This is a false dichotomy in some ways and an
incomplete way of thinking about fandom, but bear with me. Fans can
sometimes try to improve a canon. Fans can sometimes try to explore
a canon. Or fans can do both at once! sometimes through the same
reading! Which is why I acknowledge it’s false to separate them out like
that so cleanly.
But I see a lot of fannish criticism that
hinges on either the assumption that improving is better than exploring,
or the assumption that exploring is better than improving.
And I hate that.
For
Bomb Girls? I was an improver to the core. There was zero exploration.
Instead I wrote fic where Everyone’s Dreams Came True and Gladys
discovered capris and Vera married Marco and Betty got out of prison
only to enter a lesbian bliss house with Kate. Kate who had a successful
singing career. So, just so we’re clear, no pain ever. Improving all
that pain in the canon so it never ever touched these girls, the end.
Canon fixed. Fluff as improvement.
And for HP? I was often an
improver. I don’t like how the canon treats this character, so let’s
write a fic about them to fix it. I don’t like how the canon ignores a
whole class of people, so let’s write fic that gives them their own
story within the universe of the canon. Etc. Perspective improvement.
From my perspective, anyway. The thing about the improving position is
that it’s often subjective. But even with that subjectivity, like,
improvement is a totally reasonable way of doing fandom and it
gets a bad rap sometimes. There are Improving fanworks out there that
get dragged as self-insert or wish fulfillment or preachy or all three
and maybe they are! But wish fulfillment and self insert stuff and yes, a
little bit of preaching, can just be people’s ways of fixing the story
for themselves, of taking a canon and sanding off the edges and
attaching new parts and making it theirs and not just theirs but
something that comports with their personal worldview or desires or need
to see themselves or whatever. Which is…I mean. Whatever. That’s
your prerogative when you’re faced with a story. As a reader or viewer,
you’re going to be adjusting it already to make sense with what’s in
your head. You’re going to want it to go your way. That’s not dumb or
selfish or less cerebral, not necessarily. It doesn’t make you any less a
fan, and it doesn’t make you any more or less intellectual than people
who insist on sticking by the letter of canon. It’s just a perfectly
natural impulse. You want to improve the canon (for you) so that you’ll
like it better. You’re confronted with a problem or painful moment or
genuine flaw. And you say, “Wow, that’s not something I like. Let me fix
it.”
And then sometimes you say, “Wow, that’s not something I like. But it’s really interesting.”
And this is absolutely
a fair way of doing fandom too. I am zero percent interested in
improving the MCU to make it a happier place or even a universe I will
like better in a moral sense. I see too many parts as interestingly
broken. Like, sure, Steve Rogers deserves happiness. But I like that
he’s not getting it – the way he bears his pain is interesting to me.
And SHIELD was HYDRA and HYDRA became SHIELD and horrible shit happened
to Bucky Barnes and in the mix you have a spy with glimmers of an
internal journey that would put all the others to shame, a god whose
family will never ever ever get back together, and whatever the fuck
Tony Stark is this week, which is guaranteed to be in need of fixing but
will never really be fixed because that’s just not Tony Stark: take him
as he is and go from there.
So for me that’s been an exploration
canon. I don’t actually want anything improved, not even the bits I
don’t like. Everything’s a potential mess and it can be fun to navigate
that. There’s stuff there to be fixed; it’s like HP, it’s so sprawling
that there’s no shortage of stuff to be fixed. But, like HP, you
can also roll around in the inconsistencies and painful possibilities
afforded by a world that’s keeps showing it’s broken and keeps trying to
say it’s not broken. And this can be worth exploring without polishing
up the canon, without making it better, without adjusting it to be
happier or more moral.
I tend to see attempts at fannish improvement usually called out as stupid or uncanonical.
Posturing. Wish fullfillment. Brainless. Soapboxing. And sometimes that
can be so deeply unfair that I don’t know where to begin. It may not
look like an improvement to the fan who prefers exploration for that
particular canon, but to the fan trying to make the canon something they
can stomach, it’s an improvement. And that’s allowed.
Meanwhile, fannish exploring without improvement often gets called out as immoral.
It’s what Bad Fans do because they are enjoying bad things. A moral fan
would not enjoy immoral things or bad depictions. A moral fan would not
want to even touch these things. A moral fan would just pretend that’s
not happening and write a better story or a story where only kind things
happen. If there’s no improvement, people argue, what’s the point? The point
is that not bothering with improvement or just taking the shitty parts
of canon and exploring those shitty parts, dealing with them through
confronting them?
Also allowed.
Both of those
veins of criticism, anti-improving/pro-exploring positions and
anti-exploring/pro-improving positions, miss the fucking point of what
it is to be into a story. Stories are going to serve up huge glaring
flaws. They are going to do this all the time. They are created by
people and they usually feature people and people are by nature messed
up and so stories can be messed up and can crash into your brain
unpleasantly in a multitude of ways, forcing you to wrestle them down
and try to deal with that unpleasantness even as you enjoy the more
pleasant parts.
And to do this, you can fix or you can explore. Or you can do both. That is what fandom is, this moment where you decide to do
something with the fact that someone else’s story crashed into your
mind and upset all the furniture and now you need to put it back in
order. You can run through and put everything back in its proper place,
arranging the story the way you think it should go in order to clean up
the mess. Or you can wander, interested, through the weird and awful new
arrangement.
These are both totally valid options. You can do both.
And I’m so so sick of hearing that either option is somehow smarter or more moral or innately better than the other, frankly. My favorite fics and fanart have tended to be a blend of improving and exploring.
“In the last Batman movie [The Dark Knight Rises], they told me that I couldn’t get an audition for a small role they were casting because they weren’t ‘going urban,’” Kravitz told Nylon.
Yikes
remember this next time you see a post about how diverse suicide squad is
I was really bad. All the tenure-track positions I’d applied to had politely declined, and I saw my future in academia gradually slipping away from me. Then the night before, my boyfriend had said he thought maybe we should start seeing other people. I didn’t even know if we were broken up or not, and at that point I couldn’t bring myself to care. I sat on my bed, thinking about things for a while, and finally I called the suicide hotline.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice answered on the other side. Somehow, just hearing someone else made me feel about five times better.
“Hello,” I said, a little more confidently. “I’ve been thinking of committing suicide. I need help.”
