mithykster

[mithykster]

These boys who have been WARNED talking in the silent cabin in the train....i am going to kill

[mithykster]

mushrooms for a friend

buy me a coffee? ☕️

[mithykster]

occasionally I am struck dumb by the sublime beauty of the world in the small moments, you know?

egg

[mithykster]

Every once in a while I start thinking about what my ocs would look like as a horse (very different from what kind of horse they would ride, actually) and then I go like "ascribe them warrior cat names." but then the urge to draw them as kung fu panda characters burst through the door and so on and so on. And i've never done a single one of these

[mithykster]

ultimately i think the eternal draw of concubine dramas for me is that they all focus on this extremely taxing condition of co-victimhood under a supreme, omnipotent master where nonetheless gradations of power are wielded against each other, creating at all times and for virtually all characters the possibility to be both receiver and perpetrator of abuses. there is a structural impossibility in tracing a marked separation between people that harm and people that are harmed, people that have power and people that don't: everyone lives in a tightly interconnected hive of ritualised relations where numerous hierarchies are harshly defined and enforced but also open to reshuffling. navigating it requires inevitably confronting your condition as both object and subject, both passive and agentive member of the inescapable cycle of subjugations dictated by an unchangeable social order. the coexistence of multiple axes and levels of power is not uncommon in any social context, but concubine dramas are particularly effective in showing complex stratifications that are highly condensed in a closed environment with relatively few participants. it's a pressure cooker of ethical dilemmas over possessing a relation to power that cannot be rejected or evaded but only negotiated and re-negotiated. the refusal (mostly due to historical impossibility) to provide a way out of this conflict is something i deeply appreciate

[mithykster]

There used to be a lot of activities that took place around a populated area like a village or town, which you would encounter before you reached the town itself. Most of those crafts have either been eliminated in the developed world or now take place out of view on private land, and so modern authors don't think of them when creating fantasy worlds or writing historical fiction. I think that sprinkling those in could both enrich the worlds you're writing in and, potentially, add useful plot devices.

For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.

Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.

They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.

Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.

If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.

If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).

There are so many things that preindustrial people did and would find familiar that we just don't know about now. So much of life was lived out in the open for anyone to see. Make your world busy and loud and colorful!

[mithykster]

I just went to the barber and it was like an array of miscommunication and I feel like I was just on my hands and knees, tugging her sleeves and trying to get her to believe me that I in fact did use to have curls and then she styled my hair absolutely horribly but she also told me I had a nice hair colour so I just keep on winning

[mithykster]

Had to get involved and fry this up :)

occasionally I am struck dumb by the sublime beauty of the world in the small moments, you know?

egg

[mithykster]

[mithykster]

Riiiggghtt who wants to motivate me to work on my projects I just need a little guy to cheer me on. I'm beyond scared to share anything about my OCs but what if I do feel like their story needs to be told and I find it so tragic that there are so many people with cool stories that they never publish so I have to be the change I want to see in this world.... mannnn

[mithykster]

My ai is trained exclusively on small time independent artists who are obsessed with intellectual property

[mithykster]

[mithykster]

"Just the sound of someone else's babies beeping makes me want to throw up", says a bird that doesn't have kids yet. She can't wait to build her own very first nest, see eggs she laid in it hatch, and spend a very busy summer feeding them.

[mithykster]

hi if u don’t mind me asking, could u please elaborate on your thoughts on the critique of contemporary anti-intellectualism (specifically on social media)? i’m legitimately curious and enjoy a lot of ur analysis and commentary i mean this in good faith :)

Broadly speaking, the philosophical concept of anti-intellectualism tends to critically describe the ideological + rhetorical relegation of intellectual production to an elitist practice fundamentally at odds with the interests of the layman; and, crucially, the treatment of these categories as fixities. I disagree with the propositions of that philosophical discourse as well, but that’s not always the form that the discourse takes on this website. On here, ‘anti-intellectualism’ is more of a vague catch-all used to describe anything from people who express frustration with the literary canon & mainstream schooling in ways that don’t coddle the sensibilities of people with literature degrees to people who come out with outright fascistic views on provocative art; it attempts to corral what are in fact very disparate positions and perspectives under the umbrella of insufficient ‘intellect,’ often shorthanded to ‘reading comprehension’ or ‘media literacy’ (or ‘[in]curiosity,’ a new favourite) without any materialist investigation into what we mean when we talk about intellect and literacy and a lack thereof or whether this is a politically expedient description of the dynamic[s] in question.

