A Pile of Junk

It takes work to curate your online spaces, but if you don't do it, corporations will do it for you using a couple harmful key principles. 1) Negative emotions hold your attention better than positive emotions. 2) Calm/contented people are less likely to spend money.

Curate your online spaces starter pack:

[Tweet by Kingfisher & Wombat @UrsulaV: “O best beloved, if you are doomscrolling Twitter today, ask yourself if there is anything you can personally do. If there is, do it. If there isn’t, remember that anxiety is not activism. Your misery does not improve the world a single iota.”]

Anyone know about Dinotopia?

Why didn’t Dinotopia ever blow up like Harry P*tter or whoever the heck? The books are beautifully illustrated, feature what would have been very accurate looking dinosaurs at the time of publishing (with a later book even retroactively adding feathers to some of the dinosaurs), and it takes place in the real world, so it could allow for lots of people to put themselves in the settings and story like a lot of people did with H*gwarts and stuff. 

They even have something akin to HP’s house system, with some teenagers being given saurian partners and placed within a habitat group (such as forest, desert, beaches, etc) to learn more about the world and explore themselves and their relationship with Dinotopia. So not only do you get a habitat to be placed within, with whatever personality traits that implies, but you also get a cool prehistoric friend to come with you!

It’s such a rich, beautiful, setting, and I wish more was done with it. George Lucas was even in talks of making a Dinotopia movie at one point, and while that didn’t seem to go anywhere, it’s said the city of Theed on the planet Naboo in Star Wars Episode I was heavily inspired by Waterfall City from Dinotopia.

Anyway, if you’ve not read Dinotopia by James Gurney, please do so. It’s beautiful, and while it’s target audience is children, it never talks down in a way to make anyone feel excluded, and as mentioned, the art is simply breathtaking.

Notes from the Anti-heroine panel with Tamsyn

[Image ID: A string of four tweets by twitter user called mash pojadeo @saltyseaghost. The tweets were made on February 19, 2022 and read:

Tweet 1: Notes from the Female Anti-hero panel at Boskone with Tamsyn- Some notes from her Female Anti-hero Panel-

"Harrow is a super-huge dick"

"Harrow needs medication"

Tamsyn confirmed played renegade femshep in Mass Effect

Tweet 2: She wrote Harrow as mentally ill, specifically schizophrenic which she struggles with in real life

Stuggled with making Harrow sympathetic but not woobified

"You can look at Harrow and want to kick her into a well"

Tweet 3: "You shouldn't want to have coffee with Harrow at Starbucks, she wouldn't like any of the drinks anyway."

Her favorite movie as a kid was the original She-ra movie from the 80s

She really wants to write a piece of shit protagonist who isn't "saved" at the end.

Tweet 4: She said we are seeing a resurgence in quasi-victorian moral fiction especially if the fiction is being written by women.]

veil.

séance

TMA x Villain(빌런) feat. @worldformula

I guess it’s just screaming into the void day for me, but one other thing I really wish people would get through their skulls is that critical thinking and literary criticism are not “critical” in the way that your mom is “critical” of your outfit. Critical analysis of media is a lot more involved than thinking up half-baked ideas for why said media is shit, actually.

Thinking critically about a text requires that long before you think in terms of good and bad, you consider intents and outcomes, you understand both the immediate and wider context of what you’re looking at, and you acknowledge that fiction is subjective. It’s about thoughtful examination of all aspects of the work.

What function does this element serve in the work? Why might the author have included it? How was it incorporated, and how does it interact with other elements? Setting aside possible intents, but looking closely at context and execution, what impact does this element have on the work as a whole? On different possible audiences? How does all of this play into or deviate from greater patterns across media?

And for the love of god please stop forgetting:

What lens or framework am I using to examine this text? What are the limitations or problems with that framework? What are my biases? (<-Americans do this challenge) If I choose to examine this through a different lens, how does that change what I see?

…That’s barely a start, but the point is, if your idea of “thinking critically about the media you consume” starts and ends with picking any number of random things you heard are bad and seeing if they show up or not in said media, you’ve done the critical thinking equivalent of tripping at the starting line and really have no place telling other people to follow your lead whilst you are, quite obviously, face-down in the dirt.