“Okay,” she said. “Is there a gun in your house?”
“No.”
“All right. The first thing you need to do is get one. Overdosing on pills is common, but it almost never works. You can get a firearm at almost any large sporting goods store, but if there aren’t any near you, we can start talking about maybe jumping from a high…”
“What the HELL?” I interrupted, suddenly way more angry than depressed. “You’re supposed to @#!$ing tell me not to do it!”
“This is the suicide hotline,” the woman said, now sounding confused. Then, “Are you sure you weren’t thinking of the suicide prevention hotline?”
“Give me a break! I took a psychology class in undergrad, I know what a suicide hotline is!”
“I’m sorry you seem to be upset. But this is the suicide hotline. It’s like how there’s the Walk For Breast Cancer, but also the Walk Against Breast Cancer.”
“There’s the what? But…I was in the Walk For Breast Cancer! I thought…”
“It sounds like you have some issues,” said the woman, politely.
“Ugh,” I said. “Yeah.”
“Do you feel like you need professional help?”
“Yeah.”
“I do have a free clinic with an opening available tomorrow at three PM, would you like me to slot you in for an appointment?”
So you’re probably wondering why in the world I would take an appointment arranged by the suicide hotline that wasn’t a suicide prevention hotline. The answer is – were you even listening? A free clinic? With an appointment available the next day? Normally I was lucky if I found a place with an opening in less than two months and a co-pay that wasn’t completely ruinious. You bet I was taking that appointment before someone else snatched it up.
Dr. Trauer’s office looked gratifyingly normal. There was a houseplant, a diagram of the cranial nerves, some Abilify® merchandise, and on the wall one of those Magic Eye stereographic images that resolved into a 3D picture of the human brain. Dr. Trauer himself looked like your average doctor – a little past middle age, a little overweight, a short greying beard. He motioned me to sit down and took the paperwork I’d been filling out.
“Hmmmm,” he said, reading it over. “29 years old, postdoc in biochem, recent relationship trouble…mmmm…you did the right thing.”
“In coming here?”
“No, in considering suicide. After getting rejected from a tenure-track position, your life is pretty much over.”
“WHAT?”
“I mean, here you are, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, with only one area of expertise, and now you’ve been rejected from it. I can totally see why you might think it’s worth ending it all.”
“But…there are lots of other things I can do! I can get a job in industry! I can work in something else! Even if I can’t find a job right away, I have parents who can help support me.”
“Industry!” Dr. Trauer was having none of it. “A bunch of bloodsuckers. Do you realize how bad work in the private sector is these days? They’ll abuse you and then spit you out, and once you’ve been out of university too long nobody else will want you.”
“Lots of people want biochemists! If I work for a company for a few years, I’ll have more experience and maybe that will make me more attractive to employers! What…what kind of a psychiatrist are you, anyway?”
“Cindy didn’t tell you?”
“Cindy?”
“The woman on the phone.”
“She didn’t really tell me anything!”
“Well,” said Dr. Trauer. “To answer your question, we’re dark side psychiatrists. This is the state’s only dark side psychiatry clinic.”
“Dark side psychiatry? Really?”
“We’re a…well, some people say sect, but I like to think of it as more of a guild…dedicated to improving negative mental health. Think of it this way. When you’re a hijacked murder-monkey hurtling toward your inevitable death, sanity is a completely ridiculous thing to have. And when the universe is fifteen billion light-years across and almost entirely freezing void, the idea that people should have ‘coping skills’ boggles the imagination. An emotionally healthy person is a person who isn’t paying attention, and our job is to cure them.”
“There’s more than one of you?”
“Oh, yes. There’s a thriving dark side psychiatric community. There are dark side psychopharmacologists – you’d be amazed what a few doses of datura can do to a person. There are dark side psychotherapists who analyze and break down people’s positive cognitions. There are dark side child psychiatrists who catch people when they’re young, before sanity has had a chance to take root and worsen. And there are dark side geriatric psychiatrists, who go from nursing home to nursing home, making sure that the elderly are not warehoused and neglected at exactly the time it is most important to ensure that stroke or dementia does not protect them from acute awareness of the nearness of death.”
“That’s awful!” I said.
“Is it? Look where sanity’s gotten you. You want to kill yourself, but you don’t have the courage. Work with me for ten sessions, and I promise you we can help you get that courage.”
“You’re a @#!$ing quack,” I said. “And if you think killing yourself is so great, how come you haven’t done it yourself yet?”
“Who says I haven’t?” asked Dr. Trauer.
His hand went to his face, and he plucked out his right eye, revealing an empty void surrounded by the bleached whiteness of bone. I screamed and ran out of the clinic and didn’t stop running until I was in my house and had locked the door beside me.
II.
“…and that’s pretty much the whole story, doctor,” she told me. “And then I looked to see if there were any real psychiatrists in the area and someone referred me to you.”
“Well,” I said, my face unreadable. “I can certainly see why you’re complaining of, how did you put it, ‘depression and acute stress disorder’.”
“Not so acute anymore. It took me two months to get an appointment at your clinic.”
“Oh,” I said. Then, “Sorry, we’re sort of backed up.” Then, “Okay. We’ve got a lot we have to work on here. Let me tell you how we’re going to do it. We’re going to use a form of therapy that challenges your negative cognitions. We’re going to take the things that are bothering you, examine the evidence for them, and see if there are alternative explanations.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well,” I said. “It seems to be this Dr. Trauer incident that’s traumatized you a lot. I can see why you would be stressed out. The way you tell it, it sounds absolutely terrifying.”
“You don’t believe me,” she said, not accusatory, just stating a fact.
“I think it would be helpful to examine alternate explanations,” I said. “I’m willing to assume it happened exactly as you tell it. I can see why you would think Dr. Trauer wanted you to commit suicide. But are there any alternative explanations for the same event?”
“I don’t see how there can be,” she said. “He outright said that he thought I should kill myself.”
“Right. But from what you know of psychiatrists and therapy – and you did say you took some classes in undergrad – are there any other reasons he might have said something like that?”
She thought for a second. “Wait,” she told me. “There’s a technique in therapy called paradoxical intention. Where you take a patient’s irrational thought, and then defend and amplify it. And then when the patient hears it from someone else, she realizes how silly it sounds and starts arguing against it, and then it’s really hard to keep believing it after you’ve shot it down yourself.”
