#dinosaur drivel

[shimmerbeasts]

@weavertali gets a small experimental starter set in a hypothetical Star Guardian Verse.

The one aspect of being a Star Guardian, which Jinx had never really been able to warm up to properly was the whole duty part. "You have a responsibility to protect the world." "Star Guardians kill monsters. We do not harm people." "You must learn to temper yourself, Jinx." "Star Guardians are not chaotic." Blah, blah, blah! Boring! Super boring! All Janna's drivel ended up meaning for Jinx was: "We hate you being you. Stop being you and start taking things more seriously."

On some particularly bad days, Jinx thought it to mean: "You do not deserve those powers. You do not deserve to be a Star Guardian. First Star must have made a mistake when it chose you."

Today's training session had been a disaster. It probably hadn't helped that Jinx had been paired with Janna out of all people. Whose idea was this?! All the veteran Star Guardian had done was complain about Jinx's form and her 'enthusiasm for violence', giving some stupid vague warnings about darker impulses leaving you open to corruption. Horse shit! Janna was full of dinosaur doodoo.

Eventually, she had gotten so sick of the constant berating that Jinx had used her powers to quickly half-teleport and half-fly away. She needed to be alone. She couldn't handle Janna right now. She couldn't handle Poppy either. Miss World Hero had stared after her as she had flown away like the very idea of leaving training was somehow punishable by death.

They could all go to, well, not really hell. More like a starless night. Wherever Star Guardians go after they die. The void? Double void? Was that a thing?

Jinx had settled down on the brim of a chimney, her feet dangling precariously off the edge. The chill of the night air kissed her bare skin but the First Star's power was like being your own heater. Jinx barely even shuddered. Shiro and Kuro were circling the guardian, noticing her gloomy thoughts. Despite the lack of wings, both magical mediums were more than capable of flight much like their mistress.

Unlike other magical mediums, which were soft and fluffy looking, maybe even cuddly, Jinx's creatures looked more like the beasts of a horror tale. Shiro had settled down beside her, his white skull with glowing red eyes making the slim ocelot-like creature so very hard to read. Sometimes, he looked even less physical, safe for the bones of his face. His white pelt was dotted and sprinkled with pale grey or silver dots, markings and stripes.

Kuro, meanwhile, had a long serpentine body, though Jinx always swore his hide felt more like touching a shark than scales. Even his black fur was so dense and fine, it seemed to blend into his hide. Sharp claws prickled her shoulders as the cat's upper body craned sideways and peered up at Jinx. Kuro's tail wrapped around her body in a tight hug. Much like Shiro, he had not shut up, softly meowing and purring at her.

"I am not in the mood, guys", Jinx said with a defeated sigh as she snuggled against both mediums. "Kuro, your idea with the firework is cute and all, but my heart ain't in it. Why did anybody think making me spar with Janna was a good idea? She was just gonna pester me anyhow."

She cupped each of her cat medium's horrific chins and fondly looked into their eyes. "You think I am a good Star Guardian, right? There is nobody who wreaks carnage quite like me. I mean who needs starlight anyway? Just tell me what has to be blown up." She laughed and the mediums laughed alongside her.

However, Shiro suddenly got up and floated into the air. Growling, he put his ears back, his weird feathery decoration around his neck bristling. Kuro looked up too, snarled in alarm and swiftly turned himself invisible. Even around other Star Guardians, her rocket launcher rarely showed itself. Almost as if he knew Shiro created enough problems of his own.

Mistrustfully, Jinx rose too and reached up with her hands. Shiro swiftly morphed into her trusted Gatling Gun, which the Loose Canon of a Star Guardian was now directing at the approaching figure. She called out: "Whoever you are, I may have skipped training today, but I can still whoop your ass!"

Her fingers flexed around Shiro's trigger as the figure came closer and closer. It took every ounce of the miserable pile of patience, Jinx possessed, to not give in to the urge to fire wildly at the approaching assailant. Jinx had never taken the whole difference between friend and foe seriously.

However, it paid off that she had waited for as the figure came shooting closer, Jinx recognised a fellow Star Guardian. The pale, rose-coloured hair, the fair brown skin and that whitish-pink dress with its long golden and rose-coloured bands attached to the sleeves were easily recognisable.

"Taliyah?", Jinx called in surprise and lowered Shiro, however, she did not allow her rocket launcher to turn back just yet. Kuro's claws dug deeper into her skin as his eyes bore deeply into the other Star Guardian, still completely concealed. "What are you doing here? Did Janna send you?"

#weavertali #rp: botched training session #im gonna show him youll see: jinx interaction

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

reading update: april

let's go babyyyyyyy!!!!! WHAT have I been reading?

Cursed Bunny (Bora Chung, trans. Anton Hur 2022)

I added this short story collection to my TBR because I saw a reviewer call the first story the grossest thing they had ever read in their life, and you know what? that really was the grossest thing I've ever read in my life. I shan't even describe it because I'm eating and I don't want to ruin my lunch. but Chung writes a fascinating collection of sinister stories that dance across genre and offer up something strange to look at each time; do not let the awful poop baby scare you away.

White Noise (Don DeLillo, 1985)

I had no plans to read this book and in fact did not even know about it until a colleague told me about reading it for a class and then generously lent me her copy. it's an extremely clever book and also a maddening on that I wouldn't recommend to anybody; the ways in which DeLillo builds his commentary on class and consumerism and The Unbearable Shallowness Of It All is so deft and also made me feel like I personally was going insane. just pages and pages of brilliantly constructed drivel that means nothing and says so much. I think if the average booktokker had to explain this book they would explode and I should probably be on a watchlist for enjoying it.

Lunar Love (Lauren Kung Jessen, 2023)

this is hands down my favorite of romance novels I've read so far this year, because the protagonist, Olivia, it batshit fucking crazy. she's not supposed to be, we're probably supposed to just find her a little uptight and lovably neurotic, but she's absolutely unwell and reminded me of nothing so much as an early season Rebecca Bunch from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I spent the entire book waiting for her to attack someone or commit arson, because if you interpret the Chinese zodiac even a little wrong this woman goes fucking apeshit. tl;dr Olivia works for a matchmaking company based on the Chinese zodiac and truly, sincerely believes that real love cannot exist between people whose animal signs are incompatible; every time this worldview is challenged she has a fresh breakdown about it. the romance is whatever, the dialogue is nothing, and there isn't even any sex, but when I have to rank all twelve romance novels I read this year I strongly suspect Luna Love will be #1 because I support women's wrongs.

Shubiek Lubiek (Deena Mohamed, 2023)

a GORGEOUS (and massive) graphic novel about a world very similar to ours, with one little difference: magic wishes are real, and there's a tightly controlled industry surrounding who gets to use them and what they can wish for. Mohamed beings with an Egyptian shopkeeper, Shokry, currently trying to be rid of three very powerful wishes; what follows are three interconnecting stories of the people who buy Shokry's wishes and how their wishes complicate their lives. Mohamed beautifully balances magic and social commentary, examining every level of how wishes impact society. we see everything from a poor woman imprisoned in an effort to pressure her to sign over a wish to the government to an affluent but deeply depressed teen living in a gated community filled with pet dinosaurs, ending with a story about Shokry himself grappling with how to use the final wish to help a friend. reader, it did make me sob.

My Solo Exchange Diary Vol. 2 (Nagata Kabi, trans. Jocelyne Allen 2016)

there's not much I can say here that will be meaningfully different from what I said about Vol. 1 back in February. Nagata's memoir manga has just gotten to be such a little ray of sunshine for me; seeing her ongoing growth and struggles, the very relatable nonlinear progress, is affirming and devastating in equal measure. this volume in particular becomes much harsher with the benefit of hindsight - seeing her briefly hospitalized and struggling with drinking much more painful reading the book and knowing that her next release will be entirely centered around alcoholism and a much more serious hospital visit. for the love of god I just want this woman to be okay.

Mind of My Mind (Octavia E. Butler, 1977)

I would just like to say that I'm SO glad I decided to read the Patternist books in order of story chronology instead of release date, because if I had read this without spending all of Wild Seed getting to know what Doro's whole deal is I would have been lost at sea. as is, I will be upfront and say Mind of My Mind hasn't been my favorite of Butler's books - it feels like more of a supplemental text than anything, a bit of bonus content to explain the wider world of the Patternists that I know is coming, without the outstanding grace of Wild Seed. but I DO love some unhinged cult behavior, and goddamn does Butler deliver on that front. these telepaths are completely willing to go full cult after, like, two weeks of cohabiting against their will, and frankly I love that level of dysfunction for them.

Priory of the Orange Tree (Samantha Shannon, 2019) - after years of avoiding this fucking behemoth of a book I finally read it, and I'm delighted to report that it's... pretty good? it's fine. it's still unforgivably long and the prose frequently feels a little artless, but if you like a dense-ass fantasy book filled with people who have silly names debating the politics of dragons and magic gemstones in made-up places then you will have a blast. personally I love that shit, so I can wholeheartedly endorse.

Her Body and Other Parties (Carmen Maria Machado, 2017)

I've been rereading Machado's short story collection at a snail's pace, and having finally finished I'm delighted to say: this shit still fucks! I feel like I almost understood "The Resident" this time; definitely more than I ever have before. I'll get it some of these days!

My Alcoholic Escape From Reality (Nagata Kabi, trans. Jocelyne Allen 2019)

oh look, it's the much sadder memoir manga that I said was coming! I gave up all pretense of trying to pace myself this month and grabbed the next volume of Nagata's story from the library pretty much immediately; oddly, the first and fourth seem to be the only ones they have. seeing Nagata's slide back into alcoholism was rough, of course, but I was extremely impressed by the way she managed to so thoroughly translate the pain and tedium of her long hospital stay and pancreatitis diagnosis onto the page. her illustrations of food as she adjusted to her new diet were especially delightful; I felt like I could really feel the joy of discovering new treats that were safe to eat right alongside her. much is made in this book about Nagata's desire to branch out into fiction manga alongside her memoirs, and I'm curious to learn where that part of her career has gone.

#reading updates

[sickadelia]

hi im now throwing my pessimistic city dweller hat into the adult eds ring. please excuse the shitty drawing, i havent been able to draw The Boys well since i was 12. 

lore that i wrote 10 months ago while i had the stomach flu under the cut!

I can’t really see them in a tiny town or a huge city, so I was thinking that they end up somewhere in the middle, something that’s a city but isn’t too overpopulated- maybe like 600k to 1m people. 

