#Mutation March 2023

[galusaurus]

✨Mutation March - Day 11: Millipede✨

I had some fun with the names today. First, the millidillo!

Here is a jellipede.

Blink and you’ll miss it—a millispeed!

[rowyngoldeart]

I used today's mutation of a sea cucumber as an excuse to finally try out the Clip Studio cross-hatching brushes I downloaded that @foervraengd made!

Me elsewhere: Ko-Fi Patreon

[chocolatechipkraken]

A garden ray for Mutation March!

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week - March 27, 2023

🐢 - Why did the 90-year-old tortoise become a father? Because he finally came out of his shell!

1. New Mexico governor signs bill ending juvenile life sentences without parole

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has signed a bill into law that prevents juvenile offenders from receiving life sentences without eligibility for parole. The bill, known as the No Life Sentences for Juveniles Act, allows offenders who committed crimes under the age of 18 and received life sentences to be eligible for parole hearings 15 to 25 years into their sentences.

This legislation also applies to juveniles found guilty of first-degree murder, even if they were tried as adults. The move puts New Mexico in a group of at least 24 other states and Washington, DC, that have enacted similar measures following a 2021 Supreme Court ruling.

2. Promising pill completely eliminates cancer in 18 leukaemia patients

An experimental pill called revumenib has shown promise in curing terminal leukemia patients who were not responding to treatment in a long-awaited clinical trial in the United States. The drug works by inhibiting a specific protein called menin, which is involved in the machinery that gets hijacked by leukemia cells and causes normal blood cells to turn into cancerous ones.

The pill targets the most common mutation in acute myeloid leukemia, a gene called NPM1, and a less common fusion called KMT2A. The US Food and Drug Administration granted revumenib "breakthrough therapy designation" to fast-track its development and regulatory review based on the promising results of the trial.

3. Spain passes law against domestic animal abuse

Spain has passed a new law on animal welfare, accompanied by a reform of the penal code that increases prison sentences for those mistreating animals. The law will make compulsory training for dog owners, and will prohibit them from leaving their dogs alone for more than 24 hours.

It also mandates the sterilisation of cats, with exceptions for farms, and increases the penalties for mistreatment of animals to up to two years in prison, or three years in the event of aggravating circumstances.

4. Bravery medals for women who raced into 'rough, crazy' surf to save drowning girls

Elyse Partridge (far left) and Bella Broadley (far right) raced into dangerous surf to save Chloe and Violet from drowning.(ABC North Coast: Hannah Ross)

Bella Broadley and Elyse Partridge saved two 11-year-old girls from drowning at Angels Beach near Ballina, an unpatrolled beach in Australia. The younger girls, Chloe and Violet, became trapped in a rip and overwhelmed by waves and the current. Bella and Elyse jumped into action, using an esky lid as a flotation device to help them swim to the girls. Elyse helped Chloe back to shore while Bella swam further out to help Violet.

Elyse and Bella were on Wednesday named on the Governor General's Australian Bravery Decorations Honours List, which recognised 66 Australians for acts of bravery.

5. Almost every cat featured in viral Tik Tok posted by Kansas City animal shelter adopted

Let's find homes for the rest

6. A 90-year-old tortoise named Mr. Pickles just became a father of 3. It's a big 'dill'

These critically endangered tortoises are native to Madagascar and have seen their numbers decline due to over-collection for illegal sales on the black market. Captive breeding programs have helped produce new radiated tortoises, but the species still faces extinction in the wild.

That's why the arrival of these hatchlings, born to 90-year-old Mr. Pickles and his 53-year-old partner Mrs. Pickles, is such great news. Mr. Pickles is considered the most genetically valuable radiated tortoise in the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' Species Survival Plan, and the births represent a significant contribution to the survival of the species.

7. EU strikes ‘ground-breaking’ deal to cut maritime emissions

The European Parliament and EU ministers have agreed on a new law to cut emissions in the maritime sector. The law aims to reduce ship emissions by 2% as of 2025 and 80% as of 2050, covering greenhouse gas, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions.

The European Commission will review the law in 2028 and will decide whether to place carbon-cutting requirements on smaller ships. The agreement will also require containerships and passenger ships docking at major EU ports to plug into the on-shore power supply as of 2030. Penalties collected from those that fail to meet the targets will be allocated to projects focused on decarbonising the maritime sector.

- - - -

That's it for this week :)

This newsletter will always be free. If you liked this post you can support me with a small kofi donation:

Buy me a coffee ❤️

Also don’t forget to share this post with your friends.

[caixinliang]

Practice 1:

Assignment 2, Concept Art - Human and "Inhuman"

. Blog post 02

Here are some sketch analyses based on the interesting design points summarised in the previous blog.

A.Making the human organism grow like a plant

B.Integration of diverse organisms

C.Use of shape language

D.The human figure and the Uncanny valley

Transformation process between human and inhuman

I'll be applying these interesting design points to my concept design.

My final design was inspired by the horrific creatures of the Cthulhu novel "The Shadow over Innsmouth" that were mutated by the local humans. These creatures are a combination of human and sea life.

My character has a graphic representation of the letter D, emphasising the tension of the character, with the two main design centres being the shoulders and the head, next to which I have placed directional 'octopus tentacles'.

shape language:

The character's toes are  tangled together, giving it a twisted and awkward look.

final:

This is all for now, thanks for reading.

Reference:

Annihilation (2018) Directed by Alex Garland [psychological horror film]. United Kingdom United States : Paramount Pictures ( North America and China) Netflix (international).

Pan's Labyrinth (27 May 2006) Directed by Guillermo del Toro [dark fantasy film]. Warner Bros. Pictures.

Love, Death & Robots (March 15, 2019 – present) Directed by Tim Miller [adult animated anthology television series]. American : Netflix Studios.