I nodded. “That’s definitely a therapeutic method, and sometimes a very effective one. Do you have any evidence that this is what Dr. Trauer was doing?”
“Yes! As soon as he said I should commit suicide, I started arguing against him. He told me that if I couldn’t get a tenure track position there would be no other jobs available, and I told him there would be! Then he told me that the jobs would be terrible and I’d never be able to make a happy life for myself with them, and I argued that I would! That must have been what he was going for!”
She suddenly looked really excited. Then, just as suddenly, the worry returned to her face.
“But then what happened with his eye? I swear I saw him take it right out of the socket.”
I nodded. “Can you think of any alternate explanations for that?”
Thinking about it that way, it only took her like five seconds. She slapped her head like she’d been an idiot. “A glass eye. He probably had some kind of injury, had to put in a glass eye, and could take it out any time he wanted. He must have thought it would be a funny gag and didn’t realize how traumatized I’d be. Or he wanted to scare me into realizing how much I wanted to live. Or something.”
I nodded. “That does sound like a reasonable explanation.”
“But…don’t people with glass eyes usually have like scar tissue and normal skin behind them? This guy, I swear it was just the bone and this empty socket, like you were seeing straight to his skull.”
“You’re asking the right questions,” I said. “Now think a little more.”
“Hmmmm,” she said. “I guess I was really, really stressed out at the time. And I only saw it for, like, a fraction of a second. Maybe my brain was playing tricks on me.”
“That can definitely happen,” I agreed.
She looked a lot better now. “I owe you a lot of thanks,” she said. “I’ve only been here for, like, fifteen minutes, and already I think a lot of my stress has gone away. All of this really makes sense. That paradoxical intention thing is actually kind of brilliant. And I can’t deny that it worked – I haven’t been suicidal since I talked to the guy. In fact…okay, this is going to sound really strange, but…maybe I should go back to Dr. Trauer.”
I wrinkled my forehead.
“It’s not that I don’t like you,” she said. “But he had this amazing free clinic, and what he did for me that day…now that I realize what was going on, that was actually pretty incredible.”
“Hold on a second,” I said.
I left the room, marched up to the front desk, took the directory of medical providers in the area off the shelf, marched back to the room. I started flipping through the pages. It was in alphabetical order…Tang…Thompson…Tophet…there we go. Trauer. My gaze lingered there maybe just a second too long, and she asked if I was okay.
“Um, yeah,” I said. “It’s just that he doesn’t – he doesn’t take your insurance. That’s the problem.”
“It’s okay,” she told me. “He said it was a free clinic. So that shouldn’t a problem.”
“Well, uh…the thing is…when you see out-of-network providers, your insurance actually charges, charges an extra fee. Even if the visit itself is free.”
She looked skeptical. “I’ve never heard of that.”
“It’s new. With Obamacare.”
“Really? How high a fee is it?”
“It’s…um…ten thousand dollars. Yeah, I know, right? Thanks, Obama.”
“Wow,” she said. “I definitely can’t afford that. I guess I’ll keep coming here. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. You’ve been very nice. It’s just that…with Dr. Trauer…well…sorry, I’ll stop talking now. Thanks a lot, doctor.” She stood up and shook my hand before heading for the door. “Seriously, I can’t believe how much you’ve helped me.”
No, I thought, as she departed you can’t. I told her she was asking the right questions, and she was, but not all of them.
For example, why would a man with only one working eye have a stereographic Magic Eye image in his office?
I picked up my provider directory again, stared a second time at the entry for Dr. Trauer. There was a neat line through it in red pen, and above, in my secretary’s careful handwriting, “DECEASED”.
Before returning the directory to the front desk, I took my own pen and added “DO NOT REFER” in big letters underneath.
No, this isn’t a stupid question! No worries! I’m gonna start off with what liberalism is and how it relates to the idea of classism, then how communism doesn’t concern itself with classism as a notion.
Liberalism is an ideology (you could call it a set of ideologies) that emphasizes the importance of the individual over the community, and emphasizes the responsibility of the individual over the community; it understands conflicts typically on terms more personal/individual and less communal/social. Liberalism has a few basic tenets:
People are responsible for taking care of themselves. Nobody is responsible for taking care of anybody else.
A person’s success is through their own hard work.
A person’s failure is the result of not working hard enough.
The individual exists outside of and before society, and must fundamentally be protected from it.
Different groups of liberals often classify and distinguish between themselves based on how they think the individual needs to be protected from the society. The individual’s freedom needs to be protected against the tyrannical force of the government? That’s what US Republicans would say. The individual’s freedom needs to be ensured BY the government? That’s what US Democrats would say. But both believe that the person is in struggle against the community in SOME way.
The market is a neutral tool which naturally rewards hard work and punishes those who don’t work hard enough.
So that’s what I see as a basic rundown of what liberalism is and what it entails. The idea of classism is fundamentally liberal in that it focuses solely on individual actions of people within the market. So let’s take an example of what might be called classism. Let’s say a rich man gets on a train, and sees a homeless person sleeping on it. Let’s then say that he approaches the homeless guy and harasses him, telling him he should get a job, stop sleeping in public, etc etc. That moment could be called classism- discrimination based on class. The notion of classism supposes that a rich man shouldn’t be mean to a poor man, and that acting indecently towards the poor is a problem we should focus on. That’s true, from almost any perspective. But it makes two major presuppositions: one, that the main problem is the rich man being mean, and two, that the rich man and the poor man have to exist in the first place.
Let’s take that both points up for examination. Yes, the rich guy shouldn’t be mean, but should anyone be rude? Is being an ass to someone really enough for us to call something an -ism? Is the problem there that the man is being mean? Let’s say the man owns a textile factory (a very old-fashioned example, but I’m using it because it’s simple). How does he make his money? He employs let’s say 10 workers, and gives them all 40 hours/week, and pays them $10/hr. His labor costs are then about 40*10*10= $4,000/week. Just so we’re using simple number’s let’s say all his other costs come up to $1,000/week for materials, keeping up the warehouse, and powering machines. So every week he has to pay out $5,000 just to keep the business going. Sounds like a shitty deal right? BUT let’s say the factory produces 100 pairs of jeans every day, so 700 a week, and he sells those jeans for $40/pair. That means he takes in $28,000/week in money from selling those jeans. Even after taking out all his costs he’s got $23,000 in profit every single week. Now I know 10 people probably can’t make 100 pairs of jeans in a day but this was to keep the numbers simple. That money isn’t profit be created himself- the workers created it. He bought raw materials and only paid his own expenses plus the wages of his workers. All of the work that transforms the materials into a product that customers will buy is performed by workers. But they don’t keep any of it. They only keep $10/hr, much less than the value they produce in that time. Profit is the word we give to value created by workers but not left in their own hands. And in this particular situation, we’re talking about work (full time at ten dollars an hour) than many people would kill to get their hands on. That gap is widened by low wages, and low wages at major employers mean low wages further and further across the board, etc etc.
