#architecture of empathy

[zomb13s]

Titulus: Declaratio Linguarum: De Legibus Nostris Communicandis: Official Declaration on Language Use for Scholing Publications

Issued by the Scholing Institute of Multicultural Engineering and Symbolic Ethics To all readers, collaborators, scholars, engineers, friends, allies…Titulus: Declaratio Linguarum: De Legibus Nostris Communicandis: Official Declaration on Language Use for Scholing Publications

[goodhairbadmanners]

[ashmp3]

storytime but i went to the doctor’s today for several exams and tell me why i passed with 0 troubles like no i will tell you. it’s two things 1. they all asked me about my job (and were like heart eyes so interested psychiatrist was telling me about peter moro’s chair she dgaf if i took meds or anything) 2. they asked about my dead dad which made them very empathetic so LMFAOOOSJDJSJS you guys. This was so absurd like twilight zone absurd i could hear psychiatrist turn away people and also she made them do some kind of silly movements idk asking about their diagnoses and me: ☺️ <- literallyyyy

[shut-the-burrow-door-pls]

My ratty booiiiiis are on their way, approaching…*screaming in silence cuz having boring class*

[badassthezubat]

Wanted to add on to above, especially for anyone that hasn't gotten to experience this yet as an adult: This doesn't stop in the workplace, but as an adult you have the power to not put up with it in a way you couldn't as a kid. These people exist in every field, in every job, and if you encounter them the thing you have to remember is that this is THEIR problem, not yours; you aren't imagining it, and you did nothing to cause it. Don't let them make you feel bad about yourself or shrink into yourself just because they're shitty.

Anyone that's moving into the adult world or in the deep end already, don't ever feel like you have to stay some place if there's a piranha in the fish tank. The absolute best thing about adulthood is that you can just fuck off and leave, and that you can seek out and FIND places that won't make you feel terrible. As a kid, you had no power and just had to ride out the misery- regardless of what anyone tells you, no one has that power over you now, and you do NOT have to tolerate that kind of behavior, regardless of who the person is. You may not be able to change the environment, but you CAN find a better one. Nothing about you justifies their behavior, and their lack of empathy is their own problem, not yours.

(More under the break, because the word vomit got out of hand)

In a workplace, the sweet, neurotypical anti-bullying woman will be just as well loved as she was as a teacher- she might be your manager, or your boss, or in HR, or just a well-liked colleague that's been there a while. They could also be a sweet old guy that genuinely gets to know you, or a manager that always beelines to talk about a movie he just watched or always gives a wink and a nudge to make you feel welcome. They're always quick to discuss the importance of mental health days and taking care of yourself, and they'll be in the same environment as a lot of genuine, kind people that want to help and create a good environment, and probably put a lot of work into MAKING the environment better for most of the office.

Bullying as an adult in the workplace can be just as overt or incredibly subtle as when you were a kid, and hard to pin down- it can be joking-not-joking comments about you in front of the group, or a weird sense that colleagues you've never spoken to before are suddenly not respecting you, or are talking down to you out of nowhere. It can be feeling like no amount of work is good enough, or like you're spending more time worrying about what you're doing wrong and getting pulled aside for minor mistakes than doing your actual job. The person may flip 180 outside of work and act very friendly, warm, and trustworthy, which will make you doubt yourself, or wonder if maybe you're overanalyzing- especially if you're not neurotypical. I have horrific ADHD, and for me I spent more time than I should have blaming myself for fucking up so often, especially when my manager was "just trying to help" and was always delivering the criticism in a kind tone. She would always say she was trying to toe the line between being supportive and professionally strict, and would joke about how she was pulling the "mom voice" out on me, which I would laugh and thank her for. She would sandwich criticism between stressing the importance of mental health and cute stories about her kids, and then I would start hearing other managers use the same words to describe me and my work (lazy, overthinking, not ready for my position, seeing my work as busy work, etc) even when I had been honest with those managers and working late, unreported hours just to keep up with the workload. I worked at that office for six months, and by the time she fired me I had lost 40 lbs, had dark bags under my eyes, and was consistently working from 7 to 9 or 10 nearly every day of the week. I was a shaking, anxiety ridden mess in ways I hadn't been SINCE K-12, and finally got fired at 2pm on a Wednesday- right after I met a deadline I'd stayed til 9 the day before to work on, as I was finally managing to eat my lunch. I got pulled into a conference room, let go, and wasn't allowed to collect my things before I left- in the time it took an Uber to arrive my email had been shut off, I'd been removed from the website, and other coworkers had already been told about it. The next day I woke up for the first time in months feeling genuinely good and relaxed, and when my belongings arrived via courier later that day (lmao) I was genuinely relieved that I never had to go back.

The people like above see themselves as good people, and for a lot of people that may genuinely be the case- but people can justify a weird amount of cruelty towards someone that's 'different' or 'weird', and they honestly genuinely believe that they're being kind, or that they're right to treat you poorly because you aren't succeeding or reacting well like everyone else. Their kindness to everyone else becomes a bias, because every person they've helped becomes evidence that if YOU'RE struggling, that's because YOU are a problem, because look at everyone else this didn't happen with. At the end of the day, you have to be kind to yourself, and believe yourself and what you experience even if no one else does.

