Memento Mori rings 💀

so called "free thinkers" when khepri

did you get taken by khepri halfway through your sentence or wha

take my hand. we have to build a giant cannon

my cat hates taking his pills. the only way we can get him to eat them is to turn it into an elaborate pantomime - we take the packet out of the cupboard slowly and hold it up, saying “oh!! what’s this? what’s this? a TREAT? a TREAT for louis????” while making surprised faces. we offer him a pill… then, before he has a chance to sniff it, we wag our fingers at him and replace it in the packet so it becomes a Tantalising Forbidden Mystery. we continue doing this until he’s so confused and excited that he will eat the pill as fast as possible, just so he can find out what it is before we can take it away from him again. as soon as he’s eaten it he looks utterly disappointed and betrayed, like a child who just ate a delicious sweet only to find it was a chocolate-coated brussels sprout. it never gets old

Op this is the funniest thing I’ve ever read

op how could you just hide this from me in the tag this makes this objectively 10000000% funnier

50 First Doses

You trick Louis? You trick Louis like a common fool? Oh jail, jail for owners ONE MILLION YE-oh what’s this? A treat?

A comment on my livestream of a rally I attended in Vancouver for Palestine. She really thought she did something, lmao

Some clowns would really cheer on fictional characters resisting oppression and then stand behind genocide in real life.

I accidently saw my old Maximilian armour Twins elsewhere today and give me vibes to have another doodle.

damn girl, you'll make the prettiest flowers once your body rots into the earth

It has been brought to my attention that a large number of people probably don't know why Campbell's "monomyth" is bunk when discussing anything other than a piece of modern literature written under the direct influence of Campbell, in much the same way that a Freudian analysis of any story that was not written a) after Freud and b) based on acceptance of Freudian theory is bunk.

If you've studied English Lit and haven't done genuine rigorous dives into the serious studies of folklore, mythology, religion, anthropology and a number of other things, then you may have unfortunately been told by your literature professors that Campbell is not bunk. This is, indeed, unfortunate.

This is a solid takedown of why, both in terms of the fact that even Campbell's theory in and of itself is honestly so vague that it's much like a newspaper horoscope (you could shove anything in there and make it match if you tried hard enough), and then also in terms of engaging with the ethnocentric and also intellectually lazy nonsense it is.

Campbell was a literature prof who fully and completely believed in the Jungian (or at least branch of Jungian) premise that humanity has a collective psychic unconscious that is shared across the globe. He took single versions of stories, many of them in translation, massive numbers of them from cultures he did not know and did not understand, and hacked them up and reinterpreted them, out of context and based on Freudian and Jungian principles, to make a claim about a Universal Human Understanding.

This, of course, is ethnocentric bullshit.†

Now much like Freud was incredibly influential on the European literature of the early and mid 20th century and as such you absolutely should keep Freud in mind when reading, say, Sons and Lovers, Campbell was influential (and sadly continues to be influential) among lit and other creative spaces and is certainly applicable to, for instance, Star Wars and Labyrinth.

But much like Freud, you should not actually apply him to anything that wasn't written under his influence, because in terms of application to anything else, his theory is bunk.

It's also not taken seriously in literally. any. field. outside European lit circles and the visual media/etc that are their heirs. In fact the renowned folklorist Alan Dundes* said at one point, "there is no single idea promulgated by amateurs that has done more harm to serious folklore study than the notion of archetype".

tl;dr: fuck Joseph Campbell, stop letting him collapse the gorgeous array of human storytelling, mythmaking, meaning-making and metaphor into a boring tawdry (heterosexist and hetero-sex-obsessed) pastel, he is bunk.

But he's relevant to Labyrinth bc Lucas was a fanboy and also a producer, and the guy managed to convince a lot of people that he was legit.

†for instance just to start with the idea that there is only one version of literally any major cultural/folklore story is itself deeply silly; this is basically never the case. Even stories we here and now are used to thinking of as having one authoritative version - like the story of Achilles being only the Iliad - does not reflect the actual reality of the people of the time. Or us, for that matter: the cultures between the first written form of that epic and now have all of us reinvented, retold, reinterpreted and repurposed the story of Achilles to suit ourselves a million fucking times. There are a billion Achilles.

Fuck, man, you can't even claim there's only one version or one myth-set for fucking Batman, and he really was made up by one dude less than a century ago.

*who is himself not at all perfect, but who was at least an incredibly serious, dedicated scholar of folklore in its inception as an academic field

Obviously I don't know how many of the people who don't actually follow me will actually look in the notes and see this one but something worth mentioning:

A lot of people in the notes, mostly in tags, are noting stuff about "but there ARE all these stories about [whatever] that seem to line up - ! and there's no cross-contamination of cultures!" or similar - often not in an argument directly, which is why they're in the notes, but as a sort of sideline comment/etc.