THIS is how class is created. In this case you have an owning class man whose wealth depends on paying those people shit wages. His class status depends on keeping other people poor- if he hands back all of the profits the workers created, he has no money for himself. That relationship is very particular, and communism (here’s where communism comes in, hang in there!) holds that that relationship must go. Communism holds that what value workers create, they must be entitled to. Communism holds that the entire nature of work must be converted from a wage relationship and into something that lets workers live dignified lives and enjoy the spoils of their own labor. So from a communist perspective, the problem in that case isn’t that one mean rich guy was mean to one poor guy. The problem is that the wealth the rich man has is built on poverty. Poor people create the value that becomes the profit that pays the rich guy’s light bill in his fancy condo. From a communist perspective, it is class itself that has to go, because it is created by very particular conditions. I don’t care if rich people are mean to poor people. I care that by and large their wealth is extracted right from the labor of the poor, and there is no room to talk about that in the narrative of classism. According to the narrative of classism, if the rich guy is nice to the homeless guy and maybe gives him ten bucks and some food, that solves the problem. But the real tension at the root of it (the radical tension, if you like) is that one man’s wealth requires another man’s poverty, and that isn’t okay.
No one can ever tell me ever that representation isnt important I just cried for an hour and a half because non-sexualised lesbian aliens were allowed to openly love each other on a children’s cartoon show.
Steven Universe is the most important thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
if you haven’t been addicted to anything or haven’t had someone you’re close to be addicted to anything you lead a very privileged life and i would recommend keeping your mouth shut on how to deal with it
(Obviously it’s a mistake to post an actual cartoonist’s work alongside my own second-grade-quality scrawl, but hey, maybe I’ll benefit from a math humor cheerleader effect.)
Now, what is the harmonic series? It’s this:
The sum never stops. It goes on forever and ever. Lovely, yes, but does it—in any meaningful sense—“equal” anything?
That is to say: Does it level out at some value?
Or does it just keep rising, forever and ever, eventually exceeding a million, then a billion, then a trillion, and so on, surpassing any ceiling or limit we might imagine?
Perhaps your first thought is this: “You silly man; you’ve already answered your own question. You said the sum goes on forever. So it must be infinite.”
Not so fast.
Take a look at this series, for example:
We start at 1. The next term brings us halfway to 2. The next term brings us halfway again to 2. The next term brings us halfway AGAIN to 2.
And so on.
This sum is “infinite” in the sense that it goes on forever, with no final term. But it’s finite in the sense that no matter how many numbers you add, you’ll never exceed 2. Sure, you’ll get close—achingly, painfully, infinitesimally close—but you’ll never surpass it. We say that the sum “converges” to 2.
Now, back to our original sum, the harmonic series. What should it equal?
Well… let’s look at some running totals as we go along.
Where is it going to settle down?
It isn’t.
To be clear, this total grows incredibly slowly. In fact, the word “slowly” fails to evoke its agonizingly incremental pace. Instead, imagine that you’re waiting in line at the DMV.
And there’s only one employee.
And that employee is one of those talking trees from Lord of the Rings.
And he’s stoned.
And the line includes all 7 billion people on earth.
That line you’re in? It moves like ball lightning compared with the growth of this series.
And yet… this series never settles down. This sum eventually exceeds a million, then a billion, on its way to the stars. In mathematical language: the series diverges.
This is all weird enough. But now we get to the truly strange part of the whole ordeal, the truth that prompted the inimitable Zach Weinersmith of SMBC to build a punchline around it:
If you throw out the numbers with 9’s in them, the series is small enough to converge.
“Nonsense, you gullible old toad!” you are perhaps shouting to your screen. “Why should throwing out the numbers with 9’s make such a difference? We’ve still got all the other numbers!”
Again, I say: not so fast. You’re making a classic mistake. When you think of “numbers,” you’re only picturing little numbers.
“No I’m not!” you may say. “I’m thinking of big numbers. Huge numbers. Like 9 million, or 47 billion, or 228 trillion.”
Exactly my point: small numbers.
You see, the longer a number gets, the harder it is to avoid a 9. Every time you add a digit, you add a new opportunity for a 9. That might not feel like a big danger—after all, those 9’s will pop up only 10% of the time. But look what happens:
It’s as if, every time you type a digit, there’s a 10% chance that a giant numeral “9” falls from the sky and crushes you. For short numbers, with just 2 or 3 digits, you’re not very worried. The chances are in your favor.
But now you begin to type a 100-digit number. How do you like your chances? Sure, that giant “9” probably won’t fall on this digit… nor on this digit… but how long do you think your luck will last? Eventually you’ll get unlucky, and that “9” will come plummeting from the sky.
In the long run, most numbers have 9’s in them. Virtually all of them, in fact. So if you throw out these numbers from the harmonic series, it’s no surprise that it now converges. You’ve thrown out almost the entire series!
Want to know the weirdest part? The same logic applies to a longer sequence of digits. Say, 999.
At first, most numbers won’t have this sequence. But picture a billion-digit number. Just writing this number out—in size 8 font, double-siding the printing to save trees—takes a stack of paper as tall as a house.
Surely somewhere in there the number is bound to have the digits “999” in that order, right?
The same is true of every equally big number. And MOST numbers are this big! After all, there are only finitely many smaller numbers, and infinitely many bigger numbers. So, again, we’re throwing out almost the entire series.
Thus, the harmonic series also converges if you throw out all the numbers that include the digits “999.”
Perhaps you can see where this is going. (If so, you may be experiencing vertigo and/or nausea; this is normal.) The logic above works for any string of digits you can possibly think of. Even, say, a sequence of a million 9’s in a row.
