duckswithwings

[duckswithwings]

there's been a bunch of buzz about switching/dumping streaming services lately for a lot of reasons, which feels like a good time to mention: this friday (august 1st) is a bandcamp friday!

for the uninitiated, bandcamp friday means the site doesn't take their usual cut, and the artist you're buying from gets it all. it's like an inverse of spotify's business model.

moving away from streaming services costs some convenience, of course, but it's also a lot harder for the whims of a platform or payment processor to zap a folder full of mp3s off of your devices! consider it!

[duckswithwings]

happy birthday to all the tbs in the southern hemisphere!

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When its your birthday month you should be able to do whatever you want and spend as much money as you want throughout the month and it doesn't count since your birthday is on that month so it's okay

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have you ever thought about how amatonormativity is so prevalent that it twisted the word "relationship" to generally mean "a romantic relationship" in normal conversation. saying "I'm in a relationship" should be an inane statement. everyone is in relationships dipshit it came free with your membership card to a social species. but alas

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[duckswithwings]

Luis Caballero (Colombian, 1945-1995), Untitled, 1989. Mixed media on paper, 76 x 56 cm.

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Guess who watched the first Mobile Suit Gundam compilation movie.

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a while back i saw someone point out that many people, even supposed progressive types, actually enjoy being racist and i’ve been thinking about that idea a lot wrt fetishization in fandom, because it does become obvious that’s what’s happening when you think about, say, the fixation on link’s gerudo outfit in botw or fan response to miguel o’hara in spider verse. exotifying tropes have staying power because they’re seen as sexy and exciting, and combined with the let people enjoy things mentality and childish need for escapism endemic to a majority of fan spaces it’s no wonder racial fetishization runs rampant. no one wants to consider how their desires may be racist because that particular strain of racism feels good to them and fandom is all about feeling good, anyone who dares criticize your behaviour is just a big meanie who hates fun. but our desires aren’t formed in a vacuum and while people hate to admit it, what feels right or exciting to us is much more of a product of broader societal forces than intrinsic desire. so yeah, it is a good idea to have a hard, honest look at the tropes you find sexy and how they might point to broader biases in your worldview

[duckswithwings]

I’m going to defeat you with the power of friendship and this gun I found

[duckswithwings]

people who say 'just write for yourself' (me) have never met the absolute demon that lives in my head (also me) and judges every single word i put on the page. i am writing for myself, and let me tell you, the audience of me is a tough critic. she’s like, 'this sentence is fine but not groundbreaking,' and 'are you really gonna use the word 'suddenly' again? pathetic.' like ma’am, i’m trying my best.

[duckswithwings]

finally getting around to making the posts that have been half-finished in my drafts since my zz rewatch. anyway. thinking abt haman & glemy again

thinking abt how they're both vying for leadership of axis/neo zeon by leveraging their connections to the zabis (haman as mineva's regent and glemy through his. nonspecific familial connection*) but approaching it in very different ways, where haman is using zabi revivalist sentiment as a tool for her own gain and glemy seems to actually be bought in on all that bc they are each slightly different flavors of fascist (her "my personal strength gives me the right to do whatever I want" vs his "the strength of my bloodline gives me the right to do whatever I want," hers comes across as more individualistic where his comes across as more blatantly eugenicist but they are both ultimately making their claims to power based on seeing themselves as innately ~superior to everyone around them) (which also ties in to each of their understandings of newtypes as a concept, haman understands that people could become newtypes but due to what she's seen of how deeply entrenched the federation's power structures are, she thinks that they won't ("not all of humanity can become newtypes, as you've shown me. they'll devour the earth long before that") versus glemy, who says shit like "I'll rebuild a kingdom of zeon blood" and has ple 2 talking abt newtypes as entirely distinct from "ordinary people"