This is what happens when you leave Captain Shrike and their ex husband alone on the locomotive for more than five minutes

Depictions of dragons. [Tom Rhodes, via ArtStation]

I won’t say that Annihilation is a “bad” movie because I know a lot of people enjoyed it, but it is so, so, so, so wildly removed from the themes of the book that it’s unrecognizable. There are some good visuals in the movie but it removed absolutely everything I found meaningful and enjoyable about The Southern Reach and I really wish they had simply made an original movie that didn’t try to capitalize off the book.

Like. The movie isn’t about ecology at all. I’m not sure I can articulate just how vitally that changes the story and makes so much of the setting-as-character just sort of... wasted aesthetics.

The Biologist is absolutely one of my favorite characters in all of fiction and I really think that her misanthropy and difficulty with interpersonal human relationships were a key part of her character that only have real narrative resonance in a story about ecology. Her alienation and difficulty with forming strong, meaningful connections with other people, even her husband, was mirrored so wonderfully by her ache to find and create connections within an alien ecosystem. She never “overcomes” her misanthropy and integrates into a normal social life, but with her final transformation, she becomes part of a whole, a strange and beautiful cog in an intricate machine of an alien ecosystem that she now truly belongs to. Her humanity is gone, but the core of her identity remains—covered in countless variations of her own scientist’s eyes, she is still an observer, still studying the world she has become. And I love that for her.

sometimes I wonder if Jeff Vandermeer realized he’d given The Biologist a happy ending

the movie version was ROBBED of her peaceful retirement in marital bliss and happy ascension to monstrous godhood

for some characters, bestial transformation and loss of humanity is horror

for others it’s a relief

skelly spouse sKElly SPoUSE SKELLY SPOUSE SKELLY SPOU-

It’s just a repaint/clean up kind of day :’)

I am not brushing a cow’s teeth, Walter. You know I have real work to do, right?

Ooooh my hair in the top right corner is EVERYTHING!

I’ve been following @mycolyco on tiktok ever since their synth-playing fungus first graced my page and this cordyceps-generated synth tune has got to be the EERIEST one yet.

who wants to go to the aquarium with me i want to stand in cold rooms for two hours straight and look at jellyfish and maybe pet a small stingray

emotionally i am here

Feel like shit. Just want to pet sea pancakes again.

Tbh I think fandom generally needs to get better at sitting with the uncomfortable fact that a story/fanwork/meme/whatever can hurt one person and help another

This is why I think “tag warning” culture is kinder and more constructive than cancel culture / “no problematic content” culture. One size does not fit all, but if we learn to be more aware of the fact that the same thing can be emotionally validating or cathartic to one person and upsetting to another, and pick up a general mindset of thinking before we post, “what might people need a heads up for in this content?”, we grow more compassionate, more thoughtful, and more understanding of the differences in people’s experiences.

this is how maybe for one person, reading a fic about someone escaping an abusive relationship can be liberating, and for another person it’s triggering. how headcanoning a person as binary trans may hurt people who believe them to be nonbinary. you will never be able to make a character so perfectly perfect that they satisfy everyone, and you literally cannot. all you can do is just... do what makes you happy, and use appropriate tags to keep viewers safe.

I just listened to the new episode of The Strange Case of Starship Iris... and I cried. Five minutes in, I was crying, because I have NEVER had a character straight-up say they were grey-ace. I have never had a character explain their sexuality that way. Hearing Arkady say 'it has degrees, it's not that I don't want to do anything, it's just that it doesn't drive me,' struck me so hard. I had to pause the episode and give myself a moment because despite the upswing in representation lately this was still the very first time I've heard a character describe their sexuality and thought 'oh, that's me! That's exactly me!'

It means the world to me. @iriscasefiles , thank you. Thank you so so much.

i’m stressed and tired (it sure has been A Year already!!), but....i couldn’t go to bed without responding to this.

i think the first time i got asked whether arkady was ace in the spring of 2019. at the time, my answer boiled down to: i am not word of god, but headcanon what makes you happy! and i mentioned that imagining arkady as ace-spectrum made me happy, because i liked the idea that she might be like me.

that sparked a bit of a conversation, and a few weeks later, this is what i wrote:

it’s been a long two years since then. but - this? knowing that arkady got to be that for someone?

that is everything to me. so thank you for posting this, @impossibleclair​. i am so, so happy to have read it.

take this gender quiz I beg you it is literally LIFE CHANGING