@chaumas-deactivated20230115 / chaumas-deactivated20230115.tumblr.com
I don’t know how to be more clear about this: I don’t want new followers.
If you have just come to my blog with the intent to follow me but we’ve never even had a conversation, turn around now and save me the trouble of softblocking you later. I promise you’ll get over it.
Turns out Lost Carcosa had a revolution in the early 20th century, so what you've actually summoned is the Democratically Elected Committee In Yellow
Anyway. I think that depicting a society the reader is asked to accept as Good/Hopeful/Aspirational is one of the boldest and most inherently politically-charged things an author can do. Utopian fiction and lazy worldbuilding just aren’t compatible, and anyone aiming to create an uncontroversial, unbigoted fantasy society that ~Just Is~ is making a political statement whether they want to be or not. I understand and often share the desire for feelgood escapism, but what both author and reader decide feels good and what is being escaped from are not beyond criticism.
Related: I was thinking about “queernorm” and how it applies to my own worldbuilding, and the extent to which my worldbuilding is informed by my squeamishness and fear of judgement should I write something that makes others uncomfortable.
I’m not sure whether I would describe Space Emperor as “queernorm” when the whole premise is that a character learns to be repulsed and horrified by the atrocities of his own empire. The empire is queernorm, sure, but that is also something that is leveraged as a tool of conquest against colonized worlds as a major plot point.
So. I don’t know. I admit that I am cherry-picking in dynamics I want to explore and problematize—I am unwilling to truly wrestle with Patsy as a de facto rapist, for example, even though I acknowledge that it’s nonsensical to ask readers to believe that a galactic tyrant with absolutely no concept of other peoples’ interiority whose narrative is mobilized by sexual attraction is not a rapist. I want him to ultimately be likable—but moreover there’s enough of me inside him that I want to be able to like him. Perhaps as I write and mature as a person and storyteller, I will eventually be able to confront that as the plot hole it is and grapple with it in an honest way. But not yet.
Like, the whole premise of Patsy’s character is that he’s your standard old Hollywood homophobic caricature of a gay-coded villain who says things like “mwahahaha bathe him and bring him to me”—but that his sexuality is ultimately his redemptive feature. Rather than being a menacing facet of his villainy, his campy flamboyant homosexuality and desire for men is precisely what saves him. So I think that it’s thematically okay if I flinch away from making him a rapist, even though the story is about him grappling with all the blood on his hands, because as goofy and camp as it is it’s still important to me that it’s a story about gay love as a force for good.
Related: I was thinking about “queernorm” and how it applies to my own worldbuilding, and the extent to which my worldbuilding is informed by my squeamishness and fear of judgement should I write something that makes others uncomfortable.
I’m not sure whether I would describe Space Emperor as “queernorm” when the whole premise is that a character learns to be repulsed and horrified by the atrocities of his own empire. The empire is queernorm, sure, but that is also something that is leveraged as a tool of conquest against colonized worlds as a major plot point.
So. I don’t know. I admit that I am cherry-picking in dynamics I want to explore and problematize—I am unwilling to truly wrestle with Patsy as a de facto rapist, for example, even though I acknowledge that it’s nonsensical to ask readers to believe that a galactic tyrant with absolutely no concept of other peoples’ interiority whose narrative is mobilized by sexual attraction is not a rapist. I want him to ultimately be likable—but moreover there’s enough of me inside him that I want to be able to like him. Perhaps as I write and mature as a person and storyteller, I will eventually be able to confront that as the plot hole it is and grapple with it in an honest way. But not yet.
Thinking about some of the responses to that gatheringbones post from a few days ago where people in the notes are all “uwu how dare queer people be allowed to imagine fantasy worlds without oppression”, completely missing that lack of imagination is kind of the whole point. Why is your utopian queer-friendly fantasy society just Christian feudalism with the serial numbers polished off? Why is empire and the divine right of kings so appealing and romantic when you include yourself in the mythology? The reason people are sickened by it isn’t because they hate queer people enjoying fantasy escapism, lmao—it’s the idea that rainbow-washed Benevolent Unproblematic Monarchy Where We Don’t Have To Think About The Spoils Of Empire is a fantasy worth escaping to is extremely disturbing.