When I say materialism, I mean it in the Marxist sense, ie. as a counter to idealism—because what’s being described here is a fundamentally idealist (and therefore useless) position. The discourse of anti-intellectualism as it exists on this website relies on idealist propositions—people lack curiosity, they lack interest, they are ‘lazy,’ they are ‘illiterate’ where ‘illiterate’ is not a value-neutral statement about one’s relationship to a socially constituted ‘literacy’ but communicating a moral indictment, at its worst they are ‘stupid,’ ‘idiots’—these descriptors rely on an assumption of immutable internal properties rather than providing a materialist description for why things are the way that they are. These aren’t actionable descriptors; at best they’re evasive because they circumvent serious interrogation of the conditions they’re describing, at worst they’re harbingers of an inclination towards eugenicist rhetoric. The discourse casts those who are ‘illiterate’—which in this capacity means those who fail to perform conventional literacy, who lack a traditional education, who don’t demonstrate sufficient interest in classic literature—or the more unkind ‘stupid’ (which, frankly, is what people want to say when they say ‘illiterate’ or ‘incurious’ anyway, lmao) as socially disposable and places the onus of changing one’s behaviour (so as to not be cast as illiterate/incurious/stupid) on them rather than asking what conditions have produced XYZ discourse of social disposability and responding with compassion and ethical diligence; I hope I don’t have to explain why this is eugenicist.

The discourse also lacks an ability to coherently describe what is meant by the ‘intellectualism’ in question—after all, merely appealing to ‘intellectualism’ is a similarly idealist rhetorical move if you don’t have the material grounding to back it up—and indeed tends to dismiss legitimate critiques of intellectual + cultural production as ‘anti-intellectual.’ People love to talk about ‘literacy,’ but don’t like expounding on what they’re actually describing when they do so—the selection of traits and actions that come together to constitute a correct demonstration of ‘literacy’ are built on the bedrock of eg. an ability to thrive within the school system (a mechanism of social control and stratification), fluently speak the dominant language by which this ‘literacy’ is being assessed (in online spaces like Tumblr this is usually English), and engage with the ‘right’ texts in the ‘right’ ways where ‘right’ means ‘invested with legitimacy and authority by the governing body of the academy.’ Literacy is used as a metric of assimilation into hegemonic society by which immigrant and working-class children are made rhetorically disposable unless they demonstrate their ability to integrate into the hegemonic culture (linked post talks about immigrant families being rendered ‘illiterate’ as a tactic of racism in France, but the same applies to the US, UK, etc); similarly, disabled people who for whatever reason will never achieve the level of ‘literacy’ required to not have Tumblr users doing vagueposts about how you deserve a eugenicist death for watching a kids’ show are by this discourse rendered socially disposable, affirming the paradigms which already make up their experience under a social system which reifies ableism in order to sustain itself. (This includes, by the way, the genre of posts making fun of the idea that someone with ADHD could ever struggle with reading theory.) ‘Literacy’ as the ability to understand and respond to a text is difficult and dispersed according to disparate levels of social access, and a lack of what we call literacy is incredibly shameful; any movement towards liberation (and specifically liberatory pedagogy) worth its salt needs to challenge the stigma against illiteracy, but this website’s iteration of ‘anti-intellectualism’ discourse seems to only want to reaffirm it.

Similarly, the discourse dismisses out of hand efforts to give a materialist critique of the academy and the body of texts that make up the ‘canon’—I’m thinking of a post I saw literally this morning positing a hypothetical individual’s disinterest in reading canonical (“classic”) literature as an “anti-intellectual” practice which marked them as an “idiot.” (Obviously, cf. above comments re. ‘stupidity,’ ‘idiocy’ as eugenicist constructions.) People who will outright call themselves Marxists seem to get incredibly uncomfortable at the suggestion that there are individuals for whom the literary canon is not even slightly interesting and who will never in their lives engage with it or desire to engage with it, and this fact does not delegitimise their place in revolutionary thinking and organising (frankly, in many areas, it strengthens it); they seem determined to continue to defer to the canon as a signifier of authority and therefore value, rather than acknowledging its role as a marker of class and classed affects and a rubric by which civility (cf. linked post above) could be enforced. (I believe the introduction to Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism touches on this dimension of literary studies as a civilising mission of sorts, as well as expounding on the ways in which ‘literary studies’ as we presently understand it is a nineteenth-century phenomenon responding to the predictable nineteenth-century crises and contradictions.) People will defer to, for example, Dumas, Baldwin, Morrison, to contravene the idea that the literary canon is made up of ‘straight white men,’ without appreciating that this is a hugely condescending way to talk about their work, that this collapses three very different writers into the singular category of ‘Black canonical writer’ and thus stymies engagement with their work at any level other than that of 'Black canonical literature' (why else put Dumas and Morrison in the same sentence, unless as a cheap rhetorical ‘gotcha’? I like both but they’re completely different writers lmfao), and that this excises from the sphere of legitimacy those Black writers who don’t make it into the authorising space of the canon; and, of course, reaffirms the canon’s authenticity and dismisses out of hand the critique of loyalty to hegemony that the ‘straight white men’ aphorism rightly imposes.