So, in conclusion, the harmonic series diverges. It eventually outgrows any ceiling you’d put on it.
But simply throw out the numbers that happen to include a string of a million 9’s in a row… and suddenly the series converges. It plateaus. There’s some value that it will never surpass.
Somehow, by excluding only those numbers with a million 9’s in a row, you’ve changed the nature of the series.
The contextual foreignness of firm breasts in a society that doesn’t use bras
This is funny and charming
By far one of my favorite posts.
I love that across cultures, every woman grabs their boobs.
My friend is an army wife and spent some time with her husband on his Pacific posting. One day the locals invited the families from the British base for a big get-together. It was going really well but after a few hours the British women noticed that a lot of the local babies were crying, so my friend asked one of the mothers if there was something wrong, like a bug going round or something. The mother replied,
“Oh no, they’re just very hungry.”
So my friend asked, “Why don’t you feed them?”
And the mother said, “We will when you’ve gone. We use our breasts to feed them and we don’t want to embarrass you.”
And my shocked friend said, “But we do that too!”
So all the British mothers who had babies sat down and whipped out their boobs to feed them (whether they were hungry or not) and the relieved local mothers then did the same.
Two things:
- because western ladies usually cover their boobs the local ladies weren’t sure whether western women use boobs for what they’re supposed to be for
- women everywhere are considerate of other women
I also really love this photo set because, far too often, we only see pictures of African women as anthropological archetypes. They are treated like exhibits to be studied, similar to exotic animals or landscapes, rather than human beings. I LOVE these pictures, because here we have women of two different cultures laughing and talking and playing around. You can see their personalities shining through and I LOVE IT
“oh hey,” she said, “it’s a really touristy area, but since you’re gonna be passing through anyway, you might as well stop by pier 29, see the dragons. also, there’s a—”
“hold on,” i said. “i knew your city had mountains, but. dragons? uh, actual living dragons?”
“dude, it’s not a big deal. they’re there all the time. of course they’re majestic and everything, but they’re loud and cranky and mostly they lie around eating garbage. now and then the city council will talk about trying to make them roost somewhere else, but—”
“dragons,” i repeated. i knew it was making me sound like a rube, but it was a lot to take in. “you live in a city that has dragons.”
“no, it’s cool, we used to go see them when i was a little kid. it’s worth doing. but that whole area is mostly dragon-themed gift shops, and the commercialization is kind of a bummer. also, sometimes a dragon will melt somebody’s car and it’s a whole problem.”
“honestly, i forget other cities don’t have them?” she said. “there’s a few other sites on the west coast where they gather. portland calls them wyverns, but that’s a portland thing.”
“chicago’s got, like, bunnies and songbirds,” i told her, “but otherwise it’s just your typical vermin. pigeons, rats, sphinxes—”
“sphinxes? what the hell.”
“oh, yeah, they nest in the el tunnels. sometimes a fucking sphinx will flap down out of nowhere, bring the whole train to a halt until the front car answers a riddle.”
“that sounds exciting,” she said.
“it’s the worst. your train winds up being twenty minutes late, and you just have to hang out hoping somebody up there read their mythology. there’s supposed to be a program where the conductors get trained in riddling, but i don’t know. rahm emmanuel keeps saying it’s not a budget priority.”
“huh,” she said. “guess the grass is always greener and all that. but on some level, it’s nice to remember that even with all these big box stores, the country still has some variety left in it.”
“yeah, did you know that in rhode island they call water fountains ‘bubblers’?” i said.
Like I really encourage people that are so “YAAASSS DRAG QUEENS GET IT GURL YAASSSS LGBT COMMUNITY” to ask themselves why they find it so entertaining? Perspective. I, a trans woman, a year or so into her transition, an still constantly called “sir”, am clocked or misgendered every single day. Whatever.
But then I see the massive support for drag queens, in our community, at almost every lgbt event, on tv for fuck sake. And like, these LITERAL MEN DRESSING UP AND PLAYING FICTITIOUS CHARACTERS, yet they get called she/her/girl without so much as even a thought. It’s so silly, it’s all in good fun! Then you can take your cute lil costume off and thats that!! It’s fucking infuriating to me?!?
All I’m saying is, think about it. This is my perspective, as a trans woman on it. Think about why it’s so entertaining and fun and totally not transmisogynistic. Think about why men dressing up in costumes get respected as women more than actual women do. 😊
One of the distinctive features of Old Norse poetry is the use of kenning: a circumlocutory device in which a straightforward noun is replaced with an allusive phrase.
For example, a ship might be referred to as a “wave’s horse”; a sword, a “wound-serpent”; a shield, “the shame of swords”, and so forth. Sometimes, kennings could be embedded in other kennings - thus, one might have “feeder of war-gulls” = “feeder of ravens” = “warrior”; this is known as a doubled or extended kenning
Though many conventions of English literature can be traced back to Old Norse roots, kenning isn’t much encountered these days - at least, not in most genres. There’s one particular genre where the art of kenning is alive and well, though.
I’m speaking, of course, of erotic fanfic.
Whether you’re referring to a penis as a “porn-truncheon” or a vagina as “squish-pocket” (both examples I’ve seen employed in all apparent seriousness, incidentally), that perfectly fits the form and function of a kenning. Indeed, these examples even adhere to the idiosyncratic grammatical structure of many Old Norse kennings, with the base word being modified by an uninfected noun determinant inserted as a compound prefix.
Euphemisms for sex acts, meanwhile, can be even more baroque, forming multi-level allusions in the manner of doubled/extended kennings. “To ride the baloney pony”, for example, employs the act of riding a horse as an allusion to penetrative sexual intercourse - but the contained phrase “baloney pony” is, itself, a kenning of the simple type, with “pony” as the base word and “baloney” as the determinant, making the whole phrase a doubled kenning.
There are practical reasons for this sort of practice, of course; e.g., complex euphemisms can help sexually explicit works sneak through content filters. Still, it’s kind of fascinating that smutty fanfic has managed to preserve - in virtually unaltered state - a poetic form that’s otherwise been largely extinct in English literature for the better part of a thousand years.
in stories featuring aliens, they’re always like “on my planet this never happens!” or “in my culture, this differs from your human culture.” and that’s neat and all because i like worldbuilding and all that jazz but wouldn’t it be fun if they just. couldn’t do that?
i want a story where humans encounter an alien who frustrates them because they don’t know enough to tell them anything concrete
like humans will ask “tell us about politics in your planet!” and the alien’s all “uh… hold on it’s been a while since i took gov. um….”
