#partly because ‘figured out’ implies some sort of conclusion which. no.

[wlw-webcomic-bracket]

they’re not wrong

#I’m not saying webcomics are the reason I figured out my gender #partly because ‘figured out’ implies some sort of conclusion which. no. #my only conclusion is ‘I give up. no gender just vibes’ #but they have helped ground me ever since I gave up on labeling myself #and it’s been fun seeing just how many artists in my age bracket have had gender realizations of their own around the same time as me

[helnjk]

Snowed In - C.W.

Charlie Weasley x fem!reader

Requested: yes! by my love @lupinsclassroom

Ah HA I finally came up with a Charlie request. Okay, of course it’s professor reader because I’m obsessed with them but like....Charlie visits hogwarts, and then (I know logistically this isn’t possible bc ✨magic✨) but he gets snowed in and has to stay in the castle for the weekend and it’s just cozy and soft 🥺

Word count: 2.6k

Summary: sometimes, it takes just the right circumstances to get what you want. 

Warnings: meal mention, reference to/implied sex (blink and you’ll miss it), winter fluff! 

A/N: this took me so long to get done aaaaaaaa 😩 but yay ! more COMC professor & charlie 🥰

– 

Christmas at Hogwarts was always a spectacular sight. The professors always loved to go above and beyond with the decorations, but even without them, the grounds and the castle looked, well, magical. 

“Professor L/N?” a voice from across the room mumbled. 

Y/N looked up from the stack of papers she was grading to see Eloise Abbott, wrapped in her cloak and her Hufflepuff scarf, standing at the entrance to her office. A neatly wrapped present was clutched in her gloved hands as she waited for her professor to invite her inside. 

Athena was perched on her stand behind Y/N, resting after a long afternoon of delivering various Christmas gifts. Her sleeping figure seemed to appease the student’s apprehension slightly as she called out, “Come on in, Eloise!” 

“Isn’t the train supposed to be leaving soon? What’re you still doing in the castle?” Y/N questioned, stashing away the stack of parchments on her desk, that way her attention would be fully on the Hufflepuff. 

“Yep!” Eloise replied quickly, “I just wanted to drop off a present for you before I go! I know that you’re staying here for the holidays, right?” 

“You’re right.” Y/N smiled. “Thank you for thinking of me, Eloise, that was very sweet of you.”

A swift nod was her reply, and as quick as she had come, Ms. Abbott turned on her heel and darted out of the room. Thankfully, she remembered to yell a hasty, “Happy Christmas!” over her shoulder before she was fully out of hearing range. 

Y/N shook her head with a soft smile on her lips. Even after being her professor for nearly six years now, Eloise was still a shy little thing when it came to communicating with professors or any sort of authority figure. Still, the gesture warmed her heart greatly. 

The thought of gifts and spending Christmas alone, well, not exactly alone, but not with the Weasleys this year put a slight damper on her mood, though. Minerva had asked her if she could spend the holidays at Hogwarts this year since they were running short of staff who could chaperone the students. Of course, Y/N could never say no to her favorite teacher turned cool boss. It was the least she could do. 

With a sigh, she stroked Athena’s soft feathers and came to the conclusion that she was too distracted to continue her grading. 

Despite her attempt for some alone time, Minerva managed to stop her in the hallway. 

“Ah Y/N, just the person I wanted to see,” the older professor smiled.

“Anything I can do for you, Min?” Y/N replied.

She nodded, “I need your help with a particularly odd creature in my office. It doesn’t seem to want to leave.” 

The two professors briskly walked towards the Headmistress’ office side by side, their winter robes swishing around their legs. Professor L/N’s brows furrowed at the lack of concern Minerva had shown at the fact that there was a creature in her office. Of course, the older witch was highly skilled and educated, so maybe it wasn’t that big of a problem. What did she need Y/N’s help for then? 

“Er, Minerva,” Y/N began as they turned a corner, “What creature exactly is in your office? Do you think we need backup?” 

“I didn’t exactly get a good look at it, I just saw that it had orange-colored fur.” 

“Minerva.” 

The sly grin that she was met with did nothing to help the situation. Y/N simply rolled her eyes and went along with the all too obvious scheme the Headmistress had hatched up this time. 

The pair said nothing else as they continued their journey to the Minerva’s office, save for the password–’panthera leo’–once they reached the gargoyle statue. Y/N’s curiosity got the better of her as they ascended the spiral staircase, especially since the older witch hadn’t stopped grinning. 

“So, you’re not going to tell me what’s going on despite the fact that you’re grinning at me like a cheshire cat?” Y/N probed, raising an eyebrow. 

“You’ll see, dear.” 

The younger professor had to push down the urge to roll her eyes. Thankfully, they had reached the top of the staircase, and the words she was about to say got stuck in her throat as she saw what, or rather who, was in the office. 

“Charlie?” she gasped, after pushing the door open. 

Leaning against the large oak desk with his legs crossed in front of him was Charlie Weasley with a shit-eating grin. Y/N paused at the entrance to the Headmistress’ office, her eyes darting between the redhead and her boss. 

“He’s the orange-furred creature that you can’t seem to get out of your office?” 

Even as she spoke the words, her head couldn’t wrap around the absurdity of the situation. Charlie let out a loud laugh at her question, his eyes moving his former professor and head of house, who had just slipped past Y/N and into her office. 

“I asked Minnie here to help me out some with surprising you,” he grinned cheekily. 

He pushed off the desk and took a few short strides. Faster than she could comprehend, he was standing in front of her, soft eyes staring down at hers and rough hands grasping at her arms. 

“Hi,” he spoke softly. 

In an instant, she practically melted in his arms, “Hi Charlie.” 

The sound of someone clearing their throat brought them out of their little bubble and their heads turned in Minerva’s direction.

“Alright Mr. Weasley, I helped you surprise Y/N,” she smiled knowingly, “Now off with you two! I’ve got a school to run.” 

With a shout of thanks, Charlie took Y/N’s hand and practically dragged her out of the office. Biting her lip to contain her grin, she felt like she was a student again, laughing through the deserted hallways as she and her boyfriend ran towards her quarters. 

There was a lot of tripping over their own feet and a lot of giggling, but she hadn’t felt this elated in a long time. Whenever Charlie would turn to look back at her, the edges of her lips would turn upwards automatically, as if he was the source of her happiness and her laughter.

Which, in a lot of ways, he was. 

Y/N had never been so glad to see the castle empty. It meant that she could let her professional professor facade down and let loose without having to think too hard about the repercussions. 

“So,” she started as they reached the hallway containing her room, “Care to tell me when you planned all of this?” 

The sparkle of mischief and delight in Charlie’s eyes nearly made her swoon, “I can’t stay long, unfortunately. Mum’s expecting me at the Burrow tonight, but I got an early portkey so that I could see you before Christmas.” 

Pushing up on her tiptoes, Y/N kissed him softly, “You’re wonderful, do you know that?” 

“Careful there, love, we don’t want to boost my ego too much.” 

–

“You all set?” Y/N asked, smoothing out the creases in Charlie’s scarf and trying to busy herself in an attempt to distract her mind from the thought of not spending Christmas in his arms. 

With a deep sigh, he answered, “Yep, just about.” 

Majority of their afternoon together was spent in bed, much to their joint amusement. In Charlie’s defense, he had come to do whatever it was that Y/N wanted, and well, that was what she ended up choosing. In hindsight, it was probably their best option anyway, since the weather outside the castle had slowly begun to worsen. 

By the time they had stumbled out of the warmth of Y/N’s bed and had gotten dressed once again, it was practically dark outside due to the snowstorm that rolled in. 

“It’s looking pretty rough out there,” she noted, as the pair of them walked hand in hand down the deserted hallways. 

Now and then, a student staying at Hogwarts for the holidays would pass by them and try their hardest not to stare at their hot Care of Magical Creatures professor and her equally hot dragon tamer boyfriend. 

Each time a student rushed past, Charlie would wait until they were out of sight before making eye contact with Y/N and smiling so big it shouldn’t have been humanly possible. 

“You’re insufferable,” she grumbled after the third student they encountered disappeared around the corner. 

“You love me,” he shrugged. 

The bickering pair paused mid step when they heard a new set of footsteps approaching them. For the second time that day, Y/N watched as Minerva approached. 

“I’m afraid your journey to the Burrow has to be put on hold, Mr. Weasley,” she spoke as she reached the pair. 

“What?” Y/N and Charlie said together. 

“The storm outside is much too harsh for anyone to walk past the apparition wards, even with impervious charms,” she explained.

“What about your floo, can’t he use that to get to the Burrow?” 

As Y/N spoke, she couldn’t help but feel a little guilty at the pang of excitement she felt at the thought of being able to spend more time with Charlie. 

“Ministry’s just gotten back with word that the Floo Network is under maintenance until further notice.” 

Charlie’s eyes flickered from Minerva’s solemn eyes to Y/N’s slightly confused ones, before he nodded, “Alright. Seems like I’m spending the night at Hogwarts then.” 

–

Dinner that night was amusing to say the least. As most students were at home with their families, those who stayed behind all fit in the long table that was usually the Head Table. Minerva, Charlie, and Y/N tried their hardest to contain their smiles at the incredulous looks that some of the students had. 

For some, it was their first time being in such close and intimate proximity to their professors. Others were wary of the attendance of the non-Hogwarts staff member, partly because he was a dragon tamer and mostly because he was Professor L/N’s boyfriend. 

Y/N’s heart had melted, however, at the sight of Charlie having a chat with the younger students. She had a flashback of summers at the Burrow when his younger siblings still weren’t old enough to attend Hogwarts, and how they looked at him with wide eyes and thought everything he said was gospel. 

“And then he opened his mouth so big I thought I was done for,” he spoke with such a tone that even Y/N was drawn in, “But turns out the old bugger was just going in for a yawn.” 

The end of his story elicited a giggle from the youngest student at the table and Y/N was sure that her heart was positively a pile of goo.

As discreetly as she possibly could, she placed her hand on top of Charlie’s thigh and grinned cheerfully as he took the signal and placed his larger one on hers. 

“Is it bad if I said that I’m glad you’re going to be here tonight?” she whispered when most of the attention wasn’t on them anymore.

“Absolutely not.” Charlie grinned and squeezed her hand. “Don’t you think the Floo being down sounds a little odd, though?” 

The pair glanced at each other and then their eyes drifted towards the Headmistress. As if she could read their minds–which was entirely possible–Minerva caught their eyes and smirked from behind her goblet as she took a sip from it. 

“Honestly, who knows what Minerva can come up with,” Y/N murmured, “She could tell us that there was a rogue Ministry gryffin creating potions in the dungeons and we would believe her.” 

The nonchalance of her statement choked out a loud laugh from Charlie. The stilted noise coming from him as he tried to contain his amusement ended up making her giggle as well. As the group finished up with their meal, the pair of them would catch each other’s eyes once in a while and another round of trying to repress their laughs would begin. 

They waited as everyone shuffled out of the Great Hall, stomachs full and eyes slightly droopy from the big meal. Their hands found each other as they walked down the chilly halls, providing a source of heat and comfort in the midst of so much cold. 

Once they reached Y/N’s quarters, Charlie flopped down on the bed with a sigh, stretching out on the comforter with a groan. 

Y/N couldn’t resist the urge to crawl onto the bed, tucking herself at his side. The familiar warmth of Charlie’s strong arm wrapping around her was enough for her to sigh contentedly, closing her eyes and succumbing to the gentle pull of sleep. 

“Wait, wait…” she heard him mumble, feeling the words vibrate through his chest. 

A groan escaped her lips as she felt him shift, pulling the both of them into a seated position. 

“Can’t, ‘m comfy here,” she grumbled, refusing to open her eyes. 

Instead of replying, Charlie carefully maneuvered them so that she lay back on the cold sheets and he slipped off the bed. It was silent for a few moments, save for the sound of his footsteps echoing through the room. Y/N was tempted to crack open her eyes just to see what he was up to, but the comfort posed by the bed was too strong. 

She knew he would eventually come back, and he did, the bed dipping as he kneeled on the space next to her. 

“Love,” he whispered, his hand brushing her cheek softly. 

“What’s it?” she mumbled, finally easing her eyes open. 

Beside her, sitting on the backs of his heels, Charlie held out a wrapped gift. The sight of him with a sheepish smile on his face, hands fidgeting nervously with the ribbon wrapped around the package, was enough for Y/N to sit up quickly. 

“Charlie?” she asked, tentatively taking the gift from him, “What’s this?” 

Her boyfriend cleared his throat before speaking, “I, erm, I was going to wait to have this delivered to you on Christmas morning but, I figured I’d rather see you open it in person.” 

Y/N didn’t need any more explanation as she tore open the wrapping. An intricately designed box opened to reveal the most beautiful necklace she had ever laid her eyes on. It was fairly simple, the design, a single pearl-like object in the center of a silver chain. If it weren’t shifting through iridescent hues of pink then blue then green then purple, she would have thought it were a pearl.

Tentatively, her fingers glided over the small round thing and it was warm to the touch.

“Oh it’s gorgeous,” she breathed, her eyes flitting upwards to meet Charlie’s.

“You like it?” he rubbed the back of his neck. 

“I love it!” she grinned, “Will you put it on me?” 

For having such large and calloused hands, Charlie was nimble and quick with the clasp of the necklace, his fingers sending shivers down her spine as he placed the necklace on her. 

“It’s made out of the shell of an Antipodean Opaleye’s egg,” he explained when she turned to face him once more, “I asked a friend of mine back in Romania if he could fashion it onto a necklace. I saw the shell and thought it would look stunning on you, I was right.” 

With a soft smile, Y/N’s arms snaked around his neck and she pressed a soft kiss on his lips, “It’s perfect. You’re perfect.” 

“Love you.” 

“I love you too.” 

The couple stayed in each other’s arms for a long time, relishing in the warmth and comfort of the other. When they finally managed to get dressed for bed and Y/N was tucked under Charlie’s arm for the night, their hearts were full. 

“Happy Christmas, my love,” he whispered as they were lulled to sleep. 