The Last of Us (TV series) (January 15, 2023 – present) Directed by Craig Mazin Neil Druckmann Available at: HBO MAX (Accessed: 14 November 2023 ).

[flowerishness]

Ranunculus asiaticus (Persian buttercup)

Let’s face it, Persian buttercups are just plain beautiful - and that’s not just my opinion. In March 2023, Canada Post issued two lovely Persian buttercup stamps (see photo number 4, copied from the Canada Post website). However, the original wildflower species looks nothing like any of these exotic, modern hybrid varieties.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, Ranunculus asiaticus has a single row of five petals. Modern hybrids demonstrate quite extreme doubling which means a lot more than just twice as many petals (as you can see). Doubling is a very rare mutation in wildflowers but by gardeners selectively breeding, generation after generation over thousands of years, you end up with this type of beautiful ‘monstrosity’.

Incidentally, the wild five petal Ranunculus asiaticus is so rare in its original habitat that it’s protected in many places, including Israel.

[sleeptowns]

a year (or so) of fics, in retrospect

once every handful of years i remember to look back at the collection of projects i’ve finished recently and to simulate a critique as if i’m an art school student — and also as if i’m the haunted teacher’s assistant who wants to be gentle on the prof’s behalf but actually hates your work and also i am the other students who have been sitting there for seven hours straight and can’t offer much more except say, “it’s fine.” a one-man critique day, all parts played by me. 

sometimes i do this and the last period of writing has been drier than a pizza slice left in the winter sun, but this time i’m lucky that these last couple of years have been the closest i’ve had to a writing pax romana.

with that said, i’m not entirely sure how valid i am whenever i think these days that my writing has gone through some drastic changes in the last year; i’m not even sure if it’s accurate to call any of it growth, though i’m aware it’s the sort of thing i won’t have a clear perspective on until a few years after the fact. but i do know that i’m lucky to have so many works to act as markers for different periods of my writing, and while it’s far from a sure method of evaluation, there are parts there that i’m able to at least assess, if not outright measure. in the last year or so, my fics have started mutating towards — not really a separate sort of output than my previous ones, but definitely older somehow. older and quite different because of it: stylistic choices i would have steered clear of before, failed and/or lacklustre genre explorations, even relationship dynamics that were previously unfamiliar territory. my most recent fic feels like a culmination of all my attempts at wrestling with my writing in the ring, and now that it’s a few weeks behind me and i get to look at it with fresh(er) eyes and accept that it’s my favourite child (i’m sorry flls... you’re not too far behind), it’s also reminded me that i have a now overdue fic roundup to write. 

tangentially speaking, it’s interesting that you never really hear about self-taught writers. self-taught artists, yes, and self-taught musicians, but never quite self-taught writers. i don’t exactly purport to have taught myself everything i know about writing, and i know you can’t really be self-anything as a writer; what i lack in technique and finesse learned from proper writing classes, teachers, and/or workshops, i owe to the media i’ve consumed, good and bad, as well as to the creators i love and to all the thoughtful readers i’ve had over the years. if i’m self-taught in any way, then the self as a teacher was reared by countless others who have honed in me a limitless capacity to be an observer to stories, mine and all else. 

this post is just a roundup of all my fics from december 2020 to january 2023, including only the ones with enough substantial content to write about, which disqualifies a lot of the fics i left at one or five scenes max but qualifies the ones i abandoned at one chapter. just a little something for me to reference as i figure out where to take my writing next and hopefully move towards some kind of ✨ growth ✨ lol 

・・・・・・

FIRST LOVE, LATE SPRING december 2020 to march 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | dual pov romance, multimedia (?)

i covered a bit of the early chapters and conceptualization for flls in a separate post, but as i was reflecting on how to write a continuation, it occurred to me that if there’s a clear before and after to the current state of my writing, then the first portion of flls chapter five is where i’ll find it. 

when i was drafting my 58393th version of that chapter — nothing was working, none of it was the right vibe i needed, most of them too detached or too on-the-nose but never the perfect middle — i happened upon trying second person pov by accident. i’m not the biggest fan of second person (though to be fair, i don’t think anyone is) but by that point i was so sick of writing and rewriting this one section and not getting anywhere that i wondered if i should just lean all the way into that disgust. why not do something i hated entirely? and act of desperation as that was, the moment i started writing in curt, nauseating second person, i knew it was the right choice. 

the thing about writing flls!yuuji is that he felt both alive and unfamiliar. flls!megumi was easier to understand, even if he was trickier to write — but yuuji, i had to really work to get to know. one thing about him that i knew to be careful about from the very beginning of jjk is that it would be too surface level to think this boy is an extrovert. yuuji is usually painted as an energetic, sunny person, and i don’t think he’s not that, but there’s something about yuuji that’s also very internal and almost innately… isolated? i don’t know if that’s necessarily the right word, but there’s a lot about him as a character that’s out of view or grasp, which ironically i find people taking at face value. in flls, he required a lot more balance than megumi, who was a dam waiting to be relieved of its duties. flls!yuuji knows who or what he is — how could he not, when he’s never had a choice but to be this person, this kid who lost his grandpa, this kid who needs love but doesn’t know how to ask for it because he doesn’t even know there are forms of it he can ask for? 

how to write a character like that? how to nudge someone who doesn’t reveal even at his most revealing towards the christmas eve fight i had set up in the beginning of flls chapter one? back before chapter six of flls came out, i saw a lot of people argue that megumi and yuuji just needed to communicate, and yes, of course they do, but i was also very adamant as i started chapter five that the real tragedy about them is that communication will do nothing in the end. even if they magically became master communicators about their needs and wants and insecurities, none of it will change the fact that neither of them are ready to love and be loved by the other person. at least not in any way that constitutes a relationship that feels like love. 