And I get why there's that impulse, but here's the thing:

This plays out even with older stuff within "our own" culture. For instance, most people are wrong about Romeo and Juliet. And that's supposedly "our own" culture.

Please note that as I talk about this I'm talking about something different than a personal literary response to anything: I think it's extremely natural and appropriate to reinterpret stories and rework them and react to them for yourself, from your context, because that's how we do that. But it's also important to be aware of where what's coming out of a story is because you're bringing it to the text, rather than arising from the text "naturally" because of where it came from and what hands and voices put it there. Romeo and Juliet can mean whatever you want it to, personally; and it has also meant a lot of things to various cultural waves of our General Society.

But that's what we're bringing to the text; what the text brings from its own time and context, where it was composed from, most people are dead wrong about. And when you are attempting to use stories to talk about universalities between humans, or anything like that, that is what you are doing: for that you have to take stories in their own contexts.

If you want to comment on what the Odyssey says about ancient Greece, you have to take it in its original language, and know as much as you can about its original context and frame of reference. And if you don't, eg, speak and read Homeric Greek at a high level, you can't do that. Any English translation has been unavoidably reinterpreted by the translator. Our culture, English culture, has cross-pollinated it, at least a little bit.

Good translators are very honest about this and often seek to give the reader as much context as possible for their translations and why they make choices - Emily Wilson is a great example of this. But at the same time she's still making choices and because she is also choosing to preserve the poem as a poem (which there are good reasons to do, because form is also a genuinely relevant part of the information), she does for instance maybe have to choose between reminding the audience that all the domestic staff in this poem are enslaved, vs conveying the complex hierarchy of enslavement that was also an information-bearing part of this culture.

And there I'm talking about a text that has actually been part of shaping our culture; I'm talking about a culture that had significant underlying influences on ours, and so is in many ways familiar to us, or at least can be familiar. If you step out of that more direct lineage, into, say, stories of the Maya peoples, or the Dunne-zaa, and so on, you're in much greater danger of getting it totally wrong.

So if you're making your declarations about "oh but these stories do match up - " based on English translations? Be aware that you are not engaging with the stories themselves - you're engaging with how an English translator already altered them. If you don't know the rigour of that English translator, or their experience with the culture they're translating, or anything else, and if you don't have the knowledge base to assess that rigour and experience, you can't actually speak to whether that matching is because of something from the actual culture of origin, or whether it's something that's being inserted.

and tl;dr it is exactly that kind of ethnocentrism (and I do say "ethnocentrism" here - Campbell's American/Eurocentrism is on top of that, but the ethnocentrism is something anyone can manage, and for any culture)* that leads Campbell so fucking far astray: this astounding arrogant belief that he can take stories from so many different languages, cultures, eras, and origins, and even accurately understand all of them, given how many of them are in languages he doesn't speak at all (let alone well) and cultures he is deeply ignorant in.

This is why his "archetypes" are actually very bad for understanding folklore - why they're absolutely fucking not "the basics" from which "greater nuance" can later be understood but are obliterations of what actually exists to Fit into a mould he imposes and makes up. And that very tendency to veer back to thinking this is why I'm so firmly emphatic in going Fuck Joseph Campbell, despite acknowledging elsethread that yeah because he's part of the modern history of storytelling/etc we can't actually just throw out the entire man and so knowing his shit is useful to engaging with media studies/etc.

Because his rot actually set in pretty deep and getting rid of it at that deep level is important, because....yeah.

†I do however love how "traduttore, traditore" becomes its own little lesson in the very issue - it's said to have come about because of Italian objections in the 1500s to French translations of Dante, but the phrase itself made its way into French as traduire, c'est trahir whereas the two phrases come out different from each other in English: "translator, traitor" vs "to translate is to betray" - or actually if I want to be really pedantic, "to translate, it is to betray", or if on the other hand I want to be more natural and punchy, "translation is treachery."

But there's actually some qualitative difference between "translator, traitor", "to translate, it is to betray" and "translation is treachery" - it's not a huge one, but by changing what elements of speech are used to convey the idea, the impact is slightly changed. Or is it? It's changed in English, but . . .

And so on.

*for example, the genuinely kinda obnoxious tendencies of the Hellenizing Greeks and later the imperialistic Romans to assign correspondences from their gods to everyone else's

Got this expression related question in my inbox here a while back and figured a drawn response was warranted. -------------------------- Lackadaisy is on Patreon! Posting a lot of animation pre-production art and merch previews lately!

"‘mech pilots are horny because they get sweaty and fuck after the fights’ you pedestrian, mech pilots are horny because the neural feedback loop from striking an acquired target w/ +90% accuracy on a full flight of LRMs makes most pilots leak in their seat. It’s not about two pilots, separated by mountains of metal, learning to mutually respect the others skill it’s about how these industrial war machines have direct lines into their nervous systems and an oxytocin & dopamine tap directly linking destruction to pleasure."