–

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[woman-loving]

Lesbian Unintelligibility in Pre-1989 Poland

Selection from ""No one talked about it": The Paradoxes of Lesbian Identity in pre-1989 Poland, by Magdalena Staroszczyk, in Queers in State Socialism: Cruising 1970s Poland, eds. Tomasz Basiuk and Jędrzej Burszta, 2021

The question of lesbian visibility is pertinent today because of the limited number of lesbian-oriented activist events and cultural representations. But it presents a major methodological problem when looking at the past. That problem lies in an almost complete lack of historical sources, something partly mended with oral history interviews, but also in an epistemological dilemma. How can we talk about lesbians when they did not exist as a recognizable category? What did their (supposed) non-existence mean? And should we even call those who (supposedly) did not exist “lesbians”?

To illustrate this problem, let me begin with excerpts from an interview I conducted for the CRUSEV project [a study of queer cultures in the 1970s]. My interlocutor is a lesbian woman born in the 1950s, who lived in Cracow most of her life:

“To this very day I have a problem with my brothers, as I cannot talk to them about this. They just won’t do it, I would like to talk, but. . . . They have this problem, they lace up their mouths when any reference is made to this topic, because they were raised in that reality [when] no one talked about it. It was a taboo. It still is. ... I was so weak, unable to take initiative, lacking a concept of my own life—all this testifies to the oppression of homosexual persons, who do not know how to live, have no support from [others], no information or knowledge learned at school, or from a psychologist. What did I do? I searched in encyclopaedias for the single entry, “homosexuality.” What did I learn? That I was a pervert. What did it do to me? It only hurt me, no? Q: Was the word lesbian in use? Only as a slur. Even my mother used it as an offensive word. When she finally figured out my orientation, she said the word a few times. With hatred. Hissing the word at me.”

The woman offers shocking testimony of intense and persistent hostility towards a family member—sister, daughter—who happens to be a lesbian. The brothers and the mother are so profoundly unable to accept her sexuality that they cannot speak about it at all, least of all rationally. The taboo has remained firmly in place for decades. How was it maintained? And, perhaps more importantly, how do we access the emotional reality that it caused? The quotes all highlight the theme of language, silence, and something unspeakable. Tabooization implies a gap in representation, and the appropriate word cannot be spoken but merely hissed out with hatred.

Popular discourse and academic literature alike address this problem under the rubric of “lesbian invisibility” (Mizielińska 2001). I put forward a different conceptual frame, proposing to address the question of lesbian identity in pre-1989 Poland not in terms of visibility versus invisibility, but instead in terms of cultural intelligibility versus unintelligibility. The former concepts, which have a rich history in discussions of pre-emancipatory lesbian experience, presume an already existing identity that is self-evident to the person in question. They assume the existence of a person who thinks of herself as a lesbian. One then proceeds to ask whether or not this lesbian was visible as such to others, that is, whether others viewed her as the lesbian she knew she was. Another assumption behind this framing is that the woman in question wished to be visible although this desired visibility had been denied her. These are some of the essentializing assumptions inscribed in the concept of (in)visibility. Their limitation is that they only allow us to ask whether or not the lesbian is seen for who she feels she is and wishes to be seen by others.

By contrast, (un)intelligibility looks first to the social construction of identity, especially to the constitutive role of language. To think in those terms is to ask under what conditions same-sex desire between women is culturally legible as constitutive of an identity. So, instead of asking if people saw lesbians for who they really were, we will try to understand the specific epistemic conditions which made some women socially recognizable to others, and also to themselves, as “lesbians.” This use of the concept “intelligibility” is analogous to its use by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, as she explains why gender conformity is key to successful personhood[...].

For Butler, cultural intelligibility is thus an aspect of the social norm, as it corresponds to “a normative ideal.” It is one of the conditions of coherence and continuity requisite for successful personhood. In a similar vein, to say that lesbians in the People’s Republic of Poland were not culturally intelligible is of course not to claim that there were no women engaged in same-sex romantic and erotic relationships—such a conclusion would be absurd, as well as untrue. It is, rather, to suggest that “lesbian” was not a category of personhood available or, for that matter, desirable to many nonheteronormative women. The word was not in common use and it did not signify to them the sort of person they felt they were. Nor was another word readily available, as interlocutors’ frequent periphrases strongly suggest, for example, “I cannot talk to them about this. ... They ... lace up their mouths when any reference is made to this topic” (my emphases).

Interviews conducted with women for the CRUSEV project are filled with pain due to rejection. So are the interviews conducted by Anna Laszuk, whose Dziewczyny, wyjdźcie z szafy (Come Out of the Closet, Girls! 2006 ) was a pioneering collection of herstories which gave voice to non-heteronormative Polish women of different ages, including those who remember the pre-1989 era. Lesbian unintelligibility is arguably a major theme in the collection. The pain caused by the sense of not belonging expressed by many illustrates that being unintelligible can be harmful. At the same time, unintelligibility had some practical advantages. The main among them was relative safety in a profoundly heteronormative society. As long as things went unnamed, a women-loving woman was not in danger of stigmatization or social ostracism.

Basia, born in 1939 and thus the oldest among Laszuk’s interviewees, offers a reassuring narrative in which unintelligibility has a positive valence:

“I cannot say a bad word about my parents. They knew but they did not comment. . . . My parents never asked me personal questions, never exerted any kind of pressure on me to get married. They were people of great culture, very understanding, and they quite simply loved me. They would meet my various girlfriends, but these were never referred to as anything but “friends” (przyjaciółki). Girls had it much easier than boys because intimacy between girls was generally accepted. Nobody was surprised that I showed up with a woman, invited her home, held her hand, or that we went on trips together.” (Laszuk 2006, 27)

The gap between visceral knowing and the impossibility of naming is especially striking in this passage. The parents “knew” and Basia knew that they knew, but they did not comment, ask questions, or make demands, and Basia clearly appreciates their silence as a favour. To her, it was a form of politeness, discreetness, perhaps even protectiveness. The silence was, in fact, a form of affectionate communication: “they quite simply loved me.”

Another of Laszuk’s interviewees is Nina, born around 1945 and 60 years old at the time of the interview. With a certain nostalgia, Nina recalls the days when certain things were left unnamed, suggesting that there is erotic potential in the unintelligibility of women’s desire. Laszuk summarizes her views:

“Nina claims that those times certainly carried a certain charm: erotic relationships between women, veiled with understatement and secrecy, had a lot of beauty to them. Clandestine looks were exchanged above the heads of people who remained unaware of their meaning, as women understood each other with half a gesture, between words. Nowadays, everything has a name, everything is direct.” (Laszuk 2006, 33)

A similar equation between secrecy and eroticism is drawn by the much younger Izabela Filipiak, trailblazing author of Polish feminist fiction in the 1990s and the very first woman in Poland to publicly come out as lesbian, in an interview for the Polish edition of Cosmopolitan in 1998. Six years later, Filipiak suggested a link between things remaining unnamed and erotic pleasure, and admitted to a certain nostalgia for this pre-emancipatory formula of lesbian (non)identity. Her avowed motivation was not the fear of stigmatization but a desire for erotic intensity:

“When love becomes passion in which I lose myself, I stop calculating, stop comparing, no longer anchor it in social relations, or some norm. I simply immerse myself in passion. My feelings condition and justify everything that happens from that point on. I do not reflect upon myself nor dwell on stigma because my feeling is so pure that it burns through and clears away everything that might attach to me as a woman who loves women.” (Kulpa and Warkocki 2004)

Filipiak acknowledges the contemporary, “postmodern” (her word) lesbian identity which requires activism and entails enumerating various kinds of discrimination. But paradoxically—considering that she is the first public lesbian in Poland—she speaks with much more enthusiasm about the “modernist lesbians” described by Baudelaire:

“They chose the path of passion. Secrecy and passion. Of course, their passion becomes a form of consent to remain secret, to stay invisible to others, but this is not unambivalent. I once talked to such an “oldtimer” who lived her entire life in just that way and she protested very strongly when I made a remark about hiding. Because, she says, she did not hide anything, she drove all around the city with her beloved and, of course, everyone knew. Yes, everyone knew, but nobody remembers it now, there is no trace of all that.” (Kulpa and Warkocki 2004)

Cultural unintelligibility causes the gap between “everyone knew” and “nobody remembers” but it is also the source of excitement and pleasure. For Filipiak’s “old-timer” and her predecessors, Baudelaire’s modernist lesbians, the evasion, or rejection, of identity and the maintaining of secrecy is the path of passion. Crucially, these disavowals of identity mobilize a discourse of freedom rather than hiding, entrapment, or staying in the closet. The lack of a name is interpreted as an unmooring from language and a liberation from its norms.

Needless to say, cultural unintelligibility may also lead to profound torment and self-hatred. In the concept of nationhood generated by nationalists and by the Catholic Church in Poland, lesbians (seen stereotypically) are double outsiders whose exclusion from language is vital.[1] A repentant homosexual woman named Katarzyna offers her testimony in a Catholic self-help manual addressing those who wish to be cured of homosexuality. (It is irrelevant for my purpose whether the testimony is authentic; my interest is in the discursive construction of lesbian identity as literally impossible and nonexistent.) Katarzyna speaks about her search for love, her profound sense of guilt and her disgust with herself. The word “lesbian” is never used; her homosexuality is framed as confusion and as straying from her true desire for God. The origin of the pain is the woman’s unintelligibility to herself:

“Only I knew how much despair there was in my life on account of being different. First, there was the sense of being torn apart when I realized how different my desires were from the appearance of my body. Despite the storm of homosexual desire, I was still a woman. Then, the question: What to do with myself? How to live?” (Huk 1996, 121)

A woman cannot love other women—the subject knows this. We can speculate that her knowledge is due to her Catholic upbringing; she has internalized the teaching that homosexuality is a sin, and thus untrue and not real. The logic of the confession is overdetermined: the only way for her to become intelligible to herself is to abandon same-sex desire and turn to God, and through him to men. Church language thus frames homosexuality as chaos: it is a disordered space where no appropriate language can obtain. Within this frame, unintelligibility is anything but erotic. It is rather an instrument of shaming and, once internalized, a symptom of shame.

For many, the experience of unintelligibility is moored in intense heteronormativity, without regard to Church teachings or the language of national belonging. Struggling with the choice between social intelligibility available to straights and leading an authentic life outside the realm of intelligibility, one CRUSEV interlocutor, aged 67, describes her youth in 1960s and 1970s:

“I always knew I was a lesbian ... and if I am one, then I will be one. Yes, in that sense. And not to live the life of a married woman, mother and so on. This life wasn’t my life at all. However, as I said, it was fine in an external sense. So calm and well-ordered: a husband, nice children, everything, everything. But it was external, and my life was not my life at all, it wasn’t me.”

She thus underscores her internal sense of dissonance, a felt incompatibility with the social role she was playing. The role model of a wife and mother was available to her, but a lesbian role model was not.

The discomfort felt at the unavailability of a role model may have had different consequences. Another CRUSEV interviewee, aged 62, describes her impulse to change her life so as to authentically experience her feelings for another woman, in contrast to that woman’s ex:

“She visited me a few times, and it was enough that I wrote something, anything ... [and] she would get on the train and travel across the country. There were no telephones then, during martial law. Regardless of anything, she would be there. And at one point I realized that I ... damn, I loved her. ... She broke up with her previous girlfriend very violently—this may interest you—because it turned out that the girl was so terribly afraid of being exposed and of some unimaginable consequences that she simply ran away.”

The fear of exposure, critically addressed by the interlocutor, was nonetheless something she, too, experienced. She goes on to speak of “hiding a secret” and “stifling” her emotions.

A concern with leading an inauthentic life resurfaces in the account of the afore-quoted woman, aged 67:

“I couldn’t reveal my secret to anyone. The only person who knew was my friend in Cracow. I led such a double life, I mean. ... It is difficult to say if this was a life, because it was as if I had my inner spirituality and my inner world, entirely secret, but outside I behaved like all the other girls, so I went out with some boys. ... It was always deeply suppressed by me and I was always fighting with myself. I mean, I fell in love [with women] and did everything to fall out of love [laughter]. On and on again.”

Her anxiety translates into self-pathologizing behaviour:

“In 1971 I received my high school diploma and I was already . . . in a relationship of some years with my high school girlfriend. . . . But because we both thought we were abnormal, perverted or something, somehow we wanted to be cured, and so she was going to college to Cracow, and I to Poznań. We engaged in geographic therapy, so to speak.”

The desire to “be cured” from homosexuality recurs in a number of interviews. Sometimes it has a factual dimension, as interlocutors describe having undergone psychotherapy and even reparative therapy—of course, to no avail.

Others decide to have a relationship with a woman after years spent in relationships with men. Referring to her female partner of 25 years, who had previously been married to a man, one of my interlocutors suggests that her partner had been disavowing her homosexual desires for many years before the two women’s relationship began: “the truth is that H. had struggled with it for more than 20 years and she was probably not sure what was going on.” Despite this presumed initial confusion, the women’s relationship had already lasted for more than 25 years at the time I conducted the interview.

Recognizing one’s homosexual desires did not necessarily have to be difficult or shocking. It was not for this woman, aged 66 at the time of the interview:

“It was obvious to me. I didn’t, no, no, I didn’t suppress it, I knew that [I was going], “Oh, such a nice girl, I like this one, with this one I want to be close, with that one I want to talk longer, with that one I want to spend time, with that one I want, for example, to embrace her neck or grab her hand”.”

Rather, what came as a shock was the unavailability of any social role or language corresponding to this felt desire that came as a shock. The woman continues:

“It turned out that I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, that I couldn’t tell anyone. I realized this when I grew up and watched my surroundings, family, friends, society. I saw that this topic was not there! If it’s not there, how can I get it out of myself? I wasn’t so brave.”

The tabooization of homosexuality—its unintelligibility—is a recurring thread in these accounts; what varies is the extent to which it marred the subjects’ self-perception.