i think that’s the key to writing the relationship in flls. it was never a question that they loved each other, and how much. never. this is probably the first piece of ~growth i appreciated about flls. it would be easy to write a romance where the main conflict is them not knowing the other loved them back, but flls got rid of that quite early. i left no room for doubt — or at least this is the hope — that flls!itfs loved each other in a way no one else would be able to compare to. they’re it for each other. but if it had been as simple as portraying that, then i never would have finished flls at all, and it definitely wouldn’t have been my longest fic at the time. 

instead — what if it was a given that they loved each other, and it still wasn’t enough? what kind of story can we spin about that? what kind of questions and answers can we find?

that’s actually such a pretentious way to frame that, but the fact of the matter is that i needed to not waste space now that we’re five chapters in. this is the beginning of the end. how do we shift gears and take the tone of the entire story along with it? i don’t know if there’s something about second person pov that’s just inherently full of dread, but it did quite a bit of work in chapter five. it felt disembodying for me as a writer, and i could only hope the same for readers. i was really, really worried some people will give up reading altogether thinking all of chapter five will be in second person, but i didn’t want to compromise. it was going to be second person for most of their real relationship or nothing: vaguely dissociative, intensely drained, with no room to actually enjoy being each other’s boyfriend. the main challenge was to not go from zero to a hundred in a snap. i had the room to do so in only one chapter, but i had to find a way to keep a tight rein on the pace or else the whole fic will fail. 

there also had to be love. and longing. and a desperation to make it work. i think that was yuuji in a nutshell — someone desperate to make it work, whatever this thing is. that’s what constitutes his strengths and his weaknesses, in canon and in flls. i wanted to find a way to make that palpable to a reader the way it was palpable to me while writing yuuji in second person. somewhere along making sure to tether myself to him by knowing what pieces of media he’d reference (high school musical and fullmetal alchemist) and his life outside of megumi (work, basketball, tea with nanami, skateboarding), i had to also drown with yuuji in the hope that the reader would follow. chapter three afforded me the luxury of only examining yuuji from the omniscience of a writer writing in third person — i could dismantle him through the therapy scene, could show myself and the reader a way to understand him, but i could not take us there to where he is. 

i don’t know how successful the second person pov was, ultimately, though i’d be lying if i said it wasn’t what i thought was truly best at the time. it probably wasn’t that creative to anyone but me, but it gave me a nudge towards different ways to explore… vibes. atmosphere, maybe, is the more formal word for it. if not for the second person pov choice in flls, i wouldn’t have been nudged towards kamo’s newsletter to act as the midway point of the story, the last palate cleanser i’ll allow myself and the reader, and i never would have written please let me love you forever and days of brutalism and hairpin turns the way i did. i owe a lot to that tiny but crucial choice, as does flls as a whole. everything that followed that section — the fight, the aftermath of the fight, the breakup — relied on it to make themselves work, and it’s funny (and valuable to note) how it’s something as seemingly inconsequential as a pov choice that set the tone. 

especially because there’s nothing special, really, about those following scenes. the christmas eve fight, megumi’s conversation in the car with geto, the break-up itself — all of it followed my standard flow of dialogue. sure, there’s more tension when you’re writing an argument, let alone when writing scenes that will inevitably lead to a break-up, but all scenes, particularly dialogue, have to feel fraught with some kind of energy and inevitable anyway. for the remainder of chapter five and six, i just coasted on the tone set up by the beginning of chapter five, and that’s knowledge that has served me quite well since. atmosphere goes a long, long way, and with my writing style, a healthy balance between dialogue and introspection will take me the rest of the way to the finish line. the part of flls that i’ve heard people find the most heartbreaking were also its simplest. all of chapter six is dedicated to one wedding, and chapter seven to one evening. i wish i could say there was a trick there, that i agonized over how to write such important scenes, but my personal takeaway is that there is no trick. the point is that you get the story to a point where those scenes write themselves; there’s nowhere else for the flow to go, and geto’s gentle unpacking of megumi, the last few scenes before megumi and yuuji break up, and the bittersweet reunion after two necessary years — i can only hope they carried a sense of “this is the only way it could have gone” the way they did for me. geto doesn’t tell megumi anything we don’t already know from earlier chapters, if only just now put into words. megumi and yuuji also don’t tell each other anything, in the breakup scene and the getting back together sections, that we haven’t already gleaned from them. from the moment kamo’s newsletter ended and we headed into act two — everything was just wrapping up what i left for myself.  

it’s worth noting that i did try to complicate the final chapter a bit. i tried a split pov between yuuji and megumi at first, as a way to finally reconcile their two perspectives, but that felt too cheesy. i tried an outing to nagoya for nobara’s birthday, tried to divide the pov amongst the people in their lives (junpei, nanami, nobara, etc), and even to do my usual cyclical structure of starting with the same image we did in chapter two, this time in yuuji’s funabashi apartment — but those all felt too on the nose. i trusted my flls readers. maybe that’s what all it came down to. i trusted them to know these people, and this story, and i didn’t want to do too much and compromise that trust. and in the end, i would argue, returning to simplicity made the story what it was. 

something i love to think about is how to explain my fics to others. i know it’s been said a lot that the ao3 tagging system has convinced a mini generation of writers that tags and names of tropes are all you need to pitch/be pitched a story, and i wholeheartedly agree. or i might just be terrible at advertising my work, with an obnoxious aversion to learning how to do it better to boot, but to be fair, i think my premises are all just as boring as they are ridiculous. flls is a college au with two friends with benefits turned fake boyfriends turned real boyfriends turned exes. that’s it. there’s nothing else in the plot but that. yet it’s a lot more to me than that, and sometimes that’s all you have when you send a story out into the world. the knowledge that it was briefly yours, and now it isn’t, but that doesn’t at all devalue what you’ve taken away from spending time with it. 

