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countingnothings · 13 hours

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i am your end

prints!

#tamsyn really gave us everything didn't she #sobbing about these BABIES forever

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countingnothings · 16 hours

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#art #groundbreaking florals #AUDIBLE GASP

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countingnothings · 19 hours

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Math is really tiring, im so glad i finally get to relax and do some knitting and crochet and i oh god oh my what the fuck

#textile art #too real

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countingnothings · 2 days

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When attempting to critique the values of a long-running franchise like STAR TREK, it's important to draw a distinction between superficial issues and structural ones.

"Superficial" in this sense doesn't mean "minor" or "unimportant"; it simply means that an issue is not so intrinsic to the premise that the franchise would collapse (or would be radically different) were it changed or removed. For example, misogyny has been a been pervasive problem across many generations of STAR TREK media, which have often been characterized by a particular type of leering-creep sexism that was distasteful at the time and has not improved with age. However, sexism and misogyny are not structural elements of the TREK premise; one can do a STAR TREK story where the female characters have agency and even pants without it becoming something fundamentally different from other TREK iterations (even TOS, although there are certainly specific TOS episodes that would collapse if you excised the sexism).

By contrast, the colonialism and imperialism are structural elements — STAR TREK is explicitly about colonizing "the final frontier" and about defending the borders, however defined, of an interstellar colonial power. Different iterations of STAR TREK may approach that premise in slightly different ways, emphasizing or deemphasizing certain specific aspects of it, but that is literally and specifically what the franchise is about. Moreover, because STAR TREK has always been heavily focused on Starfleet and has tended to shy away from depicting life outside of that regimented environment, there are definite limits to how far the series is able to depart from the basic narrative structure of TOS and TNG (a captain and crew on a Starfleet ship) without collapsing in on itself, as PICARD ended up demonstrating rather painfully.

This means that some of the things baked into the formula of STAR TREK are obviously in conflict with the franchise's self-image of progressive utopianism, but cannot really be removed or significantly altered, even if the writers were inclined to try (which they generally are not).

What I find intensely frustrating about most modern STAR TREK media, including TNG and its various successors, is not that it can't magically break its own formula, but that writer and fan attachment to the idea of TREK as the epitome of progressive science fiction has become a more and more intractable barrier to any kind of meaningful self-critique. It's a problem that's become increasingly acute with the recent batch of live-action shows, which routinely depict the Federation or Starfleet doing awful things (like the recent SNW storyline about Una being prosecuted for being a genetically engineered person in violation of Federation law) and then insist, often in the same breath, that it's a progressive utopia, best of all possible worlds.

This is one area where TOS (and to some extent the TOS cast movies) has a significant advantage over its successors. TOS professes to be a better world than ours, but it doesn't claim to be a perfect world (and indeed is very suspicious of any kind of purported utopia). The value TOS most consistently emphasizes is striving: working to be better, and making constructive choices. Although this can sometimes get very sticky and uncomfortable in its own right (for instance, Kirk often rails against what he sees as "stagnant" cultures), it doesn't presuppose the moral infallibility of the Federation, of Starfleet, or of the characters themselves. There's room for them to be wrong, so long as they're still willing to learn and grow.

The newer shows are less and less willing to allow for that, and, even more troublingly, sometimes take pains to undermine their predecessors' attempts along those lines. One appalling recent example is SNW's treatment of the Gorn, which presents the Gorn as intrinsically evil (and quite horrifying) in a way they're not in "Arena," the TOS episode where they were first introduced. The whole point of "Arena" is that while Kirk responds to the Gorn with outrage and anger, he eventually concedes that he may be wrong: There's a good chance that the Gorn are really the injured party, responding to what they reasonably see as an alien invasion, and while that may be an arguable point, sorting it out further should be the purview of diplomats rather than warships. By contrast, SNW presents the Gorn as so irredeemably awful as to make Kirk's (chronologically later) epiphany at best misguided: The SNW Gorn are brutal conquerors who lay eggs in their captives (a gruesome rape metaphor, and in presentation obviously inspired by ALIENS) when they aren't killing each other for sport, and even Gorn newborns are monsters to be feared. Not a lot of nuance there, and no space at all for the kind of detente found in TOS episodes like "The Devil in the Dark."

#star trek #everything about this

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countingnothings · 2 days

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#how dare you

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countingnothings · 2 days

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April 1, 2024: vocabulary, Safia Elhillo

vocabulary Safia Elhillo

fact:

the arabic word هواء (hawa) means wind thearabicwordهوى (hawa) means love

test: (multiple choice) abdelhalim said you left me holding wind in my hands or abdelhalim said you left me holding love in my hands

abdelhalim was left empty or abdelhalim was left full

fairouz said o wind, take me to my country or fairouz said o love, take me to my country

fairouz is looking for vehicle or fairouz is looking for fuel

oum kalthoum said where the wind stops her ships, we stop ours or oum kalthoum said where love stops her ships, we stop ours

oum kalthoum is stuck or oum kalthoum is home

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It's here, it's here; happy National Poetry Month! In case you forgot: I'll be sharing a poem every day in April.