Also, frankly, if your oh-so-essential “escapism” is to the world where tomatoes are indigenous to Fantasy Europe… what is it you’re allegedly escaping from?
Thinking about some of the responses to that gatheringbones post from a few days ago where people in the notes are all “uwu how dare queer people be allowed to imagine fantasy worlds without oppression”, completely missing that lack of imagination is kind of the whole point. Why is your utopian queer-friendly fantasy society just Christian feudalism with the serial numbers polished off? Why is empire and the divine right of kings so appealing and romantic when you include yourself in the mythology? The reason people are sickened by it isn’t because they hate queer people enjoying fantasy escapism, lmao—it’s the idea that rainbow-washed Benevolent Unproblematic Monarchy Where We Don’t Have To Think About The Spoils Of Empire is a fantasy worth escaping to is extremely disturbing.
did u kno: ur icon is actually you in 20 years
ok I have cried over stupider things than not being able to go to or work at the transgender trapeze dance club.
holy fuck
this is the only cool place that has ever existed in the history of humankind
nothing else has ever mattered
holy fuck
this is the only cool place that has ever existed in the history of humankind
there’s a scene in an episode of the 1966 Batman TV series where Adam West watches a woman he met at a dance club die by falling into a nuclear reactor (it’s like the only death on the show) and sadly says “what a way to go-go”, a statement that lives in my head rent free and comes out of my mouth every time someone suggests that an action might kill me
the trick to including powerful poetry in your original fiction when you are a shitass garbage poet is to write shitass garbage poetry and have one character recite it and the other go “hey that was shitass garbage poetry, what gives” and then explain that it’s beautiful in the original language spoken on Glaxbatrone 5 but because Modern Standard Oureenian doesn’t even have a concept of glaxons all the beauty is lost in translation.
+100 year old salesman sample versions of coffins & caskets, with different wood types.
my controversial metric system opinion is that the meter should be 0.0692285593% shorter. This would have no practical benefits, but it would make the speed of light be 300,000,000m/s instead of 299,792,458m/s
alas, since a meter is not only the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/29,792,458th of a second but also 1/10,000,000th of the length of a half-meridian, this would make terrestrial measurements yucky and bad. the only viable choice is to reduce the Earth's circumference by 0.0692285593% to achieve total cosmic harmony
Herring gulls (Larus argentatus) can perfectly thrive in coastal and urban landscapes, however, these birds will steal your food as soon as you are distracted. Urban gulls pay attention to human behaviour in food-related contexts, and will mimic what humans almost all the time, a new study shown.
In a simple test, researchers studied how herring gulls behave in front person eating snacks on Brighton beachfront, UK. They gave the gulls the choice between two differently coloured potato chips, and when the human were eating potatos chips from one color, seagulls approached the food, and chose the same colour that the experimenter was eating, the 95 per cent of the time.
Seagulls were able to use human cues for stimulus enhancement and foraging decisions. Given the relatively recent history of urbanization in herring gulls, this cross-species social information transfer could be a by-product of the cognitive flexibility inherent in species who steal food, called kleptoparasitic species. This success in urban environments is suggested to result from behavioural flexibility, which is likely to require specific cognitive adaptations. In food-stealing birds, success is said to reflect an ability to integrate and use information about both the environment and other individuals, and kleptoparasites generally have usually larger relative brain sizes than their hosts.
#me when I see my coworker eating potato chips
i would kill for the confidence of novelists who write genius-poet characters and then actually write samples of the “genius” poetry in the book. if i were a novelist writing a genius-poet i’d just be like “trust me, the poetry’s real good.”