Ed People often seem to struggle with a career for Ed, and deservedly so, because he’s kind of an enigma. A common career choice for him is being a self-made popular comic artist or someone who works in horror movies, but I don’t think he would last very long in any creative industry, because he would probably have trouble changing his ideas to accommodate others. Sure, he takes directions from Eddy pretty easily, but once the task has emotional significance to him, he kinda shuts down and digs his heels in. To be successful in these kinds of industries, you need to work really hard to show that you’re willing to change your ideas and take criticism for the greater good of the project. So because of that, I don’t think he would have that much success in that field. Therefore, I present to you: freelance artist/record store Ed!

I’m a record collector, and I feel like that scene is very Ed. It’s all about falling down deep rabbit holes and discovering bizarre artifacts that may have otherwise been lost to time, and Ed is the kind of person I can see absolutely loving researching random things and then infodumping to anyone who will listen. So, I decided he should be the “mascot” of a record store in the hipster-y part of town: people go there specifically to hear his recommendations and learn from his infinite knowledge. This is also the only thing keeping him employed, since I can otherwise see him being confused as to what to do, like skipping out on sweeping or sorting through records. He just sits at the till and blabs, which does make the business more appealing, however he’s otherwise no use to the owner.

As for the freelance artist part, I can imagine him trying to self-publish a comic or gain a cult following online. Though, as I mentioned, he is probably unwilling to sacrifice his vision for others, making the comic basically unintelligible. He’s a good artist, sure, but his comics are impossible to follow and are filled with inconsistencies, plot holes, etc… it’s style without substance. The only successful work he’s gotten doing art specifically is posters for Eddy’s band, which I’ll get into later.

Edd Oh, Edd. He always gets the long end of the stick in terms of careers, either in STEM or as a university professor (I’ve noticed that his actual careers are always pretty vague… he’s just “a scientist”). However, while I do think science and inventing will remain one of his most prominent hobbies, I wanted to delve more into the obscure territory and make him a journalist. Though his apparent interest in journalism is only present in one episode, “Truth or Ed”, I honestly think it is a pretty fitting career for him; he has a flair for the dramatics, is very passionate about vocabulary and language, and usually takes the moral high ground and stays very committed to his standings in any situation. So I thought it would be cool if he was an opinion journalist for some dying academic dinosaur paper, which has made an unsuccessful jump to online news and now mostly reports the lowest hanging fruit, like celebrity pregnancies. Edd was probably a fan of the paper during the glory days, and though he is absolutely flattered by the opportunity to work for them, he’s stuck writing articles about meaningless drivel rather than topics of any real worth, which probably messes with his deep life philosophies or whatever.

Another trait that often gets ignored is Edd’s pretentiousness, biting sarcasm, and assholeish tendencies. He’s probably THAT kind of hipster journalist who wears oversized trench coats, owns a typewriter but never uses it, sits in cafes and stares wistfully out the window waiting for some attractive person to compliment him or recognize him, and will completely cut you off if you have an opinion that conflicts with his own, no matter how pressing they actually are. While I don’t think romance would be of any particular interest to him, I think he’d still go on several dates in an attempt to gain approval and acceptance from others, and blame them when he acts like a total jerk. 

Eddy I have never seen someone do adult eds without struggling to come up with a career for Eddy. Used car salesman or telemarketer is a common choice, which are funny and fitting, but they don't have very much depth to them. And besides, those are jobs he’d actually be good at, and most of the show’s humour comes from Eddy failing to get what he wants. I don’t think he would be an interesting character to follow if he was satisfied with his life. So like Ed, he has his aspiring career that he’s bad at and a job he hates that he’s good at: so he’s a line cook AND a metal head. 

I’ve worked in restaurants for a long time, and every single line cook I’ve met has been screwed up in some way. They either terrorize everyone for their own amusement or selectively pick who they’re nice to, and usually end up being very awkward and making every situation uncomfortable. Eddy is probably the restaurant’s top line guy, so close to being the kitchen manager, but no one can stand him enough to totally put him in charge. Throughout the show we see that eddy has an interest in cooking and baking, such as making pizza, and I definitely think he could capitalize on that for a career. But as good as he is at his job, he’s an absolute terror to work with and controls and manipulates situations to give himself power that he may not otherwise have. For example, I can see him kinda screwing around new employees or the dishwasher, and the new guy is too terrified to stand up to him (this is me projecting LOL)

Now, for the metal head portion. Eddy is probably super pretentious about music, however he fakes being into certain bands to look cool and impressive. He claims his favourite band is Tool, but if you asked him to name more than five of their songs, he’d get stuck pretty quick. He fronts his own metal band called The Hunks (the original name was “Eddy and the Hunks”... that didn’t last very long), where he sings and plays the guitar, both very poorly. However, the other guys can’t survive without him, since he brought them all together, writes all the songs, books the gigs, etc… so despite him being the only thing holding them back from success, they’re practically useless without him.

#ed edd n eddy #eene #adult eds #cringe tw #also my first art post woohoo

[markadoo]

Eat your fucking heart out, Post.

(this was done without the use of tools. just notepad)

Min letters: 6

adenine adenosine adenovirus adipose admire adonis adverse advise adviser advisor advisory aedile aeolian aerosol afield aidful aileron aimless airmen  airspeed alerion alevin alimony allium allonym allonymous allude allure allusion allusive alluvion almond almoner almonry alpine alumni alveoli alveolus alvine amnion ampere amplify ampoule ampule andiron aneurism aneurysm animus aniseed anodise anodyne anomie anonymous anymore anyone areole arisen armful around arouse asleep asperse aspersion aspire assoil assume assure asunder audile audism aureole avenue averse aversion daemon daimon daimyo dairymen damosel dampen damper damsel damson darnel deanery defame defile define deform defray defuse deliver delivery deliveryman delusion delusional delusory demean demeanor demeanour demise demonise demure denarius denary denial denier deplore deploy depose deprave depress depression deprive derive dermal dermis desire desirous desman despair despise despoil devalue develop devilry devious devise devoir devour diaper dimple dimply dinero dinner dinosaur diploma disarm disease disfavor disfavour disloyal dismal dismay dispel dispensary dispense display displease displeasure disposal dispose disprove disproven dissever dissolve disuse diurnal divers diverse dollar dollop dolman dolmen dolorous dolour domain domineer domino doofus doomer doorman doormen doornail dormouse dorsal dorsum dossier dreamy dressy drivel driven droopy dropsy dualism dunlin duress durian dynamo earful earldom elapid elapse elderly ellipse elusion elusive emerald empery empire employ employe emporia empress emprise emulsify emulsion enamel enamor enamour endear endive endless endonym endoplasm endorse endure enfilade enfold enisle enliven enormous enroll ensample ensile enslave ensnare ensnarl ensure envelop envenom enviro environ envious eolian epidermal epidural episode eponym eponymous epsilon erasion erosion espadrille espalier espousal espouse evasion eversion evildoer eyeful eyelid failson failure fallen family famine famous famuli fandom fanion favour fearless federal federalism fedora feline feller felloe felonious felony female femoid femora femoral fender fennel

ferula ferule fervid feudal feudalism fielder filename filler filmland finale findom finery finesse firedamp fireman firemen fissure flamen flareup flavone flavonoid flavor flavorless flavour flavourless flense flimsy floodplain floral florid florin flounder floury fluidram fluoride fluorine fluvial foison folder fondle fondue foodie foolery foramen fordone foredo foredone foredoom foreland foreman foremen forename formal formalin formalise formless formula formulae foulard founder foundry foveal frameup freedman freedom freeload freeman frenula frenum friend friendless friendly frilly frumpy fulmar fulsome fumarole fundie funeral funereal funnel fusion fusional illude illume illusory impale impanel impasse impede impend impersonal implode implore impose impound impress improv improve impulse impure indoor indoors infamous infamy infernal inferno inflame inform informal infuse inland inlander inroad insane insole insular insure invade inverse island islander lampoon lamprey landform landless landsmen lanner launder laundry laurel lavender laymen leaden leaven leisure leisurely lemonade lemony leonine leopard leopardess leprosy leprous lesion lessen lesser lesson lieder lifeless limeade linden lineal linear lineman linemen linesman linesmen lineup linseed lioness lipread lipoma lively livery liveryman liverymen loafer lonely lonesome looney looper loosen lordly louden louver louvre 

loveless lovely lovesome loverly loyalism luminal luminary lumine lumpen lupine madrone maiden maidenless maidenly malodor malodorous malodour mandolin mandoline maneuver manful manifold manille manner mannerly mannose manoeuvre manrope mansion manure manyfold marine marlin marline maroon marvel marvellous marvelous maslin masseur massif massive maunder mealie meander meanie measles measly measure medallion medial median medieval medlar medley medulla medullae medullary medusa medusae melanin melodeon melodious melody menial menopause mensal menses mensual merino merlin merlon messer mindful mindless mineral misdone miserly misery mislay mislead misled misplay misread misrule missal missay missel misspell misspend misuse modern moderne modernise modify modius modular module moduli modulo molder mollify monera monody monopole monopolise monopoly monorail monsieur monsoon moonless moonrise moorland moraine morale moralise

morass morose morsel moulder mousse mudflap muesli mullein mullion mundane munion murine muslin mussel myelin myriad myself nameless namely napery nelson nemesis neural neuron neuronal neurone neurosis nimrod ninefold nodular nodule nomade nomina nominal nominee nondairy nonfan nonfinal nonlinear nonperson nonplus nonpolar nonrandom nonslip nonvisual noodle noonday normal normalise normie novella novelle nudism nullify numeral nursemaid oarsmen odious odorless odorous oedema oenomel oilman oilmen oilseed oleander ominous omnivore omnivorous omnivory onefold onerous oneself onesie online operand opossum oralism ordain ordeal ordinal oriole orison ormolu osprey ourself overall overalls overdo overdone overdose overdue overfed overfill overfull overlaid overland overlap overlay overleaf overleap overlie overload overman overmen overpaid overpass overpay overplay oversea overseas oversell oversold overspend overspill overuse ovular padrone padroni pailful painful painless paisley palfrey palimony pallid pallium pallor palmer palmful palomino pander paneer panful panino pannier pardon pareve parley parlous parodise parody parole parolee paronym paronymous parsimony parsley parson parvis passel passion passive pavior paviour pavise payroll pearly pedalo pedlar pelisse pelvis penalise penfold penile penman penmen pension pensioner pensive penury perennial perfidy perfume perilous perinea perineal perineum period person persona personae personal personalise personalism personify persuade persuasion persuasive perusal peruse pervade pervasion pervious pessary pieman piemen pilfer pillar pillory pilsener pilsner pinafore pineal pioneer planner plasmid player playful playroom please pleasure plenary plenum pleura pleurae pleural pleurisy pleuron plosion plosive plover plunder plural pluralise pluralism pluvial podium poison poisonous polarise polder polearm pollard pollen polonaise polonium polymer polymerase polymerise polynomial pomade pomander pomelo ponder ponderosa ponderous poodle poolside poorly porous poseur posole possum pounder praise praiseful praline prelim preload prelude premed premise premiss presale presell preside presold pression presume prevail previous prideful primal primate primer primeval primula prison private profane profess profession professional profile profuse profusion prolusion promenade promise pronoun prosody proven provide pseudo pseudonym psylla puerile puisne pulley pullover pulmonary pulsar pulverise purfle purify purine purism purlin purloin purvey pylori pyramid radfem radium radius railmen rainless rallye ramify ramose rampion ramson random randomise ransom rapine ravenous ravine realise realism really reason redeploy redline redone refile refill refilm refine refold refuel refund refusal refuse relaid relapse relief reline relive reload remade remain remand remedial remedy remind remiss remodel removal remove rename reopen repaid repeal repine replan replay repose repulse repulsion repulsive resale resave reseal resell resend reside residua residual residue resile resinous resold resole resolve resound respell respond response responsive resume reunion revalue revamp reveal revile revise revulsion rifleman riflemen rindless rissole roadie roadmen rollup romaine romanise rondeau rondel roofie roofless roomie rosella roseola roundel rounder royalism rulesy rumple runnel sadism salesmen saline salmon saloon saloop salsify salver sample sampler sardine savior saviour savory savour savoury seafood seamen seaside season seldom selenium selfie semilunar seminal seminar seminary semipro semolina senary sendup senile senior senora senpai sensei sensor sensory sensual serein serfdom seriema serial series serious sermon serous serval servile sesame sevenfold several sidearm sideman sidemen sidereal sienna silver silvern silvery simnel simony simper