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

US april 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | short form, childhood friends

this is one of a handful of attempts at writing a trope i don’t love all that much, inspired largely by the atmosphere in “horatio” by t.j klune. i was very conflicted about this fic when i first published it, primarily because it was so short and written in a sparse style i didn’t know how to evaluate, and partly because it didn’t feel substantial. in a post i’ve put on private since, i’d written: 

what if i repeat the same themes in another context? that doesn’t make the theme carry any less weight as long as i put heart and sincerity and compassion into how i’m writing about it. there’s something that is equally as much self-deprecation as it is borderline vanity in me placing these rules upon myself. i’ve always known i wrote first and foremost out of love, out of what makes me excited to write — and that still applies here. i was thrilled to be able to experiment with a short, snappy fic. and that’s far more important, isn’t it, than whether i’m writing a different dissertation angle on love or friendship or family or career? it doesn’t feel like it, no, but it should, because i know it is. i know that what matters to me is that writing is fun and compassionate, and i know that as long as one person finds comfort in a world i’ve built, it’s enough.

i don’t sound very convinced there, and i wasn’t. i still don’t know what to make about us. i like that it’s short, and i endeavour to write more short fics with nothing specific or significant about them — but it’s hard to stomach its existence, let alone see it as something to love. it just feels so… not empty, but definitely less than what i’m used to asking from myself. it’s short, it’s sweet, it’s snappy. it’s also formulaic in its own sparse way, and i think it works because of the sweetness, but the truth is that if i hadn’t written it for itafushi week, i would never have greenlit it for publishing. i still wrestle nowadays with wanting to delete it, but it matters so little to me that i can’t even justify that much. it’s a weird limbo of a story, though i still hope to explore this kind of writing more in the future. 

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

SOME KIND OF WE june 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | sequel to existing complete story

broke my own rules here by revisiting a story past its run, but to be very fair, it was less out of sentiment (though there was also that) so much as me startling at my first proper reread of the latter half of flls and realizing there are still unresolved arcs for megumi because the final chapter set two years later only had yuuji’s pov. not many of them, and none especially urgent, but i thought it would be a good opportunity to reorient the story to something quieter and more mature than what the central conflicts in flls left room for. i’m not convinced the back-and-forth between pieces of their recent few months being together and the present evening worked as seamlessly as i wanted it to, but it was still a nice opportunity to use a non-linear narrative to explore the growth and development of a relationship that i left at quite the bittersweet open-endedness. what was only delicately certain by the end of flls was made concretely certain through some kind of we, even if it did run a bit too sentimental and saccharine. but i think it can be forgiven, considering what yuuji and megumi went through in flls proper. 

the main challenge of this fic was figuring out which portions of their life post-flls were worth including, and the first draft had five potential sections:

tokyo, for megumi’s first visit back after moving to chiba, mostly dedicated to him realizing that home — after being rooted for so long to this city, this one apartment with his dad, the same neighborhood and transit lines, to the gojo-geto household — now finally belongs somewhere else, with someone else. 

funabashi, most of which was preserved in the version that was published. 

sendai, to visit grandpa itadori’s grave, which i decided to streamline into a single scene at the end of the final some kind of we draft to cut away the excess and break it down to the core of why i wanted them to make this visit — which is to hammer home for yuuji that he isn’t alone anymore, that he has someone taking care of him and loving him without fail and with care, and to give megumi the agency to solidify, for his own sake, that he’s someone who means the whole universe to yuuji. enough that what place is his will always and solely be his, and enough that megumi will be allowed to love and take care of another person in a way that’s both eternal and an ever-evolving work in progress. 

okinawa, for a trip that was only referenced as a backdrop in the final version but that i still like to think a lot about even now. a cc anon said once that the gojo-geto household must be so lonely with all the kids grown up, but as i talked about in another reply once (it’s too far back for me to have time to dig out at this point), i do love to imagine yuuji and megumi being uncles to the next generation, even if not outright parents themselves. sometimes you don’t know what you’re capable of giving as someone who was denied so much as a kid until you see someone so young, a stranger to the world, and know what to give them precisely because you didn’t have it once. and between yuuji not having much family and megumi’s life being complicated by the fact that he has too much family, i think they’re well-equipped to be uncles to tsumiki’s kids and beyond. and i was tempted for a bit to show this in the annual okinawa trips i mentioned in the final version of skow, but there just isn’t enough space without becoming superfluous. 

kuantan, to visit nanami, mostly to reconsolidate the rather serious interaction megumi and nanami had in flls into something gentler, considering he’s still family to yuuji and while nanami might say yuuji doesn’t need his blessing, yuuji will want it anyway. i never did end up writing this part, so it’s not exactly canon to the au and i’m hesitant to make it so, but the idea was to end with megumi asking for both nanami’s blessing and help to propose to yuuji on that malaysia trip.

the end result for this fic was a little lesson for me in cutting and cutting and keeping my hand light on the source, until i’m left with what i consider necessary. the final version of some kind of we is more a collection of vignettes than a straightforward account of megumi and yuuji’s life together post-flls, which i found much more strangely fitting. i feel like i spent so much of flls trying to get them to a point where they’re ready to be with each other, and i just wanted to dedicate skow to them not just making it work but building love on top of the foundations they secure. it’s one thing to portray that through a whole fic dedicated to each milestone; it’s another to write ordinary moments that are made extraordinary because they have chosen that for and with each other. neither of them say i love you out loud in the entire fic, but i wanted there to be no doubt that they do say it. that they do love each other, and that this part isn’t the obstacle it used to be. they’re just some kind of them, together, and this time it doesn’t feel bittersweet for me to send them off to the world for good knowing there’s love falling out of the spaces between each vignette i wrote. 