One of the good things about getting older is that your sphere of people can constantly shift and widen as you go through life- and I can promise that there ARE genuinely good, kind people in the world. I left that job with four new friends that I still keep in touch with, and every comment above is evidence that for every shitty person you encounter, there ARE people who notice and are bothered by that person's behavior. They could become friends or remain strangers, and they may not be in an environment where they can help as much as they'd like, but I can promise that behavior like this is noticed and noted as a black mark against that person- not you. Don't let people kill your joys in life or make you hate yourself, and don't let those people become what you expect from every person you meet- they don't deserve that much power over your day-to-day.

Look out for people the people like this, and look out for anyone suffering because of these people. The shit from your childhood won't go away, but it also never has to happen again, and it can help you support other people now the way you wish you'd been supported then. (Or be incredibly vindicating to Not Put Up With It now, the way you couldn't when you were a kid- best fucking feeling.)

every piece of ""autistic representation"" in hollywood sucks not just because of the infantalization and inspiration porn but because movie executives always fail to realize the real universal autistic experience: spending your childhood slowly and unfalteringly realizing all of your friends not so secretly hated and/or merely tolerated you at best and you've missed every social signal about it ever

[studiokultuurscape]

New story on the blog: Invisible Space, Visible Care

Architecture is never neutral. Especially when it comes to care, space can either support or silence the needs of those within it. In my latest article, I explore how architecture can embody care—not just in hospitals or care homes, but in the everyday environments we move through.

What does it mean to design with a relational mindset?

How can we shape spaces that allow for presence, softness, and human connection?

This piece is a reflection on invisible spatial gestures, subtle thresholds, and the societal need for architecture that responds to vulnerability without overpowering it.

Read the full post here:

www.kimberlywouters.com/post/invisible-space-visible-care-a-relational-attitude-as-social-urgency

Feel free to share, comment, or reach out—this is a conversation I believe we need to keep having.

[philmonjohn]

A Call to the Children of the Global South: The System That Made My Father Disown Me

I didn’t write this living testimony for virality. I wrote it because silence almost killed me. Because truth, even when ignored by algorithms, remembers how to survive. If this resonated with you — even quietly — share it with someone else who’s still trying to name their Fracture. That’s how we outlive the system. - Philmon John, May 2025

THE FRACTURE Several months ago, when I, a South-Asian American man, turned 35, my father disowned me.

He didn’t yell. He didn’t cry. He simply stopped calling me his son.

My father is a Brown, MAGA-aligned conservative Christian pastor, born in Kerala, India, and now living in the United States. His rejection wasn’t provoked by any breach of trust or familial responsibility, but by my coming out as queer and bisexual — and by my deliberate move away from a version of Christianity shaped more by colonial rule than compassion.

I became blasphemy made flesh.

My mother and sister, equally immersed in religious conservatism, followed suit. Most of my extended family — conservative Indian Christians — responded with quiet complicity. I became an exile in my own lineage, cast out from a network that once celebrated me as the Mootha Makkan, the Malayalam term for “eldest son”.

This break didn’t occur in isolation. It was the culmination of years of internal questioning and ideological transformation.

I was raised with warmth and structure, but also under the weight of rigid theology. My parents cycled through different churches in pursuit of doctrinal purity. In that environment, my queerness had no safe harbor. It had to be hidden, managed, controlled — forced into secrecy.

Literal, cherry-popping closets.

Even my childhood discipline was carved straight from scripture — “spare the rod, spoil the child” was not metaphor but mandate. I was hit for defiance, for curiosity, for emotional honesty. Control was synonymous with love. The theology: obedience over empathy. Is it sad I would rather now have had a beating from my father, than his silence?

I would’ve taken the rod — at least it acknowledged me.

Instead, Daddy looks through me.

THE INHERITANCE And I obeyed. For a time, I rose through the ranks of the church. I led worship. I played guitar in the worship band. I wasn’t just a believer — I was a builder of belief, a conductor of chorus, a jester of jubilee and Sunday morning joy — all while masking a private ache I could not yet articulate.

In the last five years, I began methodically deconstructing the ideological scaffolding I had inherited. I examined the mechanisms of theology, patriarchy, and colonial imposition — and the specific burdens placed upon firstborn sons of immigrant families. Who defines our roles? Who benefits from our silence? Why is this happening to me?

These questions consistently pointed toward the dominant global structure: wealthy white patriarchal supremacy. Rooted in European imperialism and sustained by centuries of religious and cultural colonization, this system fractures not only societies but the deeply intimate architecture of family.

What my family experienced is not unlike what the United States of America continues to experience — a slow, painful reckoning with a foundational ideology of white, heteronormative, Christian patriarchal dominance.

My family comes from Kerala, home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. But the Christianity I inherited was not indigenous. It was filtered through the moral codes of Portuguese priests and British missionaries and the discipline of Victorian culture. Christ was not presented as a radical Middle Eastern teacher but as a sanitized figure — pale, passive, and Western.

In this theology, Christ is symbolic. Paul is the system. Doctrine exists to reinforce patriarchy, to police desire, to ensure control. When I embraced a theology rooted in love, empathy, and justice — the ethics I believe Jesus actually lived — I was met not with discussion, but dismissal.

To my family, my identity wasn’t authenticity. It was apostasy.

THE RECKONING In 2020, the ground shifted.

I turned the triple decade — 30 — as the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.

Remote work slowed life down, and I had space to think deeply.

That year, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others triggered a national and personal reckoning.