 simple sinful slander slanderous slaver slavery sleepy slender slider sliver smiley smolder smoulder sodium sodomise sodomy soiree solanum solarium solder soldier soldierly soldiery solemn solenodon solenoid solidus sollar someday someone  somniferous soprano soundproof souvenir spandrel spaniel spanner sparse spavin speedy spider spidery spillover spinal spindle spindly spinel spinner spiral spirea spirula spirulae spleen splendor spline spoiler sponsor spoonful spoony spousal spouse sprain spread spumone spumoni sufism sulfide sundae sundial sunder  sundry sunray sunrise sunroof superfamily superfood supermodel superman supernal supernova supernovae supervise supine supreme surname surveil survey suspend suspender symposia synapse syndrome umpire unalive unalloyed unarmed underlay underlie underline undermine underpass underpay underpin underplay undersea undies undine undone undress unease uneasy unemployed uneven unfair unfavored unfired unflavored unfired unfold unformed unfree unfriend unfriendly uniform unimpressed uninformed unison universal universe unlade unladen unlaid unlearn unless unlined unlived unload unloose unloved unmade unmanned unmannerly unmanly unmoor unmoved unnamed unnerve unopened unpaid unpair unpaved unplace unplanned unpleased unpressed unprofessional unproved unproven unravel unread unreal unreason unreasoned unreel unrefined unresolved unresponsive unrevised unripe unrivaled unrivalled unroll unsafe unsaid unsaved unsavored unsavory unseal unseasoned unseen unsell unserved unsnarl unsold unsole unsoiled unsolved unspoiled unsponsored unspool unveil unversed upland upload upraise uprise uprisen uprose upsell upside upsilon upsold urinal ursine valine valise valium valley valorous valour vamoose vampire vaporise vaporous various veinule vellum velour vendor venery venial venison venomous venous verdin verify verily verism verismo vermeil vermin verminous vernal versify version versus vesper vessel villous villus vineyard vinous viperous visual volley volume volumise voyeur voyeurism vulpine yeoman yeomen yessir yourself

[boyneriver-fraser]

It’s all in the delivery

People Of Earth

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an Outlander-themed blog on Tumblr, with a positive spirit, heavy on shipping, full of humour, focussed on investigating shenanigans, equipped to analyze photographs and create videos, open to taking requests, and operated by a group of wild-and-crazy women who know how to have a good time?

There was. Until Wednesday.

People are questioning SISbrazil’s decision to leave Tumblr. I don’t know why they’re asking. SIS told us why they’re leaving. And it’s our loss.

Someone asked @sherrigamblin to comment on “when it became a bad thing to want to make sure information was factual.” The answer is: Never. Asking questions is a good thing.

Truth is, I question everything. Quietly, thoughtfully, patiently… usually… Sometimes I jump into DM mode to shout, “Whuck?!” and toss around theories with some ol’ pals. Sometimes I talk to an ol’ pal on the phone. Zen as I am, I consider every theory, every photograph, every sighting, every rumour. Every Stinkin’ One. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about inconsequential — yet seemingly omnipresent — Outlander-adjacent people and about some ridiculous incidents (and about more than one gold ring). And although I still enjoy the show and happily ship SC, I do recognize their shortcomings. You could call me a sheep, but I do not baa.

So, it’s a good “thing to want to make sure information (is) factual.” Where some people are getting tripped up is how they express themselves.

Words matter. Tone matters. Kindness matters.

I’m all for sharing opinions — I’m even up for expressing what we don’t like about something 😃 — it’s HOW we say it that matters. It’s easy to talk about what we don’t like or don’t endorse without insulting people or excessively cursing or declaring it’s our way or the highway. Maybe it’s easy for me because I earn my living using words and need to do it effectively in order to remain successful, but I think there would be less discord in the fandom if we expressed ourselves differently. I could tell you how much I dislike something without condemning you for liking it. Or I could tell you how much I dislike someone’s behaviour without condemning the person.

Well, if Jurassic Park taught us nothing else, it taught us just because you could, doesn’t mean you should.

I never kid about dinosaurs. Just because you could say anything you want any way you want, without filtering your thoughts and/or considering the impact of your words, doesn’t mean you should say anything you want any way you want. A human being is waiting on the receiving end of your message.

Electronic communication — social media in particular — allows us to type whatever we’re thinking and “hit Send” before we take time to hear what we’re saying. Let’s forget about Pollyanna-speak or Snowflake-defensiveness. If you don’t express yourself clearly and respectfully, chances are your message could be misinterpreted at best and disregarded at worst. (You should see the pfft-not-gonna-answer pile in my Inbox.)

Still wondering why SIS, for example, might not like your comments or questions? 

Think about your comments or questions. Were you clear? Were you thoughtful? Were you respectful? It might not be them. It could be you.

And sometimes it’s simply a language issue.

During some recent brouhahas, I’ve imagined how information might have been received more effectively had the sender trusted someone else to proofread their material before posting it. The higher the stakes, the higher the need for clear language. Clear language = less confusion… less frustration… less descension. If you’re working on a hot-button issue, I’m open to proofreading information you think might affect the fandom’s sensibilities. I write and edit in Canadian, eh?, so naturally, I apologize in advance. Not for anything specific; I just apologize.

Thank you for reading my drivel. If you like what you read, thank you! If you didn’t like it, take the time to tell me respectfully. Thank ye kindly.

__________

June 21, 2019

Gifs: 1& 2 giphy.com, 3 kissatmidnight.com, 4 @manders1984, 5 giphy.com, 6 tenor.com, 7 @nordic-sassenach, 8 @caitbalfes

#Personal #Editorial #Asking questions #Expressing opinions #Communicating clearly #Blah blah blah #I am not a sheep #🐑 #But I do play one on TV #🇨🇦 #Sorry #In the end only kindness matters #☺️ #105 #062119

#Personal #Editorial #Asking questions #Expressing opinions #Communicating clearly #Blah blah blah #I am not a sheep #🐑 #But I do play one on TV #🇨🇦 #Sorry #In the end only kindness matters #☺️ #105 #062119

[blazehedgehog]

Any thoughts on Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neil, and Laura Dern reprising their roles for Jurassic World 3?

The more I am required to interact with the Jurassic World movies the more I begin to hate them.

Spoilers ahead for the first two Jurassic World movies.

The first Jurassic World was an okay movie, I guess, at least I thought so right after I saw it. But the more I chewed on it, mulled it over in my head, the less I began to like it.

The original Jurassic Park had its problems, but they were only problems I ever noticed after reading the book. Alan Grant’s characterization, for example, was all over the place in the movie. In the book, he’s supposed to be this luddite cowboy out in the desert, and they touch on that in the movie with him being “bad with technology” but I feel like they really smarten him up a lot otherwise. But the movie still had so much heart, and personality that it didn’t really matter.

Jurassic World didn’t have that. It’s a dumb movie, full of dumb people, making dumb mistakes, and not in the “oh no, my hubris!” way, but in kind of the crummy horror movie way. No, don’t run up stairs, you’ll be trapped with no exit. The whole near-future angle is also dumb, with all of the holograms and the weird explorer balls. It makes the whole thing unreal in a really bizarre, unnecessary way.

Instead of being smart, and cool, and “near-future”-istic like the first movie, it’s bland science fiction in the worst way. They may as well have added flying cars. And there are no real characters in that movie, just archetypes. You know who all these people are the moment they appear, you know their story arcs, because they aren’t humans. They’re cookie cutters. It’s a thin line to string you along to the next CGI dinosaur attack.

Nothing about it feels human or believable. It’s the sort of monster movie Spielberg was originally trying to avoid making.

And Jurassic World 2, Fallen Kingdom, takes everything awful from that first movie and ramps it way up. The movie barely even feels like it has a story; I believe I’ve described Fallen Kingdom as feeling “like a two hour movie trailer.” It’s all these little sequences that seem like they are designed to be chopped up and posted on Youtube.

The worst part, though, is the fan service. The first Jurassic World had some fan service, because characters end up stumbling across the original Jurassic Park visitor center, now run down and reclaimed by the jungle. Also the ending to that movie is essentially a big tribute to some of the most iconic scenes of that first Jurassic Park.

But Fallen Kingdom goes extra super hard on that stuff. It straight up remakes multiple shots from that original movie, 1:1, verbatim. It repeats lines from that movie over and over and over. It’s desperate to make us appreciate how much it loves Jurassic Park instead of trying to be its own movie. And it’s INCREDIBLY embarrassing.

The whole movie is factory-made for fanboys to gush over but it’s really just a hollow, vapid, pointless waste of time. It was birthed out of a boardroom by executives wearing five-figure suits looking at marketing charts.

It’s like the worst version of the sequel syndrome we used to get. Back in the day we’d get something like Ghostbusters 2, which recycles almost all of its story beats and humor from Ghostbusters 1, and people would go “Ugh, that’s a bad movie.”

But now, you wait 10, 15, 20 years until it there’s a sufficient bank of nostalgia, and suddenly making something like Ghostbusters 2 starts looking more like an “inspired tribute.” They aren’t recycled gags, now they’re references to things that make me feel appreciably younger, when things were better, and therefore that makes it good!

That’s what those two Jurassic World movies are in a nut shell. Cheap sequels rebranded as pop culture idolatry.