-twitter user nyetalia

yeah sure i'll permanently attach that addition to this image

This is pretty much the plot of I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter

whenever i have those brutal searing being-dissolved-from-inside period cramps during school or work i pretend i am a viking warlord who has been stabbed in the abdomen but i killed the assailant so i’m the only one who knows im injured and i have to carry on normally til the end of the battle to keep up my mens morale

this is good

Gonna adopt this method of dealing

This is a very valid approach, but as someone who dealt with those exact cramps for many years:

THAT IS NOT NORMAL OR HEALTHY

It turns out your period should actually make you feel just vaguely sick and sore, with mild cramping when you pass a clot. MILD. As in “easily beaten by 2 ibuprofen and a large coffee.”

You should feel tired or gross, sure, but not in agony. If the cramps are worse significantly worse than a headache, you have a problem

The agonies are NOT HEALTHY.

Please contact a doctor, ideally a gyno you trust, and tell them about this cramping. Be clear that you are dealing with a level of pain you normally associate with grievous injury. 8+ on the pain scale.

“Oh it’s not that bad” YOU ARE ROLEPLAYING A DYING MAN TO COPE YES IT IS THAT BAD

And I’m willing to bet that you’re passing more than a typical amount of blood, too. Did you know that you shouldn’t EVER fill a menstrual cup to capacity in the course of a normal 8 hour work day? That if you have tampon or pad leakage in under 4 hours, you’re “flooding” (passing blood too quickly to be absorbed).

These, too, are not healthy. But most people don’t know what a “normal” period even is. Especially since these symptoms often start around age 12, when adults are busy obsessively telling you to grow up and that it’s “not that bad” so that most of us with problems internalize that we are weak, not that we need help.

There is help.

There are treatments.

In my case, it was a simple matter of changing a single medication. It turns out, menstruation is supposed to suck because you’re vaguely lightheaded and your hormones are wacked out.

It’s NOT supposed to make you enter psychotic episodes or torture you like an open wound.

If you at all can, contact a doctor about this issue.

ingrid sundberg's colour dictionary - writing help

“Poor? Have you tried starving? “

What if we

And I do mean this

Set their buildings on fucking fire

“To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.”

― Oscar Wilde

Looks like they’re doing both at once now!

Yep. If history gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling, you aren't learning history. You're being indoctrinated.

the undersiders are really funny because every single teenager on that team is fucked up in a unique and extraordinarily weird way and yet all of them are convinced that they're the single normal person on the team. every undersider team meeting involves all of them thinking "what freaks....i'm the only normal one here" simultaneously

taylor: Class-A Bug Girl Freak. the only time she ever calls herself 'unhinged' is when she accidentally experiences regular human emotions instead of successfully dissociating hard enough to kill god (which is her default mode, and also something she's convinced makes her the most normal person in the room)

brian: if he was a 45yo man, he would be very normal. but he is not a 45yo man. he is a 17yo boy LARPing being a 45yo man, while actively being a literal supervillain, and maintaining that doing so makes him more normal than everyone else

lisa: knows she's not normal, but is convinced that being self-aware about the fact that she's not normal means she's wrapping back around to counting as normal

rachel: dog autism. thinks that there's something wrong with people who do not also have dog autism, and she's arguably occasionally right

alec: not entirely sure what's wrong with him, but is pretty sure it can't be that bad compared to what everyone else has going on, thus leaving him convinced that he's the most normal one via elimination. yes, this contradicts with his self-sidelining tendencies. no, he hasn't noticed that. he has the emotional literacy of a brick.

aisha: thought she was a freak prior to joining the team (read: lonely 13yo with adhd), promptly learns what actual freaks look like, and decides that, despite her best efforts, she is unfortunately the most normal person here

who wants to explain "dog autism" to me?

the canonical explanation for rachel's atypical behavior is that her power stripped her ability to understand human body language, social norms, etc. and replaced it with the ability to understand dog body language. in practice, this literally just makes her read as autistic--she has a neurodivergency that results in her not adhering to societal standards for ways of thinking and behaving, and she subsequently receives traumatizing levels of systematic and interpersonal abuse for it. hence: dog autism. bonus points for autistic people having a tendency to identify with or as nonhuman things and her just, like, straight up having a dog brain and hanging out with dogs all the time

I cannot believe you guys did my gal Lily dirty by not mentioning her. But, I guess that's fine? Because, as a hero with such attachment issues that she abandoned professional heroism for super-villainy only in order to be with the several-years-older woman whom she met in a time of crisis just so she wouldn't be alone, that's so normal that it doesn't really fall under any sort of "freak" category. She's the only normal teenager on the team.

"kill them with kindness" wrong. bone construct

“kill them with kindness” wrong. two handed sword

"kill them with kindness" wrong. attack soup

“kill them with kindness” wrong. explode yourself

"kill them with kindness" wrong. nuke melbourne.