I turned to K-LOVE, the Christian radio station I grew up with, hoping to hear words of solidarity, truth, or even mourning. Instead, there was silence. No mention of racial justice. No prayers for the dead. Just songs about personal salvation, void of historical context or social responsibility.

As Geraldine Heng argues in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, race was not merely a modern invention void of scientific basis — it was already taking shape in medieval Europe, where Christianity was used to sanctify, encode, and sell racial hierarchies as divine order and social technology.

As Ademọ́la, also known as Ogbeni Demola, once said: “The white man built his heaven on your land and pointed yours to the sky.” That brain-powered perceptive clarity — distilled in a single line — stays with me every day.

With professional routines interrupted and spiritual ties frayed, I immersed myself in scholarship. I entered what I now see as a period of epistemic reconstruction. I read widely — revolutionaries, poets, sociologists, historians, mathematicians, theologians, cultural critics, and the unflinching truth-tellers who name what empire tries to erase.

I first turned to the voices who now live only in memory: Bhagat Singh, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Vine Deloria Jr. Each carried the weight of revolution, tenderness, and truth — from anti-colonial struggle to queer theory to Indigenous reclamation.

I then reached for the veteran thought leaders still shaping the world, starting with Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Shashi Tharoor, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Susan Visvanathan, Geraldine Heng, George Gheverghese Joseph, J. Sakai, Vijay Prashad, Vilna Bashi Treitler, Claire Jean Kim, and Arundhati Roy — voices who dismantle the illusions of empire through history, mathematics, linguistics, and racial theory.

In the present, I absorbed insights from a new generation of public intellectuals and cultural critics: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jared Yates Sexton, Cathy Park Hong, Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Heather McGhee, Mehdi Hasan, Adrienne Keene, Keri Leigh Merritt, Vincent Bevins, Sarah Kendzior, Ayesha A. Siddiqi, Wajahat Ali, W. Kamau Bell, Mary Trump, & John Oliver. Together, they form a constellation of clarity — thinkers who gave me language for grief, strategy for resistance, and above all, a framework for empathy rooted in history, not abstraction.

I also turned to the thinkers shaping today’s cultural and political discourse. I dreamt of the world blueprinted by Bhaskar Sunkara in his revolutionary The Socialist Manifesto and plunged into Jacobin’s blistering critiques of capitalism. The Atlantic’s longform journalism kept me tethered to a truth-seeking tradition. The Guardian stood out for its global scale and reach, offering progressive, longform storytelling that speaks to both local injustices and systemic inequalities across the world. And Roman Krznaric’s Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It helped crystallize my core belief:

Be a good human. Practice empathy.

That’s the playbook, America. Practice empathy. Do that — and teach accurate, critically reflective history — and we have the chance to truly become the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.

And this empathy must extend to all — especially to trans people. In India, the Hijra community — trans and intersex folk who have existed visibly for thousands of years — embody a sacred third gender long before the West had language for it. But they are not alone. Across the colonized world, the empire erased a sacred third space: the Muxe of Zapotec culture, the Bakla of the Philippines, the Fa’afafine of Samoa, the Two-Spirit nations of Turtle Island, the Māhū of Hawaiʻi, the Sworn Virgins of the Balkans — each of these communities held space outside Western gender binaries, rooted in care, ceremony, and spirit. Some align with what we today call trans or intersex, while others exist entirely outside Western definitions. Colonization reframed them as deviants.

And still, we must remember this: trans people are not new. Our respect for them must be as ancient as their existence.

THE RESISTANCE As I examined the dynamics of coloniality, racial capitalism, and Western empire, I realized just how deeply imperial power had shaped my family, our values, and our spiritual language. The empire didn’t just occupy land — it rewrote moral codes. It restructured the family.

I learned how Irish, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, and Albanian immigrants were initially excluded from whiteness in America. Over time, many adopted and embraced whiteness as strategic economic and social protection — and in doing so, embraced anti-Blackness and patriarchal hierarchies to maintain their newfound status. Today, many European-hyphenated Americans defend systems that once excluded them.

And over time, some Asian-Americans have followed the very same racial template.

At 33 — the age Jesus is believed to have died — I laid my childhood faith to rest. In its place rose something rooted in clarity, not doctrine.

I didn’t walk away from religion into cynicism or nihilism. I stepped into a humanist, justice-centered worldview. A system grounded in reason, evidence, and above all, empathy. A belief in people over dogma. In community over conformity.

I didn’t lose faith. I redefined it.

I left the pasture of institutional faith, not for chaos, but for an ethical wilderness — a space lacking divine command but filled with moral clarity. A place built on personal responsibility and universal dignity.

This is where I stand today.

To those with similar histories: if your roots trace back to Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, Oceania, or to Indigenous and marginalized communities within the Global North — you are a Child of the Global South. Even in the Global North, your experience carries the weight of displaced geography, the quiet grief of colonial trauma, and a genealogy forged by the system of empire. Your pain is political. Your silence is inherited. You are not invisible. They buried you without a funeral. They mourned not your death, but your deviation from design. However, we are not dead. We are just no longer theirs.