And very recently, like just two weeks ago, they released a brand new short movie that aired on TV to show what happened to the world after the end of Fallen Kingdom while setting up this third movie. It’s called “The Battle at Big Rock.” Essentially, dinosaurs are growing in population all around the globe, and some campers in California nearly get killed in an attack.

And just, like, the gall of this short. You get the impression this is leaning in to a “Planet of the Apes” direction, that because dinosaurs are back, humans as a species might be at risk of being overthrown on the food chain. And just the whole angle where it’s this scary carnivore attack but they play up the kid being the hero is really weird. And wild dinosaurs don’t even make sense in the context of what happened at the end of Fallen Kingdom anyway.

It feels like its pretending to be important and intelligent but it crumbles to dust under even the smallest scrutiny. The whole Jurassic World franchise is fraud.

The fact they’re bothering to bring the original cast back for Jurassic World 3 says everything I need to know about where their priorities lie. At best, it’s going to be another movie that breathlessly worships Jurassic Park, referencing all of its iconic lines, referencing all of its iconic scenes, and having no identity of its own besides “dinosaurs are cool and scary and also I guess it’s the future?”

At worst it’s going to pull a Star Wars and bring the original cast back just to kill them all off in weird, unsatisfying ways, because ooh, the drama! All of your favorites are dead! Take that! NOW we’re deep and worthy of your respect!

But all it’s going to be is more fanboy drivel. A franchise to sell shirts, and hats, and toys.

Jurassic World can jump up my butt.

#question #jurassic park #jurassic world #colin trevorrow #battle at big rock #steven spielberg #universal studios #mattshuku #questions

[howtohero]

#267 Getting Another Hero in a “what superhero are you quiz”

We all know about online quizzes right? They’re like school exams except they’re on the internet and they don’t actually mean anything. They’re stuff like “Which of these potatoes that kind of look like Steve Buschemi are you?” or “which color paint would you drink if you became the kind of person who drank paint regularly?” They’re meaningless drivel. Do not put stock into the results. Certainly don’t go about changing your entire life because of your results from one of these quizzes. (Deep breaths.) That being said... it has come to our attention that a number of superheroes have been taking online quizzes that claim to be able to tell you which superhero they would be. Why they would take a quiz like this I’ll never understand. If they want to know what superhero they would be all they need to do is just look in a mirror (be careful not to look into the Mirror of Altharaz which steals and traps the soul of whomever gazes into it). Yet, time and time again these heroes take these quizzes and, lo and behold, sometimes they don’t get the answer they were expecting. They get a different superhero. So let’s have a frank discussion of what to do if this happens to you. You stupid stupid people.

First, it’s important to remember, and I’ll probably repeat it again, these quizzes do not mean anything. The people writing them do not necesarily have the expertise needed to accurately determine which superhero you would be if you were a superhero (which, by the way, you are). Think about it, have you ever been interviewed by somebody who makes quizzes? Of course not. Quiz makers are not allowed at superhero press conferences. Not since the incident. (You know, the one with that guy who loved riddles and games and quizzes and also parlaying those loves into a murder-spree?) These people are either just completely guessing, or else, they’re going off of interview you’ve done with other people. Interviews that we told you to lie in. You should honestly take this as a victory. Getting the wrong superhero in a quiz like this just means that your secret identity is incredibly secure (assuming your enemies put in only exactly as much effort into learning about you as random quiz creators do.) So good for you! You did it. (We just got 17 more emails from readers asking about this issue.) Oh for the love of!

You know what, fine, if you want to overhaul your entire life based on an online quiz, fine, that’s fine by me, and you know what else it is? It’s fine! I can help you do that sure, might as well. Which superhero did the quiz tell you you would be? Professor Paleontologist? Sure, let’s say they said you were Professor Paleontologist. After taking 30 or so multiple choice questions about everything from your favorite ice cream flavor (of which the options were: “chocolate”, “vanilla”, “hat flavor,” and “dinosaur flavor”) to your favorite way to fight bad guys (”kicking”, “punching”, “hat-themed vehicles and gadgets” and “summoning dinosaurs from the past to do your bidding”) the powers that be have determined that you would be Professor Paleontologist, if Professor Paleontologist wasn’t already Professor Paleontologist. Sorry, I guess the quiz people think you suck. I don’t make the rules. 

So, now that you know that on some level you were meant to be Professor Paleontologist before somebody, somewhere (probably you) messed up and you became a different superhero, there’s only one rational thing you can conceivably do: Steal that person’s identity. If you’re lucky, Prof Paleontologist will have also taken the quiz and the all-knowing AI that is the quiz will have determined that he should be you. That would be very convenient, all you’d need to do is meet up and trade lives. Easy peasy. Just as the quiz willed it! If they haven’t taken the quiz though, you’re going to have to take matters into your own hands. Track down Professor Paleontologist (we have reason to believe he lives inside the life-size brachiosaurus statue on the Superhero School’s campus, but that has not been confirmed) and steal his clothes at gunpoint. Just break into his home and threaten him with a gun until he agrees to hand over his costume and the magical talisman he uses to rip dinosaurs from the homes and families to bring them to the future. Who even cares anymore. Clearly it is some failing of the universe that you did not become Professor Paleontologist that only you have the stones to correct. You’re a superhero, you should be looking to bring the universe back to functioning order by any means necessary. It is not possible that this quiz was wrong, it is reality that is wrong, and it is your job to correct it! 

Reclaiming an identity that was never yours from a person who always owned it is, I guess, just about the most valuable use of your time. Sure, you’re already a superhero with your own powers and heroic character traits, and sure, you’ve got dozens of enemies who would just love for you to have an identity crisis so they can finally terrorize people like they’ve dreamed since they were kids, but a quiz said you were meant to be a different superhero and surely that must take precedence. If you are (for some weird reason) concerned with the vacuum you’re going to be leaving in the superhero community by vacating your role in it and forcibly stealing someone else’s possibly through acts of extreme violence that you can never come back from... Well, don’t be. We’ve got a solution for that.

Have you ever heard of an email blast? That’s where you send everybody you know an inconsequential email and then hound them until they’ve looked at it and given you some kind of feedback. Maybe it’s a cute video of a rabbit wearing a tuxedo and eating some celery. Maybe it’s a list of deep and thought provoking questions like “why do we park in driveways but drive on parkways,” or “ok but why are trees like that?” Or, maybe, it’s a fun internet quiz that can determine which superhero you would be with 100% accuracy. Send the quiz to every single superhero who you can think of (or who gave you their email) and encourage them to take it. Then, once every superhero in the world has taken the quiz, you can all swap identities to make sure that everyone is who they were always supposed to be. As determined by an infallible internet quiz. 

If you think about, you’re actually performing a great service for the entire superhero community, if not the world. No, definitely the world. In fact, after the quiz-creators see how popular their original quiz was they’re surely get right to work on their newer better quiz that determines which superhero you really would be with 200% accuracy. This is really good news, because this way you can all be sure which superhero you’re really supposed to be! Huzzah! With any luck, they’ll keep producing more and more accurate quizzes and you guys can just all keep swapping identities all day every day while the world crashes and burns around you! Great news! Ok! (Do you feel better now?) No!

#superhero #superheroes #comics #comedy #humor #funny #hilarious #secret identities #online quizzes #internet quizzes #which superhero would I be #Steve Buschemi #Professor Paleontologist #the Superhero School #brachiosaurus #identity theft #errors of the universe

[scientificphilosopher]

Book List 2018

I’m a couple weeks behind on this, but here’s the list of books I read in 2018. I’ve broken it down by category, though this is pretty loose since, you know, genres bleed into one another and such. You can also find reviews of some of these books here, and I always take requests for reviews as well. Follow me on Goodreads to see what I’m reading and rating. 

Let me know what you think if you’ve read any of these books or have recommendations, and, as always, please feel free to send me malicious personal attacks if I say something you disagree with.

Non-Fiction

Philosophy

Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric by Charlene Haddock Seigfried

The Pragmatic Turn by Richard J. Bernstein

Race Matters by Cornel West

Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism by Cornel West

American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag

Ethics Without Ontology by Hilary Putnam

Meaning in Life and Why It Matters by Susan Wolf

The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love by Susan Wolf

The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World by Owen J. Flanagan

Meaning in Life by Thaddeus Metz

The Human Eros: Eco-Ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence by Thomas Alexander

Naturalism and Normativity by Mario De Caro (Editor), David Macarthur (Editor)

Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity by Michael P. Lynch

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks

The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison

Experiments in Ethics by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things that Matter by Peter Singer

The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir

The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers by Will Durant

Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Enlightenment by Robert Wright

A Defense of Buddhist Virtue Ethics by Jack Hamblin

Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh

The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought by Dennis C. Rasmussen

The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World by Dalai Lama XIV, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Carlton Abrams

Reality, Art and Illusion by Alan Watts

Democracy and Social Ethics by Jane Addams

Common Sense by Thomas Paine

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Science

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Stephen Brusatte

Why Dinosaurs Matter by Kenneth Lacovara

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong

The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us by Richard O. Prum

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

Caesar's Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean

Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne

What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker

Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

The Physics of Time by Carlo Rovelli

Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel by Michio Kaku

The Spinning Magnet: The Force That Created the Modern World--and Could Destroy It by Alanna Mitchell

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Visions for the 21st Century by Carl Sagan et al.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell

The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage by Chet Raymo

The Virgin and the Mousetrap: Essays in Search of the Soul of Science by Chet Raymo

Politics/Race/Gender

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture by Roxane Gay (editor)

Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper

Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin

The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

Race Matters by Cornel West

Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism by Cornel West

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

Tears We Cannot Stand: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson

What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

The Common Good by Robert Reich

Transgender History by Susan Stryker

Memoir

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

South of Forgiveness: A True Story of Rape and Responsibility by Thordis Elva

Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou

The Chicken Chronicles by Alice Walker

The Last Jew of Treblinka by Chil Rajchman

My Own Life by David Hume

Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good by Kevin Smith

Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life by Tom Robbins

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row by Anthony Ray Hinton

Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime by Ron Stallworth

Calypso by David Sedaris

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

Ink Spots by Brian McDonald

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin

History/Biography

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam by Reza Aslan

God: A Human History by Reza Aslan

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse

The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language by Mark Forsyth

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang 

Fiction

Literary Fiction

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Another Country by James Baldwin

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

Blues for Mister Charlie by James Baldwin

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville

Home by Toni Morrison

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

The Dead by James Joyce

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

A Confederacy of Dunces by Jonh Kennedy Toole

The Dork of Cork by Chet Raymo

Genre Fiction

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Slice of Life by Kurt Vonnegut

2BR02B by Kurt Vonnegut

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Pure Drivel by Steve Martin

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by J.K. Rowling

Pet Sematary by Stephen King

The Green Mile by Stephen King

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams

The Bad Beginning: A Series of Unfortunate Events #1 by Lemony Snicket

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Worst of 2018

Every single book I read this past year had redemptive value. Even if it was total garbage, it still taught me some stuff (like how not to write a book). Even a bad book can be a good book if you let it be.