#lgbtq history #poland #lesbian history #unintelligibility #lesbian unintelligibility #this might be deleted in the future so read it while you can

[propshophannah]

I've always seen you as the Captain and the one who first laid the bricks to the Elriel ship and seeing your post is just... Sobering. I was ready to welcome Elriel, but Azriel's PoV.... If it's going to be like this I want Gwyn and Elain to stay far away so he can sort his issues.

Yeah. It was... icky for a hot second. Now I get why he came off that way. He’s sleep deprived, he’s feeling down and angry and he’s happy and envious of his brothers happiness. Like it’s a lot. He’s also overworked (which is likely his own fault for not saying no). But Rhys hit the nail on the head with the “deserve” line. Az needs some therapy. I don’t want him anywhere near either Elain or Gwyn until he figures his shit out. It came off really bad in that scene and kind of creepy. 

Then Rhys used the word “seduce” and Az straight up tells us he hasn’t thought that far through it, and basically implies that he’s thought of the sex and not what comes after. That’s both selfish and stupid (BUT I GET that in that moment, we’re seeing a strung out Az. So it’s not necessarily indicative of his normal behavior). 

But THEN he thinks about how he wanted to invoke the Blood Duel for Mor and I was 100% creeped THE FUCK OUT. I mean I don’t think SJM intended it to be creepy, but she DID want to let us all know that Az going after unattainable things is his pattern. He won’t be happy until he can learn to break that cycle and I honestly think it goes back to his daddy issues. His dad didn’t lock up the mom because he liked her, he did that so no one else could have her, so he could keep her to himself. If Az’s behavior is any indication, this strange infatuation thing with females stems from that. But ALSO from him not feeling good enough abut himself. That’s apparent in the fact that he goes after things he knows he can’t have. 

Cuz you can’t tell me he doesn’t—on some level—know about Mor. Both that she prefers ladies, that she avoids him on purpose.... His shadows seem smart enough to be able to pick that up. Or at the very least provide all the info he’d need to come to the correct conclusion. 

I honestly like Gwyn more for him after this book. Partly because she’s in Nesta’s friend group and Az is apart of that so it wouldn’t change the dynamic as much as adding Elain or taking Az out of it would. I also think their healing arcs potentially fit together really well. 

My ONE reservation with Gwyn is we don’t know who her father is. And I do NOT want some fucking plot twist that’s like... Gwyn is Azriel’s kid or something! (Excuse me while I vomit all over the floor.) I mean I could learn to love it, and I DO NOT think that’s what’s happening here. But I do NOT TRUST SARAH NOT TO FUCK WITH US on that parentage. Bitch is crafty af.  (My money for her dad is on someone in the Autumn court. I think.)

#ACOSF spoilers #ACOSF spoiler #Azriel POV chapter #Az POV #acosf #Azriel x Gwyn #Azwyn #Gwynriel #gwyn

[theoreticalli]

tma and unreliable narration

you know in thinking so much about melanie and jon and helen and jon (and to an extent georgie and basira and martin too) I just keep coming back to how good an example of unreliable narration tma is (spoilers thru 160 and for 187, as well as a link to a post abt the finale).

because jon is our pov character, right? for the vast majority of the series, outside of statements, everything we experience is implied to be through his perspective. we start out with him and him alone, we return to him again and again-- alone in the tunnels, alone in America, alone after the Unknowing, alone as the apocalypse swirls around him. we let him entrust us, an unseen confidante, with things he won’t tell anyone else. we are intimately familiar with his experiences and his personality, and we see every little moment of development he goes through. we spend so much time with him.

but jon... is wrong sometimes. like, objectively, we know that. his paranoia spiral in s2 is the first major indicator that this character, who is functionally our narrator, is not objective. he makes decisions based on prior experiences and the information he has and assumptions from both, like we all do. it’s just good character building! it makes him feel more real if he’s wrong sometimes, if he has flaws and blind spots!

and sometimes he is wrong. the most signposted and indisputable moment is the web table, when he just straight-up puts the clues together and comes to the wrong conclusion, or when he spends a whole season being suspicious of tim and martin (and elias) when not!sasha’s right there. basically, He Is Not Immune To Propaganda

so that’s our sign that this is not the kind of character who is always or even usually Objectively right or in the right. he’s not frequently outright wrong, either, but his view of things is always limited, and the other characters are carefully placed to be foils to his perspective, to highlight things he isn’t thinking about or illustrate contrasts or just other opinions. again, It’s Good Character Building! it’s smart writing to have all your characters exist first and foremost as bundles of principles and priorities informed by certain key backstory events, because then you can rely on that to figure out how they’ll react to any given situation, and personalities and quirks tend to fall into place from there. my brain is not moving on the frequency to illustrate exactly what all these foils are right now but I’m sure there’s other posts about that so moving on

most of jon’s conflicts with his allies are not because either of them are wrong, but because they each have distinct and conflicting perspectives. and there’s some posts I see that just... frustrate me because they only take into consideration the context for jon’s actions, and don’t extend the same analysis to any other characters involved. there’s no thought put into why georgie might feel the need to draw the boundaries she does, why melanie goes off on jon at the specific times she does, or god forbid when either of them try to reconcile with him at various points. jon is sympathetic to us as the audience in his shoes, but the actions he takes don’t always have positive effects on those around him in the same way that other people severely hurt him without really meaning to. really, my first reaction to posts like these is always to want to just point out 5 different moments of context that show that most of jon’s allies are never being malicious to him because they’re bad people, or heartless. they have their reasons, and are not being cruel for cruelty’s sake like many of the avatars. they aren’t required to agree with him to still be taken in good faith.

(I have a post about this wrt the end of s5 that I’ll link here to make this stay mostly spoiler free so feel free to go read that but anyways)

and there’s also the things jon directly says about other characters, which again, should not always be taken at face value! and this bit is partly a personal grievance with the way helen’s arc ended, so ymmv, but I think that leaving the exact nature of the distortion (esp how it meshes with its host of sorts) more vague is much more effective in terms of her function in the story. so to my interpretation, even though jon says a lot of things about what the distortion is, that doesn’t necessarily mean any of them are entirely accurate! that’s a point helen made repeatedly, and her role as a foil is to make it clear that the truth is never one thing, no matter how the eye likes to pretend it can find objective reality. she wiggles her way out of the liar’s paradox because reality is complicated, and there are many statements that lie in that grey area between true and false while still sounding very sure. so even though jon states a lot of things in a very certain tone, that doesn’t mean any of them reflect the nature of the distortion any more than anything helen said before. it’s just one more piece of information to put together with everything we’ve seen about the character’s words and actions up to that point and come to our own conclusion!

to me, that’s a much more fun and interesting way of engaging with this story than only looking at things through jon’s pov and taking the things he says without a grain of salt, and I think jonny’s done a really good job of having a lot of characters with specific traits and clear histories that pretty consistently inform how they engage with any given situation. of course, there’s a lot of characters and a lot of extrapolations one can make, especially for more minor or intentionally mysterious characters, so there’s no one right way of understanding a given person. but it’s fun to mess around with, to discover new bits that you’d forgotten about that inform your interpretations, to fill in the gaps.

that’s all no I will not shut up about melanie king if you read this far thank you so much you have my affection and pls reblog w your thoughts!! xoxo

#theo.txt #tma #the magnus archives #jonathan sims #melanie king #tma meta #hoo boy I have a lot of thoughts about this #also like... could make a point that people tend to be more willing to look into martin's and tim's backstories #than into georgie's or melanie's #but I feel like the fandom misogyny hornet's nest is one that I've kicked enough times #it may or may not be intentional but I do see some of yall #and every time I make a post like this I am just. violently aware that I only see a small fraction of the posts in this fandom #and I'm sure there's ones that do the exact opposite and look at the girls' perspectives above all else #so I want to make it clear that my idea is that we do this for All The Characters #up to and including jon #they are all pretty well written if you look past your first impressions yall #like I'm not saying you have to like any given character god knows there are certain ones who I Do Not #but I'm very aware that that's for personal reasons #and I've tried to pinpoint exactly why #and still try to look at the character as a whole #esp when said character is Generally Beloved. I don't wanna go ruining people's fun or just stewing in my feelings #better to work through it I think! #anyways I like this podcast a lot

[latenightcinephile]

#703: 'Marketa Lazarová', dir. František Vláčil, 1967.

Marketa Lazarová is a slightly unusual film for me, because its effects go slightly beyond my ability to articulate or explain them. I originally saw it at a Film Society screening in 2015 or 2016, back when I was able to go to movies at 6 p.m. on a Monday evening, and it enthralled me then, splayed wide across the screen at the Paramount in crisp black and white. I knew very little of Czech cinema at the time and, embarrassingly, still haven't seen very much. Coming back to it five years later, it still holds a lot of that arcane power that it had. Marketa Lazarová is simultaneously a meditative experience and a gut punch.

František Vláčil was one of the Czech filmmakers who was originally trained with the Army Film Division, which surprisingly became a breeding ground for avant-garde filmmaking styles. Vláčil became disillusioned with the types of historical films that were being produced at the time, which seemed to him to feature contemporary people pretending to be characters from the past. What was needed instead, he argued, was a more immediate form of historical cinema that made audiences feel like they were witnessing history rather than a lacklustre interpretation of it. In order to achieve this, he frequently joined his cast and crew on long-term shoots where they lived in the types of conditions that the characters would. Sets were built using traditional methods, and scripts were written using archaic dialects to avoid that common experience of characters speaking in a recognisably modern way. The shoot for Marketa Lazarová lasted almost two years in these conditions.

The film's plot concerns three groups. The Kozlík clan, a family under the helm of a robber baron, robs a noble entourage and takes Kristian, the son of the bishop, hostage. Before Kozlík's sons can return to claim their loot, a neighbouring clan led by Lazar steals the spoils. Lazar is saved from being killed when a vision of a nunnery on a hillside appears. One of the chief themes of this film, alluded to early on, is the conflict between paganism and early Christianity. The two worldviews are muddy and indistinct, but the difference between them is what drives a lot of the retribution in the film. Kristian falls in love with one of Kozlík's daughters, Alexandra, while Kozlík's son, Mikoláš, falls in love with Lazar's daughter, Marketa, whom he has taken as a hostage in retaliation for Lazar refusing to side with Kozlík against the king and the bishop. In addition to the religious dimension, then, there is also an ongoing theme of where one's loyalties lie - with existing morals (family, God) or with the person you love. Over the course of this epic, the fates of all three groups trend downhill: members of each of these bands are slaughtered and betrayed; Kozlík and Alexandra are imprisoned; Marketa is released by Mikoláš but rejected by Lazar. The film's conclusion seems to suggest that it is Marketa, and the future generations she helps to bring into the world, that will be able to overcome the divisions that affected the clans so catastrophically, but also acknowledges that these types of conflicts are part of the human experience.

As vast and interwoven the plot of the film is, it's not what makes the experience of watching quite so transcendent. What makes this film feel like an out-of-body experience is Vláčil's use of non-linear and non-realistic techniques. Parts of the film's story are told in flashback, but without any explicit indication that this is happening. At times we see disconnected, hallucinatory images that only make sense when they are contextualised later on. One example of this is an erotic scene between Alexandra (Pavla Polášková) and a young man, who we assume to be Kristian (Vlastimil Harapes). It's only later that we discover that this is a flashback to an abortive romance between Alexandra and her brother Adam (Ivan Palúch) - a man I had initially disqualified from appearing here because Adam only has one arm in the current scenes. Revealing that it is Adam propels the story forward in traditionally linear fashion, but also causes the viewer to reassess the film's earlier scene to determine why these images are included there. These images are made further alien by their unexpected visual qualities: the sex scene takes place in a field of summer grain, but most of the film's 'present day' takes place in winter and early spring. Rather than ascribe them to an unmotivated flashback, it seems easier to read them as a poetic hallucination, and then Vláčil returns to reorganise what we had previously believed of the narrative.

As well as the narrative structure, Vláčil frequently employs long periods of silence and a seeming mismatch of cinematography, where figures are either oddly close to the camera or absurdly far away. On a deep level, it feels like nobody, even the director, has total control over what is being portrayed - like we've entered a kind of fugue state in which cinema just happens regardless of how legible its results are. Although its filming process was so long, the resulting scenes feel accidental or improvisational, culled down from a vast amount of footage.

While many of these techniques give us the experience of watching a dream of an imagined past, these techniques are also quite violent and confrontational. Even when the shots are distant or filmed in long takes, they're cut together in a jarring way, and the lack of a straightforward narrative makes it difficult on the viewer too. The activity implied in this method of editing, a complicated soundscape and opaque narrative combine to make Marketa Lazarová a film that feels very immediate and present. As Tom Gunning put it, writing for Criterion about his early encounters with the film, "an energized mobile camera and abrasive editing peers into a primitive era of human history." Just as the characters of the film are quick to anger and quick to act, the film also lacks temperance. This is a film of life and death in its most vital forms, and so it makes a certain kind of sense that Vláčil would, in defiance of the typical historical film, try and remove any layer of modern logic or reason that would prevent us from experiencing the film's events in a visceral way. This is also why the myth of the werewolf hangs so heavily over the film - invoked a few times by Kozlík's wife, and present in the appearance of his children and their uncanny survival abilities - it both defies modern logic and refers to a particularly corporeal type of monster.

Vláčil structures Marketa Lazarová with sudden intertitles that refer to the events and themes that we are about to see, in a poetic way that recalls the chapter titles of a 19th-century novel. 'On the Lot of Widows' and 'Who in the Past Brewed with Hops' provide the vantage point of someone placed about the action, narrating it to us in a distant sort of way. The music is similar: both ancient and modern, it frequently uses atonal incantations. Taken together, it feels like this story is being shouted at us from a distant time when things were more tactile. "The presence of animals and plants, the textures of stone and tree bark, of snow and marsh water," Gunning writes, "cling to us as we watch, often overriding the narrative."