White supremacy endures by fracturing us. It manufactures tensions between communities of color by design — placing Asian businesses in Black communities without infrastructure and opportunities for BIPOC folk to share and benefit from the economic engine. Central to this strategy is the model minority myth, crafted during the Cold War to present Asian-Americans as obedient, self-reliant, and successful — not to celebrate them, but to invalidate Black resistance and justify structural racism. It’s a myth that fosters anti-Blackness in Asian communities and xenophobia in Black ones, while shielding white supremacy from critique. These divisions are not cultural accidents; they’re colonial blueprints.

And these blueprints stretch across oceans and continents and time.

In colonial South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi — still shaped by British racial hierarchies — distanced Indians from Black Africans, calling them “kaffirs” and demanding separate facilities. In Uganda, the British installed South Asians as a merchant middle class between colonizers and native Africans, breeding distrust. When Idi Amin expelled 80,000 Asians in 1972, it was a violent backlash to a racial hierarchy seeded by empire. These fractures — between Black and Asian, colonized and sub-colonized — are the legacy of white patriarchal supremacy.

Divide, distract, and dominate.

We must resist being weaponized against each other.

Every Asian-American must read Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong. Every high schooler in America must read and discuss Jared Yates Sexton.

Study the systems. Name them. Disarm them.

Because unless we become and remain united, the status quo — one that serves wealthy cisgender, heterosexual, white Christian men — will remain intact.

This is A Call to the Children of the Global South. And An Invitation to the Children of the Global North: Stop the infighting. Study and interrogate the systems. Reject the design.

To those in media, publishing, and the arts: postcolonial narratives are not cultural sidebars. They are central to national healing. They preserve memory, restore dignity, and confront whitewashed histories.

If you want work that matters — support art that pushes past trauma into structural critique.

Greenlight truth. Platform memory. Choose courage over comfort.

Postcolonial stories should be the norm — not niche art.

Jordan Peele’s Get Out was a cinematic breakthrough — razor-sharp and genre-defying — in its exposure of white supremacy’s quiet machinery: liberal smiles, performative allyship, and the pacification of dissent through assimilation. The Sunken Place is not just a metaphor for silenced Black consciousness — it’s the empire’s preferred position for the marginalized: visible, exploited, but unheard.

A system that offers the illusion of inclusion, weaponizing identity as control.

Ken Levine’s BioShock Infinite exposed white supremacy through a dystopian, fictional but historically grounded lens - depicting the religious justification of Black enslavement, Indigenous erasure, and genocidal nationalism in a floating, evangelical empire.

David Simon’s The Wire exposed the institutional decay of law enforcement, education, and the legal system - revealing how systemic failure, not individual morality, drives urban collapse.

Jesse Armstrong’s Succession traced the architecture of empire through family - showing how media empires weaponize racism, propaganda, and manufactured outrage to generate profit and secure generational wealth.

Ava DuVernay's Origin unearths caste and race as twin blueprints of white supremacy - linking Dalit oppression in India to the subjugation of Black Americans. Adapted from Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, it dismantles the myth of isolated injustice, revealing a global system meticulously engineered to rank human worth - and the radical act of naming the system.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners — a revelatory, critically and commercially successful film about Afro-Asian resistance in 1930s Mississippi — exposes the hunger for speculative narratives grounded in historical truth.

Across the Spider-Verse gave us Pavitr Prabhakar - a Brown superhero who wasn't nerdy or celibate, as Western media typically portrayed the South-Asian man, but cool, smart, athletic, with great hair, in love, and proudly anti-colonial. He called out the British for stealing and keeping Indian artifacts… in a Spider-Man movie. That moment was history reclaimed.

A glitch in the wealthy white patriarchal matrix.

Dev Patel’s Monkey Man is a visceral fable of vengeance and resistance, where the brutality of caste, corruption, and religious nationalism collide. Amid this chaos, the film uplifts the Hijra community who stand not only as victims, but as warriors against systemic violence. Their alliance reframes queerness not as deviance, but as defiance — ultimately confronting the machinery of empire with what it fears most: a system-breaking empathy it cannot contain.

The vitriolic backlash from white male gamers and fandoms isn’t about quality — it’s about losing default status in stories. Everyone else has had to empathize with majority white male protagonists for decades. Diverse representation in media isn’t a threat to art — it’s a threat to white supremacy. It’s not just a mirror held up to the globe — it’s a refusal to let one worldview define it.

Hollywood, gaming studios, and the gatekeepers of entertainment — if you want to reclaim artistic integrity and still make money doing it, we need art that remembers, resists, and reclaims — stories that name the machine and short-circuit its lies. The world is ready. So am I.

Today, efforts like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society are not merely policy shops — they are ideological engines: built to roll back civil rights, impose authoritarian values, and erase uncomfortable truths. They represent a hyper-concentrated form of white supremacy, rooted in unresolved Civil War grievances and the failures of Reconstruction.

Miraculously, or perhaps, blessed with intellectual curiosity and natural empathy, through all of this, my wife — a compassionate, steadfast partner and a Christian woman — has remained by my side. She has witnessed my transformation with both love and complexity. While our bond is rooted in deep respect and shared values, our spiritual landscapes have diverged. Her faith brings her solace; mine has evolved into something more secular, grounded in justice and humanism. We’ve navigated that tension with care — proof that love can stretch across differing beliefs, even as the echoes of religious conditioning still ripple through our lives.

I am proud of her increasing intellectual curiosity and her willingness to accept me for who I am now, even if I wasn’t ready to accept myself when we met.

But our marriage has defied the splintering that white supremacy specifically creates: hyper-capitalist, hyper-individualistic, fractured families and societies.