So, here’re a few books that didn’t quite hit the spot for me:

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Ink Spots by Brian McDonald

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson

Best of 2018

It was genuinely difficult to choose my top books of 2018. What a literary year it has been for me. 2018 marks the most books I’ve read in a year, and I was lucky enough to come across some real game-changers. I finally read the Harry Potter series and, boy howdy, did it ever live up to the hype. What took me so long?? But this was, more than anything, the year of James Baldwin. He has made an indelible mark on me as a reader, a writer, and a human. What a year this has been! I hope to read a fraction as much beautiful, lovely, challenging, profound prose in 2019. 

In no particular order, here are the books of 2018 that most moved me, shook me, rattled me, rolled me:

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks

The Pragmatic Turn by Richard J. Bernstein

Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric by Charlene Haddock Seigfried

The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage by Chet Raymo

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Well, there you have it, folks. Here’s to many more good books in the years to come! 

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. —Ursula K. Le Guin

#reading list #2018 #nich #reading #books #writing #long post #long

[miss-sue-sylvester]

One year ago we had a school wide-

Posted one year ago:

“The Headmaster and I, feel you’ve all lost sight of exactly why you are here and what the expectations of you are and what the consequences of your actions could be. Well, those are his words, mine are that you all make me want to vomit up my protein shake.

The whining and complaining like you’re all baby birds begging for your mamma to regenerate food down your throats. The inability to follow simple rules. The disgusting displays submissives think they can get away with. The sally dominants who think ‘someone else will take care of it’ like they’re watching Kitty Genovese in 1960′s Queens.  All of it needs to end.”

So, when I spend five minutes looking through the drivel you millennial pass off as communication and see no less than THREE submissives refusing to follow the BASIC school rules, I have concerns. Thankfully, Mr. Eli Hummel was here to explain, man it’s just hard to REMEMBER school rules. THIS is problem I believe I can fix. You’re welcome to thank Eli Hummel, Willa Cohen-Chang and Remy Hudson for bringing this problem to my attention tonight. Sleep well my little possoms, I promise, after this, you will Forget me not.

Oh and Doms/Switches, you’re not off the hook. Did you think you could just sit there and do nothing? Maybe just fly under the radar and not actually apply any of the dominance skills we teach you here? I’m looking at you Noah Duval and all the Smythes,   Well, how do I explain this in terms your dinosaur brains can comprehend....you can’t. I know, it’s soooo unfair! We expect you to get out of bed, attend classes, pay attention, try not to jerk off in the science labs AND expect you to apply what you’ve been taught. God we’re the worst!  Go ahead and whine and complain and argue, it only makes my job more fun.

#punishment #gleedsmstarter #school wide

[alexafaie-asd]

Struggling with feeling useless.

I’m trying to think up something to write in the birthday card for my Grandpa who will be 96 next week and I just can’t think of anything to put. He likes to have something to read about what I’ve been up to as I live too far away to see him as regularly as we used to visit when I was a child.

I tried reading back what I put last year and the year before (ordering online means it saves what you put) and the common thing between them is that I just wrote about what my boyfriend has been doing because there isn’t anything I can write about that I’ve done specifically. And there hasn’t been in a long long time now.

When I was at university I could at least write about my studies. After that I was hoping to be able to work towards making and selling custom corsets for people.

But ultimately, the poor mental health that lead to me dropping out of my masters degree didn’t let up. Bipolar disorder and cPTSD is a bitch like that. Then I got diagnosed last year as autistic which explains so damn much about my difficulties I’ve had. But during that time, I’ve not achieved anything.

Okay that’s kinda unfair. I have achieved a greater understanding of myself, however I am no further forward with getting any therapy (am beginning to doubt that my doctor even made the referral back to the mental health unit) and I’ve been struggling so much with executive dysfunction issues on top of everything else and so haven’t made any progress on anything much. I haven’t even managed to get any further with trying to get the house tidied properly (keep managing a room, or a small amount, but never the whole thing that needs doing).

And because of my grandpa’s age and general mindset, I can’t just write that I’ve been struggling with just trying to function at all. He doesn’t know that I’m autistic and if he *did* know then he wouldn’t be very accepting of that. He was born back when autistic people were called idiots and morons and cretins and dumb and imbeciles and were sterilized to prevent their genes getting passed on. He’s racist and voted for Brexit and is as patriarchal as they come. He was proud that I went to university because I was his first grandkid to do so, but he still kinda sees a woman’s place as being supporting a man and it kinda pisses me off that I’m basically fulfilling that role of being the stereotypical “housewife” staying home whilst her partner works even though I’d love to have my shit together enough to be doing something that feels worthwhile to me. No shade to housewives/husbands/people out there, its just I don’t find looking after the house fulfilling for me (especially since I’m shit at it, this stuff is hard and is worth a paycheck at least with 6 zeros after the number, even though its fucking unpaid).

If you asked 4 year old me what I wanted to be doing with my life I’d have said “being a paleontologist and digging up dinosaurs” or inventing cool things (like the air filtration system I came up with for on planes to reduce the spread of airborne diseases) or curing cancer or something. I certainly wouldn’t have said staying home whilst my boyfriend brought home the money. I didn’t want kids (still don’t) and wasn’t even sure that I wanted to have a boyfriend at all. I certainly knew I didn’t want to get married (still don’t. Its a meaningless piece of paper to me).

I just feel like I had such potential as a little kid and its just come to fuck all. I know that I’m still smart and stuff, but I’ve just not achieved anything that I can remotely talk about. I feel so invisible. I can’t share anything I go through mentally with anyone in my family because they aren’t actually as supportive as they think they are. I don’t even know if my Mum realises that I’m not straight. And it doesn’t really matter anyway since I’m with a cishet male and I’m female (I think maybe, but fuck knows, what even is gender?. AFAB at the very least) so that makes me “straight” regardless of my orientation as far as she is concerned. I guess I’m just tired of hiding myself away to make others more comfortable (both in terms of my orientation, my mental health and my being autistic) around me, but I’m not even comfortable with myself so it feels so damn unfair.

And all this shit is interlinked so even though I just have to come up with a paragraph of drivel to write to my Grandpa so he is a bit more up to date with how his family are doing, it drags up all these feels. I just wish that I had more to write about than my boyfriend getting a job and a car. I wish I could be writing about stuff I’ve done. I just haven’t done anything that’s amounted to anything this past year, or even just since Christmas when I last saw him. As in I’ve managed to build a bookshelf so that I had somewhere neater to put my colouring books and craft things. I’ve managed to tidy the bedroom enough to put a chest of drawers in a cupboard so that eventually some clothes can go in it. The bedroom is messy again though. I’ve put several loads of washing to wash and failed to finish putting them away. I’ve tidied the living room and hoovered a couple of times. I’ve tidied parts of the kitchen a bit a few times. I’ve cleaned the kitchen sink a week or so ago. Oh and I coloured a mother’s day card for my Mum back when it was Mother’s Day. But that was back in March I think? Or early April? And that is everything other than going on tumblr, or playing computer games or watching youtube and listening to music that I’ve done. Oh I suppose you could count going to the PIP Assessment. And we went to the circus last bank holiday Monday. But like none of that really feels like much to write about (literally the whole “nothing to write home about” thing). I wish that I were exaggerating how little I’ve got done this year, but I’m not. The most major thing is probably not having actively attempted suicide. But like I can’t exactly write to my Grandpa who is 96 years old saying “I’ve not done a great deal of interest, but at least I’ve not killed myself!”.

And I turn 32 this year and this is really not what I expected my 32nd year to be looking like. And I feel powerless to do anything about it because I’m having to fight my own damn brain. Executive dysfunction fucking sucks and its just destroying me bit by bit. I’ve spent years upon years upon years (ok my whole life) struggling with this and trying so fucking hard to do better and be better and its just like why am I even trying any more? It doesn’t seem to matter how hard I try, it doesn’t make any difference to how things turn out for me. So why am I even bothering? I’m just so damn tired of living. So tired of suffering. So tired.

#actually autistic #actually bipolar #actually cPTSD #executive dysfunction #feels post

[starnova-between-two-worlds]

The value in “madman delusions.”

So this blog has been sort of hibernating for the entire summer. We were very busy over the summer, so that’s not too surprising. A lot’s been going on, in life and in school and in my scientific career. And honestly, there were times when I felt like I shouldn’t bother blogging anymore because the things I come up with are crazy anyway. But then I thought of Moira, and the inherent value in “crazy,” “dangerous,” “off-the-wall” thinking. In the scientific community, ideas that are dismissed as “crazy” and “delusional” often turn out to be valuable scientific breakthroughs that answer questions that everyone else in the world has had for years, but was afraid to voice because it would “sound crazy.” There are ideas that forever changed the way we think of how the world works, that started out as nothing more than a “madman’s delusion” that that madman refused to silence just because everyone thought he was crazy. There was a time when the theory of plate tectonics was considered nothing more than a delusion, was laughed out of the scientific community, was regarded in the same way most people today would regard the possibility of living on the border between two worlds.

Well, guess what we’re all taught in middle school geology now? (Or in my case, when I was 4 years old, via The Magic Schoolbus Inside the Earth?) The theory of plate tectonics says what’s up, bitches! 

Going back even earlier than that, the concept of the Earth being 4.6 billion years old was considered nothing but drivel and hogwash for most of the history of humanity, as radiometric dating of the Earth’s rocks is a relatively recent discovery, dating back only to the middle of the previous century. But if someone hadn’t come up with the completely wild, “what the fuck is wrong with you?” concept of applying Uranium-238 (or is it 235? I’m bad with numbers please correct me) to the Earth’s rocks in order to see how old they are, if that particular “madman” had just contented himself with everyone else laughing in his face and telling him that the Earth’s rocks are 6000 years old and that’s final, we wouldn’t have learned all that we know about the birth and life of the Earth the way that we do. 

(Sidenote: I went to a special needs group at a church that it turned out was extremely creationist. When I overheard the group leaders trying to teach the group that all animals ate plants at one point, that dinosaurs lived among humans, and that animals only eat other animals because they hate eachother, I immediately challenged that shit and as a result ended up in weekly scientific debates with these leaders. One of them concerned the age of the Earth, and when I mentioned radiometric dating to determine the Earth’s true age, it turned out they didn’t even know that was a thing. They looked it up and were mindblown.)