The grand experience of watching this film is partly contradictory, then: this is a film that feels very modern, tells a story from the past, alludes to contemporary struggles, and when situated in Czech film history is wildly experimental. Gunning sees this film as being, in some respects, a statement about what Vláčil thought cinema could be, in those days of the 1960s where most national cinemas were experiencing their own variations on the New Wave that had developed in France. The experimental aspects of the films of Godard and Varda would be subsumed into the traditional toolbox of cinema and lose some of their vibrancy as a result - either directors would use them for blockbuster films or extend them into a new type of experimental film that was sterile and aloof.Considering this, it's worth appreciating exactly how daring Vláčil was being here: under a Communist regime, making a film about paganism, bestiality, sadism, incest, and torture. With all this darkness, Marketa Lazarová is a bright film, even funny at times. Humanity is a fallen, self-destructive thing, but there is something about this way of life, before it was layered deep underneath civilisation, reason and enlightenment, that was exciting and vibrant.

Does civilisation mean we lose something of our potential? The final narration of Marketa Lazarová tells us that these cycles of mistrust and anger are likely to repeat through the generations, but is that a price Vláčil thinks is worth paying? The urgency and difficulty of life in the distant past was inseparable from the superstitions of the time, but the urges were easier to sate, at least temporarily. The taming of these clans, like the taming of the avant-garde techniques Vláčil employs here, might have been inevitable, but this film shows that there is something valuable there nonetheless.

#1001 movies #František Vláčil #Marketa Lazarová #Czech film #epic

[wrenhyperfixates]

Party Favors

Pairing: Loki x reader Summary: Loki comes to the rescue when your nephews’ birthday party is on the brink of disaster. Warnings: some curse words and implied smut; fluff

Disclaimer: Gif not mine

“No! Don’t run there. It’s slippery.”

“Hang on, the bathroom’s right inside.”

“There’s going to be cake later, and you don’t want to get a tummy ache.”

Gosh, kids were tiring. You’d promised your sister, Katie, that you’d help out at your nephews’ birthday party. It was a sticky summer afternoon, but the heat did nothing to slow down the thirty-something kids running around the backyard. Between neighbors, classmates, and camp friends, the birthday boys had quite the guest list. Your sister and brother-in-law were both chaperoning the party, along with some other parents, but you were still outnumbered. Even if you weren’t, kids in large groups seem to have a penchant for trouble. It sure didn’t help that they were all at the age where chaos seemed like average fun.

Spotting the twins, you decided to take a few photos for your sister, who was busy running around to make sure everything was running smoothly. “Hey, Timmy. Hey, Tommy. How’re my favorite nephews today?” you said after snapping a few shots.

“But Auntie (y/n),” Timmy started, “we’re your only nephews.”

“Yeah, and we’re eight now,” Tommy continued for his brother. “You can’t trick us anymore.”

“We’re big boys now,” they finished together.

“I guess you are,” you replied, laughing. “Not too big for the bouncy house, I hope.”

“Of course not, Auntie. Bye!” they shouted, running towards the inflatable castle.

You walked over to the boys’ father, Lucas, and helped him check all the Slip 'N Slides and water balloon supplies. Just when you thought you might get through the day without any disasters, your sister came running up to you and Lucas.

“The clown just cancelled. There was a huge traffic jam and he can’t make it in time,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper.

“That’s all right,” Lucas said. “I’ve been saving some grade-A dad jokes for a situation like this.”

Both you and Katie groaned, eliciting a hurt scoff from her husband. And then a genius idea hit you.  

“Wait a minute, guys. I literally work with superheroes.”

A few years ago, you’d scored a position at Stark Industries and, though you’d never worked in the field, often helped the team from the lab. You’d even played a large role in designing Tony’s latest suit.

“Could you really get one of them to come? I mean, aren’t they busy?” your sister asked.

Truth be told, you weren’t sure that they were free, but they definitely owed you a favor. You’d saved their butts more times than you could count. It was, at very least, worth a try. You found the quietest place you could, then called Tony. Then Thor. Then Steve. Then Nat. None of them picked up. In a desperate last attempt, you phoned the Tower hoping someone would pick up. F.R.I.D.A.Y. answered and confirmed the presence of one Avenger in the Tower. You immediately asked her to put them on, not bothering to check who it was.

“Hi. I have an urgent matter and need to call in a favor.”

“And since when do I owe you one?” a smooth baritone came from the other end of the line.

Shit, you thought, of all the people in the Tower it had to be him. You and Loki got along well enough, but you weren’t friends, per se. The two of you constantly kept up a witty banter that was often flirtatious. The others teased you about it, and you were sure they placed bets on which one of you would ask the other out first. That, of course, was stupid, as Loki obviously did not feel that way about you. And how you felt? Well, it was best not to dwell on it.

“Oh, hi Loki. Sorry, you weren’t who I was expecting. Where’s everyone else?”

“Out at the movies. They should be back in half an hour, if your urgent matter can wait that long.” You let out a frustrated groan, which prompted him to say, “Well, that’s certainly not how I imagined getting that sound out of you.”

You were thankful he wasn’t there to see you blush. You didn’t know if you could wait that long for the rest of the Avengers. That didn’t even include the time it would take for them to actually arrive. You were about to hang up and tell Katie she better try to find a replacement clown or magician when you got your second great idea that afternoon.

“Loki,” you said, “I’m sending you my location. Just come over as fast as you can. I’ll explain when you get here.”

Then you hung up before he could respond. You raced to the front of the house to wait but were nervous that he wouldn’t show. You didn’t have long to worry, though, because he suddenly materialized, making you jump a little. Sometimes you forgot that he could teleport.

“Your savior is here,” he declared, striking a dramatic pose.

You couldn’t help but roll your eyes. “Yeah, yeah. My hero,” you said before explaining the situation to him.

“Well, I’m afraid I’m not very popular with the masses, (y/n). I think you’d be better off waiting for one of the others.”

You couldn’t help but notice how he tried to hide the sadness behind those words. Before he could leave, you protested, “Kids may love superheroes, but you know what they love even more? Magicians!”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow at that. “I’m not sure how you came to that conclusion. Besides, I don’t much appreciate being reduced to a mere magician.” He stopped for a second to tap his chin as if deep in thought, before continuing, “But, I suppose if you ask nicely, I might consider it.”

You made your best puppy dog eyes and stuck out your lower lip while giving him a pouty please. He considered you for a moment before responding.

“Very well,” he said. “I will save you this time. Just remember that you owe me. In fact, I’ve already got just the thing in mind.”

The devilish grin he gave you with that last part caused an involuntary shiver to run down your spine. He noticed but decided not to push his luck. Besides, he genuinely found it cute. In fact, he found everything about you cute. However, he refused to acknowledge the way his heart beat faster when you took his hand to lead him into the house. As you were walking, he conjured a classic magician outfit for himself. Though, he opted to have green accents instead of the traditional red. When you turned back around to face him, you couldn’t stop the girlish giggle that escaped your lips.

“Like what you see, darling?” he asked, striking a pose.

“Oh, fuck off.”

Despite your harsh response, you were blushing. As much as you were loath to admit it, he was rather dashing in the suit and top hat. You felt a sudden rush of nervousness as you introduced him to Katie and Lucas. You could see on their faces that they were trying to figure out where they knew Loki from. The second they connected the dots, their faces fell, but the reassuring smile you gave them must have worked since they started gathering the kids for the show. In all honesty, you hadn’t thought about their reaction to his being there. Or the other parents’ reaction, for that matter. It was hard to remember that the world was still clinging to the madman he’d been at the battle of New York when you knew he was just a witty prankster. Actually, he did a lot of good for the world. To you, he was just Loki.

You offered him a grateful smile as he stepped up in front of the kids and introduced himself as Loki the Magnificent. For as reluctant as he was in agreeing to this, he was putting on quite a show for them. It was a good thing, too, considering how brutally honest kids could be. You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding when it became apparent how enraptured all the children were with his act. He even brought Timmy and Tommy onstage to assist him with a few tricks. You made sure to take tons of pictures, partly for your sister, but mainly to tease Loki with later.

Once he finished his last trick, the kids were seated at various tables and the cake was brought out. You wanted to run up to Loki and thank him, but you had to help distribute the cake. After double checking that all the kids got a slice, you brought a piece to Loki.

“Hey, you were great up there. And I guess you really saved my ass,” you said, mumbling the last part.

“It was my pleasure. Believe it or not, I had fun.”

He raised a bit of cake on his fork in a sort of salute to you. You fully expected him to leave once he finished eating, but, to your surprise, he stayed even after all the guests had gone. You two were cleaning up the junk in the backyard when you found yourself thanking him again.

“Really,” you said, “I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

“Well mortal, let this be a lesson on how superior I am and-”

His sentence was cut short by you dumping a bucket of water down his back. You were laughing so hard that you didn’t notice him get one of his own to return the favor. You shrieked in delight as he started hurling leftover water balloons at you. You ran away from him, but his aim was impeccable. Pretty soon, you were drenched. Though you were able to seize some ammunition of your own, you were no match for the god.

“Okay, okay,” you shouted to him, bent over, trying to catch your breath. “Truce.”

“No way,” he replied, running up behind you and grabbing you by the waist. Lifting you into the air and spinning, he said, “I’m claiming this as a victory!”

Your laughter was making such a racket that Katie came to see what was going on. Through giggles, you apologized to her, but she just waved you off. Seeing as you and Loki were both sopping wet, she thanked you for all your help and sent you home to dry off. You wondered why she didn’t let you stay there to do so, but the smirk on her face answered that. Rolling your eyes at her, you said goodbye and then shouted farewells to Lucas and your nephews, who were inside.

You and Loki made your way to your car in a peaceful silence. You offered him a ride, but he insisted on teleporting you home instead. Only problem was, he brought you straight to his bedroom, not your home. You gave him a quizzical look that demanded he explain himself.

“Don’t forget, little one. You owe me a favor.”

“Oh yeah? Bring it on.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After their movie ended, the Avengers tried to return your calls. You never did pick up. They didn’t have to wonder why for long, though. The sounds coming from a certain bedroom answered that question perfectly.

#loki x reader #loki x you #loki x y/n #loki laufeyson #loki odinson #reader insert #fluff #loki fluff #marvel #mcu

[cosmicpines]

OTGW Dream-Unknown Comic Lore

Hey! Thought I’d make a post about the “ongoing” (now finished) post-series OTGW comic and the implications it has to the lore of the show, since I’m not sure everyone has read them.

Big Note: these comics are only dubiously canon! None were written by Pat McHale.

Other Big Note: I think assigning hard “mechanics” to how the Unknown works defeats the purpose. It is mean to be loose, fairytale like, shepherded by emotion. Putting a stamp on “this is how they get in and out” and “this is exactly what happened” doesn’t make sense -- part of the point is we, Greg, and Wirt don’t know exactly what the Unknown is.

That being said, i still think it’s fun to look at the facts presented in the comics and see if we can figure out a bit of what’s going on. This post is long because this is who I am as a person, apparently.

TLDR: Wirt and Greg can be brought to the Unknown during their dreams, potentially for multiple days in one night. They are there until they both realize they are dreaming and they solve the problem they were brought there for.

Right off the bat, in issue 1, we find out that Greg can go to the Unknown in his dreams -- in this case, because Jason told him that there was a “new case” for them to solve.

He briefly wakes up and goes back to sleep (probably because they wanted to show Wirt in issue 1.)

Greg doesn’t seem surprised to find himself in the Unknown; quite the opposite: Jason is telling him about a “new” case, implying that this has happened before, possibly multiple times. We have no idea how long after the series this takes place, only that it’s either fall or winter, judging from their pajamas.

Greg doesn’t offer us any other insight to what’s going on, but, eventually, Wirt shows up in issue 4.  He asks Greg what he’s, and later they, are doing here, implying he did not choose to come and they don’t always come here at the same time.

Wirt is particularly interesting that he seems to think they may not be able to leave again, as he brings up on 2 occasions.

However, this may just be because he doesn’t know he’s dreaming.

(Yes, that’s Sara. More on her later.)

A detail that I think is important from the show here -- then, Wirt also couldn’t remember entering the Unknown, since he seemed to think he and Greg were lost and not, you know, drowning in a river. I think it’s very possible that when you enter the Unknown, you forget how you got there. Remembering that is key to being able to escape.

Sara tells Wirt he’s dreaming, and from that point on, he no longer waxes about being trapped: he instead tells Greg he wants to go home, as seen in issue 12.

When Greg and Wirt split up to solve the last mysteries:

This implies that they don’t have to go home together and, at this point, they are more or less capable of going home whenever.

Issue 16 brings them both home, Greg after revealing Hero Frog’s intentions and getting Jason elected mayor:

And Wirt after he and Sara defeat the Shapeshifter.

(poor wirt lmao)

I think these puzzle pieces can lead to a conclusion: They can only go home from the Dream Unknown once they are both aware that they are dreaming and they solve whatever problem they were brought here for. Once they do, they can go back whenever they want. 

After waking up, Greg immediately checks on his brother.

Solidifying that they remember what happened, and, implying at least, that they don’t always get home at the same time. I can see scenarios where one sits in the other’s room, waiting for them to wake up...

We ultimately don’t know how often this happens, what triggers it, and how aware they are of the whole thing. Judging from their reactions to being there and going home, I feel like this sort of thing happens often enough, but not so often that it’s exhausting and/or terrifying... once a month, maybe?

If that rate increases, though... well, that’s just some fun fanfiction fuel.

Some other observations:

1. Greg and Wirt may not experience things exactly the same in the Dream Unknown.

When Wirt first shows up, he makes this comment:

“A bunch of nightmare stuff” seems a little... extreme, for what Wirt was doing, as said ghost was a beaver in a sheet. 

Issue 6 offers a potential explanation. The framing device for this issue is a tavern keeper asks them why they look so tired, and Greg and Wirt both tell the story of having to sit in a location all night to meet someone, but their stories vary wildly. For Greg, they were on a stage. For Wirt, they were in a graveyard.

Both stories have seriously different levels of Wirt’s enthusiasm,

and how creepy it is.

I won’t pretend that this is canon that they’re experiencing it differently; it’s definitely possible that one or both of them are unreliable narrators. Certain details, like Wirt singing, point more to that, but others, like Wirt getting eaten by a demon horse, is... a lot more extreme, haha.

This is also partly refuted later in the comic, as Greg and Wirt get separated but visit the same places, which are largely the same.