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

HAND IN UNLOVABLE HAND october 2021, jujutsu kaisen trial element | fantasy au

yikes. one of two fics in this round-up that i abandoned at chapter one. started this because an idea occurred to me while reading the atlas six, wrote until i had to stop, then didn’t look back once even when it would have served me to. 

i flew too eagerly close to the sun with this one, truly, but as far as intentions go, i think both my mind and heart were in the right place. it’s quite clear where this one went wrong: i had neither time nor the energy to dedicate to it; i started it on the same whim i start most other things but this time didn’t have the passion for it — and i confess i just didn’t have the patience required to work on writing the story i wanted to write.

it was also one of those lessons in how often big ideas — or an attempt at them — cannot sustain a story. i had what i thought were clear ideas and intentions about the themes i wanted to cover in this one (the downfall of religious devotion, reconstruction, academic institutions versus personal/individual responsibility, all of which just look like buzzwords now that i’m typing them out, omg), but it just didn’t leave room for the kind of story i like to write. i guess my main takeaway here is that the pitfall of high(er) concept genre stories is that you have to make space for the world at the cost of room for character writing; it’s just the nature of how much space in the narrative you can allot for each individual aspect of the story, and with stuff like fantasy and sci-fi, the worldbuilding takes up a significant amount more than your run-of-the-mill slice of life story where the only world i have to worry about sketching is where someone lives and works. 

i do like some parts? it’s kind of crude, how i tried to reconcile my writing style with genre-specific bits, but it’s not all terrible. this sequence is alright:

Megumi was seven the first time he restored something. 

Every part of it had been an accident, and he remembers it now only in fragments. The wet rag in his hand as he wiped down the dining hall tables, having to climb the chairs to get to each corner. The horrible echo of something shattering in the kitchen, where Tsumiki had been tasked to do all the dishwashing for the evening. The panic on her face when Megumi got to her, both of them crowding around the shards of ceramic left by what was once a plate. The spill of harsh candlelight from above the sink, the harsher shadows it sent dancing around the broken glass. 

But he does remember the remembering. The knowing of what the plate had looked like once, the image behind his eyes anchoring him in place as he latched onto the curl of the shadows on the floor. It would be more intuitive, more rudimentary, than anything he’d learn to do later in life, propelled by the worry on Tsumiki’s face and the footsteps he swore he could hear coming towards them from the other end of the servants’ quarters they called home back then—but it had taken only a single blink for the shadows to cover the plate, tighten around it into darkness, and then retreat to where they were, leaving a clean, untouched plate in the middle of the kitchen floor. 

it could be better, but it still could be worse. and i do like the overall architectural imagery and how i managed to scrounge up some standard fare coziness somewhere in the cold, almost-medieval setting. 

as far as disastrously failed ventures go, this one could be a lot more embarrassing than it is. i’m not mad at it. it’s far from good enough, and if i didn’t write it in such a frenzy, i probably never would have allowed it to be published. but. it’s a useful failure. 

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

PLEASE LET ME LOVE YOU FOREVER march to june 2022, blue period trial element | five-character gen dynamic, multimedia

what a... headache of a project. bit off more than i could chew without choking and decided to take even more bites each new chapter because why the hell not, apparently. i do appreciate how un-edited this fic is, despite it all. it feels the most bleeding-heart of all my fics from this past year or so, and it’s nice to look back at this and know exactly when i shifted my approach to it altogether because, again, why not. it’s such a valuable “why not?” to have. it’s nice when i don’t feel quite as… under surveillance? when writing a story. and i get to just go off the rails a bit. a lot, actually, with this one. it’s nothing crazy because i don’t think i can write anything crazy (though i think hairpin turns had blinks of it), but there’s definitely plenty of choices that i’m surprised i decided on with a sober mind. 

to be fair, they weren’t exactly mindblowingly successful. if i were to rate this fic out of five, despite all my fondness for it, i’d maybe give it a 2.75. it’s a well-earned mark, and i have a special soft spot for people who have read it, but i’m not mentally proud of it. emotionally so, maybe, in whatever way i can be, but if this fic didn’t feel so intimate with a much cozier readership and comment section, i’d be a lot crueler to it than i am, i think. as it is, it makes for wonderful conversation and reflection for me, and it’s always fun to consider how a story about a disbanded idol group became a metaphor for childhoods lost to growing up too fast and also involved alternate universes. 

but cycling through five povs really is too much, i think, and if it was exhausting for me to write then i imagine it was just as exhausting to read. a nicer alternative would have been to stick to one pov for each chapter, but even that was a lot to juggle considering there were also smaller dynamics going on in the background with each character. within the core group of five alone, there were thirty-one variations of scenes to write, including individual introspection and pairs — and that’s not to take into consideration trios, or groups of four or the whole five plus a secondary character, for example. i don’t know how i pulled off my usual character study here. i don’t know if i did. 

another thing about this fic is that i’m still not sure why a time loop didn’t work. i wanted it so badly to work. i thought it would be fun, but i guess time loops aren’t necessarily compatible with prose. there’s something about repetition and looping that’s best visually, but even if i had been able to stick to imagery and vibes, it would have gotten tedious at some point for me and a reader considering the quantity/length i tend to need. just something to keep in mind if i get the urge to keep trying time loops in future works and wonder why it’s not sticking seamlessly. as with a lot of things in life, if you have to force it then maybe it’s not meant to be there. or maybe you have to go shortform, narrow down the playing field?