As Children of the Global South — descendants of peoples who survived enslavement, colonization, and erasure — we carry within us the urgent need for stories that do not turn away from history, but confront it with unflinching truth.

In the pain of losing my family, I found a deeper purpose: to tell this story — and my own — any way I can. A sudden rush of empathy, pity, and love struck me: My parents’ and sister’s rejection was not theirs alone — it was a lingering Fracture left by colonization and global exploitation, tearing apart families across generations. As Children of the Global South, we still carry those wounds.

Make no mistake: white supremacy leaves wounds — because it is the system. And unless it is dismantled, both the Global South and North — and their collective Children — will remain trapped in a dance choreographed by empire — built to divide, exploit, and erase. Any vision of democracy, in America, will remain a fragile illusion — if not an outright mythology — built on a conceptually false foundation: white supremacy itself.

A cruel, heartbreaking legacy of erasure — passed down through empire — indoctrinating God-fearing Brown fathers to erase their godless, queer Brown sons. Preaching shame as scripture. Teaching silence as survival.

I reject that inheritance.

Empathy as praxis is how we reject that inheritance. In a world engineered to divide, it rebuilds connection, disarms supremacy, and charts a path forward. If humanity is to survive — let alone heal — empathy must become our collective discipline.

And perhaps what cut even deeper for my father — beyond my queerness — was that I no longer validated his role as a pastor. In stepping away from the faith he had built his life upon, I wasn’t just rejecting a belief system. I was, in his eyes, nullifying his life’s work. For a man shaped by empire, ordained by colonial Christianity, and burdened with the role of moral gatekeeper, my departure from his manufactured worldview may have landed as personal failure. But it wasn’t. It was never about wanting to hurt him. I love my father. I love my mother. I love my sister. It was never about them — it was about the system that taught them love was conditional, acceptance required obedience, and dissent unforgivable. That kind of pain is real — but its source is systemic. I still want to be Mootha Makkan — not by obedience, but by truth. By love without condition. Not through erasure, but by living fully in the open. Not in their image, but in mine.

Yet, and yes, I also carry the wound — but I also carry the will to heal it.

THE CALL I believe in empathy. I believe in memory. I believe the Children of the Global South are not broken. We are not rejected. We are awakening.

Children of the Global North: join us. We are not your enemies. We are your present and future collaborators, business & creative partners, lovers, and kin. We are building something new — something ancient yet reawakened, a pursuit of empathy, and a reckoning with history that refuses to forget.

If this story resonated with you, kindly share it, spread the word and please comment. I’d love to hear from you. Your voice, your memory, your Fracture — it matters here.

You are not alone. All are welcome.

Thank you so, so much for your time in reading my story.

You can also email me directly: vinesvenus at protonmail.com I'll be writing more on Medium as well: https://medium.com/@vinesvenus/a-call-to-the-children-of-the-global-south-the-system-that-made-my-father-disown-me-fecad6c0b862

[ianfulgar]

Understanding the client's vision is a delicate and essential part of our design process. In our recent clubhouse concept presentation, we took the time to listen, ask questions, and truly grasp what the client wanted. It's a process that requires empathy and patience, and it's what helps us create designs that resonate with those who will inhabit the space. #empathy #clientvision #architecture #designprocess #clubhouse #listening #understanding #collaboration #community #space #3dmodel #presentation #architecturedesign #3dmodeling #architectureanddesign #architecturesketch #architectureproject #architectureph #communication

[kiragecko]

Story Idea

Telekinetic supervillain who REALLY loves historical architecture. Living in a superhero universe where heroes keep crashing through stained glass windows and leveling entire streets. As well as the normal corruption causing building to be demolished or “restored” in extremely destructive ways.

Kinda has Poison Ivy vibes, without any of the femme fatale trappings - her entire focus is preserving historical valuable buildings, and she doesn’t really care if humans that get in the way die. But she also isn’t going out of her way to kill people.

And the leader of the local superhero team can see where she’s coming from. And decides that just throwing her in jail every time she acts up is a sign they’re failing in their duty to protect the city. Instead, he starts trying to gain her trust. He doesn’t care that much about buildings, but he works on lessening his team’s collateral damage. He promises the supervillain that he’ll try to pressure the city government if she brings problems to him rather than taking them into her own hands. Eventually, he convinces her that she can protect the city’s infrastructure better by being on his team than she can on her own.

She’s incredibly helpful! She will keep burning buildings from collapsing until everyone can get out and the fire is extinguished. She’ll hold skyscrapers up while supervillains reign destruction down around them. She’ll deconstruct traps and grumpily direct her teammates towards the hidden mastermind who set them up. And when the crisis is over, she’ll see what can be salvaged and rebuild it if possible.

But she’s a PR nightmare.

Former Supervillain refuses to help people. She DOES NOT care. Your kid is trapped in the burning building? That is not her problem. Go bother someone else. Dude is holding a bunch of people hostage? It’s fine, he’s not causing any damage to the building he’s in.

People DO NOT like this attitude. People do not accept that she’s part of a team, and other heroes are capable of filling the “empathy” and “human rescuing” gaps.

And she’s high maintenance! The team frequently end up in situations where protecting lives is in conflict with protecting property. They take missions that mean very little to them, because they’re important to her. And the leader is constantly having to talk her out of rampages, pressuring the government to drop lucrative and unethical contracts, and making sure she’s sticking to the plan in the field. And she isn’t interested in interpersonal relationships or social niceties, so none of them are even doing this out of friendship!