The discourse operates on a unilateral scale by which the more ‘literacy’ (ie. ability to speak the language of the literati) one has, the greater their moral worth, and a lack of said ‘literacy’ indicates the inverse. This overlooks the ways in which the practice of literary criticism wholly in line with what these people would call ‘intellectualism’ has historically been wielded as a tactic of reactionary conservatism; one only has to look at the academic output of Harold Bloom for examples of this. People will often pay lipservice to the hegemony of the academy and the practices by which only certain individuals are allowed access to intellectual production (stratified along classed + racialised lines, of course), but fail to really internalise this idea in understanding that the critical practices they afford a significant degree of legitimacy are inextricable from the academy from which they emerged, and that we can and should be imagining alternative forms of pedagogy and criticism taking place away from sites which restrict access based on allegiance to capital. Part of my communism means believing in the abolition of the university; this is not an ‘anti-intellectual’ position but a straightforwardly materialist one.

A final core problem with the 'anti-intellectualism' discourse is that it's obscurantist. As I explained above, it posits the problem with eg. poor engagement with theoretical concepts, challenging art, etc., to be one of 'intellect' and 'curiosity,' idealist rather than materialist states. In practice, the reasons behind what gets cast as 'anti-intellectualism' are very disparate. Sometimes, we're talking about a situation wherein (as I explained above) someone lacks 'literacy'; sometimes we're talking about the reason for someone's refusal to engage with and interpret art with care and deference being one of bigotry (eg. racist dismissals of non-white artists' work, misogynistic devaluing of women's work, etc.); sometimes we're talking about a reactive discomfort with marginalised people communicating difficult concepts online as a 'know-your-place' response (eg. backlash against 'jargon' on here is almost always attacking posts from/about marginalised people talking about their oppression, with the attacks coming from people who have failed to properly understand that oppression; I've been called a jargonistic elitist for talking about antisemitism, I've seen similar things happen to mutuals who talk about racism and transmisogyny). All of these are incredibly different situations that require incredibly different responses; the person who doesn't care to engage with a text in a way that an English undergrad might because doing so doesn't interest them or they lack the requisite skill level is not comparable to the person who doesn't care to engage with a text because they don't respect the work of a person of colour enough to do so. Collapsing these things under the aegis of 'anti-intellectualism' lacks explanatory power and fails to provide a sufficient actionable response.

Ultimately, the discourse is made up of a lot of people who are very high on their own capabilities when it comes to literary analysis (which, as others have pointed out, seems to be the only arena where all this ever takes place, despite the conventional understanding of ‘media literacy’ referring as much to a discerning eye for propaganda and misinformation as an ability to churn out a cute little essay on Don Quixote) and have managed to find an acceptable outlet for their dislike of anyone who lacks the same, and have provided retroactive justification in the form of the claim that not only is [a specific form of] literary analysis [legible through deference to the authority of the literary canon & the scholarship of the nineteenth century and onward surrounding it] possible for everyone, it is in fact necessary in order to access the full breadth of one’s humanity such that an absence thereof reveals an individual as subhuman and thus socially disposable. A failure to be sufficiently literate is only ever a choice and a personal failing, which is how this discourse escapes accountability for the obviously bigoted presumptions upon which it rests. In this, all materialism is done away with; compassion is done away with, as it becomes possible to describe the multiplicity of reasons why someone cannot or does not demonstrate ‘literacy’ in X, Y or Z ways in the sum total of a couple of adjectives; nothing productive comes of this discourse but a reassertion of the conditions of hegemony in intellectual practice and the bolstering of the smugness of a few people at the expense of alienating everyone else.

As I’ve said countless times before, the way to counteract what we might perceive as ‘incuriosity’ or disinterest in challenging texts is to talk about these challenging texts and our approaches to them as often as we can, to make the pedagogical practices that are usually kept behind the walls of the academy as widely accessible as possible (and to adjust our pedagogy beyond the confines of ideological hegemony that the academy imposes), and to encourage a culture by which people feel empowered to share their thoughts, discuss, ask questions, and explore without being made to feel ashamed for not understanding something. The people who cry ‘anti-intellectualism’ because they saw someone on Tiktok express a disinterest in reading Jane Eyre are accomplishing none of this.

[mithykster]

occasionally I am struck dumb by the sublime beauty of the world in the small moments, you know?

egg

[mithykster]

who wants to see my silly birthday cake

[mithykster]

hey girl Did you know that

um When the nettle is young, the leaf makes an excellent vegetable; when it is older, it has filaments and fibres like hemp and flax. Nettle cloth is as good as linen cloth. Chopped up, nettles are good for poultry; pounded, they are good for horned cattle. The seed of the nettle, mixed with fodder, gives gloss to the hair of animals; the root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow coloring-matter. Moreover, it is an excellent hay, which can be cut twice.

And what is required for the nettle? A little soil, no care, no culture. Only the seed falls as it is ripe, and it is difficult to collect it. That is all.

With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated.

How many men resemble the nettle! Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.