“what sorts of plants grow on your planet?”
“i dunno i grew up in the suburbs. they’re like… purple? idk what you want me to say”
“tell us about the culture on your planet!”
“do you have any idea how many fucking countries are back home, i don’t even know where to begin”
“your planet is obviously much more scientifically and technologically advanced than ours. is it possible for you to enlighten us on certain matters concerning space travel, or would that be a form of interference you must avoid?”
“naw it’s cool, it’s just that, um, i’m a philosophy major”
People love to talk about whether or not disabled people can work
but if you can work just fine and your disability is destroying your ability to have a life outside of work (because work takes all your energy and more)
Dead silence. Nobody cares.
File this under, oh you can be active for 4 hours? You can work part-time. Um no, I have to get ready for work (30 min) get to work (15 min) get home from work (15 min) feed myself all day (30 min) maintain myself, my home and my life (15 min, yeah right), which leaves 15 min for work and absolutely nothing else.
This is so accurate, back after I’d relapsed I wanted to try and go in for one class at school so I could still stay in contact with the education system. I let slip during a meeting that I managed to drag myself to that I could manage about 4 hours of activity a week, which the teacher sprang on to mean I was being lazy for just trying to get to 1 hour class. Never matter that it was 30 minutes travel, that I would have to get washed and dressed, that I would probably still need to recover for 3 days from it.
Far too often abled people see the things they do easily as “non activities”, they don’t realise that for many disabled people these things have to be carefully planned and measured, and sometimes they simply can’t be done.
reblog bc the non activities thing seems really important words
I get X number of pain-free steps per day right now, which means that, for large conventions (like SDCC), I need to be in a mobility device. I had someone ask if I used up my steps every day before transferring to the scooter, and look surprised and a little horrified when I said “no, I save them so I can go to the bathroom unassisted.” Like, they had never considered that walking is involved in peeing.
!
I constantly have to remind people of things like…
Okay so I suddenly gained a bunch of skills recently. Like they popped in out of nowhere for the first time since I became an adult, really. Like I’ve learned all kinds of emotional coping skills and social skills as an adult, but until now practical skills have all been losing not gaining. And suddenly after getting treated for adrenal insufficiency and myasthenia gravis (which I’ve had at least one of, not sure which, since I was probably 18 or so, minimum, from what we can tell) I’m gaining some practical skills.
Like I can clean up cat puke for the first time in my life.
But I still can rarely clean the litter box. Like it’s something I can do if I really work hard at it and someone starts me off, but it’s not something I can do consistently very often at all.
Someone approached me and told me basically “Since you’re learning all these skills you should do MORE. So maybe we should have staff prompting you to clean the litter box.”
And was completely shocked when I blew up at her.
I calmed down enough to explain.
And one of the many reasons I was pissed off was…
Despite the amount of services I get, there’s a large section of the day that I spend alone. I can have someone come over during most of that time, if I’m really really stuck, but that’s a last resort, it’s not something I can do every night without there being problems. (I’m working on getting a roommate but I’m not there yet.)
And in all that time, I need all the spoons I can get so that I can go to the bathroom and back, self-administer medications, manage my feeding tube, and do all the other things that people don’t think about at all.
That means that if an activity is going to pointlessly lose me spoons, then that is not an activity I should be doing.
Like, if I get a lot out of something? Like crocheting? Then it’s okay, because it improves my quality of life. Everyone should have something like that they can do – but a lot of us don’t, because loss of spoons means we lose the ability to do things we like as much as things we don’t like.
(This is what I try to explain every time someone makes it sound like my six years in bed were some kind of frigging vacation from life. If you’re sick enough to be in bed for that long, then you’re sick enough to lose the ability to do things you like as much as things you don’t like doing. It is so completely not the same thing as staying home from school with a (real or fake) stomachache or something for a few days and feeling good that you got the time off. After enough time in bed, you want to go to school or work or something. In fact I took online classes to keep from losing my mind, literally. And I couldn’t finish some of those.)
But like, pointlessly asking me to clean the litter box? Not going to happen. There are people who are literally paid money to do that for me. They’re not paid as much money as I would want to pay them if I were in charge of their funding, but they’re paid in money and pretty good healthcare benefits and stuff like that. There is no danger that if I don’t scoop the catbox, my cat will suffer because of it. Because there are people willing, able, and even paid to do that.
Which means, having me do that? Simply takes spoons away that I could be using for something else. Like all that long stretch of time when I have to manage things on my own. Things that other people think of as “nothing”, but that take actual effort on my part. For instance, any time I cross a boundary line – like a doorway, or getting in or out of bed, sitting on or off the toilet or a chair – it eats spoons like nobody’s business. I can spend hours in bed working up the energy just to cross the bed-to-floor boundary so that I can go to the bathroom. Once I’m past a boundary line, everything is relatively easy, but every boundary line takes energy out of me. And that’s true for mental boundaries as well (harder to explain but same basic reasons – autistic catatonia).
So, yeah. Things that people do that they think don’t take any effort at all, simply take effort that they don’t notice because they have so much energy that they have the luxury of not noticing how much work they put into doing things. I don’t have enough energy, even with treatment, to be able to spare the spoons on things that don’t directly improve my quality of life and that can’t be done for me somehow.
Oh another thing that confuses people (and this happens with a lot of cognitively disabled people in general): The more you help me, the more independent I’m able to be.
That’s because all the things I’m unable to do are like thousands of straws on my back (thanks Donna Williams for the straws-on-a-camel’s-back analogy), and each thing someone does for me takes a straw off my back (or spares me the spoons, to use another common analogy), which then allows me to stand up straighter and do more things for myself.
Also, I will pretty much never refrain from doing something if I could do it myself without any effort or dangerous spoon loss. Why? Because when I can actually do something, it’s fifty billion times easier to just do it than to explain to you what I want done and how I want it done and how to do it. Even asking for help takes spoons I don’t always have. (Which sometimes actually results in me losing spoons doing things for myself because I’d lose even more spoons explaining how to do them, which is a sucky situation that happens more often than I’d like.)
So… yeah. All of this and more.