-

Sometimes, you help someone not because they’ll be grateful, but because it will make your community better. Sometimes, you help the local drug addict not because he’s likely to turn his life around, but because he smashes less windows when he has a warm, quiet space to stay. And sometimes, keeping that community benefit takes a long term commitment.

I want to see a superhero team turn a villain as harm prevention and then willingly bear the cost of keeping that villain from causing harm. Not because it’s rewarding (though there are rewards) but because it’s more effective than any other method. And I want the villain to go along with it because the heroes actually found a more efficient way for her to reach her goals.

And it being messy for everyone, but I want them to make it work. And it to be worth it, in the end.

[zomb13s]

Titulus: Declaratio Linguarum: De Legibus Nostris Communicandis: Official Declaration on Language Use for Scholing Publications

Issued by the Scholing Institute of Multicultural Engineering and Symbolic Ethics To all readers, collaborators, scholars, engineers, friends, allies…Titulus: Declaratio Linguarum: De Legibus Nostris Communicandis: Official Declaration on Language Use for Scholing Publications

[bloodmoonmary]

to love me is to suffer me, ethel cain.

not strong enough to be your man . . . the pages of mary graham's life rustled like unfinished manuscripts scattered across a oak desk—each chapter etched with the peculiar patina of a mind too restless for conventional narratives. she had emerged from rural silences, that peculiar child who pressed wildflowers between kant's critiques and traced latin conjugations in the condensation of kitchen windows. the countryside had shaped her in negative space—the absence of crowds making her hunger for stages, the solitude sharpening her tongue until it could flay pretensions with a single murmured syllable.

at sapienza, she moved through lecture halls like a specter in elbow-patched tweed, her brilliance a carefully contained fire. philosophy taught her the architecture of thought, but it was the act of writing—that alchemy of spilling ink until it coalesced into meaning—that became her true vocation. her notebooks bulged with fragments: a villanelle scribbled during a metaphysics seminar, character sketches of strangers observed from café windows, the occasional furious margin note about plato's glaring blind spots. when she came to metropolis for journalism, it was not for credentials but for the raw material—the city's pulse providing counterpoint to her natural reticence.

the daily planet newsroom never quite knew what to make of their most anomalous intern. she appeared like a sudden weather change—vintage blazer sleeves shoved to her forearms, hair perpetually escaping its pins—dissecting municipal corruption with the precision of a poet parsing meter. clark kent learned to keep extra pens in his desk drawer after finding her gnawing thoughtfully on a borrowed biro, her marginalia spiraling into existential asides. when acting roles found her (never sought), she approached them as anthropological studies—stepping into fictional skins with the same intensity she brought to peeling back the layers of a news story.

her solitude was neither accidental nor tragic, but a deliberate ecology

she grew up in a world of filtered light—not quite a prison, not quite a sanctuary, just a carefully constructed dome where the violence of baltimore streets became muffled shadows against the glass. her parents (hannibal with his surgeon’s precision, will with his fractured empathy) had built it for her, a gilded isolation where tutors came and went like seasons, where knowledge was poured into her like wine into a crystal decanter. she didn’t mind. the other children outside seemed loud, messy, their games crude compared to the crisp pages of her books.

her cousins were her first and only playmates—rough boys with scraped knees and laughter like barking dogs. she tolerated them, sometimes even led them in games that bordered on cruel, her quiet voice spinning rules too complex for them to follow. they adored her anyway, drawn to the way her stillness felt like a dare. but real friendship? that came later. for years, it was just her and the books, the way they whispered secrets without demanding anything in return.

then there were the dreams. they came like unwelcome letters—vivid, insistent. a teacup shattering before it slipped from the maid’s hands. the exact shade of a storm that wouldn’t arrive for weeks. she never spoke of them, not even to hannibal, though sometimes she caught his gaze lingering a second too long, as if he could smell the premonitions clinging to her like perfume.

adolescence cracked her open. suddenly, the dome felt less like protection and more like a bell jar. she cut her hair asymmetrically, wore mismatched socks on purpose, let her wardrobe become a rebellion of silk and safety pins. the other girls watched, whispered, then flocked to her—not despite her strangeness, but because of it. she curated friendships like an art collector, drawn to the ones with sharp edges and dangerous laughter, though she herself never touched the pills they passed like candy, never let a boy’s hands wander too far. she wasn’t afraid. she just knew the cost of surrender.

high school was a performance. she played her part—straight a’s, polite nods at teachers, the occasional sarcastic quip that made her friends gasp-laugh into their hands. but her real life happened elsewhere: in the library carrels where she kissed a girl from her philosophy class, in the thrift store dressing rooms where she pieced together her identity one vintage blazer at a time, in the quiet of her bedroom where she read until dawn, her parents’ murmured conversations downstairs a lullaby.

when the sapienza acceptance letter came, she didn’t hesitate. baltimore had been a prologue. rome awaited, ancient and hungry, and she was ready to let it devour her whole.

ib to @kerryshifts and @girlberrie 💖

[sillysiluriforme]

hello! i absolutely love la terreur and i’ve been wanting to make an oc for a while now. i usually don’t use tumblr at all but i really wanted to participate in la terreur.