and they both have such a strong sense of entitlement, but haman's is from both her belief in her own skill and her feelings of having been wronged (her sister dying in service to the zabis, her resentment over being exiled to axis & the federation's corruption), and glemy's is bc he's a nepo baby who thinks his ~bloodline makes him special and gives him the right to be in charge of everything and use as many cloned child soldiers as he wants in order to make that happen (bc he thinks he should be the one to tell everyone, especially women & girls (leina, roux, the ples), what to do and how to behave) (and haman obviously also uses people as tools, that's kind of the main thing abt how she interacts with and relates to other people, but she cares primarily abt utility rather than having the focus on propriety that he does)

also I think it's fun that neither glemy nor haman use military titles the way the zeon remnants on earth do, their people call them glemy-sama and haman-sama and the people working under them aren't referred to by military ranks either, which to me seems to emphasize the way they're hearkening back to the more monarchist aspects of zabi rule bc those are the aspects most conducive to one person gaining the kind of power they each want, rather than the focus being on, like, zeon as a whole. or maybe it's just bc neither of them vibe with the military titles aesthetically, or some secret third reason, but regardless I think it's an interesting detail that does set them apart from most of the rest of the post-oyw zeon movements. and sure, part of that is bc lots of post-oyw zeon stuff is written by uh. military otakus (stardust memory, etc) so they lean into the military scifi stuff for that reason, but it's not like tomino's not also out here writing neo zeon factions who still use military ranks (the remnants they encounter in zz, char's neo zeon to an extent)

*tbh the vagueness with which he talks abt that makes him even funnier to me. like we get a few references to him being "related to the zabis" and he clearly has plenty of thoughts abt how his ~superior bloodline makes him Better but he never explains what his actual connection to the zabis is. and I know fandom consensus seems to be that he's gihren's son/clone but 1) afaict the source for that is production notes, plenty of things in production notes blatantly contradict the actual shows (there are production notes for 0079 that say that garma has a younger sister called miharu which. obviously he does not lol) (and also it's referenced in a video game. and video games are not exactly a credible source for the text of the show either Imo, lots of things get said in lots of different gundam video games, and some of those things can be interesting but where it contradicts the show I'm gonna believe the show version, y'know?)

2) in glemy's first proper appearance he says "papa, mama, at last I'll be in a real mobile suit battle. please, watch me," and then a few episodes later "my mama always said you have to make up for your mistakes" which are the kind of things you say when you had parents that you knew who have died, not when you're someone's clone/science experiment. I guess you could argue that maybe he doesn't know the truth but that's boring to me, sorry, I don't think it would be interesting for him to have just been a clone the whole time and it was never mentioned and neither he nor anyone else knew

and 3) being the child of a previous leader legitimizes your claim far more than being vaguely related, so I think he probably would have played that card if he had it to play, which makes me think that it's far more likely that he was like. a cousin or something (probably on his mother's side considering his name tbh like. you can maybe argue that at first he was trying to hide his true identity so that haman would see him as less of a threat but by the end when he's openly declaring himself against her using his family ties as justification, if he thought he had a right to the name he would be using it) and his parents raised him to think that he was special bc of it but didn't actually train him to rule (which is why he doesn't really have the skills haman does, as someone who was handed conditional power at a young age and therefore had to learn very quickly how to effectively wield it), because that wasn't something that was really on the table for him until the post-oyw power vacuum

[duckswithwings]

i have never understood or played magic the gathering, but i have nothing but respect for it after seeing this tittieless snake woman

you could have gone the easy route. you could have given her titties. but you didn’t. cause she’s a reptile. thank you mtg. thank you.

[duckswithwings]

In the spirit of encouraging people to comment on fanfics while also making it easier to do so, I feel obliged to share a browser extension for ao3 that has quite literally revolutionized the comment game for me.

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

Comments are what keep writers going, and as both a writer and a reader, I think it's such an easy way of showing support and enthusiasm.

[duckswithwings]

It’s crazy that countries on the edge of the Sahara desert are reversing desertification by just digging half circles

[duckswithwings]

Art by Yinka Shonibare

1-2. How to Blow Up Two Heads at Once (Ladies) 3-4. The Age of Enlightenment: Adam Smith 5-6. The Age of Enlightenment: Gabrielle Emile le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise de Chatelet