one thing i’d commend this fic for is how it managed to unpack so much between dynamics that barely exist in canon. that, and how it managed to pack so many formats into one story — song lyrics, album reviews, tweets, a play, nonfiction, a profile, wikipedia pages, messages, i don’t even know how many more — while maintaining a semi-cohesive tone throughout. there was a lot of fun there, in figuring out how to adapt your typical characterizing to a format you haven’t tried before: how would kuwana write a preface to hashida’s book? would this particular character include rhymes in their song lyrics, or are they more of a diaristic stream of consciousness kind of lyricist? what medium best translates this character’s personality? what medium best conveys this dynamic’s under-the-skin knowing of each other? who sees more than the others, and how can i show that without using the same structure of two or three characters talking in a setting that doesn’t change? 

my favourite part is probably the fake album review at the top of chapter four? there’s something giddying about the research-like quality of figuring out how to perfect the tone that music reviewers tend to default to, but also sobering about how easily adapted this fake idol group’s history is from real life. the easiest part of the entire fic was making this group feel real to me, situated in the real life history of j-idols and beyond, even if i admit to shying away from being explicit about the worst things that would still have been grounded in reality. some references to real life idol incidents worked a little too well, but there was also how clean it felt to spin fictional lore for this group in that fake album review. from their individual songwriting styles to tobi’s own background in-story to the kind of themes and concepts a faux pretentious pitchfork reviewer might like to talk about — it was just incredibly fun. i don’t know when else i’d get the chance to write something like that. everything else paled in comparison to it soon after, though i do also tolerate whatever my writing was doing at the end of chapter five, even if some parts of that chapter also feel lacklustre through a hypercritical lens. it doesn’t hold up under extremely rigorous scrutiny, even if i consider the fact that i’d just wanted the fic wrapped up as soon as i could at the time. it could be better, more so than all the other fics in this post could be better. but i don’t mind too much that it isn’t better. i mind it a little. just a little. but its flawedness is also what forced the multimedia format to happen in the first place, and that, i like a lot.

there’s a fair amount that this fic did quite more than alright, i think. if nothing else, it was useful as a playground that i didn’t have to be too finicky about. it will be one of those projects i’ll look back at someday and laugh deliriously over because how did i think that was the only way to make it work, but with the facilities i had at the time, it’s definitely not a shitshow. it has a lot of heart — which doesn’t necessarily redeem awful works, but in passable ones, those parts of the writing meet each other halfway. please let me love you forever holds its own weight, which is plenty more than i can say for most of my other experiments. plus it contains a background relationship that is not at all the focus of the story yet will probably haunt me forever. it’s always the ones you least expect to matter that will ripple further down the line, etc.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

LOSER TAKES ALL july 2022, tomodachi game trial element | soulmates, mystery au

another unpublished little guy left to rot at one complete chapter. i don’t really have any huge problems with this one, just that i tired of its demands very quickly and didn’t have enough attachment to the dynamics in it to muster up any motivation for. but tomodachi game, and especially yuuichi and kei, are so uniquely positioned for a fic like this, and i don’t resent past me for approaching it this way at all. is a soulmate bond that fosters a telepathic link between people who come back from a brush with death kind of an unhinged premise for a mystery au? yes. but so is remodeling a breakfast restaurant with my mom and the guy i didn’t know confessed to me in high school and who is now literally displaced in more ways than one by said remodeling, and even also acting is all i know so here i am trying to find the love of my life by dating anyone for an entire month on a first come first serve basis only to be shocked when that doesn’t work. 

again. boring yet equally ridiculous elevator pitches. if i cemented anything for a fact from this abandoned wip, it’s that my premises have always been questionable, and that time and time again, the only path forward is to lean all the way into it — which i did with hairpin turns, thankfully. hand in unlovable hand and loser takes all are apart by about a year, and there’s palpable change here in my approach to worldbuilding even if i abandoned each for unrelated reasons. granted, i might just be better suited to one side of speculative fiction than the other, but that’s such a copout. when it comes to trying new things in writing, the “if he wanted to, he would” logic applies, even if the he in question ultimately finds that it doesn’t work the way he wants it to (like in hand in unlovable hand). 

loser takes all worked fine for me, and i loved the inherent intimacy in having two incredibly smart and perceptive characters in each other’s minds while trapped in this soulmate bond that isn’t necessarily romantic. not to mention yuuichi is a deeply unwell person, and his ways of showing attachment to kei range from drastically protective, such as offering to fire the receptionist that was rude to kei, to:

Sometimes, watching Kei asleep right against him, Yuuichi wants to press his lips against Kei’s pulse. To feel it warm and alive under his mouth, to hear that little sigh of ticklish laughter Kei does if someone so much as runs a soft cloth against his neck. 

And sometimes—sometimes Yuuichi is also seized by a strong thought, a strong urge, to sink something sharp into that pulse. His teeth, a fork, a shard of broken glass. Sink it in hard, deep enough to leave a bloody bruise, a scar, a puncture. Hard enough to maybe even sever that heartbeat, to tear it, slit it into silence somehow. Hard enough that it feels almost the kinder choice to imagine himself wrapping his hands around Kei’s neck—tightening them without hesitation, itself a mercy of a kind as the blood quickly drains out of Kei’s cheeks. Yuuichi imagines then how Kei will struggle, whether he’ll kick or bite Yuuichi, if he’ll reverse their positions with one twist of a martial arts trained body, or if he’ll just accept it, resign himself to it knowing that not even this, if it’s Yuuichi, could possibly be meaningless.