But still, it’s a fun idea.

2. Sara is here

Yeah, so, this can either be adorable or terrifying.

All Sara really says about her being here is that she thinks this is a lucid dream where Wirt is a person in it, which Wirt never presses her but come on Wirt please press her cause what the fuuuuuuckkkkk????? Sara ultimately doesn’t seem to know what the Unknown really is, since she only refers to it as a lucid dream.

Three explanations I can think of:

1. Her line “I’m having a lucid dream and you’re a part of it” could be meant to imply that the opposite: Wirt is the one having the dream and has dreamed up a Sara to adventure with him.This Sara is just something Wirt has created to join him in the Unknown, and the real Sara isn’t involved or aware of this at all. This isn’t the first time the Unknown has created a Sara, if you consider Distillatoria canon (which... ehhhhh......  I have Opinions about that lol)

2. Sara has been to the Unknown before. If that is the case, it either happened recently, since Wirt is surprised to see her there, or Sara has been doing this for a while and they just haven’t run into each other. Her saying it’s just a dream isn’t incorrect, and if she doesn’t think Wirt is really Wirt (that the Unknown created him), there’s no reason for her to be like “hey, we’re in a dream recreation of purgatory that apparently has a grasp on my soul for all eternity.”

3. This is the first time Sara has been to the Unknown, and Wirt unintentionally brought her along. This one has the least evidence towards it, but I think it’s interesting. Greg is able to bring his stuffed raccoon with him to the Unknown, so why can’t Wirt bring the consciousness of his crush and/or girlfriend?

Another thing to think about when considering this: Wirt and Greg are in the Unknown in their Halloween costumes. I like the idea that whatever you wore to the Unknown when you go is what you always wear when you’re there. Sara is all dressed for an adventure, with a cute green cape, a huge backpack, and a bee mask (specifically to trick the shapeshifter).

So I’m not sure what she might have been doing to be wearing this and then end up in the Unknown... Either she’s into LARP, she got into a hiking accident while wearing a sick cape, she changed clothes after arriving in the Dream Unknown, or her outfit is part of Wirt’s dream.

No idea which explanation is “correct;” I think they’re all interesting to play with!

3. Jason has relatives in the Unknown

Apparently the Hero Frog is Jason’s dad???

Which is... fascinating, considering they found Jason before going into the Unknown.

I think I read ages ago a theory that Jason is originally from the Unknown and got out somehow, as he is a lot more intelligent than a real frog should be. Who knows, though.

It’s probably also of note that Jason is the one who instigates them entering the Unknown, “telling” Greg there’s a mystery to solve.

4. Multiple days pass by in the dream

This is “fun...”

Day 1: Issue 1 (Greg’s arrival) - Issue 4 (Wirt’s arrival, diverging story)

Day 2: Issue 6 (morning after diverging tale) - Issue 7 (Greg sneaks around bird town, Wirt encounters a ghost)

Day 3: Issue 9 (Greg goes over a mountain. There’s a very fast day-night cycle here, but I think it’s for comedic effect. Wirt arrives in bird town and meets up with Sara.) - Issue 11 (Greg joins some “highwaymen”) /12 (Wirt and Sara help a sick goose)

Day 4: Issue 12 (Greg, Wirt, and Sara meet up in frog town) - Issue 14 (Greg spies on Hero Frog, Wirt and Sara get taken by an orphanage)

Day 5: Issue 15 (Greg/Wirt/Sara make their plan, Greg goes home before nightfall in 16) - Issue 16 (Wirt and Sara defeat the shapeshifter)

This is 5 full days they spend in the dream. Some of them are a lot fewer events than would happen in a day, and it’s very likely time is moving faster in the dream, but... jeez. That’s got to screw with your mind if this happens too often. Like, imagine the worst case scenario where they go to the Unknown every night and spend 5 days there every time! I doubt this is the case, but holy shit.

5. Beatrice, the Woodsman, Lorna, and the Beast are nowhere to be seen

This is more of an observation, but there is not even a passing mention of any of these three. Either they were all checked in on their first dream adventure, or they can’t remember that first adventure while in the dream too clearly...

There’s a ton of fun theories that you can make out of the Dream Unknown. Is the Dream Unknown the same as the Halloween Unknown? Are the boys souls claimed by the Unknown forever? Will it keep calling them back, night after night, until they go back permanently? How does this effect their healing from their trauma? Are these dreams going to increase or decrease in frequency? Do they always last exactly one night? Can Wirt fall asleep in class, spend a week in the Unknown, and wake up before the end of the period? Can Greg go to bed for the night and not wake up all day, but only have been in the Unknown for a few minutes? Does time pass in the Unknown without them there? In the Dream Unknown, will they always be the age that they originally were when they entered the Unknown? Does anyone else in the Unknown do this? (at some point, I want to do a theory post about who is from the Unknown and who is from the “real” world...)

Anyway... this post completely ran away with me. Hope you enjoyed! Send me your theories; I’m itching to hear them!

#over the garden wall #otgw #jeez this ended up really long #there was just a lot to talk about haha #mary blabs

[littlefoxwithbighat]

The sides denying aspects of themselves

I could write 50 essays on this topic but you'd all get bored and it would be incoherent. So let me talk about some of the parts of the sides that they deny. You probably all already know these but I think it's interesting to talk about and look at the examples--so here we go!

Logan "I don't feel anything" Sanders

OK, right out of the gate this is so untrue. Its so, so, so untrue. You know it, I know it, we all know it.

We've seen him happy:

Angry:

Scared:

Frustrated:

And empathetic/ remorseful:

We've also seen him passionate (Crofters musical), defeated (SvSr) and childish (Losing my motivation)

And all of this requires feeling.

I think what's interesting about this, is that the veil is so thin for this lie. For the pieces I wrote on Roman and Virgil, other characters have had glimpses of the parts they deny but for the most part it's pretty hidden. However Logan having feelings and denying them is common knowledge. Like all the characters know it.

Even Deciet, who yes, is incredibly astute and intuitive, picked it up within knowing the guy for like 10 minutes of canon interaction.

But what is most interesting about all of this to me is that CHARACTER THOMAS KNOWS.

Not only KNOWS but has canonically called him out on it!

C!Thomas [to Logan]: This just serves as testament to the fact that you have a temperament- which is fine, you just haven't accepted it (-LNTAO)

C! Thomas [to Logan]: I've seen you scared. (-Embarrassing Phases)

This is so so fascinating. Firstly, it's worth remembering that Thomas is in control here.

As Virgil said "You're the boss Thomas. Anything you want to know, you can know. You just have to be open to hearing it."

They're his sides. He ultimately has control over them. And Thomas knows that Lo is hiding his emotions, so WHY doesn't he resolve this? Because, let us be clear, it might take time, but if he wanted to, he could.

A) He doesn't think that ultimately, it doesn't matter

B) He doesn't want to

C) He hasn't actually adressed the matter

D) He is concerned about the consequences

Personally I think it's a combination of all four, although perhaps less so D.

We never really get long enough to pause on this topic and see the other sides reactions to this, so it's difficult to draw any firm conclusions. The best we really have is The Puzzle Song in LNTAO, and from that we can conclude Roman is frustrated, and Patton and Virgil are empathetic, but also a bit frustrated and trying to facilitate change.

OK, we've established that he has feelings and looked a little bit at other character reactions. Let's move on to our favourite blue boy himself.

Firstly, motive. WHY does he do this. This is one is easy, and widely canonically established, its his overwhelming need to be taken seriously. Right?

Well sort of.

That what I would have said at first too, but I don't think thats exactly right. It's because he needs to be LISTENED TO, and it's important we make that distinction. I think Crofters is a great example. He made a bit of a fool of himself in that video, and what's more, he didn't care. And I don't think it's becuse of his powerful love of Crofters overtook his sensibilities (lol) it's because he didn't have a point he needed it express in that video. His emotionless, serious personna was created is that the other sides, and Thomas, would listen to him, when he expresses facts and opinions. Because that's all Logan wants.

So it's pretty heartbreaking that it hasn't worked.*

*(Please note I do not think the sides were unjustified in talking over him in some of this points and that some of them are clearly a result of high emotional stress. That said its still clearly getting to Logan)

This is even more distressing when you consider that for Logan listening and learning, going both ways is very much his love language (See Joans explanation of Sunrise from In The Heights on his playlist, and his reaction to Thomas saying he might take an astronomy course). Logan is killing himself trying to be listened to, trying to be loved, and it's not WORKING (Hmm, remind you of another side?)

But this is a progressive development. Maybe it's partly a result of Thomas not having the characters super fleshed out when the series started, but even so, this personna Logan is putting up is coming up more and more often, and he's clearly repressing his feelings more and more. It's kind of difficult to show this, but just watch Logan in early season 1 compared with now, there is a marked difference.

But actually, I think there are two things that illustrate this perfectly.

First, him making himself into a textbox in POF. I mean it goes without saying, but textboxes aren't people. They don't have emotions. Logan feels he can't even show up anymore, because he as a person, is not worth paying attention to. I don't think it's a coincidence that he chose a form that cannot be talked over, and pops up on the front of the screen, impossible to hide, or cut out of shot. Remember, it was Janus who created the skip button.

(That being said I think I'm not saying this is a sign of him having a healthy ego and interfering, if anything it implies the opposite)

Second, the unicorn onesie. The unicorn onesie is something I keep coming back to when I think about Logan because... UNICORNS. They're a fantasy creature, there's not a jot of science or reality about them. Of all of the choices, Logan, fact oriented Logan, doesn't understand figures of speech Logan, doesn't like cartoons because they're not realistic Logan, WHY does he pick a UNICORN!?

In my opinion, the unicorn onesie is something of a confession. Vulnerability. It kind of represents all of the feelings and fantasy and fun that Logan tries to repress. And that kinda makes sense doesn't it, I mean, feelings, fun and fantasy, that's what unicorns often stand for.

So I think it's telling that throughout the series, we first see him embarrassed, but not too torn up about being seen in his onesie (able to show and engage with his feelings fairly openly, but trying to keep fairly calm and serious) to being unable to wear it around his friends in a relaxed environment, WHEN THEY ARE ALL WEARING ONESIES (Can't show any emotional vulnerability at all and suppressing all his feelings in order to seem serious and be listened to.) Thinking about it this way, Roman saying "no onesie, no vote" could be an interesting parallel to how the sides view this. Because, again this isn't working, and if anything, the deeper Logan goes into this emotionless front, the less he seems to be listened to, which makes him go even deeper, and it's an endless positive feedback loop, which is ironic considering how soul-crushingly negative this is.

What I'm trying to say is that we've seen repeatedly, that the point in the episode where a/the side(s) get emotionally vulnerable is often the point in the episodes where everyone calms down and listens to one another, so this emotional repression is doing nothing but damaging Logan.

That being said, you can understand how he's worried about letting his front it down. Because Logan is right.

There will be times where he needs to be heeded, and ignoring him could lead to disastrous consequences. The biggest example of this is DWIT. If he wasn't there they could not have gotten rid of Remus, everyone else would be panicking, and Thomas' mental state would be in the gutter.

Thomas NEEDS Logan.

So if Logan feels like showing his feelings will stop him from being listened to, then logically, he has to continue to hide and suppress them.

I think in season 3, maybe even the season 2 finale this will be adressed and be a big part of his character arc, and I for one, can't wait.

Anyway I think that about does it for this one. Thanks for reading!

#sanders sides #ts logan #logic sanders #logan sanders #Sander sides analysis

[gallavictorious]

hi!! i am currently watching s10 of shameless rn and i just finished 10x09. i’m still a little confused as to exactly WHY ian doesn’t wanna get married. Does he really not love mickey enough at this point? Can you give me your opinion? thanks xx

Hiya nonnie! Hope you're having a blast watching season 10! :)

I can certainly give you my opinion (and I was delighted to be asked for it!), but I should preface this by noting that it's a work in progress: Ian is a character that I really love but sometimes struggle to understand. Because of this I spend a lot of time thinking about him and his motivations, and my thoughts on those tend to develop and shift as I discuss them with others. This is not likely to be my final say on this issue, and it's not a fully formed or all-encompassing explanation either. Make of it what you will (and as always, feel free to chime in with your own ideas, because I'd love to hear them).

First things first: Ian's hesitation has nothing to do with his love for Mickey. “It's marriage that I don't know that I love,” he says, and I think he's being entirely honest here (which is supported by the fact that he continues to profess his love and try to work things out with Mickey even after the latter has accidentally broken his leg and run off with another guy). His reluctance is multi-layered, and I doubt that Ian himself is initially very clear on just why he hesitates. Lip's advice to figure that out before he does anything else is good, and Ian eventually does get his thoughts on the issue sorted out, even if he has some trouble communicating that to Mickey.

I've previously written a bit about what goes down with both Mickey and Ian in 10x08-10, and in that piece I focused on the fact that “Ian absolutely knows that Mickey will stand by him through thick and thin, and this scares him because what if he develops into someone that Mickey no longer can love but feels obligated to stay with anyway? Ian hates being helpless; Ian hates being a victim; Ian hates feeling indebted to people because that implies he can’t take care of himself, and I think that nothing terrifies him more than being a project, or being someone people stay with because they pity him or worry that he can’t take care of himself. The issue here, I think, is that he doesn’t trust Mickey to leave.”

I still think there's some truth to this, but returning to this question now – thanks to your lovely ask – I have two additional thoughts, which I believe play a large part as well:

Firstly, I'd say that Ian is very, very wary of making Mickey a promise that he's not completely sure he can keep. When Debbie tells him he might as well marry Mickey to make him happy since he can always get a divorce later on, Ian is initally ready to roll with this idea, but he's clearly not really feeling it, as illustrated by his wish for Lip to talk him out of the whole thing. I believe that this reluctance stems not from a general concern about the sanctity of marriage, but rather a very real fear of letting Mickey, specifically, down. In the past, and for a number of perfectly understandable reasons, Ian has walked away from Mickey. Whether it is entirely fair or not, I'd argue that several of these instances feel like broken promises, both to Ian and to Mickey, and Ian absolutely does not want to hurt Mickey like that again. As he later tells Mickey, he doesn't know who he is from day to day, so he can't promise Mickey shit. Better not to make any promises at all then, right?