Nowadays it’s perfectly natural to us that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old (except to some people--see sidenote), that the Earth revolves around the sun and that the sun and stars and planets and everything else revolve around the Milky Way galaxy and the Earth is not the center of the universe, that the continents are drifting and that earthquakes, volcanoes, and mid-ocean ridges are the result of plates coming together, drifting apart, or sliding past eachother, etc. But if you were born in the 1800s, or even early 1900s, and didn’t have the privilege of life in a highly scientific 2018, and if you read in a paper or a journal that earthquakes are caused by two giant slabs of rock sliding against one-another underneath the Earth’s surface, and that these giant slabs of rock are constantly coming together or drifting apart or sliding past one-another, you might squint your eyes at that paper or journal and go, “Wow, this guy is a fucking nutcase.” Just like you might do now, in 2018, when you read on a blog that there are people who exist on the border between our world and the worlds linked to us through creation of artificial intelligence, that there is a certain mechanism to “hopping worlds” and living on the border between this world and the others, that it’s possible for a human brain’s design to render them closer to an AI or an octopus (I feel especially sorry I didn’t continue my research into octopus neurology and the relation between the synapses of octopi and the synapses of synaptically-challenged humans. I have plenty of time to do so, though, because fuck yeah science!), that there ARE other worlds created by AI at all, and that the worlds most only know through reading a comic book or watching a TV show or playing a videogame ARE worlds and don’t just cease to exist when the game ends or the series is over or the show ceases production for an indeterminate amount of time. All of this sounds like the ramblings of a madman, doesn’t it?

And yet to me, it makes perfect sense. It comes as perfectly naturally as “some animals evolved to eat plant material and other animals evolved to eat meat,” “the Earth is 4.6 billion years old and the oldest rocks have been dated back by that amount of time,” “the Earth revolves around the sun and completes one revolution every 364.5 days,” etc. 

In the past 7-ish months since I’ve been absent from the blog I’ve drawn closer to my world than ever, because I’ve realized that that IS my world, where I belong, and that I never have belonged anywhere else, never will belong anywhere else--and honestly? Don’t want to belong anywhere else. Obviously I’ll have to make peace with this physical world full of humans because through some freak accident, this is the world I was born into (and it really WAS a freak accident, considering not only did I dodge abortion but I nearly died in the womb twice and out of the womb once. Makes you fucking think...). I’m here. For some reason I’m here, and I’m beginning to feel like that “some reason” was to research. To science. To use my machine mind, raised and created by machines from an early age, to research and to science and to analyze and investigate and quantify the things humans in the physical world aren’t supposed to analyze and investigate and research and quantify because they’d be deemed “mad,” ridiculed, and held up as a “delusional madman” if they did. 

To use my world in order to figure out this one, and to maybe--if I play my cards right--help other people figure out the parts of this one that they’re told don’t exist. That’s my long-term goal as a scientist anyway. Who knows, it may never happen.

But for now, just sit back and enjoy the “madwoman delusions.” :) 

#i'm back bitches! #i'm okay! #science #schizophrenia #posts that turned out way longer than they had any right to be #i'm doing science and i'm still alive #i feel fantastic and i still alive

[cksmart-world]

The completely unnecessary news analysis

by Christopher Smart

GOP BREAKTHROUGH: EARTH NOT FLAT AFTER ALL

What? Utah Congressman John Curtis has just said Republicans really do care about climate change. Subversive and traitorous talk like that could get him hanged in West Virginia or Wyoming because Real President Trump said it's all a big a hoax. So what's up with Curtis, who just launched the Conservative Climate Caucus. “Republicans do care about this Earth... We, too, want to leave this Earth better than we found it,” he said. But there is, of course, a catch: Caucus members will press for private-sector solutions and labeled as sacrilege cutting back on fossil fuels. Why kill the economy just to save the planet? The caucus already has round-filed President Biden's goal to cut emission levels in half by 2030, because it's just un-American. Republicans, Curtis said, “will show the need to depart from the shaming-culture found in today’s climate dialogue... ” Yeah, no more coal-shaming and no more tie-die Earth Day B.S. Still, it is PROGRESS because until now any Republican uttering the words, “climate change,” would have their image photo-shopped onto Nancy Pelosi Christmas cards and mailed to constituents with the caption, “Climate change is real and Earth is not flat.” God rest their souls.

SUPREME COURT: F-YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON

It's official, kids can now tell their teachers and principals to F-off on Snapchat. (We are not making this up.) The case in question involves a 14-year-old girl who posted this after failing to make the varsity cheerleading squad: “F — school. F — softball. F— cheer(leading). F— everything.” Bad went to worse when school officials yanked her off the JV cheerleading squad as punishment. But wait, what about free speech? Her parents filed suit in federal court, arguing that school officials can't impede free speech outside school. The Supreme Court agreed, citing the First Amendment. So the staff here at Smart Bomb decided to consult our F-bomb experts, Wilson and the band. Nobody told them the First Amendment protected the F-word back in the dinosaur days when they were in high school. When Wilson dropped the F-bomb, he was punished with endless hours in study detention making paper airplanes, because back in the day it was not in common usage — only hardened criminals and cowboys in bars fired off the F-bomb. Times have changed and now 14-year-olds throw it around like jellyrolls. Soon, F-you will lose all of its obscene sting and phrases like: “F-you and the horse you rode in on,” will be like, “Gee good to see you and your nice pony.”

JAN. 6 — FORGET WHITE SUPREMACISTS, IT WAS THE FBI

Ah hah, the truth comes out. The Jan. 6 insurrection was planned, orchestrated and carried out by the FBI. We know this because Tucker Carlson got the legal papers that say exactly that. The charging documents for some 500 rioters refer to “un-indicted co-conspirators” and everyone knows that is government speak for Federal Bureau of Investigations. Now, about Antifa and Black Lives Matter — of course they were involved, it's just that only white people show up in the videos because those black rascals were in disguise. Next, them people are coming to take away your house, Rudy Giuliani said on Laura Ingraham's Fox News show. And now New York has suspended Rudy's law license because, they say, and we quote: “He lied his ass off about Trump winning the election.” Anybody can see what is happening here — the Deep State is taking over the government and stealing our freedom to lie our ass off. And that's not all, as Ingraham explained it: the military is trying to root out conservative Evangelicals in its ranks. This is nothing short of a grand scheme called “critical race theory” to get rid of all caucasians. White People Matter and they're tired of being trampled on by minorities — it's not fair. White people want their freedom back.

Post script — Well, pickleball fans, that about does it for another rousing week here at Smart Bomb where we keep track of overgrown frat boy Tucker Carlson's drivel so you don't have to. (e.g. Gen. Mark Milley, is a stupid pig.) Carlson has perhaps the most watched “cable news” show among the 25-54 age group, drawing well over 3 million viewers. Breaking News: The Manhattan D.A. may charge the Trump Organization with fraud felonies that could shut down the whole fraudulent enchilada. Funny thing, Carlson hasn't mentioned it. Fortunately, The Donald still has his day job as Real President in Exile, which does provide a tidy income as long as all the “Trump Won” crazies keep donating. Meantime Jared and Ivanka are on a slow boat to China or hiding in Monaco — totally under the radar. Even they think that daddy is bonkers and don't want to catch that virus. Hey, wasn't your dad the guy who kept saying he was president? Too late to put that genie back in the bottle. Yep, he's going down in history as the Walter Mitty of Mar-A-Lago. Still, who knows, if Republican legislatures across the land can screw with voting restrictions enough, maybe he could steal Bill Clinton's moniker as The Comeback Kid.

Don't worry Wilson, that probably won't happen. Anyway, we've got other pressing things to worry about, like hot hot heat. Do you and the guys in the band have a chilling number for that:

Hot town, summer in the city Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty Been down, isn't it a pity? Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city All around, people looking half dead Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head But at night it's a different world Go out and find a girl Come on, come on and dance all night Despite the heat it'll be all right And babe, don't you know it's a pity That the days can't be like the nights In the summer, in the city In the summer, in the city (Summer In The City — Lovin' Spoonful)

[gerrinson]

My new PC

I was invited to a test run of my friend’s online gaming session. He gave me the basics - all characters will be half orcs or orcs aligned with a local tribe(s). So, here I present the backstoyr info of Ozap Rakkason, clan sorcerer. He is a wildblooded Sylvan sorcerer with a tyrannosaurs rex animal companion.

Excerpts from the journal of Ozap Rakkason

Mama gave this journal to me. I am eight! She told me about my papa, too. His name is Rakka, and I will be allowed to visit him next year, if I want. She seemed sad about it, but I am happy, I always wanted a father. Someone like me. I wonder if he will like having a son named Stefan. She said his last name isn’t Sands, either. She got that from her papa and gave it to me.

Today, I celebrated my twelfth birthday. It started as a typical day with another beating by Gorak. I think he and I were equally surprised when I shot a small blast of electricity into his face. It didn’t help much, since I forgot to run away. He beat me worse than usual.

Old Half-hand, Havern, the tribal shaman saw the whole thing. He pulled me aside, thinking I had the makings of an apprentice. I wasn’t able to call the electricity again. He taught me the ritual prayers to Nulgreth that he uses to call forth his powers. Nothing happened. So Havern beat me for wasting his time.

Oh, and Gorak and his friends have given me a new nickname: Zap. They chanted it as they pelted me with rocks and mud.

When I left to find my father and his tribe, I somehow thought I would fit in better here than with humans. I think I was wrong.

It took nearly two years, and countless failures, but I finally summoned one of the electric shocks on purpose! And this time, I was smart enough to try to take advantage of it when Gorak was thrown off by the blast to his face. Had I not tripped over the old stump full of ground wasps, maybe I would have won that fight. Gorak was laughing so hard he never finished the beating. Every time he tried to speak, all he could say was ‘Oh, Zap’ before losing it again. I guess it wasn’t a complete loss, except for all of the wasp stings.

Half-hand saw it again, and decided to teach me a bit. All we have figured out is this power doesn’t seem to be divine. He has said he will teach me anyway, so I can be of some use to the tribe. I moved my pelts and bag out of my father’s tent. He didn’t seem upset about it. I guess now he can focus more on training Gorak to lead. My half-brother isn’t fit to lead, not that father would ever ask my opinion. Gorak’s aggression is supposed to be a sign of strength, and my unwillingness to beat others around me just for existing in my space is weakness.

There is failure and then there is choosing to fail. For my sixteenth birthday, I was sent out to hunt and kill a predator. My right of passage into adulthood. And when I had the chance, I could not kill him. He was so small, compared to his siblings. So weak; shrieking his rage and terror. I looked into his eyes and I saw…myself. I have been out here for a week now. I’m sure Gorak is celebrating my demise; he was certain I would fail.