But it would be. It would be meaningless to kill Kei. Meaningless because Kei is singular in his position within Yuuichi’s life, loyal and intelligent and a force to be reckoned with like no one else is, not even Yuuichi’s sister, not even the only friend he trusts most. Meaningless because every time Yuuichi pictures it, every time he wonders if he’ll have it in him to press two killer’s hands around Kei’s neck, it doesn’t take long for the accompanying sting to come like a splash of boiling water on exposed skin. A kind of scolding, a kind of reminder, that just as much as it would be difficult for anyone to kill Kei—so impervious to physical harm, whose broken bones and bleeding wounds will always heal even if he jumps off a twenty-story building—it would be just as difficult for Yuuichi to do him harm and survive it without any damage done to his own heart at his own hands. 

the temptation to keep writing this is not entirely absent, to be honest. but a mystery takes care and attention, and i just don’t have that in me the way this story deserves. but this fic was delicious to write, and i think it gave me a hunger to write more dynamics that feel just as juicy. dynamics that aren’t necessarily geared towards healthy love, but ones that ooze if poked anyway. 

i definitely want to revisit the telepathy plot device i explored here someday, but for now, this fic, abandoned wip as it is, is kind of the goldilocks midpoint between failed venture (hand in unlovable hand), almost-passable venture (please let me love you forever), and basically there if being there counts taking your literal first baby step into a new frontier (days of brutalism and hairpin turns).

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

HONORARY MENTIONS

i don’t mean to ignore the canonverse fics (here and where you are, i’ll give you something so real, detour, and the two manhwa fics, that is) out of favouritism, but i’m afraid there’s nothing much to say…? not that these weren’t lessons in themselves, but canonverse takes a quarter of the energy and brainpower to write, and i’ll be lying if i don’t go about them essentially all no thoughts, head empty. i talked a bit about here and where you are here, while the logic for detour, which i was happy to write for and based on exchanges with a friend, is pretty self-explanatory. i did love getting to write a character like loid (and i’m relieved that the chapters that follow the ones i took into consideration for that fic hold up the characterization i imagined for him) + it was interesting to give sexual content and the philosophy of desire or whatever a shot in i’ll give you something so real. they were effective at what i needed them to do — which is, really, just to check the temperature of the water. i always feel so rusty when any amount of time passes without me writing, and these small, low-maintenance fics work as a burst of ice cold water before jumping in. i don’t value these fics any less for their place in The Process, and i might even be extra happy when someone likes them, but as far as Advancing The Craft 🤢 goes, all of these are simply necessary bridges to get to the next checkpoint. sometimes you gotta scratch the tip of the pen before the ink starts bleeding like it’s supposed to. words are the same. it takes a while each time to get my writing to a place i recognize, and sometimes a while is an entire fic before i can write the next chapter for an ongoing multi-chaptered story.

(that said: shoutout to the particular flavour of introspection in detour, within which my favourite line was written the literal minute before i sent it off, and a big heart emoji for the fact that i’ll give you something so real unfolds in a span of barely half a day. both are very interesting to think about moving forward.)

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

DAYS OF BRUTALISM AND HAIRPIN TURNS january 2023, blue lock trial element | a romantic triad, sci-fi, memory loss (finally!) 

my angel. my darling. my love. who is far from being perfect but is the closest i’ve had to at least being sure i won’t just wake up one day loathing the soul out of it. i’ll laugh at it, probably. i’ll think it’s hilarious and cringy someday soon. but it’s a work i can’t not appreciate wholeheartedly. 

my cc tells me that the first time i put it on record that i won’t mind doing a blue lock fic is may 16, 2022, and the fact that i didn’t even make it a year and did so in the most Hard To Pitch If This Was An Actual Novel And Not Just A Fic For Fun way possible is worth at least a salute of disbelief, i think. my journal from my writing hiatus also tells me i’ve been trying to make memory loss work since 2020 and managed to scratch the itch minutely with here and where you are (which is… a pretty janky piece of work, looking back now) — but i’m just really, really content, even proud, of how i managed to weave it into a fic adapted from a story about football battle royale. 

it’s almost kind of unnerving how satisfied i am with the premise of hairpin turns, even if the execution leaves quite a bit to be desired — as it always will, really, and therein is the joy of finding the next writing project. i laughed a lot at myself while writing hairpin turns, and of all the inside jokes that my works started as, this one is by far the fic to feel most like it — a fun little joke that got funnier and funnier the more of it i wrote, and so i wrote more, chasing that laughter until it was time to catch my breath. and i think with how much i require writing to feel urgent and single-minded to be fun, there’s a part of me that’s easily... bored, for lack of a better word, when something doesn’t give me that. without this fast-paced almost-violence, i get bored and restless, the way i was around all the projects i had lined up after please let me love you forever. i’m making a face as i type that but maybe i just mean to say that there were a good few months there where nothing scratched the itch in need of stimulation. i’d write scenes and they wouldn’t be awful, wouldn’t even be bad, but they weren’t exciting to me. they weren’t thrilling. they didn’t feel like i was dissecting anything, just poking at skin with a scalpel and rolling my eyes when i didn’t draw blood from a dead body — you know? 

but projects have an uncanny way of arriving in your life when you most need it, and just when i have peeled and replaced my wallpaper and assembled and reassembled my keyboards and poked at this manuscript i refuse to rewrite until i did a warm-up that felt substantial enough, the blue lock anime started airing. i knew vaguely what dynamics i wanted to write even back when i had only the manga, but i know i could not have tortured this fic out of me then. not before please let me love you forever, not before loser takes all, not even before all my failed attempts at pitching speculative fiction stories to myself at 3 AM and gritting my teeth at my own disgust. the best aus fall into your lap fully formed and fully realized before you even know what you’ll be shaping it into; they’re a little predestined that way, and aus might be why i owe fanfiction my certainty that the author is just as possessed by the narrative if the narrative has its own pace and direction. i think that’s logic that should be applicable to original projects as well. 

