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The Question Is Now

@the-question-is-now

the shared joy of meeting a new friend and no longer being alone in the universe.

yeah. yeah. I kink hard on trad marriage, relationship as employment contract. that shit is so fucked up and hot. wife as maid + prostitute + bReEdEr, husband as bank account. ooooh yeah baby I want to be mutually dehumanized by the gears of capital with you.

part of what's so hot about it is that there's a clear dom role and sub role for whatever suits your preference, but also the power dynamics are kind of mixed. like yeah the husband is in charge, he has all the "hard power" by virtue of being a petty bourgeois employer. but also the wife has various types of leverage she can use, she has sexual and emotional soft power because of the intimacy of the relationship, and she's incentivized to use it because of the adversarial economic nature of the thing. I mean it's so fucked up but it's so fucking hot. and then it's all confusedly mingled with genuine affection for one another because, at least in a fantasy, you probably got into this marriage because you did actually love each other, and maybe still do.

holy shit.

@iridescentknife is this what you meant by "some people's /d/ worldbuilding scenario got to be real life"?

in addition to being super hot if you're weird like me, this is also like... one of the primary things that is wrong with society. so.

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People talk about Transformative Fandom and fanfic and so on breaking down the barrier between fans and creators but sometimes I feel like it goes the opposite way

people write things that vastly diverge from canon, sure - and, at the same time, popularise this idea of ‘canon’ that I don’t remember from English Lit or like. the old fashioned practice of reading books and having friends who also read books and talking about them, or whatever

The people of Fandom seem to believe questions like “What is Willow Rosenberg’s sexual orientation?” or “Are these two boys in love, and will they always be together - and if so, exclusively, or can the furry chick get involved?” will always have an answer that is truer than any other. And, while they sometimes revolt and often diverge, as a first instinct they tend to consider the author’s stated intent so authoritative that they call it ‘the Word of God.’

so it’s like in some sense they’re widening the gulf in terms of who is considered to have control over The Narrative in its platonic form from which all fanwork is an acknowledged diversion.

And - fucking, and

There’s this tumblrer recently who wrote a take on Cinderella that did big numbers, you mighta seen it and anyway people keep complimenting her on her ‘fanfic’

Writing a take on Cinderella is just legit a thing you can do! As a regular, payable-without-getting-sued writer! It’s a longstanding tradition, rewriting Cinderella, people been doing that shit for years, but what

because she’s a regular person on tumblr, one of us, not A Creator (person with the backing of corporations to professionally produce and market their work) it’s a fanfic?

“I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can’t even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk…

- Franz Kafka

Hey, do you know of any paper or something examining the Baldr myth critically besides Anatoly Liberman's paper? Also, what do you think about Dr. Crawford's Loki misconceptions video or his collab video with ReligionForBreakfast?. I know you said in one of your posts that the question to whether or not Loki was worshiped historically has not been argued successfully either way, so that's why I'm asking if you've seen it since in one of them and others he says Loki wasn't worshiped bc no place names. Sorry if this is too hard of an ask. I decided to ask you since you're the only person who I know won't make up bullshit/give moral reasons to questions about Loki historically/mythically.

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A lot of scholars have written about the myth, though not necessarily in the granular detail or from the same angle that Liberman did. I think that more has been written about Loki which touches on the Baldr myth than works which are specifically about the Baldr myth. Here are some that come to mind, and they all have references to others.

John Lindow has written a lot about it, including a book, Murder and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology (which I haven't read). His article "The Tears of the Gods: A Note on the Death of Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology" can be read for free on JSTOR, which is valuable if for no other reason than his very quick rapid-fire summary of the main threads in the history of research up to that point, which also constitutes a good reading list for exactly this question. Lindow also contributed the "Baldr" chapter to Brepols' The Pre-Christian Religions of the North series (which I have also not read).

Jens Peter Schjødt mentions it throughout his book Initiation Between Worlds: Structure and Symbolism in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religion. He's mostly concerned with looking at the relationship between the world of the living and the world of the dead, so those are the aspects of the myth he focuses on. Schjødt has more experience writing about Loki than about Baldr, but of course you can't write about one without the other.

Kevin Wanner, best known for writing Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia, wrote an article called "Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth: Loki, Óðinn, and the Limits of Sovereignty," which is mostly about the relationship between Óðinn and Loki (including the Baldr story), and the relationship of the pair to human people, especially poets. It takes a little while to get to the point, but I think it's worth it.