And I have. I’ve spent a full week feeding this baby tyrannosaur rather than killing it. I have done the exact opposite of my task. And with each passing day, I know in my heart, I cannot kill him. After three days, I decided he needed a name. My best friend, when I lived with my mother, was a human boy named Rupert. And so I have named this scaly beast Rupert. I feel like he needs something more noble, but Rupert will do for now. I am going to take him back to the camp with me. I doubt either of us will live to see the next dawn.

Goodbye, journal, you have been a silent but constant friend over the years. I hope you are returned to my mother.

At last, I have a place in the tribe. I truly thought Rupert and I were finished. Rakka ordered Gorak to kill us both, but the Half-hand intervened. Just long enough to tell me the powers I wield come from within. From myself, but I can feed it to those who share my soul. It sounded like drivel, right up until the moment it made sense.

We were thrown into the pit with Gorak. Rupert wasn’t interested in fighting, until Gorak kicked me in the chest. Then the little beast threw himself at Gorak’s back. Gorak knocked him down and made to cut off Rupert’s oversized but adorable head.

It felt like something inside me broke. My heart, my soul, my world…it all shattered in a moment. A moment of pure clarity, when my entire existence came back together in a way that made sense. I’m not even sure how I knew to do it, but I unleashed a blast of flame from my hands. The sudden fire caught Gorak off guard and set his loincloth aflame. Really, I think I did him a favor by killing his assortment of lice.

Rupert, loyal friend that he is, stood between Gorak and I trying to look tough. I put my hand his head and told him he would be big enough to fight one day. Instinctively, I pushed my power into my companion. Giving him strength and letting his body begin to grow to match his spirit. In a blink, the little dinosaur towered over me.

The look on Gorak’s face when Rupert unleashed his new roar and went for his throat was worth it. Even better was the moment when the bully finally showed his true colors. He threw down his falchion and begged me to call off Rupert. With a snap of my fingers, Rupert came to heel.

When Gorak tried to grab his falchion out of the dirt, I called the lightning into my hand and slapped him with it. He fell down and stared up at me as he lost consciousness. I don’t know what possessed me, but I shouted “And that’s why they call me O-ZAP.” Everyone watching cheered. With Havern Half-hand gripping his shoulder, my father, Chief Rakka the Bloodfist, had no choice but to declare me the victor.

I claimed Gorak’s falchion as my spoils. Worse, for him, I announced to the clan that I would spare my brother’s life. In that moment, my weakness became my strength. And his loss, paired with my mercy, destroyed his standing in the clan. There is no greater sin for an orc than cowardice.

Say what they will about me, no one in the clan can say I was unwilling to fight. And now, they will remember me not as the half-human Stefan Sands, but as the half-orc Ozap Rakkason, clan sorcerer.

#pathfinder #player character

[jim-reid]