Oh, the difference between cat puke and the catbox?
Cat puke generally happens in a spot that’s in my way, and advertises its in-my-way-ness by sitting there being disgusting right in the middle of the path, or (as Fey tries really hard to do) near the drain in the bathroom, or wherever. It’s fairly easy for me to throw a paper towel over it, which is what I learned to do first, and then from there was able to learn to use the paper towel to scrub it up and spray stuff on it and then scrub some more. The entire situation prompts me to respond to it.
The catbox is out of the way and requires crossing at least two boundary lines. It does not stand in my way. It sits in a corner of the bathroom. Cleaning it requires picking gross stuff up and carrying it around and then operating the toilet, all the while avoiding getting cat litter everywhere. All of these things require crossing more boundary lines than cleaning cat puke. And this is all if the cat is actually using the catbox as directed, which is not a safe assumption (she likes to, instead of burying her crap, tear off a huge chunk of the litter box liner and then pull it over the crap and possibly pee or crap on top of it again, so it’s also logistically hard to get in there and pick it up without doing some gymnastics).
And, as I said, there are people who will gladly clean the litter box and are paid to do so, so it’s not like I or my cat are suffering because I can’t do it consistently. (When I can do it with minimal consequences, I do do it, of course. See above about doing things vs. asking people to do things.)
Whereas if I don’t clean up the cat puke, it’s in the way, it reeks, and the cat is in danger of eating it and getting sick again.
So one of these things requires fewer skills to do, and is more important for me to be able to do, and unsurprisingly that’s the one I learned to do pretty consistently. This, really, should not be surprising.
Also? When someone learns practical skills for the first time in their adult life?
Congratulate them.
But do not frigging tell them “Oh you just learned some skills for the first time ever? Here’s some more skills you need to learn. They just happen to be the skills that would be more convenient for me if you happened to learn them. What, you don’t want to learn them? Don’t you want to be independent? What’s wrong with you?”
I guarantee that somewhere inside they’ll want to trout-slap you. If you don’t understand why, read the above and think about it for awhile, and maybe learn to be less condescending. (The “don’t you want to be independent?” as a code word for “don’t you want to learn skills that would make my life more convenient?” thing is incredibly condescending and fairly manipulative as well.)
But here we encounter somewhat of a check for the beaten petit bourgeois does not to any extent take sides with the proletarian and does not furnish that leadership and brains to the proletarian movement which it was confidently expected that he would. On the other hand, the later decades have been marked by the growth of what is called “the new middle class” which is not revolutionary. Indeed, the whole Bernstein controversy which has occupied so much space and generated so much heat rests precisely on this undeniable fact.If we look at the matter from a practical and concrete standpoint it is easily understood why this is so.
When a trust takes over the field of an industry it disposes of its opponents two ways. It buys them out and takes the best brains of the smaller industry into its own service, the rest it annihilates by sheer force of economic superiority. It is obviously true that the more vigorous portion of the petite-bourgeoisie thus assimilated by the trust does not become revolutionary. On the contrary, its interests are henceforth identified with the interests of the trust of which it has become employee.
Economically, the smaller capitalist [the Petit Bourgeois] has been crushed out by this process, he has become a proletarian in receipt of a salary. Obviously he cannot be generally described as a capitalist large or small, and, according to the Marxian idea, he ought to be ranged with the proletarian class, but, as a matter of fact, he is no proletarian. He becomes a good servant of his new master, he accepts the political views of his new master as a good servant should, and he is not to be reckoned as a force with the revolution but as a distinct acquisition to the power of his destroyer.
Besides this, large numbers of the middle class are shareholders in the greater capitalist concerns. The Pennsylvania R. R. has twenty-five thousand shareholders and the steel trust an even greater number. In fact, the capital of the great trusts rests largely upon the subscribed capital of middle-class stockholders. It is clear that the economic interests of these people are not with any other than the greater capitalism into which they have become merged.
honestly I think one of the great things about Steven Universe is the way that people can do bad things but their motivations are explored and treated by the show as being things we might understand
it’s not that surprising that this is something a lot of fans can’t deal with though because I think fandom discourse to a large extent is about passing judgment. I remember similar freakouts over Finn basically objectifying and manipulating Flame Princess for example because this heroic character was suddenly making a really big mistake and treating someone very badly and I don’t think there’s a lot of room for that in current fandom culture.
It’s also fascinating to me though because it’s far more genuine than the Gritty Antihero bullshit in, say, Man of Steel, or whatever bullshit they’re gonna bring into Kill Me Now Squad. That entire 90s era antihero nonsense that WB sees as the golden age of comics apparently is really all about the aesthetics of moral ambiguity and the use of moral ambiguity to condone ever more extravagant displays of physical, psychological, and sexual violence, whereas these children’s shows are using moral ambiguity to explore what it means to be a good person, and to fail to be a good person, and to work through the process of making amends and finding forgiveness.
Fandom culture has rightly rejected one form of moral ambiguity as fundamentally a front for hypermasculine power fantasies but in the process seems to have rejected productive forms of ambiguity as well.
So an observation based on this evening’s episode:
Garnet is uncomfortable with casual fusion and feels really uncomfortable about Pearl leading her to fuse under false pretenses.
Both Pearl and Amethyst seem to have much stronger positive feelings about fusing with Garnet than they do about fusing with one another.
So, I’m wondering, could this be explored in the future as something Pearl and Amethyst have in common? This week is clearly going to involve schisms in the group but how will the group dynamic look after it’s resolved? I think that has a lot to do with how they’re resolved. And I’m hoping it involves a resolution which opens a new understanding between Amethyst and Pearl as well as between each of them and Garnet.
While the need to stick together for Steven will factor into this, as it always does, I don’t think these rifts can really heal without dialogue between the crystal gems about what they’re each struggling with: Amethyst’s crisis of identity, Pearl’s feelings of abandonment, and Garnet’s lingering guilt regarding the forced fusions at the Kindergarten.
The ending floored me. I was expecting a step towards resolution, and then… ending it THERE, with a lampshade hung on it. Holy shit!!! That’s the kind of thing that hits you like a brick. I was incredulous, and I love it.
This is a thing that helped me, and it helped some other people on Tumblr, so I’m going to turn it into a real blog post.
When you think about your sexuality and gender, think about what you want to signal.