Secondly, I think that Mickey's reluctance to actually talk about things is a real stumbling block. Ian has concerns and fears both about himself and about getting married, and those are things that he (very sensibly!) wants to discuss with Mickey before they get hitched. But Mickey won't have it – when Ian brings their future up in 10x03 Mickey shuts him down, and the same thing happens when Ian repeatedly (at the court house, and twice outside of Byron's) tries to discuss it after their first, botched attempt at a wedding.

I’ve participated in some recent and very interesting discussions about how both Ian and Mickey have been reluctant to face and properly talk about their tangled past and the hurt it's caused them, and how this reluctance plays a large part in how things play out between them in season 10. While I do agree with @whaticameherefor in that they must have had some meaningful conversations after their prison reunion, I do believe – not least because of what we saw in season 10 – that they have yet to fully discuss and make peace with what's gone before and the things they've done that's hurt the other. Ian, I think, is now willing and ready to talk, even though it's difficult for him, and – as @damngcoffee notes – Mickey makes some attempt at expressing his feelings when he asks for Ian to throw his parole, but it's still just scratching the surface, and they (well, mostly Mickey) still shy away from being candid about the really difficult and painful stuff.

This is unfortunate in general, but it's also directly tied to Ian's reservations about marriage. Bascially, he needs confirmation that Mickey truly understands what he's getting into, what with Ian's illness being a thing they can never escape. This is what Ian tries to articulate when he shows up with the promise rings, but he doesn't quite manage – partly because he's not actually very good at expressing himself (lack of practice, no doubt – but he's trying!) and partly because Mickey takes the mere suggestion that Ian isn't convinced of Mickey's  commitment as an insult and won't hear anything else. To Mickey, a man of action, his past deeds should make it plenty obvious that he is fully committed, and so Ian questioning that is a sign that Ian doesn't understand and appreciate all that Mickey's done and sacrifieced for him (whether Ian asked him to do it or not). To Mickey the whole situations likely reads like Ian trying to pin his own insecurities and lack of love on Mickey just to have an excuse to back out of getting married. This is not an accurate read at all, however: what Mickey doesn't understand is that Ian absolutely isn’t questioning Mickey's love or commitment: he just needs reassuarance that Mickey has really thought about this; has actually considered what Ian's illness means for their future and Ian's ability to make promises, and has come to the informed conclusion that sure, he does want this in spite of all that, in spite of the uncertainity of it all. Given Mickey's tendency to do rush in and do anything for the people he loves, and his unwillingness to talk about his feelings, it's not at all unreasonable for Ian to worry about this and want to have an actual discussion about it.

(I would also like to note that I really understand where Mickey is coming from here: given their past, there is little wonder that he's feeling insecure about Ian's feelings and reacts so strongly when Ian won't sign the papers. He misunderstands Ian, to be sure, but it's very easy to see why he would do that. I've also previously written a short meta on why Mickey's reluctance to talk about his feelings is perfectly understandable, which you can read here if you're so inclined.)

So, that's my opinion nonnie: Ian's hesitation regarding marriage has nothing to do with a lack of love for Mickey. :) Though he has to deal with his issues without actually getting to discuss them with Mickey - which is unfortunate, but let’s hope they start dealing with that once they’re back together - he finally understands enough to feel confident to propose to Mickey again.

Phew. Unsurprsingly this got pretty long: hopefully this was somewhat coherent. As mentioned, it's not in any way a comprehensive overview of the situation, but just touches upon a few aspects I think is particularly pertinent to it. Please feel free to contradict me or add your own further thoughts.

#gallavich #ian gallagher #10x09 #asks #meta #my stuff

[andrew-eberhart]

FLASHBACK: 2009|| British Military Temporary Camp, Southern Border of Belarus || 1947 Hours

“Who the fuck is this?” Andrew demanded, throwing a glance towards his Captain. The man that had just entered the tent had strong Russian features, and when he spoke, his english was so heavily accented that the men could barely understand him.  Several of the team rose from their seated position when the man greeted them in Russian, a force of habit for a team that had been working directly in opposition to the Russian terrorist groups in the region, without rest, for the past 13 weeks.  “Lads, this is our contact for the area. He’s the one who’s supplying our intel,” Captain Rickards informed them, moving to his left to make room for everyone in their small tent. Outside, the sun had set, and the temperatures were dropping rapidly. Inside, however, the temperature was increasing rapidly. Several of the SAS troopers, Andrew included, had beads of sweat on their faces, the perspiration partly from the heat and partly from the adrenaline that was starting to seep into their veins.  They’d been given the opportunity to capture a leader of the region’s most dangerous terrorist, and they were moments away from launching the helicopters. He’d been found in Kiev, according to intelligence reports, and Andrew’s team had been chosen to pick him up. They all eyed their informant with distrust. Andrew stared into the Russian man’s eyes, and saw something that unsettled him: there was no emotion in them when the informant smiled. There was a disconnected look to the man, as if he wasn’t quite present in the head. And that made Andrew immediately doubt the validity of their intel. “You’re fucking joking,” John, Andrew’s buddy, muttered behind him. “The bloke’s fucked in the head. What’s wrong with him?” The feeling was shared by the rest of the team who began to stir, until the C.O. stood up again and motioned for them to be quiet. “Our analysts say this is good intel, so we’re rolling with it,” Rickards said firmly, waving the Russian over to the table that had a map of the city of Kiev. “End of story.” The five team members stood and made their way to the table, and Andrew muttered to John, “Yeah, but the Analysts aren’t the ones who have to put their asses on the line.”

They gathered around the table in the stuffy tent, practically standing on top of each other, as the informant of questionable competence began to explain where the terrorist leader was located and the details of the compound.  ******************************************************************************************* || Kiev, Ukraine || 0213 Hours ||  Andrew heard John exhale into the mic and whisper “Clear.” Andrew rounded the corner quickly, his MP5 sweeping his sector as he pushed down the hallway, trusting his teammates to sweep their own sectors to protect him from any enemies he couldn’t see. They moved down the hallway of the compound, nearly silent, their black fatigues blending into the darkness. If it weren’t for their night vision goggles, they wouldn’t have been able to see each other, let alone any enemies that they came across. Andrew slowed as the approached a close door on his right, feeling John move up next to him to cover him as they passed it.  John reached out a hand, grasped the bronze door nob in his gloved hand and turned it, testing it. A loud click echoed on the other side of the door, and Andrew had a brief moment to realize what it was before the explosion ripped the silent night. 

The door splintered under the force of the explosion, sending wooden and metal shrapnel into John, who in turn was thrown bodily into Andrew. The force of the blow knocked Andrew into the wall to his left with enough force that he went through the dry wall. His body splintered the wooden supports in the wall and he found himself in the next room, a study of some sort, the ringing in his ears so loud he swore he would be deaf forever. John’s body had absorbed most of the shrapnel, shielding Andrew from the worst of the blast. His goggles cracked upon impact, and the entire room went from the green night vision to pitch black.

Once Andrew was able to steady the spinning room around him, he rolled John over to check the extent of his injuries; he barely contained the involuntary intake of air when he saw what little remained of his friend’s features. While his ballistic vest had stopped most of the shrapnel, John’s face, neck and shoulders had been shredded, leaving behind a bloodied pulp that left Andrew with no doubt that his friend was no longer alive.  Andrew saw flashes of light coming from the hole his body had made in the wall, and he looked up to see one of his teammates stepping over another, his MP5 flashing brightly. Each flash, coming from the end of the hallway, illuminated the hallway much like a strobe, furthering his sense of disorientation. The sound of the gunshots never registered to Andrew, as his ears were still filled with a terrible ringing. He looked back down at the body of his best friend, and pushed past the lump in his throat that threatened to suffocate him. The SAS trooper’s hands searched the ground for his weapon, and he found it, pulling it up to focus on the hole just in time to see another one of his teammates fall. The gunshots began to become louder in his ears as the ringing decreased. As he raised his weapon, he found it jammed- the force of the explosion seemed to have damaged it. Without hesitation Andrew rose to his feet, drawing his side arm from the thigh holster just in time to fire shots into the first person to pass the hole in the wall from the opposite direction of his team.  Something was wrong. There wasn’t supposed to be any sort of resistance in the compound, save a couple guards, but the amount of rounds that were coming down the hallway implied a massive firefight.  As Andrew’s head finally cleared of the ringing, he drew the only conclusion he could think of- it was a set up. The intel had been fed to them to lead them here.  Another loud explosion rocked the building, sending the bookshelf to Andrew’s right to the floor. He fired three more rounds as another figure tried to pass the hole in the wall, and fired another round into the back of the man’s head as he fell to the floor. He heard the distinctive cough of the silenced MP5 from the hallway, which told him at least one of his teammates was still fighting. He started to move towards the wall, trying to get a sight picture on who was firing at them. He flinched away from the wall as several made impact into the wall, missing him by mere inches. The obvious reality of how close he had just come, again, to dying sobered any remnants of the disorientation he had right out of him. He heard a yell of pain from the hallway and instantly recognized his commanding officer’s voice. Another volley of fire erupted from the enemies, and the hall then fell silent. Andrew was on his own.  The orders to the team had been clear. No one was to be taken alive, they couldn’t afford to have Ukraine know they were in the country. They were on their own, none of them had identifying info on them.  He made the only play he had left. The sole remaining SAS trooper turned and jumped, throwing himself through the large window that lead to the outside of the building. He landed with a dull thud on the dirt outside, and aided by the adrenaline that was surging through his veins, took off into the darkness as fast as he could. Shots rang out behind him, and he flinched to his right as another round hissed past him in the darkness. The yells of the terrorist behind him rang out after him as he finally reached the street, and he ran for his life as the lights of surrounding buildings began to come on. He had to find a way to contact command, to get in contact with them, before they sent the evac helo to pick up the team that no longer existed. Andrew ran as if his life depended on it, because it surely did.

#I know this is trash #but wanted to get it down before I left!

[journeysintowebcomics]

Homestuck Epilogues - Epilogue

Surpriiiise, the liveblog for the Homestuck epilogues ends here, even though I have read only one half. Here, allow me to give you my thoughts and reasoning! After all, I did decide to liveblog for a reason. Let’s see, where to start...

So, allow me to give my general opinion about the epilogue.

I didn’t really enjoy it much. Honestly, in terms of liking Homestuck, it drags my opinion down a little further. It’s rather unusual, though...the epilogues are well written, they’re interesting to read, and the situations aren’t dull at all. The characters go through a lot of situations and the emotions are so raw you feel them. By all means it sounds like they would be quite the masterpiece, no?

After thinking it, I came to the conclusion that the reason why I didn’t enjoy the epilogue despite how good it was is because it didn’t feel like something that’d be part of Homestuck.

Throughout most of it I had this insistent sensation of reading something that’s slightly off. The conclusion I have reached is that this epilogue feels like the author (or authors, because turns out there’s more than one. That was mentioned in the prologue I failed to read, haha) thought of situations and roles and then tried to make the character fit them, instead of making the situations fit the characters. Nothing wrong with assigning roles to characters, of course! The problem is when you have to force the characters in to the point where it feels like something’s wrong.

I figure part of the reason why things feel off is because there were several authors, too. I don’t know if only one handled each character or what, but it does explain a character may be handled differently than how the original author would.

Something else that kind of makes the epilogues not work likely is that, well, it kind of feels the authors didn’t...really seem to notice just how bleak things were? Like, once again, even at its bleakest Homestuck had this sliver of hope that showed that things would be fine. I don’t mean everything has to be okay for the characters or anything like that, what I mean is that a story shouldn’t feel like the author or authors are writing something for the sake of crushing the characters until they’re mincemeat. Hussie was pretty good in not letting Homestuck feel like it was misfortune for the sake of misfortune, even when things were definitely grim.

Here, I’ll give a couple examples: Terezi, through some clever directions, got John killed by the denizens, Jade is missing and most likely dead because she couldn’t enter the session, and Dave and Rose are trapped in a session that can go nowhere. That by all means is a pretty bad situation, no? In a way it’s similar to how in the meat epilogue John is dead, Jade is unlikely to get back to normal, Rose is kidnapped, and Dave is the only one who can do something about it. So what’s the difference?

The difference is that, in the first situation, it doesn’t feel like the characters have hit a brick wall in their lives.

I believe it’s partly because it was the end of Homestuck, pretty much. Nothing else will come after this – maybe? Possibly? Hah, who knows. But that’s not the only reason, though. Even though John and Jade had died, everything indicated Rose and Dave could do something about it. Likewise, Dave would be instrumental on doing that, and although Rose was the only one who was kind of screwed, it felt she had agency and helped set things right. Now, compare that to the situation in the meat epilogue.

John is dead and it’s pretty unlikely he can be revived, given how it’s said it’s ‘theoretically possible’, which is far from a guarantee, so he’s as good as gone. Rose by now may be inside a robot, and given her situation and affliction, it’s rather unlikely she can be transferred back into her body, so she’ll have to cope with being in a metallic tin forever, and that’s supposing whatever Dirk did to her brain can be undone when he dies. Jade likely will have to stay possessed by Dead Calliope in order to ensure nobody else can take over the narrative. Dave is the only one who is kind of okay, really. Do you see the difference?

I’m not asking for there to be a clear way for the characters to get out of their problems, or for nothing bad to happen to them. It just is that, well, everything they went through seems to have been carefully engineered to leave them for the worse.

Pretty much all the characters had some sort of disgrace in the meat epilogue. I already mentioned the Wonderkids’ fates, so I won’t repeat them. Jane won the presidency and now is cheerfully descending the slippery slope towards turning into a human version of the Condesce. Jake is pretty much a slave to Jane, not taken seriously by anyone, and it’s implied he’ll be kind of a sexual slave to her whenever she wants one. Dirk is the villain and has doomed himself to dying by Dave’s hands, all while deluding himself about how this was the only way to do whatever he’s doing. Kanaya got her wife kidnapped and things likely won’t be the same due to the changes on Rose. Terezi is incredibly depressed and carrying John’s corpse in a wallet. Calliope is traumatized, locked in a room, and doing nothing but painting on the walls.