(i got too lazy to colour it)

here everybody’s favourite evil teenage capitalist!

additional info:

-sentikid (dad died but it’s ok he was an ass)

-PROUD AMERICAN rahhh 🦅🦅🇺🇸

-centrist-republican (it varies) 

-constantly says “money makes the world go around” as an excuse for everything

-operates on 1) “everything is legal as long as you don’t get caught” and 2) “if get caught, be rich enough to avoid consequences”

-enjoys sci fi and brutualist architecture. enjoys modern shit basically. also possibly the only person ever to enjoy modern art (she frequents the guggenheim museum regularly on vacays)

-pro capitalism WASP family, has family members spread out across various new england states. some are in government (usually municipal or state), others are in academia or business 

-hates wearing the hat and sunglasses actually (it looks fabulous but it’s lowkey bothersome) but has to to hide her natural roots and eyes

-her favourite character ever is patrick bateman

-loves heels (just enjoys making her presence known with click clack sounds)

-hates children. hates everybody actually

-yes that is a tie. she wears a tie 

-protestant christian but a weird mix of strict but also incredibly loose in faith 

-actually aspiring to be a corrupt billionaire 

-distinct lack of morals and empathy (both inherent and learned)

-unhinged and psychotic behaviour (is not very good at pretending to be a normal person)

-actually needs glasses but doesn’t like the look of them so she just goes around blind and squinting at things (she is not allowed to have contacts) 

-has meltdowns like a man. punches walls and destructive shit. she does not have the ability to cry (senticommand)

-huge anger issues 

-huge huge superiority complex 

-very loud and general lack of volume control (it’s actually on purpose)

-homeschooled

-born in washington dc

-unapologetic. does not try to hide her true opinions. in fact she actually doesn’t shut up about them. no social filter whatsoever 

-despite running around proclaiming to be WASP she’s is actually a quarter east asian and russian descent. it doesn’t show at all except in for her black hair and monolid eyes. she’s the only one to look slightly non-WASP in her family and she’s pissed about it  

what an icon,,,,,,,

[amosprinz]

^ tldr: kaveh is as much of a scholar as alhaitham!! architecture is difficult!!

i think people fail to realise just how incredibly difficult architecture is and how taxing the work of an architect can be—it’s not the same as painting where rules are basically nonexistent, architecture is the beauty and art of mathematics and science. which is why i find it so sad when people push kaveh as this emotional artist (he is, don’t get me wrong) when he’s basically on par with alhaitham with his intellect, kaveh just has more empathy and emotional capabilities than someone pragmatic like him.

every architect is an artist, but not every artist is an architect. kaveh combines the beauty and aestheticism of things like traditional painting and drawing with the logic, law and reason of architecture. which is exactly what makes him such a beautiful and fantastic character to pair with someone like alhaitham!! they are the same level of genius and talent, but kaveh sees beauty in things alhaitham doesn’t because of his innate creativity.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Villain Monologue

Villain Monologue - a long speech by an antagonist, antihero, or “bad guy”.

Villain monologues may reveal the speaker’s inner humanity or be an opportunity to showcase the bad guy’s wickedness.

Strong performers can bring these characters to life, but movie monologues start with a great screenwriter.

How to Write a Villain Monologue

Define the purpose of the monologue. Monologues can progress the plot, delve into character backstories, and much more. Understand how your monologue operates and how its placement fits into the architecture of your script. Ensure you are intentional with each word.

Hear your monologue read aloud. When you have a draft of your monologue, read it aloud and then hear an actor or peer read it. Assess how natural the speech sounds and ask yourself if your specific villain would speak this monologue.

Instill truth in your villain. Though your character is fictional, their wickedness may be more symbolic than realistic. Ground the villain in reality. Villains should have goals, reasons for their actions, band a three-dimensional personality beyond their malice.

Play with different forms. Villain monologues come in many different styles. There are origin stories (in which a character explains why they behave the way they do), torture descriptions (in which the villain tells what violence they will enact), and calls for sympathy (in which a character expresses remorse for their wrongdoing).

Revise your monologue. After drafting and hearing your monologue, edit as you see fit. Some parts may be unclear or overwritten—edit your writing until it comes across as you intend.

Tips for Writing Villain Monologues

Counter your protagonist’s traits or speech patterns. If your protagonist speaks cheerfully and quickly, give your villain a dark, measured cadence. Villains can be foil characters to your main characters, and monologues can show off this contrast.

Position your villain monologue toward the end of the narrative. In some stories, but not all, the villain is the supporting character, not the protagonist. For this reason, you must give the audience or readers time to get to know the character. Only after that point, and often during a final confrontation, should your villain finally get their shining moment to change the audience’s mind or confirm their notions of this character.

Try giving your villain a catchphrase. Sometimes writers utilize the power of threes: Repetition is a helpful tool, and repeating a phrase thrice in a story can help audiences track a beginning, middle, and end. If your villain has a catchphrase, let them speak it toward the start, the rising action, and the climax.

Examples of Great Villain Monologues

Apocalypse Now (1979): Colonel Kurtz details the horrors of war in his monologue, sharing that he poisoned children with polio. Kurtz deduces that the best soldier is the one who cannot feel and instead transforms into a killing machine devoid of empathy.