There are basically two reasons to identify as LGBA. First, you might want to signal to prospective romantic partners: you might want to say “I’m bisexual” so cuties of all genders know that you’re into them, or you might want to say “I’m a lesbian” so that men know not to waste their time hitting on you (as tragically unsuccessful a strategy as that might sometimes be). Second, a lot of people want to know who does and doesn’t experience homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality, for a whole bunch of reasons. A lot of LGBA people are more comfortable talking about their experiences with people who share them. Many people will take your opinion more seriously if they know it’s informed by life experience. Groups ranging from health centers to suicide hotlines are primarily open to LGBTA+ people.
So: if you want to signal to guys “hey! Guys! I want to kiss you!”, and you want to signal to girls “hey, girls, not my thing!”, congratulations, you get to identify as a gay dude.
And it’s 100% okay if you want to change your label. Because this isn’t some Basic Reality Of Your Fundamental Being: it’s just a word. It’s just signaling. If you used to be a gay dude and now you’re like “actually, that whole sex thing is not my bag, baby”, you can be asexual– homoromantic, if you still want to signal to boys that you want to hold their hands and get gaymarried (which we can do in all fifty states!), or aromantic if you’ve decided that’s not your bag either.
Similarly, trans shit.
The best advice I got when I was transitioning was stop worrying about your fucking label. A lot of times it’s easier to answer questions like “do I want people to use female pronouns for me? do I want to change my name? do I want to wear makeup or dresses or girl-cut jeans? do I want to tuck or wear falsies? do I want to take hormones? do I want voice therapy? do I want sexual reassignment surgery or electrolysis or facial feminization surgery?” than it is to answer questions like “really, on a fundamental level, do I identify more with men or women?” There is no empirical way you can answer the latter question. On the other hand, if you want to find out whether skirts are fun, you can go out and buy a skirt. Problem solved.
(Skirts are fun, by the way.)
And eventually it’s going to turn out that one set of vocabulary is the easiest to use to explain what’s going on with you. You can say “I’m a crossdresser” if you want to wear falsies and lipstick sometimes but mostly want to be called “he” and wear pants. You can say “I’m a woman” if you want to take HRT and use “she” pronouns and be called “Mary.” You can say “I’m nonbinary” if you like “they/them” and you want a boob job but you’re okay with your current hormone balance. You can say “I’m genderfluid” if your preferences change a lot, or “I’m a demigirl” if you’re mostly female but like “zie/hir” sometimes, or even “I’m cis” if this whole process ended with you going “actually, chest hair and Michael Bay movies are the shit.”
If Deep Essences of Ineffable Whatever are your deal, it’s cool. None of this blog post should be taken to say that you can’t go about having a deep essence of gay if you want to. But if you’re worried about being Fake Trans or Fake Gay or Fake Ace or Fake Bi… it’s fine. It’s just signaling. As long as you’re signaling what you want to signal, you don’t have to worry about whether you count or not. You do.
Though she has occasional dalliances in the cinematic world — 2002’s “Frida” remains a highlight, though 2007’s “Across The Universe” has some fans — Julie Taymor is mostly thought of as a theater director. Her stage production of “The Lion King” is estimated to have been seen by over 45 million people, and she may be on her way to translating another pre-existing and already successful work to the stage.
According to a completely unexpected tweet by author Chuck Palahniuk, Taymor is “working with David Fincher on a ‘Fight Club’ rock opera.” Cruelly, Palahniuk doesn’t elaborate, leaving us to our unanswered questions. Presuming Fincher is actually involved, is it a fair assumption that...
That girl I bailed out, her mom got my email someway or another and sent me this brick wall of a letter. She misgendered her in the first sentence so I was like “nah I’m not burning the energy it would take to entertain this horseshit”.
But it spooked me pretty bad for a minute. I’m not much for confrontation, you know? But hey, she lives hundreds of miles away and has no idea where I live in this maze of a city, or even where Dani’s at, so the fuck is she gonna do to either of us now?
Fly free, little bird. Find people whose “love” doesn’t hurt you. <3
First, there’s the fact that no one can agree on which one of “genderqueer” and “nonbinary” is the umbrella term, and which one refers to people who identify specifically outside the gender binary (instead of as both men and women or whatever).
There are well-behaved words like “genderfluid” which have a fair amount of predictive power, insofar as I can expect a genderfluid person to have “girl days” and/or “boy days” and/or “nonbinary days”. These are, tragically, the exception.
There are words like “agender”, which seems to have at least two different kinds of people in it. There are agender people who don’t really care about gender: they just go “meh” and move on with their lives. And there are agender people who feel incredibly shitty whenever anyone calls them any gender or treats them like any gender. Those two groups seem, to put it lightly, like they have absolutely fucking nothing to do with each other whatsoever.
And then there are words like “bigender” and “trigender” and “pangender” and “androgyne” and “intergender” and shit, where people who clearly have different gender experiences are identifying as the same word, and people who have the same gender experiences are identifying as different words, and it’s a total goddamn mess and I can’t predict anything about how someone experiences gender based on what words they like.
And then Tumblr happened and a bunch of fourteen-year-olds started using extremely elaborate metaphors for their genders and deciding that they’re “voidgender” because their gender is so nonexistent it’s like T H E V O I D. This is very nice from an aesthetic perspective but doesn’t exactly help the “no one has any goddamn idea what they’re talking about” problem.
I’m not sure this problem is actually fixable. Gender feelings are, by their nature, very hard to talk about– I can’t feel exactly what you’re feeling, so how do I know if we’re experiencing the same thing or not? And the way we experience our genders is so influenced by our race, our disabilities, our sexualities, our class, where we grew up, our assigned sex at birth, our parents, our childhood friends, the books we read, and so on, that getting at the raw feeling itself is nigh-impossible.
I guess the take-home message of this post is that you cannot assume that someone is not dysphoric because of the words they identify with. If someone identifies as stargender, it gives you information about some things– for instance, that they probably have a Tumblr– but it doesn’t tell you whether they have to dissociate to get through sex, or whether they avoid mirrors because they can’t stand their body, or whether it feels like a icicle in their gut every time someone calls them “she”. You have to go with the base rate of those traits among people who use gender-neutral pronouns, which is “high”. The whole fucking situation is entirely too messy for anyone to conclude things about a person’s gender experiences from their chosen labels.