Though it hardly even mentions Baldr, one of the most influential recent works on Loki is "Loki, the Vätte, and the Ash Lad: A Study Combining Old Scandinavian and Late Material” by Eldar Heide. I'm going to bring this up again soon.

Anyway, to the second part of the question, I'd rather get kicked in the solar plexus by a mule than watch a YouTube video so I'm not going to comment on what Crawford says there specifically, but the "Loki doesn't have any place-names" argument is old and usually comes in two varieties. If Crawford came up with a third, then I apologize for the oversight, but I imagine it's one of these:

  • (the good one): We know from the sagas that naming places for gods was a common way to show devotion, and from archaeology that many places named for gods were important ritual centers; furthermore places named for gods tend to concentrate near centers of social and political power. Therefore, if we're able to demonstrate that place-name evidence was passed down reliably from medieval or earlier times, it can be one of the strongest indicators available to us of cultic activity directed toward specific named gods and its presence allows us to make much more confident statements about worship than we can make in their absence. While this is inherently limited, because it necessarily privileges the beliefs of the people who had the social position to declare names of places and to direct the construction of ritual sites, it's one of the best pieces of evidence available to us.
  • (the bad one): oh yeah, no, if they don't have any places named for them they weren't worshiped. Yeah, they definitely would have named a place after him and it definitely would have been unchanged until modern times. No, there were no other forms of devotion, just naming stuff.

I don't recognize the statement "the evidence does not permit us to say that there was a cult of Loki" as equivalent to saying "we can say definitively that there was not a cult of Loki."

Moreover, I think it's a failure of imagination to think that all devotion would take the same form. I don't imagine that Loki's idol was ever on the highest platform in a major ritual site like Thor's was at Uppsala but that's also not a useful standard, and it seems to me that it's the standard that the place-name argument holds him to. If we look at the Baltic peoples for comparison, they had very different forms of worship for different gods, so the absence of evidence for worship of Žemyna in a context appropriate for the worship of Perkūnas does not mean that Žemyna was not worshiped.

Anyway these days everyone seems to be on the "Loki was just a regular house spirit for many generations before being assimilated into the gods" bandwagon, one that I have disagreements with, but one which is compatible with "Loki was worshiped but not in a way that would result in place-names." Liberman made a case for Loki being a very, very ancient god; and Riccardo Ginevra's etymology of Sígyn requires that Loki's wife already be thousands of years old by the Viking age. There's lots and lots and lots of ways to argue in favor of him having been worshiped, all of which require modification of the word "worship" from the one the place-name-arguers use, so that eventually everyone is talking past each other. At the end of the day, "We don't know" is the actual answer to most of our questions.

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“I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can’t even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk…

- Franz Kafka

I wrote a new Disco Fic!

It is a lot shorter than my first one, and contains: magical realism, an anecdote about Kim getting Jean drunk, and Harry taking morale damage from interior decorating.

(Mind the tags, it is rated E for a reason and contains Themez Not For Teenz™️)

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I dislike "it made me feel threatened, unsafe, and upset" as a justification for banning a behaviour or person *because* I feel threatened, unsafe, and upset by all sorts of random and unreasonable things. I don't want to live in a society where random things are banned. We as a society must not change to respect people's feelings in all things. This is not because the sensitive ought to be tougher or their feelings don't matter or that they are exaggerating their upset for power, but because it is between impossible and intolerable to avoid making anyone threatened, unsafe, or upset. Ex: Some people are upset by loud sounds, others by being told they must remind quiet. Being able to slightly hurt others is vital to freedom. Since almost everything hurts someone slightly. (ex. it is okay to drive on the roads even if the congestion enrages others)

(this post is about dealing with the public, or default social interactions. Once you know someone one can accommodate more, or unfriend them if their demands are too extensive)

An argument you often see around the discourse-sphere is that the "ancient aliens" style of explanation comes from a racist belief that only white people can invent things, and I think it's important to emphasize that this is subtly but significantly wrong. In particular, it's wrong in a way that sheds light on how the concept of "white people" forms a gravity well that draws all discourse around racism and nationalist propaganda into itself, often to its detriment.

The way that ancient aliens type conspiracists justify their own beliefs is by suggesting that the various things they're talking about are anachronistic; the "actually it's white supremacy" argument is based on a theory that their concept of anachronism is actually informed largely by the race of the people in question. This doesn't really hold up, though: there are lots of ancient great works by nonwhite people that never got this treatment, and one of the most classic sites to get the "ancient aliens" treatment is Stonehenge, whose putative builders are people the theory's proponents would generally consider white.