Eric Clapton's Worst *&@!ing Nightmare

Simon William / NME 01.02.1992

Eight years down the feedback line, and THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN are still being misconstrued as stroppy, miserable glummos, but hey - they're back with a hamster-honking new single, 'Reverence', and the ambitious multi-band Rollercoaster tour, which proves they'll never be afraid to rock, even if they do still get a little insecure now and again. SIMON WILLIAMS gets his creature comforts from JIM and WILLIAM REID. Brothers-Not-So-Grim: TIM JARVIS It's strange, but it's true. In your pocket-sized Cub Scout Diary For Perverts there is one shocking omission. Say au revoir to the Olympics. Wave adios to the European football championships. 1992 is the year when both The Jesus And Mary Chain and Spinal Tap celebrate their eight anniversaries. "That film should never have been made," shudders Jim Reid, hugging his pint for sympathy. "It was too close to the truth. We've lived thaat film so many times." "The first time I saw Spinal Tap was in a hotel in New York," recounts brother William, sorrowfully. "Me and Bobby Gillespie were sharing a room in this place where one room had been booked for seven people. I had a cold sore on my lip and Nigel Tufnel had a cold sore and we were all watching this film and it was the most depressing f---ing hour-and-a-half of my life. When we were onstage later that night I expected Stonehenge to come down!" "We once played this gig in Detroit," rejoins Jim, beaming at the memory. "We came offstage and our dressing room had been hired out to a wedding party! We walked in and there's this bride standing there and a big tough looking guy going, 'GET THE F--- OUTTA HERE!'" "Yeah! Yeah! But there was more!" shouts William. "After that gig we walked offstage, cool as f--- , and the venue was like Spinal Tap with this big underground labyrinth. We walked down all these tunnels and came out of this door and found ourselves in the foyer of the gig! So we're standing there in front of all these people who'd just been watching us on stage! We said to the bouncers, 'Get us out of here, we've got to get back to the dressing room', and they didn't believe we were the f---ing band! We're sweating and holding guitars and they wouldn't let us through! Oh God!" Oh God. Jim shakes his head for the billionth, zillionth time this afternoon. William's pale blue eyes water with tears of mirth. The Reid brothers quiver at the daft, desperate memory of it all, and two hours of conversation with The Jesus And Mary Chain suddenly fits into place: it's no good, it has to be said - with Jim and William sitting side by side on the other side of the pub table this is like talking to the Scottish pandas in the Creature Comforts' electric dishwasher adverts. "Hey, do me a favour and don't print that!" snaps Jim, on the defensive. "I don't wanna be compared to a f---ing plasticine panda!" OK, OK. No need to get so animated... The Jesus And Mary Chain: where does it all begin? Where does it all end? Well, it starts with a bunch of spotty reprobates trashing other people's gigs in Glasgow and it will finish, in Jim's own words, "When we realise that we can't do it anymore." In between there's all the interesting stuff, the kind of hysterical history that would make rock'n'roll writers soil their spandex in thigh-moistening excitement: legal writs, illegal riots, slapped wrists and - unbelievably at that time - bona fide chart hits have followed the Mary Chain around like a potent concoction of rotten aromas and deluxe perfumes. Little is more potent, however, than the similarities between the Mary Chain and The Tap. Que? Both appeared in 1984, exploiting the cliché "This much talent". Both have outlasted their immediate cultural targets, be it frigid, flabby-buttocked rawk dinosaurs or foppy synth prannies. And both remain valid violators of the consumerist ethos, each with another generation of metallic morons and fop-poppers to undermine. Rock'n'roll? Hey, how much more rock'n'roll can you get? None f---ing more, mate. The fundamental difference is that, while one sought to parody the likes of The Scorpions, the other decided to paralyse the establishment with a scorpion-style sting in its poisonous, feedback-flinging tail. Oh, and one of them has come back with a stonking, badger-bonking, hamster-honking new single called 'Reverence' and details of a British tour to make The Man erect the gallows post-haste. And the other one, erm, hasn't. There is only one minor snag. Since the 'Automatic' LP in 1989, Spinal - sorry, the Mary Chain - have only released one single, 'Rollercoaster'. And since 'Automatic' in 1989 something has arrived and dropped its baggy kecks to shag the British muzak scene with the kind of volatile effervescence and pube-curling anti-stardom not witnessed since the Mary Chain themselves tore the heart out of the charts in the mid-'80s. Reid 'em and weep. While the brothers were away, the Roses and Mondays did play their way from the toilets to the nation's proverbial lounge. Not only that, but while the Mary Chain were busy buying their own studio in Sarf London, Thatcher's children were turning Nintendo Game Boys and washing up liquid bottles into Portastudios for the sole purpose of churning out whizz-bangin' top Top Ten tunes. And not only that but while the Reids were reading about their rivals and making bassist Douglas Hart redundant, even the Bul & Gate fraternity saw red and stampeded into the charts, with everyone from Senseless Things to Daisy Chainsaw to Banana Snorkel peppering Plebland with (cough, splutter) 'proper' music. Now the Mary Chain are rejoining a (b)rat-race beleaguered with alternative types, it must be akin to a strenuously individualistic zit suddenly waking up one day to find that it's just another spot in an ocean of acne. "It's been good, these are interesting times in music," nods William with magnificent understatement. "Obviously with bandwagons there's been a lot of shit, but pop music's been really interesting to me. I think the '80s were a horrible decade, a horrible, horrible time. I never enjoyed it - if I remember it, it was all Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. People's tastes went haywire. Teenagers became boring and really did prefer Culture Club to us or The Smiths. At least over the past couple of years teenagers have got an attitude. Something's happening." "It seemed as though to become that big in the '80s you had to be crap," muses Jim, cheerfully, "whereas these days the likes of The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays becoming huge is an example for everybody. You can look at that and think, well, you don't have to be drivel to be massive. It's possible to be a stadium band and not be shit! "There's a feeling of gatecrashing going on. Bands shouldn't be there, but they got there anyway against all the odds. In a way, that's what we tried to do in the beginning. People didn't know what we meant by it, but we said we wanted to be on Top Of The Pops with 'Never Understand', but that's what it was for, that's why it was made. THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT!" "Or we'd say, "We wanna play stadiums in America' and people thought we meant 'We wanna be shit!," sneers William. "But all we were saying was, if Dire Straits are playing stadiums, we should be f---ing doing them as well, y'know? We're better than that band - they sell more but we're better! People misunderstood us a lot, and now you get Nirvana and they'll have to play stadiums this year!" "I must admit, with all this talk about stadiums, the thing is, I hate stadium gigs!" confesses Jim with a sly grin. "I'd never go to see a band in a stadium - they depress the shit out of me!" The Mary Chain are in the perfect environment to mull over the past, present and future. We're in a pub off the Clerkenwell Road, ECI, within vomming distance of the Creation label's old offices where the brothers made their first (skid)mark on the road to ruin. While the bar's clientele may be wrinkled, the jukebox is incongruously fresh, spurting forth the Roses, St Etienne, The KLF... in short, the ideal soundtrack for the duo's recent stint as passengers on the rock'n'roll bus to Benylinland and beyond. And here they are, talking about Rollercoaster, the stadium-sized touring venture which isn't actually hitting any hallowed turf, but may as well be for the sheer audacious size of the project in myopic UK terms. As live comebacks go, the Mary Chain's return is hardly likely to be relegated to the level of, say, The Primitives' last (non-)league performances, but, according to Jim, after all the work that went into bringing them together on a bill with Dinosaur Jr, My Bloody Valentine and Blur, that's the least the Mary Chain deserve. "I must admit I didn't think it was gonna come together," admits the wiry one. "It seemed like such a difficult thing to do, to find four good bands just willing to get on with it, and I thought maybe there'd be too many clashes of egos - us included. Everybody in a band has got an ego the size of a mountain, but that hasn't been a problem." "Aye, but we haven't started it yet," observes William perceptively. "Yeah, but to get everybody to agree to do it has been relatively easy - people were into it from the very start." For sure, the blend of the bands is a plectrum-fanciers' frottaging delight. Yet surely, if we pay heed to the incessant comparisons with last year's Lollapalooza bashes, doesn't the bill lack a rap or dance-orientated act like a giraffe would miss a long neck? "It wouldn't be bad," admits Jim, "but then again, this is Britain we're talking about, so who would do it? Who's at the right level, ie not nothing and not too huge? It's a difficult thing." "You're talking about broadening people's horizons, but this is Britain and people's horizons are pretty wide, anyway," defends William. "In America it is good that Public Enemy play with Sisters of Mercy 'cos people are very narrow-minded. The radio plays either rap or white rock, but it's not really like that here, so there's not much point in doing a big missionary type thing. You can turn on the telly and see Techno next to something really different - I think this country's incredibly healthy in that way." "Yeah, nothing changes in America," snarls Jim. "You know that in ten years' time Kiss are still gonna be in the US charts. They'll be hobbling around on crutches with wheelbarrows carrying their bellies, and they'll still be trying to rock out!" 'Reverence' is indisputably, irrevocably, classically Mary Chain. The guitars are sufficiently serrated to shear a sheep at 20 places. The old nonchalant swagger swaggers, caring very little about The Devil and his supposedly great collection of tunes (hey, does that make Jim a music publisher?). Jim sings like a man possessed by Jeremy Beadle. And, whoops, hang on to your prejudices, kids, there are electro-tinged beats of the decidedly feet-shuffling, leg-breaking variety. Between them, me and half a million readers, 'Reverence' isn't a copious quantity of continents removed from the glacial grooves of Curve - without the crap pop background, natch. William promises more of the same on the forthcoming album, ironically recorded with Curve's drummer; Jim points out, "You're dead if you're not looking at what's going on around you," and the climax to this particular plot is that the Mary Chain have slyly reinvented themselves, cunningly customised the old malevolent model and thus, after eight years, sound like anything but a bunch of sad old bastards throwing teenage tantrums. "That's because we've never stopped being a rock'n'roll band," decides William, with nary a hint of embarrassment. "Rock'n'roll has come back, but we've always been a rock band. We've never been afraid to say it, even when it wasn't really fashionable." It's that phrase again. Rock'n'flippin'roll. With the riots'n'arrests, the drink'n'drugs, the darker than dark approach, have the band consciously - conscientiously, even - strived to maintain the ideology of indulgence and irresponsibility? "No, I think whatever we've done we've never been clichéd," says William through a thoughtful beer glass. "Like with Guns'n'Roses and Slash's bottle of JD and his snakes, there's something kinda stupid about that. It's almost saying rock'n'roll's dead, that is what people used to do in the '60s, this is what Keef would do. Whereas to us, rock'n'roll isn't dead and we're still doing it." "All of the best bands ever haven't been that contrived that they actually sit down and study their image, and we've never done that either," elaborates Jim. "We never planned anything, things just seemed to naturally disintegrate around us. Chaos just seemed to follow us around. It wasn't like, 'Oh yeah, let's start a riot tonight'. How could you plan something like that? Or even stuff like getting arrested - I was just some guy that couldn't stand up onstage! "People seem to think that you scheme these things, but you can't. If you start thinking it looks good if you do a photo session with a bottle of Jack Daniel's then f--- it! That's nothing! Anybody can do that! Really, honestly, anybody could be Guns'n'Roses, and that's the truth. Anybody could swig the Jack and go through the entire embarrassing history of rock'n'roll!" They've kept their part of the bargain. Now, one assumes, we just have to wait for 'Reverence' to whisk the Mary Chain into the Fabbo 40 and show all those whippersnapper, chart-crapping pretenders how this screechy'n'melodic noise/pop crossover thing is really done, right? After all, if the Valentines are the forefathers of the Home Counties cavalry, surely the Mary Chain are the Godfathers. But, uh-oh, here comes Jim, mauling an innoncent packet of crips... "I don't know if 'Reverence' will go into the Top 40," he crunches with a thundercloud frown. "It won't get any radio play, it isn't gonna get any TV coverage..." "Oh, I forgot to tell you," interjects William, "I just heard today that Woolworths aren't stocking the record." "Also, it's been so long since we've made a record, I don't know who's out there anymore." Say what? SAY FLIPPIN' WELL WHAAAT??? The Mary Chain have nurtured this image of casual stroppiness for so long that 'insecure types with a penchant for paranoid tendencies' isn't something that one imagines would appear in the band's biography. Yet here they are, detailing the chart positions of their hit singles which didn't glean Top Of The Pops appearances like numero uno trainspotters with degrees in diesel engine knobbing. "Och, we've always been insecure," insists William. "But in the beginning we hid it a lot better. There was a lot of forced arrogance and that's not really the way we are. We've just finished an LP which has left us dry and songless and it's not even released yet and we're thinking about the next one. It scares the shit out of me, it really does. "We've not had a video on The Chart Show for four years now, which is really extraordinary! I watch it and I see such a variety of bands, so many obscure bands, and we haven't been on since 1987! I'm not being paranoid here, am I?" Admittedly, the band's vociferous rent-a-quoting aside, 'Reverence' does concern itself with death. And not with much subtlety, either. In fact, it's with none more subtlety that Jim howls, "I wanna die like JFK / I wanna die on a sunny day / I wanna die in the USA." This is one record that hospital radio won't be beaming into the Whipps Cross intensive care unit, let alone making friends with Master Simon Bates. "It's a wannabe song," explains William. "People wannabe Madonna and live that kind of life, and there's a glamour in dying as well, like Jesus Christ and John F Kennedy are two of the most glamorous deaths in the history of the world. And I certainly don't wanna die like a 75-year-old man in a bedsit in Hackney!" "I'd like to die instantly in some way," decides a jovial Jim. "Not famously - that's asking too much, let's face it. In fact, that's inviting some psycho to have a go at me. Preferably when I'm 85 years old, I'd like to get shot in the head, how about that? "I don't wanna get AIDS, though. That's how I don't want to die. AIDS cuts through the shit, basically. It brings... Christ, all of everybody's life is spent trying to deny what is inevitable, anyway, and everybody romanticises and glamorises everything, but AIDS has something brutally real about it. You die a miserable, horrible death and you did it 'cos you f---ed somebody. That's it. You screw someone and you die a disgusting, humiliating death. I don't wanna do that, do you?" To be quite frank, I'm fairly worried about a religious upsurge, whereby a stupid mistake becomes God's punishment. "Yeah, but that's not so ridiculous anymore! Nowadays you can't call those people religious cranks, you're thinking, Jesus, I'd better get my Bible and start f---ing praying..." For all their insecurities and realism-loaded outbursts, if Jim has his arm twisted he will eventually - amidst cries of "I don't wanna blow our own trumpet!" - admit that "I don't think there's anybody better than us. There's people I like but nobody's doing it better. That's the way it's got to be." Naming names, the singer says he rates Spiritualized, Cocteau Twins, The Pogues and Pussy Galore, which for some unfathomable reason sends the conversation spinning over to Barbara Cartland and escapism and sends William right off on one. "I think the reason why I believe in the soul is because scientists don't know why music affects people. They don't know why that makes you feel good and why that makes you feel bad. I don't know why a certain chord sequence makes me feel so good, and I don't know why that Scorpions record makes me want to f---ing vomit! It's such a positive song, 'Dahdahdah the Iron Curtain's falling down', but it makes me so depressed. There's something in music that you can't evaluate, but that Scorpions record is like an ITN newsflash, it's like Sandy Gall telling you what happened in Gorky Park. If someone clever wrote a song about what's happened in the East over the past two years it could be incredibly moving, but that song just brings you down. You just start thinking about unfashionable trousers, food queues and waiting for eight hours for a sewing needle. I mean, I'd like to write a Christmas song, but not a sentimental one. I'd write a Jesus And Mary Chain Christmas song!" he finishes. Oh yeah, and what would that seasonal delight be like? 'F---, It's Christmas Again'? 'Let's Crucify Santa'? 'I'm Dreaming Of A Black Christmas'? "There may be a touch of darkness about it," concedes William. "I mean, it is a time to be cynical. What the f--- is Christmas? Jesus is the last name mentioned! I saw Liz Kershaw on TV and she was just going on about 'Christmas is for the kids, innit?' It made me think like, is it? Did Jesus die for the kids? God is Toys R Us!" "But if people expect us to come out with something like, 'Oh It's Been A Bloody Miserable Christmas This Year' I'd say they misunderstand us," protests a wounded Jim. "You shouldn't be fooled by the press photos where we look miserable, 'cos I don't know what to do in front of a camera. I don't consider myself to be an entertainer, but don't be put off by it. Some of the songs are incredibly optimistic and happy." So 'Reverence' isn't really a song from the dark side, right? "OK, so some of the songs aren't that optimistic, but a lot of them are. It's the same on stage - I enjoy playing live but there isn't a single showbiz bone in my body. I really cannot jump up in the air and do the splits and say, 'Hiya London, are ya ready to rawk?' That's not to say that we're miserable bastards and sit around all day going 'F---ing hell' and 'Gloomy gloomy shit shit shit'..." So the Brothers-Not-So-Grim are still being taken the wrong way after eight years, but that need not make them the suppositories of rock. They're still insecure and unsure of their position after four albums, which I guess makes them more human than yer average amp-smashing, leather-clad 'entertainer'. And they're still sneering on the outside, ringing rock's doorbell and running off down the garden path before being invited in. It's easy to forget what a storm they caused back then, what a hurricane they can whip up now. But not that easy. They mercilessly relate stories about Popstar A attempting to cement a carnal relationship with an unwilling Popstar B, safe in the knowledge that, if names were printed, the libel case would bankrupt a financially secure publication. All of which leaves them high and verbally dry - apart from the minute problem of finding some more Mary Chainers for the Rollercoaster jaunt; in other words, pop beasts who aren't too precious about what they play or how it's put down. "That's what we're like," announces William, emphatically. "Guitars are for making noises. I've done songs and played guitar without playing a single proper note in it!" "We were making records for a year before we realised what a guitar tuner was for," adds Jim, proudly. "We've just never concerned ourselves with all that stuff. I started playing guitar in 1985 and to this day I still don't know what the chords are all called, and I only know about five of them. But I don't care about all that - I can do things with a guitar Eric Clapton probably hasn't even had a f---ing nightmare about. Who cares? "It's all to do with imagination. Are KLF musicians? Do they need to be? Are their records good? Why are their records good? It's got f--- all to do with musicianship. Just follow your instincts. Our instincts are worth more than a thousand years of guitar lessons, y'know? That's what making music's all about. That's my advice to the younger kiddies out there that are waiting for words of wisdom - don't listen to boring old f---ers that have been making records for years... Oh f---!" Oh f---, indeed. As the pandas say, if you've got it, flaunt it.

#interview