Out of everyone, Roxy and Karkaroni are pretty much the only ones who didn’t end worse than when they started.

So, now that I addressed the complaint I had about the meat epilogue, allow me to talk about the good things this epilogue had.

Honestly, leaving aside what I mentioned about characters and about how off it all felt, I definitely think it was pretty well-written. Other than the strangely descriptive meat-eating, the use of the wording is effective. Also, the situations were interesting and it made me want to read more, and if this weren’t the end of the story, I’d want to find out more. The many smaller plotlines were handled well, and it didn’t feel like any character other than the Calliope who is alive got pushed aside for convenience. Rarely a story can handle a large number of characters without making a few be so prominent they make everyone else look like background filling instead of characters in their own right, but here they managed to make almost all characters matter in the story.

The ending was satisfying in some manner even though it was an open ending. It felt rather appropriate and I loved it, honestly. The adventure goes on! And the way the story closed with that bizarre postscript made clear no more can be expected to be written about these characters. In terms of ending, I found it rather nice. Open-ended but not too open-ended, unlike Act 7. I think the difference between these two endings is that the epilogue didn’t have something hyped up for three thousand pages, unlike Homestuck with the Lord English fight. The meat epilogue ending left open threads but none of them was the elephant in the room, so to say. Do you understand what I’m saying? Everything the epilogue was about was solved in some manner – the fight with Lord English, the president of earth elections, and Dirk’s takeover of the narrative – so all that was left open in the end was the characters facing something new, even if it was a consequence of the plotlines of the meat epilogue.  That’s the way an open ending should be like, I say.

Overall I think if this was a standalone story with its own characters, world and logic, it’d be a pretty damn good short story and I’d have loved it to bits. I said it before and I say it again: the downfall of this epilogue is that the Homestuck characters don’t fit well the roles they have here.

So, now what?

I thiiiink I won’t liveblog the Candy liveblog. Based on what I have already read on it, it doesn’t seem like my general opinions would change much. The situations are shaping up to be different than the ones in the meat epilogue, but I keep having that persistent feeling everything’s off. I have decided in my own time I will read the candy epilogue and the prologue I didn’t see until I was told it existed, but I won’t liveblog my opinions. Is it deceitful of me to stop the liveblog here? Maybe. But in the end, well, that’s how I think I will maximize my enjoyment of what’s left of the epilogues, so it’s for the best.

So, this is the final update for Homestuck, most likely. I like the thought of considering the meat epilogue the canon ending for Homestuck due to the sense of finality it has. Not the brightest ending ever, but it’s an ending that feels more...ending-y than Act 7, I’d say. So yeah! I’m glad I chose to read these epilogues despite the myriad of negative opinions I heard both from messages I received in my inbox and from friends.

Thank you very much for reading these few updates! From the next update on this website onwards, we’ll return to our regular programming.

#homestuck #homestuck liveblog #webcomics #liveblog #webcomic liveblog

[prophecyread]

         @anonymous sent in a meta thing for me to answer!

A question for the mun about writing Amos: you've mentioned before that he doesn't feel fear. How has this affected your writing of him? Does it differ from muses you've written before? What sort of scenario do you think it might take for him to feel afraid, now?

      Listen I know you sent this a month ago but honestly I’ve been mulling it over and pondering the questions here off and on through all this time because wow there’s so many aspects of this I wanted to figure out how to explain.  Thank you so much for these, they have been really fun for me to think on and sort out!!  So let’s get to it.

I’ve written a lot of muses over my many years and honestly even those that weren’t human were still capable of fear in some regards, even if not in a traditional sense, be it they were alien or they were damaged, or had something that would be described as sociopathic or psychopathic mindsets, or were like androids that shouldn’t be capable of fear but there was always some degree of it.  Whether it was the fear derived from self preservation or the urge to protect others or the desire to avoid pain or capture or conflict - there was always some underlying emotion / need / impulse that created the same overall affect as experiencing fear.  Amos simply doesn’t have it.  In the books (book I guess as I’m only about 1/2 way through the first one) there are moments were he gets angry or he gets a tingle or a moment of wtf but when it comes to feeling fear about his situation, his health, his surviving, even those he cares about in the show who -- he would fight and kill and die for -- it’s still without ever feeling that cold trickle of fear.  

It is a challenge, as a writer, to portray that.  When a character is in a life and death situation, when shit’s gone horribly wrong (which it does often for Amos in the canon storyline & in aus) your first instinct is to imply dread or fear, nervousness, anxiety, and I have to backtrack sometimes and rewrite and rethink the scene.  It has its advantages for him - he is capable of seeing the situation with a mostly clear head, he might feel anger, which does override common sense sometimes, but he is able to analyze what’s happening and see the different sides of any given situation (which I really like that they did portray that in the show if you pay attention you see it).  But it can also be difficult to walk that line between him not feeling fear and portraying him in a way that makes him seem uncaring / unfeeling.  He has been labeled a sociopath by a lot of the fandom even though the author has flat out said that’s not the case and while I can see how some people might draw that conclusion, I also have to wonder if they’re watching the same show as me.  He feels concern, he makes connections, he is capable of empathy - it’s either instant, or it takes a long, long time to build because of his long history of abuse and trauma.  I’m not, ever, going to say he’s normal.  He isn’t.  But I’m digressing.  Yeah.  So finding the balance between writing him without fear and making sure it still shows that he does care can be difficult.  I also don’t want to give him too much of an appearance of ‘good’ because while he is at some core element, he’s also extremely broken and damaged and he is dangerous and he is violent and he is capable of manipulation.  

He is almost always willing to put himself in harm’s way if it means protecting the ship, increasing chances of survival for other people, especially children, families, good people, his crew, the ship.  It’s partly out of that nugget of goodness.  And it’s partly out of just not feeling that fear of death.  Yeah.  When he dies, it’ll suck.  He doesn’t want to die but he also knows it’s inevitable and that’s a fact he’s lived with the majority of his long and tumultuous life.  There’s a video HERE that shows a very important scene where he’s telling someone that yeah, you’re going to die.  I’m probably going to kill you.  It happens.  People like you and me, we die.  And if we don’t, great.  If we do, that’s just how it is.  We’re all caught up in the churn.  (This term has a very specific meaning for Amos, which you can read about in his novella aptly labeled “The Churn” which is about his late adolescent years in Baltimore and how he became Amos - but as a whole it also means, for him, just - the churn. The world.  The verse.  Fate.)  He considers himself just a piece on the board.  The only important thing for him is that whatever decisions he makes, he makes.  (Barring certain moral decisions but that’s a whole different meta.)  He knows he isn’t the master of his FATE but he is the master of his own life and, when it comes to it, death, and how that plays out.  

As for what might eventually make him capable of feeling fear again: I’ve spent some time developing an au plot / story line with @notthescarsyoucansee with Carla’s Prax & Mei where they rejoin Amos and the others on the Roci after the rings open and how being part of a real family unit, with a significant other and a child to look after and care for and after a few months of this, him being with Prax & Mei on a space station like Tycho or Ceres, and Amos looks away for a few seconds and looks back and Mei’s just gone.  Like any normal kid, curious about something and skips off to see it, and it just brings all of those memories of what happened to her with Strickland, what happened to him as a kid, the kind of stuff he saw happen to kids around him and there’s just this sudden trickle of ice down his spine and when they find her he gets yelly and angry with her which he is horrified about and is just like why the fuck did I do that, what kind of monster am I, and Prax is just like it’s okay -- parents gets scared and they say dumb things.  And then Amos is just like scared?!  And I was like waffling about it because -- I didn’t want it to be some sort of oh, true love ‘fixed’ him but it wasn’t that, and it wouldn’t be that, it would just be that gradual influx of responsibility and care and concern for someone that went beyond just ‘I have to try and keep them alive’ combined with the actual legitimate concern of ‘what happens to her if I die’ and having so much to gain and lose at the same time.  It would be something like that - and there’s a plot I have with @shallowsurvived and a couple others to plot with still that were interested in some kind of reunification / long lost child plot that could lead to similar things.  And I’m not saying that a child is the only way that it might lead to that level of growth and commitment that starts to slowly, slowly, patch together old wounds but.  It would really require a level of attachment and care and something to lose that he doesn’t necessarily feel solely with a grownup in the relationship.  They’re grown.  They’ve experienced their life.  They make their own choices.  They know the risks of their own decisions.  It’s not so much riding on him to help shape / protect etc.  

I hope .... any of this made sense and if anything needs clarified, for anyone, please let me know!!!! I really did enjoy mulling this over and trying to figure out how to word things.  I hope it works!

#META. #META. ( amos burton. ) #ANSWERED. #ANSWERED. ( penny. ) #DO NOT REBL.O.G.

[meteora-rachelle]

SACRED MADNESS

She was raised to be rational, economical, political, pragmatic, cerebral, sophisticated and knowledgable. She was taught to be polite but hard in affairs and her only true god should bee money. She was unfortunately not taught to how to feel much and even less on how to express those feelings. Despite it all Elisabeth was in love. The purest sort of love. She was in love with the mad Artists. She loves Baudelaire, Apollinaire and Camus. She loves Dali and Paris in the 1920’s. She dreams she could have been Gertrude Stein. Through art she discovered her emotional self. 

She had come to the conclusion that it was the root of her madness. This paradox living inside of her. The constant pull and push between rational and emotional, spleen and ideal. The death of her father made her aware of her own mortality. She wanted a legacy and not to be the continuation of her fathers legacy. She cared not for the rest of the world, except in as far as it contributed to her own selfish glorification. (1) I don’t think it’s particularly selfish not to want to die. At least for nothing.(2) Eternity as Artist patron.If it is to have a chance of rebirth, the human must recognise its own hideous deformity. (3)Some appear single in their Opinions, only to be continually opposite to the common Judgment of Mankind.(4)She wanted to create a memorial in Paris. The memorial of sacred madness. A remembering of the mad artist, l’artiste maudit. It is funded on tree paradoxes. They consist of six figures that are endlessly entangled. In these constraints, this closed off vacuum, this 'milieu', confined madness found a privileged element in which the essential forms of its truth could surface.(5) In this house, milieu one can experience and learn to enter that state of madness. It is a state of ‘hysteria’ (Baudelaire), ‘disordering’ (Rimbaud), or ‘paranoia’ (Surrealism)   but it is an incipient state only, and one compensated for by very real considerations; if it presents no real dangers this is precisely because it is accepted, deliberate, exploited aesthetically (whereas for the genuine sufferer such states are involuntary, unconscious or resisted).This state of deliberate semi neurosis, partly play acting, often little more than an ambivalent infantilism, allows the ‘modern’ intellectual to push far from his lips the bitter chalice of an everyday life which really is unbearable — and will always be so until it has been transformed, and until new foundations for consciousness are established. By his attempt to maintain such an incipient neurosis as a reflection of his detachment, the ‘typical’ intellectual is able to replace the trivial and the familiar with emotions and illusions which he finds more appealing, more bearable: the mysterious, the strange, the bizarre. He ‘lives out’ these emotions, and the element of play acting is rarely significant enough to provoke accusations of insincerity.(6)Throughout the rooms the symbol of the emotional fabric and water should be used as they have organic forms. For the ration it will be repetitive geometrical forms and architecture.

It begins with shivering, and a notable Sense of Cold, which is succeeded by a sensible heat, which at length ends in large sweats …(5)

We alternate between euphoria and despair, cycle of frenzy and fear, narcissism and paranoia.(8)

Those suffering from paranoia, delusions, psychosis, they love their delusion as they love themselves.(7) A loving trust in paranoia and a terrifying paranoia for trust. 

Trust is comforting. It is warm and calm. It stems from traust "help, confidence, protection, support,”. This understanding of trust is celebrated in this room. (represented by cloth) It is seemingly the opposite of paranoias.

However trust also stems from truth. The concept of truth is the death of of both emotional and rational. It is a delusion, a psychosis. 

Paranoia as a remedy for this trust. Recall Freud, who, in his analysis of the paranoid Judge Schreber, points out how the paranoid “system” is not madness, but a desperate attempt to escape madness.(3) A forever questioning of everything.

This room can also be read as a symbol of control. Trust, the cloth is not controllable and there is no desire to control it. On the other side Paranoia is about repetition and control.

Madness was no longer an absolute perversion that went against nature, but an invasion by nature.(5) Water, a simple, primitive liquid, belonged to all that was most pure in Nature.(5) But architecture is by definition anti nature, an act of delimitation against nature: one draws a line separating inside from outside, clearly stating to nature, “Stay outside!The inside is a domain from which you are excluded!”—the Inside is a de naturalized space to be filled with artifacts. The effort to harmonize architecture with the rhythms of nature is a secondary phenomenon, an attempt to obliterate the traces of the original founding crime.(3) But triumph over nature is dearly paid for.(9) Rousseau had already demonstrated how nature had ended, and how the human milieu had taken its place, ()Madness, like the plant, is the living rationality of nature.(5)

Feel broken, absurd, like nature … not logical and unitary, like reason.(5)

God is dead, he has been replaced by the primacy of the idea of incessant quests, of ‘cheminement’, of a progressive and hesitant search for oneself (reflexivity), which implies flexibility and the possibility of change. The simple dichotomies are refuted. The oppositions of soul spirit/ body, rationality/emotions are denied in favour of the idea that they are closely interconnected and that the material and mundane dimensions of individual life are in close connection with the spiritual aspects of this life because it is always the whole self who is concerned. In the same perspective, the transcendent and the immanent are joined (the God within).  the logical analysis of the faith.(10)

A spirituality deprived of gods and faith. L’homme dieu.

The rooms are a vehicle for experience and self discovery and lost. The visitor can stay as long as desired. Architecture not changing but the perception of them and experience in them do. The visitor should leave questioning everything and embracing the absurd.