What's actually going on here is that this strange way of defining "anachronism" is about, not "whiteness" or even race in the sense we talk about it today, but rather a narrative of "civilization" which both predates and informs "whiteness" as a cultural construct. This is where you get such ingrained stereotypes as the "stone age -> bronze age -> iron age" progression, or the notion of a "tech tree" so often replicated in sim games. It's a narrative view of history which is centered on the people that narrative is designed by and for, and this relates to whiteness, because the mythology of whiteness is that this is its "cultural heritage" -- it is the same pot in which modern-era race mythology was cooked -- but it's different in ways that are important to understand. In this model, Stonehenge is excluded not because of racial differences but because of cultural ones, because its builders were "outside the story" that the hegemons of Western society tell about themselves.

Another factor that's important to understand here is that a lot of this is informed by works whose construction felt mysterious due to a lack of supporting documentation, and that what was considered a "lack of documentation" comes not from objective standards but from the biases of the theory's originators -- so a lot of the detailed Egyptological documentation wasn't incorporated because it was later work not known to the people who kicked off the idea, oral records were discounted due to a textual bias, and so on. (The theory is also particularly fond of attributing alien origin to the works of oral cultures who were wiped out by colonialism, which is where Stonehenge comes into it, yeah?)

These are all ethnocultural biases of the same kind as white supremacy, but they're different, and trying to make it all about whiteness limits one's ability to understand the phenomenon. It's important in particular to understand the way that the logic of ancient-aliens conspiracies is narrativizing, in which it reflects a desire to fix untidy elements of the highly fictionalized narrative of "civilization" by replacing it with something else which provides the same narrative satisfaction; the reality that real human history is just messy and scattered and impossible to reconstruct entirely lies outside what that kind of person is willing to contemplate.

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So although Order of the Stick is explicitly textually not an actual D&D game with actual players, it’s pretty cool how well Belkar’s character arc work not just as your usual ‘asshole character learns to care’ story but also mirrors the narrative of an asshole troll player learning to play the game seriously.

Like, while the whole Order kinda plays on standard D&D Class Stereotypes on some level, Belkar was always the one who played more into a Player Archetype than a Character Archetype. Maybe because that Player Archetype is often defined as lacking an interest in serious Roleplaying.

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to play a tabletop RPG just for dice-throwing and violence. The problem with That Kind Player is more when they attach themselves to a group that is otherwise interested in character and plot - and rather than finding some sort of compromise with the rest of the group or just looking for a new one more amicable to random violence - they keep hanging around while expressing just a total disinterest in the plot.

And caring for really nothing but scoring as many kills as possible, even if it gets in the way of the group’s general strategy…

And/or the DM trying to tell a compelling narrative…

And sometimes just being disruptive and causing conflict for the lols.

Also, Belkar has, like, objectively the worst build in the entire Order and he started out with no understanding of his Class outside the Two-Weapon Fighting. He really does act just like the One Guy who really wanted to play a double-wielding character because it’s badass, saw it’s a Free Ranger Feat and refused to read any of the other features or flavor text of the class.

So when he befriends Mr. Scruffy, it’s not just the ‘Mean Character Warms His Heart to a Cute Animal’ trope - it’s also figuratively about a player learning how to actually play and roleplay his Class and use other class features that are not directly related to just Stab the Enemies and They Fall Down.

And so much of his character arc is about the realization that he doesn’t really know himself. It is a character arc from an in-universe person but it also parallels a narrative of someone who is learning how to engage with his character for the first time and almost, like, retconning more connection between Belkar and his non-combat class features as the metaphorical Player becomes more invested in using them.

And it’s just… pretty interesting, in a stage where OOTS is really moving away from meta-D&D jokes - that the most meta-D&D part of the comic is the pretty-serious character arc of one of the main party members

And, I dunno…

Anonymous asked:

on canon vs fanon: i actually have my fave character where i've dumped all my hcs into (he's nb! he has a complicated relationship with his gender! he's aroace!) and i know a lot of ppl esp in my current fandom where fanon has overtaken the source material and now every blog has their own twist on these characters, but i still have the kneejerk reaction of 'i'm doing it wrong' or 'i'm projecting too much' bc the source material is beloved to me, it feels like i'm just using this character as a base for my oc and isn't that weird? to think that others can get a pass for being self-indulgent yet when i do it, it's 'too far'?

i've absolutely seen characters get this treatment in other fandoms and i love their takes on it but when it comes to mine it suddenly becomes 'wow who is this guy', like the version of this character that exists in my head is so divergent from the version of him i loved as a kid that it's a completely different person now, and i'm coming to terms with the fact that as i grow older, i also want this character to grow with me, and that changes my relationship with how i view them, y'know?

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!

[ID: text reading

Leaves

By Ursula K. Le Guin

Years do odd things to identity.

What does it mean to say

I am that child in the photograph

at Kishamish in 1935?

Might as well say I am the shadow

of the leaf of the acacia tree

felled seventy years ago

moving on the page the child reads.

Might as well say I am the words she read

or the words I wrote in other years,

flicker of shade and sunlight

as the wind moves through the leaves.

End ID]

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Article about how insanely tasty and diverse tofu is in China, compared to how Americans experience it.

Haven't heard of most of these, but as a kid I remember basically always liking what people did with tofu in Korea. As an American adult who occasionally uses her kitchen, tofu is... this sad substandard thing I eat when I have the willpower to avoid meat. It doesn't surprise me that China does much, much better things with it all the time.

Fascinating to read how these Chinese chefs who make [tofu that I'd pay a lot of money for] see it:

The ability of Chinese craftspeople and chefs to turn humble plant-based ingredients into dazzling culinary experiences is on par with the highest gastronomy in the West. But to the creators, these foods are rarely seen as “art.” They are subsistence. To consumers, these foods are not pride and treasure. They are relics of poverty, discardable afterthoughts en route to modernization.

you know those movies that follow an animal around through different human lives? Black Beauty, War Horse, that sort of thing? I would like to write one about a shipping pallet. they’re animals to me and you can only imagine the shit they see

Finally, someone who shares my bizarre/damn near psychosexual obsession with shipping

what an underappreciated part of society! everyone talks about Bezos, but nobody thinks about the cardboard box that made his business possible; everyone knows what a sea captain does, but who writes stories about longshoremen?

I don’t think you can truly appreciate (or hate, or understand) something without understanding the materials that made and maintain it, and for modern society, that’s intermodal containers and pallet jacks.

You know what I can't stand, though? Those skids made of pressed wood chips. If they get even slightly wet they just fall apart.

On the night of January 7, sitting alone in my room, I hit play on the world’s longest movie.
I found the film by accident. Around that time, I was searching for something that could count as the longest horror movie ever made. The most viable contender I found was Douglas Gordon’s 1993 film installation, 24 Hour Psycho, which plays Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho at roughly two frames per second, amounting to a 24-hour viewing experience. But another film that kept popping up on the lists I searched is ultimately what caught my interest: Logistics Art Project.
Complaining about the length of Marvel movies is standard fare in our world. The longest of the bunch is currently Avengers: Endgame, which clocks in at three hours and one minute. Logistics, meanwhile, has a running time of 857 hours, or roughly 285 viewings of the Avengers film. If you wanted to watch Logistics in one sitting, you’d need to stay awake for 35 days and 17 hours. I’m one of likely just a few people to have watched the entire thing.
In 2008, Swedish artists Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson came up with an idea. As they describe on the Logistics website, they got fascinated with “the fact that the sourcing of just about every object in our surroundings involves almost inconceivable global logistics,” and wondered what those journeys looked like. They determined that in order to truly satisfy their curiosity, they’d need to track, in reverse chronological order, the journey of the “sort of anonymous clutter that everyday life is full of.” 
Eventually, Magnusson and Andersson decided upon tracking the course of a pedometer they bought in Stockholm to the factory it was manufactured at in Shenzhen, China. They write that, “Four years later we found ourselves on the largest container ship in the world on our way from Sweden to China.” As per the trip: “We had started the journey by truck to Middle Sweden, then by freight train to the port of Gothenburg, and after four weeks at sea, we filmed from a truck again, this time from the port of Shenzhen to a factory in Bao’an.”

...