Want it as an email? Sign up here and it'll be whisked to your inbox by a team of digital carrier pigeons.

Or follow along on Tumblr, Twitter, or RSS. (Want to see it mirrored elsewhere? [Instagram, Substack, Bluesky, etc] Please let me know!)

==

This is, uh, the 20th year of this project??? See many years of past selections by browsing the archives or exploring the poems sent on today's date in:

2023: Reasons to Live Through the Apocalypse, Nikita Gill 2022: New Year, Kate Baer 2021: Instructions on Not Giving Up, Ada Limón 2020: Motto, Bertolt Brecht 2019: Separation, W.S. Merwin 2018: Good Bones, Maggie Smith 2017: Better Days, A.F. Moritz 2016: Jenny Kiss’d Me, Leigh Hunt 2015: The Night House, Billy Collins 2014: Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls, Nico Alvarado 2013: Nan Hardwicke Turns Into a Hare, Wendy Pratt 2012: A Short History of the Apple, Dorianne Laux 2011: New York Poem, Terrance Hayes 2010: On Wanting to Tell [ ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes, Mary Szybist 2009: A Little Tooth, Thomas Lux 2008: The Sciences Sing a Lullabye, Albert Goldbarth 2007: Elegy of Fortinbras, Zbigniew Herbert 2006: When Leather is a Whip, by Martin Espada 2005: Parents, William Meredith

Thank you for being here!

#lit #language #i have reblogged this poem before and i will again #favourite poems

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countingnothings · 3 days

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#utterly delightful #skipping the queue because time-sensitive #it's gonna be MAY

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countingnothings · 3 days

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Fans' attitudes toward AI-generated works

Irina Cisternino, a PhD candidate of Stony Brooke University, is writing their research on topics related to technology, art and fandom. You can participate by filling out a survey and additionally, signing up for an interview. The survey is expected to last until at least the end of April, those, who signed up for the interview, will be contacted later. You need to be at least 18 years old to participate in either, be able to understand and speak English and identify as a fan.

After the completion of the research, it will be accessible as the dissertation of the researcher. If you have further questions, you can contact Irina Cisternino at [email protected] or Lu-Ann Kozlowsky at [email protected].

#fandom #this was a quick and interesting survey!#i appreciated the opportunity to think about WHY i'm not interested in consuming AI-generated fanworks

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countingnothings · 3 days

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paired with their often intimate and violent subject matter, i find the incidental way tamsyn muir frames women and their bodies throughout the locked tomb series to be refreshing bordering on radical

consider harrowhark; in the first book we see her as gideon sees her. she's a hideous ghoul with a flat ass and no tits, she's a delicate sopping wet beauty with a sharp face and angel bow lips, she's a triumphant and awe inspiring master necromancer screaming and fighting drenched in her own blood. the shape and condition of her body is allowed to take on meaning contextually based entirely on the situation and how gideon feels about their relationship in any given moment

she then spends the second book hobbling around with a sword twice her size, ripping apart her body to use as a weapon and passing out in her own vomit, struggling to eat and sleep – she and puts herself through absolute hell and never once thinks anything of it, and we're made to mourn this not as the desecration of a beautiful woman but as a manifestation of a human being's despair and self loathing, and we see this specifically contrasted against the care gideon tries to take when inhabiting her body during the last act

it's jarring, in nona, when we're suddenly made aware that her body could be perceived or valued as a commodity, when pyrrha is assumed to be nona's pimp. it feels strange and horrifying when we learn alecto's form was modeled for a doll, learn that she was given a woman's body as a display of ownership, an alternative to being consumed, and as we're processing this we watch gideon, paul, and ianthe, immediately setting aside their conflict in a desperate scramble to preserve harrow's body for no reason other than because it is harrow's and they love her

feminist fiction often focuses on women's relationship to a body which is valued more than the person within it – and that is a worthy experience to explore – but as a transsexual butch(ish) dyke, i have never really had the privilege of seeing my body as a precious commodity, never felt like it couldn't or shouldn't be a sight of violence and disgust, and as a result the locked tomb books have made me feel seen in a way that few other works of fiction have?

we as an audience are not made aware of how attractive any character would be outside of the context of our lesbian POV characters' perspectives, their relationship to patriarchal beauty standards is an utterly irrelevant detail we're never told and only occasionally glimpse through implication. the women in the locked tomb books are simply free to exist, to have experiences and feelings, to love and hate and grieve and suffer and die like anybody else, and to have those experiences reflected in their physical vessels

it's a perspective that's so fundamental and obvious that to praise muir for it for it feels almost patronizing, but i also think it's a huge part of what's made the series so resonant for so many queer women and i feel that that's worthy of highlighting and celebrating

#tamsyn really gave us everything didn't she #yes this #gender #bodies

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countingnothings · 4 days

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Those people who constantly reblog your stuff but you never really talk: