queer.

But Dietrich openly proclaimed herself queer, dressed in men’s clothing, kissed women on screen- and became a Queer icon not just in fashion, but in sexuality, decadence, and identity. The so-called famous ’Dietrich’s Sewing Circle’ (of which Hattie McDaniel was a member) was essentially every Queer woman in Hollywood who all had affairs with each other. Books have been written on this. Here’s a brief article about one of those books that goes through some of the basics.

Okay, Queer Fashion Film Academic, what’s your point?

The point is that by wearing a duplicate of a Dietrich suit- one where she openly flirted with women, no less–Janeway is 100% coded as queer in The Killing Game.

Especially with that tuxedo scene and the way she’s talking to Seven. In fact, most of the scenes in those episodes where she is talking to Seven, you will notice that Mulgrew plays Janeway with a bite- her eyes linger on Seven just a bit longer, her body language is just a bit more open and fierce than usual.

Even in Paris, for a woman to wear what Mulgrew/Janeway is clearly coding herself as a Queer person through that specific outfit. She is wearing a giant billboard that says I AM QUEER.

By putting Kate Mulgrew in a replica of a Dietrich 1940s tuxedo, Janeway is visually coded as queer through replication and imitation of one of the most Queer icons in cinematic history. That suit is too famous, too iconic, too specifically loaded with subtext and text of queerness through Dietrich.

I am convinced that the costume department 100% knew what they were doing, and part of me wonders if Kate Mulgrew herself had pushed for that suit. Why? Because Kate Mulgrew herself was the one who pushed for Janeway to have a same-sex relationship.

Above quote from this article.

Watch Blonde Venus. Watch Morocco. Then, watch Kate Mulgrew in The Killing Game. She imitates Dietrich’s body-language, her mannerisms, the smirk, in that opening scene. There is no question- Janeway has been possessed by Dietrich’s characters.

Funnily enough, for the rest of those two episodes, Kate Mulgrew is also very clearly imitating another Queer woman through her voice intonation and mannerisms, general fashion and hairstyles: Katharine Hepburn.

Because of her absurd visual and voice similarity to Katharine Hepburn (another Queer in Dietrich’s sewing circle), Mulgrew once played Hepburn in Tea at Five.

Like Dietrich (bisexual), Hepburn was very clearly Queer coded, as she was a lesbian. She was also famous in Hollywood for her male-coded attire, though she preferred regular suits to Dietrich’s tuxedos.

She, like Dietrich, had the same problem whenever they teamed up with Cary Grant- watch Philadelphia Story and tell me that the real ending of that movie is not Hepburn’s character, Grant’s character and Stewart’s character all ending up in a thruple together. The movie makes no sense if that’s not the real ending.

Hepburn wore trousers on film sets and this upset the studio so much they literally stole her trousers, trying to force her into a skirt. Hepburn just walked around in her knickers, refusing to wear the skirt. Eventually, the studio gave her back the trousers.

Okay, I’m going off tangent. Here’s your takeaway:

Kate Mulgrew, (because she’s an absurdly amazing talent), is very heavily is influenced in mannerism, voice, accent and appearance by two of the most Queer-Coded women in cinematic history in The Killing Game. Through fashion and performance, she embodies Dietrich’s Blonde Venus and Morocco characters, and through appearance, voice and body language, she gives that image an additional layer of of Hepburn’s fierce, Queer persona.

Conclusion: Arguably throughout all of Voyager, but specifically In The Killing Game, Kathryn Janeway is visibly Queer.

By the way, although she never got credit for it, the person who wrote Blonde Venus was Dietrich herself. Both she and von Sternberg were suspended for several months because the movie was considered too salacious by the Hays code, and it caused production problems for over a year.

The BFI has a great write-up on Dietrich’s queerness and fashion, you can read it here: https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/my-best-girlfriend-queer-dietrich-screen

That white suit means so much more than you thought.

Hands on deck

New chapter! I’m really doing this at a glacial pace, but we are getting there!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/46750624/chapters/121371400

Turns out the knife was cursed

“I pick up the knife” is now a mini-meme among my party and obviously it just means “I did something impulsive and now it’s going to take two sessions to solve.” 

“I pick up the knife” saga continues because listen we can sit around failing investigation checks all day or we could play d&d

They’re learning

I accidentally deleted the og blog follow me here

i think the funniest possible star trek viewing order might be strictly chronological.

you’d have to start with that Voyager episode where they go to before the Big Bang, then work your way through every other time travel episode, the one with the whales, and First Contact before you even get close to anything approaching a normal viewing order.

at some point you’d have to watch “City on The Edge of Forever” followed by “Little Green Men” followed by “Far Beyond the Stars” which is about the most tonal whiplash you could possibly get from three consecutive episodes of star trek. I think I want to try this now.

HEY THATS ME IM DOING THAT I HAVE A SPREADSHEET FOR IT AND EVERYTHING

me and all the bitches i pulled with my autistic swag

there's just something inherently holy about a girl vibing alone in her room

via Vincent Giarrano on instagram

https://instagram.com/vgiarrano?utm_medium=copy_link

There is, though. For so much of history, the concept of a private space for a woman to have to herself was a true fantasy that most women simply couldn't dream of.

So many women today take for granted a concept that women wrote entire books about a century ago.