The Matrix (1999): In the cyberpunk movie The Matrix, Agent Smith interrogates a captured Morpheus and tells him of his plan: to destroy Zion, the underground city where those who have escaped the Matrix go to be free. The monologue underlines how Smith is Morpheus’s antithesis: The former has chosen to live within a planned system, and the latter wants to break free from it.

The Incredibles (2004): Even an animated movie can feature a fantastic villain monologue. In The Incredibles, the character Syndrome shares his origin story: He was a fan of Mr. Incredible and wanted to be his sidekick, but Mr. Incredible rejected him. This embittered Syndrome, who then manifested artificial superpowers to wreak havoc on the Incredibles.

The Dark Knight (2008): The Joker gets a few famous supervillain monologues in this Christopher Nolan film, which sits between Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). First, the Joker tells Bruce Wayne’s love interest Rachel how he got his scars, and later, he tells Batman just how similar the two are.

Inglourious Basterds (2009): Anti-Semetic SS officer Hans Landa delivers a monologue disparaging Jewish people and the police to hawks who have to search for rodents to keep the circle of life going. Set in World War II, this movie, and Landa’s monologue, showcase the ideologies that led to the persecution of countless lives.

Game of Thrones (2011–2019): Cersei Lannister is a power-hungry character who gets many monologues across this hit HBO drama’s eight seasons. Toward the end of the series, she torments Ellaria Sand, who poisoned Cersei’s daughter. Cersei explains the equal vengeance she will seek on Ellaria’s imprisoned daughter.

The word “monologue” derives from the Greek roots for “alone” and “speak,” and it is the counterpart of the word “dialogue,” which comes from the Greek word for “conversation.”

Monologues can address other characters in the scene or be one character talking to themselves or the audience.

Monologues serve a specific purpose in storytelling—to give the audience more details about a character or the plot.

Used carefully, they are a great way to share a character's internal thoughts or backstory or to give more specific details about the story.

Source ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[theladygrim]

I feel like this illustrates a bigger problem with how we're taught honestly. ADA is a massive, massive part of what we're supposed to be learning, but at least at the school I go to it's hand waved a lot for the sake of time and "design integrity" when it should really be a class in itself. My senior year I did ALL of the ADA research and planning for a built project our class was working on and got my ass chewed by people who were upset about the roughly $600 basic ADA accomodations would take from our budget.

I found this article pretty interesting.

[sparrowlucero]

would life as a larrow suck? like if you could choose to be isekai'd as a larrow rn would you take it up? what about the other way around, would a larrow want to be us

It doesn't really suck anymore than life as a human does, but a lot of humans would see it as bad or stressful in certain ways:

Larrow imago usually only live about 30 years, and it's not super abnormal for them to die before 20. They're also very tiny (like on average the size of a button quail or a smallish parrot) so compared to humans they seem pretty fragile.

Their society doesn't consistently exist; eggs are produced, hatched and grow up at roughly the same time, and all the larrow of a single generation usually die off entirely before new ones emerge from the ocean (with an occasional outlier). That next generation isn't exactly the same culture as before, just formed through similar needs and off of the technology left behind by the last. their whole 'rome falls every few decades' set up would probably be very offputting to most alien cultures

They have next to no health care; larrow learn medical care by themselves, for themselves, and they practice surgery and similarly extreme procedures on themselves quite regularly.

Larrow are basically fine not socializing and will sometimes go years without talking to one another; it's to a degree where even anti social humans may be stressed and lonely. They also don't really show a ton of concern for other people and animals, empathy is more of a philosophical idea than this totally innate thing.

The world they live has very extreme storms; their average low winds would be difficult for a human to walk around in. They don't have houses but public access "storm shelters" which, from a human perspective, look woefully incompetent as they're full of holes and look more like animal nests than a "real" building

On the other hand:

Larrow are adapted to live in an environment with constantly moving air and are instinctively adverse to areas with stagnant air, as they struggle to breathe in it and it can make them really sick. Human buildings seem really gross to them in the same way rot or mold does to us

The way humans are constantly trailing each other and actively trying to initiate touching and interaction all the time feels both animal-like and weird/scammy/aggressive to them, our social behavior is their "about to get mugged" behavior

complex nest building in constant storms was like their main evolutionary pressure to Get Good with the brain power, so they're very technologically minded in a way humans just aren't. They could open up a human car or computer (or indeed a body) for the first time and understand how it worked back to front. This is all just architecture to their lizard brains. Which means humans needing to go to school to study this stuff sounds like, really stupid to a larrow.

the whole idea that humans will bribe other humans to knock them out and operate on them sounds like a horror show. What if the doctors got bored and left? What if it turned out they wanted to hurt you while you were asleep? If letting other people chop you up is a normal cultural quirk why do they keep making scary movies about it

the way humans have all these complex daily networks of giving things up and gaining them is confusing and stressful. they're kind of like that boar in this tumblr post

This is all to say many humans would see larrow as living short lonely survivalist lives in ramshackle houses in a dying culture too selfish to care about each other, where many larrow would see humans as spending most of their lives in gross little prisons being so incompetent at everything that they'll die of minor ailments like "tumors" and "internal bleeding" if other humans don't randomly take pity on them.

Not to say some people wouldn't be interested or jealous about aspects of each other's lives... "what if you could just fly alone for weeks at a time and work on the first draft of your novel" would obviously be appealing to a lot of humans, and getting to root through a world of completely alien tech and biology would make a larrow feel like it was one of these caddisflies