Each of these vehicles has a person at the helm, but they are just as invisible under capitalism as they are in Logistics. In 857 hours of total silence, I can recall each moment a person entered the frame. 
Our container ship makes regular stops at ports to exchange cargo. Each time we stopped, I would scour the frame for any sight of a human behind the cranes, forklifts and trucks taking cargo to and fro. I spent hours waiting to see one particular crane operator only for them to stop their crane stare directly down the barrel of the camera lens. I nearly cried. 
The most beautiful moment in Logistics comes at one of the lowest points. Hundreds of hours of not seeing so much as a human-shaped silhouette, and then a deck hand stops dead centre in the frame and washes the windowpane that sits in front of the lens. Soap, bubbles and water wash down the frame. The world of containers and the open sea drift into a gentle, psychedelic haze. 

one of my opinions that's apparently controversial is that if writing has neither rhyme nor metre then it's prose. you need only one of the two, assonance and consonance count as rhyme, and neither rhyme nor metre need be rigid, but those are actually the things that make something "poetry". just writing with an eye for cadence and how it will sound when recited, or inserting half-assed enjambed line breaks everywhere, does not change prose to poetry

this conception of "poetry" as something with no qualities of verse except short lines and an artistic sensibility is a weird dead-end we wandered down as printed works gradually became ubiquitous, as people started thinking of prose as schematic and silent and came to see all artistic and oratorial qualities of the written word as "poetic". In the 20th century this coincided with that process by which poetry's decreasing relevance gave it a patina of "high culture" historicity -- the same thing that happened to opera -- which led to a bunch of people styling their writing as poetry simply because they aspired to the status of "poet". ironically this led to a significant atrophy of actual poetic skills and now we're in this situation where most of our best modern poets are rappers because that's where people care a lot if you actually do the work. just a very silly situation

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this would mean the Epic of Gilgamesh is not poetry, and while it may not have a specific identifiable metrical structure, that would be a weird way to classify something which otherwise has many features of poetry (repetition, a density of metaphor and abstraction more commonly found in poetry than in prose, use of epithets and other literary motifs that are usually associated with an oral poetic tradition), and which also predates even the earliest monuments of prose literature by many centuries

contemporary free verse may frequently be bad poetry, but it’s still pretty clearly poetry--and it’s not doing anything that poetry hasn’t done for thousands of years.

It's pretty straightforward. If you're an elite, Ivy institution whose brand is all about mingling with "future leaders" and the ruling class of tomorrow, the rise of poor and working-class Asian children of immigrants who've been absolutely crushing the SATs presents a big problem. If something like half of an incoming class is composed of these students, it makes it difficult for admissions offices to include enough children of the current (largely white) elite, who will go on to be in influential positions in politics, media, finance, etc. in the next generation (and will be donors, influential alumni, etc.). This is not only *not* about admitting more poor black and brown kids, it's about keeping the "merely" bright kids of laundromat and bodega owners from diluting the social capital of the Ivy league "experience." It is deeply classist on an axis that is also, alas, racist. It is also about keeping elite college presidents from having to testify in front of the Supreme Court (reputation management -- like stock price -- being the obsessive goal of any executive board or body).

Quote is a commenter.

The problem is not that institutions like the Bilderberg Meeting or the New York Times are an unelected shadow government, but they act as if they were. Harvard admissions have so much weight because Harvard admissions officers themselves think and act as if they were selecting the future leadership of the US.

Any institution that sees itself as a gatekeeper of democratic or popular consensus in this way must be abolished, one way or another, in the long term, or it must have its power curtailed until it is demonstrably and verifiably unable to act as such a gatekeeper.

Anonymous asked:

Any thoughts on the long-term effects of the Iran-Saudi agreement? It feels like a meaningful realignment but I can't really guess how it will change regional politics beyond the immediate "less war" part (which seems obviously great).

I wouldn't expect too much from the new deal since it seems to be something of a first step, but it is a first step in the exact right direction. The Saudi-Iranian rivalry has thrown gasoline on the fire of most Middle Eastern armed conflicts for the last 15 years, and deescalating tensions between the two greatly reduces the likelihood of prolonged proxy conflicts. The big question is whether this deal can last to serve as a foundation for further deescalation, or if this is only a temporary detente

The biggest immediate winner of the deal is Yemen, which has been absolutely devastated by years of Saudi attacks on Iranian-backed forces. Also good news for Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, which have similarly been trapped between the two powers. In addition, Israel hates this deal because it reduces their opportunities for creating an anti-Iran coalition, which has recently become their primary gambit for normalizing regional relations without having to address their colonization of Palestine. That's just another win in my book

This is also a big step-up for China in terms of showing off their diplomatic capabilities, especially because they've done so in a situation where everyone knows the US could not have brokered such a deal (we're too anti-Iranian and pro-Israeli). Even though Saudi Arabia has long been a US ally and Iran has long been a Russian ally, both governments clearly see cooperation with China as a positive endeavor. The deal is a tangible example of the kind of multi-polarity which will likely come to define 21st century geopolitics

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