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No tech CEO or NYT bestselling novelist will ever match the creativity of a humble French postman who decided on a whim to spend thirty-three years building a surreal, majestic palace with the bricks and mortar of his dreams.

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My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

Which is totally fine for people’s D&D games and cute oneshot comics and personal works and such, but when you want me to take your worldbuilding seriously, you’re going to have to convince me! And a lot of it is not convincing.

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Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

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welp. it was bound to happen at some point. looks like the whale was feeding and nabbed the guy by accident, and immediately spit him out:

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after all of murderbot's unreliable narration as relates to personal relationships, plus its off-handed mention of three's "possibly apocryphal friends", i can't help but suspect that this: (ASR)

might be narratively equivalent to this:

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You ever hear that old chestnut about how most people neglect the part of the story of Icarus where he also had to avoid flying too low, lest the spray of the sea soak his feathers and cause him to fall and drown? You ever think about how different the world would be if Icarus died that way instead? If the idiom was to Fly To Close To The Sea? A warning against playing it far too safe, about not stretching your wings and soaring properly? You ever think about how Icarus died because he was happy?

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Ok, concept, after System Collapse those two random SecUnits Murderbot gave the hacking directions to decide to go absolutely nuts with sharing it around and it goes,,, kind of viral. Resulting in a community of new FreeUnits who,,, obviously need ways to share info and help each other out

The result is FeedFreeUnit, a hyper-encrypted feed that eventually spreads to, like, every port. It starts out as just tips and helpful code and instructions on how to get to Preservation and stuff, but eventually it also turns into THE social media for FreeUnits, basically

Which means memes. And they're kind of wild. (Sorry, I got the idea for ONE of these and it turned into a whole bunch)

(Yes, FeedFreeUnit calls Murderbot "MB". Yes, Murderbot HATES this. Yes, it causes the first known instance of construct Discourse.)

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fake relationship but its a king and his concubine that was once an amazing soldier but he couldn’t go up the ranks for whatever reason so the king was like listen. hear me out. you can be my strategy dude. u just gotta be okay w walking around shirtless a lot. and soldier dude is like man that’s an UPSIDE and yknow they end up falling in love

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The most beautiful thing about Chengqing to me is that if their roles were reversed, say if WRH won; if the Jiang were on the brink of extinction and the Dafan Wen were struggling to regain their political foothold; if under those circumstances, Wen Qing came to Jiang Cheng and said "Jiang-gongzi, I can –" his response would be the exact same as hers was in canon:

"Wen-guniang, what can you do?"

Because she can save him, but not his people. And they both know this. They look at each other, and they know that they are two of a kind: they would choose their families over each other, and in doing so, over themselves. In a heartbeat, they would. That is why they could have been in love. That is why they never will be

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chicago pope tweets

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Colombian hair braiding competition

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all goofing aside I genuinely don't understand the urge to reimagine Taylor Allison Swift as a secretly queer icon when the pop music scene(TM) is like. literally overflowing with women who actually like women. Gaga and Kesha and Miley and Halsey are right there. Rina Sawayama and Hayley Kiyoko and Rebecca Black and Kehlani and Victoria Monét and Miya Folick if you're willing to get slightly less top 100. Janelle and Demi for them nonbinary takes on liking girls. like what are we doing here. like I'm not even saying you can't enjoy Taylor but why would you hang all your little gay hopes on her.

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I never got how past TOS every Star Trek writer seems to treat the Prime Directive as some sort of sacred edict rather than the anti imperialist screed it actually is. TOS was made in the Cold War where Russia, the USA, and other countries were basically playing tug of war with smaller countries to their detriment, so writer Gene L. Coon came up with the idea that Starfleet should not do that, that civilizations should be allowed to develop on their own without being used as catspaws by more powerful entities.

The problem is that somewhere along the line this got lost and it turned into “these people are all going to die but saving them would violate the Prime Directive”. Like yeah you should save people from dying, just don’t do it in a way that makes them your client state!

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I love every fucking part of this.

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I constantly need to be out and doing things to keep my mind working as okay as possible, but I’m really bad at remembering any of the places I want to go when it comes to making plans to go places. So I’ve made a jar to make decisions for me.

Each lollipop stick has a place I want to go to that I’m pretty sure will be accessible. It’s all colour coded, so I can pick from the category I want at the time. The categories are:

Green: relatively short drive to get there

Yellow: moderate drive

Orange: long drive (but still a day trip)

Red: super long drive (overnight stay required)

Purple: Cafes

Blue: indoor activities for rainy days

ID: a collection of bright coloured lollipop sticks in an old jam jar /end ID

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"Punishment works!!!" We're drowning in three to four generations of people so pants-shittingly terrified of ever being wrong that half of everyone has constructed a worldview wherein they never even consider the possibility that they could be wrong and the other half behaves like one wrong move will make anything or anyone explode violently into a million irreperable pieces. I don't think it works guys

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Literally every single Neuroscience guy I listen to on audiobooks and podcasts: Multitasking is a lie. You are not more efficient. You're just rapidly switching between tasks and doing all of them slower but your brain is tricking itself into thinking it's more efficient because you get a little dopamine reward when you activate the 'change task' neurons. And you're burning up way more glucose in the process, leaving you more tired with less done. STOP MULTITASKING. JUST DO ONE THING. PLEASE IT'S ONLY WORSENING YOUR ATTENTION SPAN. WE'RE BEGGING YOU, PLEA--

My ADHD: Don't listen to them, babydoll. You are sooooooo efficient and attractive. Whoop. You got an email. Whoop you got a text. Whoop you got a blog ask. WOW look at all the tabs open on this window. Do you even remember what they're all for? Better look through them and close the ones you're not using because you're soooo sexy and efficient. Whoop, email again.