1 Fergusson, An Historical Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty in Art

2 Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology

3 Zizek, Less Than Nothing

4 Mallgrave, Architectural Theory

5 Foucault, History of Madness

6 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life

7 Lacan, The Psychoses Seminars of JL

8 Braidotti Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary

9 Jung, Two Essays in Analytical Psychology

10 Coomans, Loci Sacri

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW YOU BUY A STARTUP

When eminent visitors came to see us, we were a bit sheepish about the low production values. Obviously that's false: anything else people make can be well or badly designed; why should this be uniquely impossible for programming languages? The urge to look corporate—sleek, commanding, prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve—is an unexpected development in a time of business disgrace. In fact, they're lucky by comparison. And if they're driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is the reason that high-tech areas only happen around universities. Scientists don't learn science by doing it. He's now considered the best of that period—and yet not do as good work, on an absolute scale, as you would if you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it seem as if he saw it as a drawback of senility, many companies embrace it as a valuable source of tips—more like manning a mental health hotline. The European approach reflects the old idea that new things come from the margins? Sure, it can be interesting if it poses novel technical challenges.

The whole tone is bogus. Someone like Bill Gates can grow a company under him, but it's confusing intellectually. The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people. But when I consider what it would take to reproduce Silicon Valley in Japan, because one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive features is immigration. It's probably because you have to find peers for yourself, you stop learning from this. They happily set to work proving theorems like the other mathematicians over in the math department had the job of replying to people who like unions, because it takes less time to serve founders than to micromanage them. But it will be a good time to start any company that competes by litigation rather than by making good products. But I didn't realize why. Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over 90% blocked and 3 days later he had a quadruple bypass.

GMail. The monolithic, hierarchical companies of the mid 20th century are being replaced by networks of smaller companies. It sounded promising. It must once have been inhabited by someone fairly eccentric, because a they may be on the board of someone who will buy you, and if you love to hack you'll inevitably be working on projects of your own. And since success in a startup, than smart users. Let's start with the most basic question: will the future be better or worse it looks as if Europe will in a few decades speak a single language. Even a bad cook can make a difference. When I finished grad school in computer science I went to visit my family twice. I was a philosophy major in college. Not wanting to blow such a public commission, he'd play it safe and make the talk a list of n things. And though this feels stressful, it's one reason startups win.

This talk was written for an audience of investors. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they haven't followed it to its conclusion. Up till a few years ago, writing essays was the ultimate insider's game. Google understands a few other things most Web companies still don't. Junior professors are fired by default after a few years ago, it turned out to vary a lot. Do you need a San Francisco? What fraction of the smart people who want to live where the smartest people and get them to come to your country.

If you're lucky you can get in three words. We never even considered that approach. But regardless of whether patents are in general a good thing, but slower. These problems aren't intrinsically difficult, just unfamiliar. I put the lower bound at 23 not because there's something that doesn't happen to your brain till then, but because it gives them more control. After all, as most VCs say, they're more interested in the people who create technology, and some may look quite different from universities. Young startups are fragile. That's the way to do that, you have to say actually is a list of n things is that we get on average only about 5-7% of a much larger number of neanderthals in suits. 7 billion, and the doctors figure out what's wrong. And I can see why political incorrectness would be a way to get to know good hackers. Getting money from an actual VC firm is a bigger deal than getting money from angels.

Universities and research labs—partly because talent is harder to judge, and partly because people pay for these things, so one doesn't need to rely on teaching or research funding to support oneself. Email was not designed to be used the way we now know something like our weight. Paris has the best eavesdropping I know. Although a lot of people to help them. What difference does it make how many others there are? A rounds are not determined by asking what would be best for the companies. You can't fight market forces forever. And if you're a quiet, law-abiding citizen most of the good people will be outsiders. Politics, like religion, is a concept known to nearly all makers: the day job. More people are the right sort of person who could get away with hiring thugs to beat up union leaders today, but if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. Microsoft's original plan was to make money, you tend to be in a place where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and having the same people both design and implement the product. Whatever you make will have to be some mechanism to prevent people from saying everything is important.

That's why oil paintings look so different from watercolors. The reason these conventions are more dangerous is that they can do original work. But we knew it was possible to start a startup today, there are only three places I'd consider doing it: on the Red Line near Central, Harvard, or Davis Squares Kendall is too sterile; in Palo Alto on University or California Aves; and in Berkeley immediately north or south of campus. They also wanted very much to get rich, startup founders will almost automatically fund and encourage new startups. Whatever you build, make it fast. In those days you could go public as a dogfood portal, so as a company. Even hackers can't tell. The conversations you overhear. It seemed possible to start a startup when they meet people who've done it. Maybe it would be between a boss and an employee. The difficulty of firing people is a drop in the bucket by immigration standards, but would apologize abjectly if there was any signal left.

But the problem is more than just deciding how to implement some spec. Outsiders don't have to content themselves anymore with a proxy audience of a few smart friends. Then I realized: maybe not. It's natural for US universities to compete with focus is to see what it's like in an existing business before you try running your own. And indeed, you can watch them learn by doing. Good PR firms use the same simple-minded model. They don't have time to work. One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see into the houses. In the US things are more haphazard. At the time, were worth several million dollars. A real essay, as the name implies, is dynamic: you don't know very well, you can compete with delegation by working on larger vertical slices, you can manufacture them by taking any project usually done by multiple people and trying to do it, do it. It can get you factories for building things designed elsewhere.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #drop #philosophy #years #mathematicians #US #challenges #concept #something #spec #game #way #startup #math #science #future #neanderthals #till #bucket #school #dollars #tone #founders #people #talk #country

[lligkv]

what will we do, expecting no reward?

The copy on the back cover of Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory asks a question: “Can we avoid repeating history?”

The answer to that question lies in determining what we’ve been doing thus far and changing it. But many of the essays in the collection focus on the possibility of empathy and compassion at the expense of much discussion of what these feelings might help us to do. See for instance Gabbert, at the end of the essay “I’m So Tired,” growing maudlin over the state of the world until her activist friend justly snaps at her to “Stop despairing! That’s not a strategy.” Some time later, he relents; he grants that writing may be her form of activism. Should it be? Maybe we’ve really reached the end of what “personal essays” can achieve for either those who write them or those who read them.

Many of the essays in The Unreality of Memory are about the anxiety that the average middle-class person—the person who has a job in an industry like marketing or tech, has a healthy social life, keeps herself reasonably informed, and makes sure to vote—feels when she considers natural disasters, climate change, war, and mass death. Because this person is seldom at risk herself, the regard for others she experiences is often nominal rather than meaningful. “Worry, like attention, is a limited resource,” as Gabbert says in the essay “Threats,” and what we do with it depends on how immediate the threat we face is and whether it poses a risk to our individual survival. Often, we offload our worry onto experts who can tell us, for instance, where and how to build a structure to keep it safe from earthquakes.

But offload too much of your worry, leave too much of your responsibility for experts and systems to take up, and when a crisis comes that no one set of experts can address, you’re reduced to paralysis.

And there are limits to what any one expert can address when the crises and the systems wracked by them are big enough. When he was president, Barack Obama was a symbol of the systems, domestic and international, that claim to represent us and to work for our collective welfare. In the essay “In Our Midst,” Gabbert shares Obama’s response to a reporter’s question about South Sudan at one of his final press conferences:

Mike, I always feel responsible. I felt responsible when kids were being shot by snipers. I felt responsible when millions of people had been displaced. I feel responsible for murder and slaughter that’s taken place in South Sudan that’s not being reported on, partly because there’s not as much social media being generated from there. There are places around the world where horrible things are happening and because of my office, because I’m president of the United States, I feel responsible. I ask myself every single day, is there something I could do that would save lives and make a difference and spare some child who doesn’t deserve to suffer. So that’s a starting point. There’s not a moment during the course of this presidency where I haven’t felt some responsibility.

Gabbert takes this in good faith, as a genuine reflection of Obama’s deep capacity for care. I found it harder to do that. Reading the passage in 2020, I think: Is this expression of care anything more than mere expression? Did Obama work to stop what happened in South Sudan, or did he just feel bad about it?

I grant I’m overestimating the ability even the US president has to act to regulate conflicts fueled by global interests—not least that of the country he leads. The problem is probably the question Obama was asked. “Do you, as president of the United States, leader of the free world, feel any personal moral responsibility now at the end of your presidency for the carnage we’re all watching in Aleppo, which I’m sure disturbs you?” To that, I think: The president can feel as much personal moral responsibility as he likes. What will the systems around him let him do with that responsibility?

So often when we consider global catastrophes or natural disasters as responsible, empathic, suffering individuals, we end up stuck pathetically in the realm of affect. We know things are bad and we need to act to change them and we have no idea how. We don’t know what action even a president could take that would cut these knots we’ve so long tied. All we can do is talk about how bad it feels to be stuck—our fears and obligations and how it feels to contemplate them.

By the time we reach the epilogue of Unreality—a book written by an essayist considering the idea of catastrophe as an anxious, curious, empathic, suffering individual—Gabbert’s investigations culminate in banalities. “I don’t think most people are good, or bad, for that matter,” Gabbert says. “I think most people are neutral”:

It seems to me that “good people” can become “bad people” when provided the opportunity within an existing power structure—to claim and exert power at a deadly cost to others and get away with it.

I don’t think Gabbert needed to write this whole book to come to that conclusion. That could’ve been the premise she started from.

It led me to think we probably don’t need essayists to comment on this moment at all; all essays about how our current moment feels will be empty, reflexive, performative gestures that just don’t need to be made. And what we really need are critics and theorists who can give activists and laypeople an understanding of the power structures they live in and identify concrete ways to make those structures change, stop the people who exert power within them, and hold those people accountable.

In the epilogue to the book, as she considers the question of what we can ever know of the world, Gabbert writes of her attraction to the German biologist Jakob von Uexhull’s idea of the Umwelt—which is the name he gives to the information an animal picks up from its surroundings, often limited to just what the animal can sense given the equipment it has and what it immediately needs. Think of a tick: all it knows to pay attention to is the temperature and particular odors that will help it find blood. “Like a tick or a bat,” Gabbert adds, “we only know what we know.” But that seems wrong. At the risk of stating my own banality here, humans aren’t ticks or bats. They’re humans. They’re the one creature on this planet with a mind that is equipped to know what it doesn’t know and what it’ll need to figure out. And to pretend otherwise feels like dithering as we approach an event horizon.

I know Gabbert doesn’t have any answers to the questions of climate change or war or putatively democratic systems that no longer respond to the will of the people. No one person does. But to do so much pontificating instead is frustrating.

But I don’t mean to pile on. I’m essentially in Gabbert’s position myself. I didn’t go to many of the past summer’s protests either; I was generally too leery of getting or spreading COVID. I regularly write and think and talk more about problems I see than I act in ways that might solve those problems. I generally enjoyed this book. And I’m generally sympathetic to the authors accused of falling into the reflexivity trap—Katy Waldman’s term for the idea, often implied in contemporary essays and works of autofiction, that to be aware of your own privileged position is to be absolved of it; that awareness alone is sufficient. I liked Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror; I liked Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley; I like Sally Rooney’s novels, basic though they might be, even as the ranks of today’s literary critics have closed around the positions that her books don’t bear out her politics and aren’t worth the time the mainstream press gives them. Or more accurately, I feel empathy for those writers, and for Gabbert. I suspect we were formed by the same pressures.

Many of us writing today grew up under similar narrow, capitalist, rightward political horizons; we were given the same withered political vocabularies and feeble political imaginations. And so, today, there are many artists whose work doesn’t really reflect their stated politics; there are many (left) positions that are more easily stated than lived; there are many changes we want to see in this world that we have no real way to make. And often, all we can do is say how much we want to make them and confess over and over that we can’t. Doesn’t an individual’s ability to effect change depend on whether systems respond to her efforts? And do ours? To what extent can political orientations or commitments to combat climate change be meaningfully lived when political life for so many is voting once or twice every few years, for politicians who don’t listen to us or can’t or won’t deliver what we need, while systems stay gridlocked?

In her review of Trick Mirror, Lauren Oyler wrote that what people in the reflexivity trap often do is shield what is really a demonstration of their priorities and desires under the guise of “surviving” in a compromised world. And as Amber Husain wrote in The White Review, the sort of informed exceptionalism exhibited by Jia Tolentino or Anna Wiener, the apparent belief that if you write convincingly perceptively about the morally compromised systems you participate in, you can avoid being held to account for that, is not enough.* You have to interrogate your own desires, refuse to indulge the ones that make you complicit in an unethical world, and consciously choose to satisfy desires and imperatives that are productive or just. Having read The Unreality of Memory, I feel the desire to write about how we feel when we think about, say, the climate changing, the desire to dramatize that feeling, isn’t a productive desire. But it feels that way. And because it ends in a result, in a concrete thing like an essay or a book, it feels better than the impossible work of trying to act in a way that might curb climate change or mitigate the damage of our next fire season. That work, by contrast—it’s hard to figure out what it would look like. And just contemplating the issue is unsatisfying, difficult, grinding, humiliating. It hurts.

But that’s a pain we need. I think also of a recent conversation between Donald Glover and Michaela Coel in GQ, in which Glover says, “Every generation has a job they need to do,” and “the job is always the same, which is to plant a tree you won’t eat from.”

...you need to plant a tree right now. And you don’t get to eat from it. Maybe your kids don’t even get to eat from it. You just teach them to water it, but their kids get to eat from it. And you do or you go on, you transition, knowing you did the right thing.

Enough about how we feel; we know the answer is “bad.” And on to the question: what will we do, expecting no reward?

*The connections I’ve made here come courtesy of Haley Nahman’s “Maybe Baby” column: specifically, “#24: The Emily Ratajkowski effect,” in which Nahman writes about Emily Ratajkowski’s “Buying Myself Back” and the position of the culture worker who both profits from the culture and agitates against it. I’d read both Oyler’s piece and Husain’s as they came out, but I hadn’t made the connection until I saw it so well elaborated by Nahman.

#books #literary #essays #elisa gabbert #lauren oyler #amber husain #haley nahman #climate change #sally rooney #the reflexivity trap #katy waldman #barack obama #jia tolentino #anna wiener #donald glover #michaela coel