i did hesitate in the very beginning of hairpin turns because sci-fi was such a huge deviation from my comfort zone and i have the misfortune of being both a taurus sun and an enneagram type five. i’ve never tried writing proper sci-fi, not even a little, let alone enough to be comfortable with knowing where to start something that wasn’t merely regular slice of life with a slight sprinkling of specfic. i was sure my writing style wouldn’t be a good match for it. i still don’t think it’s a match, necessarily. my prose is a bit too sentimental for some of the demands sci-fi asked of me — and that’s fine. i wouldn’t know the precise nature of that incompatibility if i hadn’t jumped into the pool of sharks and came out of the tank somehow, disbelievingly, friends with them. i began wary of relying too much on technobabble since i’m not exactly the most stem-oriented person around, but even the background of this au wrote itself, half because blue lock was a shockingly perfect match for the world i had in my mind and half because i found that the technology i imagined for the plot was both possible and easy to break down into the narrative. even now i’m still shocked at how scientifically sound the core pitch of the story is, and the fact that it married itself well to both the overarching plot and the character dynamics i wanted to highlight was just icing on a cake i would have tried to politely finish anyway. 

it could very well be that hairpin turns is just a fluke, its parts too seamlessly glued to each other that i’m not sure it could have been anything else except luck doing the work there, but i think there’s also credit to be found in how nothing is sacred in blue lock. these are characters who have done ridiculous things and said ridiculous things, and it was a matter of matching their energy. therein is the same lesson from loser takes all: if i’ve always known that characters decide the pace, tone and atmosphere of the story and everything else in it, then doesn’t it also go to say that in order to write a story far out of my comfort zone, i need only start with characters far outside of my comfort zone?

i think with au fics in particular, a lot of the work begins with justifying why certain things are in character for them in this universe based on what we know from canon. but because those boundaries are expanded by what blue lock innately is, it doesn’t feel as weird to posit something like, what if you and your android bf get tasked with rescuing his older brother’s android bf and find out along the way that you might also both be in love with your childhood best friend? as with most other of my initial ideas, this quickly spiraled into something significantly different — which luckily for me included the memory loss idea that i’ve been wanting to explore for forever now. proper sci-fi was the perfect backdrop for it, and bachira the perfect person to willingly do it, and isagi and rin the perfect people to be left in the aftermath of that loss. stars aligned, truly. i’m incredibly grateful for it. 

whatever challenges i encountered writing this fic had nothing to do with writing it. it was as smooth to write as it was an absolute pain to edit, because the three povs are so vastly different from each other, and with no outline to mentally check each time i add a new scene, i was reliant on going back and forth again and again to make sure the worldbuilding is cohesive and the plot is coherent. at some point i couldn’t look at it anymore, and it might even be a testament to how much i appreciate the fic that i still can’t look at it now yet cannot deny how fond i am of the final result. 

with sci-fi in particular, it really is a case of faking it till you make it, and whatever lies don’t feed into each other, you can always revisit and adjust later. that’s the common sense magic of fiction, i suppose. there’s a degree of patience i held onto writing hairpin turns that i wouldn’t have had with any other previous work, and i think it benefited me more to have all three chapters written in varying increments, out of my usual linear order, than publishing it chapter by chapter. i had all the room to experiment — what does the world look like in 2070? is 2070 even the right year to set this in? is there anything big happening around that time period? how does the lingo change in the time between present and this potential future? when i run into things that feel too out of my depth to write, like isagi’s pov for instance, do i actually have a justification for saying no other than how it will be easier than trying? are there benefits to giving bachira the final chapter that i’m being biased against because i think it would be a challenge? and between all of these choices, how do i adapt existing blue lock canon, from their playstyles to the favourites listed in the egoist bible, to worldbuilding in other forms of media that i’ve always wanted to try a different approach to? 

i used to think it was unnecessary and superfluous to go into writing something while getting bogged down by stray facts about characters, in both fic and original projects, but at the same time, it’s truly the tiny details that will humanize more than knowing a character’s birthday or what traumatic events lie in their backstory. tiny details that breed more tiny details, until it’s about the fact that bachira and isagi are childhood friends in this au yet when we meet bachira again he’s calling isagi by last name, or how rin understandably questions the validity of his own humanness because we can only assume sae had recreated him in grief or defiance against mortality or whatever other emotion that we’ll never know for sure because we only ever see sae in this fic through rin, and that matters a lot more than if i gave sae a pov — and yet rin manages to love through the small things, in how the warehouse is in an eternal sunset waiting for bachira to return to him and isagi. it’s about how first love, late spring was about learning how to love someone else the way they need you to when you weren’t loved the way you needed to be, but hairpin turns is about how spending your whole life never questioning if you were loved can rob you of the facilities to put a name and shape to what you feel for someone who’s always been in your life. the things you don’t take for granted, necessarily, but you do love for granted by not calling it love.

hairpin turns is about the pieces obscured from view and all the more present because of it. it’s about lost memories, the phantom outline of a person like a haunting. it’s about how sae never once appears in a direct scene yet he looms over rin’s existence. it’s about how rin’s chapter represents the past, isagi’s the present and bachira’s the future, but time matters little in the end — how could it weigh any more, in a story about memory? it’s about the uneasy momentary peace that’s the only scene we can count on as a happy ending. it’s about the lengths you’ll go to get the chance to be ordinary about your love, even if all else about it is unconventional. 

and yet above all, what i like best about this fic is that it works towards questions that feel like being given answers. some of my other fics try to provide answers to its characters and the readers they resonate with, to give them a way to be well-equipped to move forward, while a few other fics settle on non-answers because uncertainty is the only ending there is. but hairpin turns moves outward only to ask more questions, questions that are the answers and the thesis, yet in a way that isn’t strictly open-ended. and i have no fucking clue how i managed it, but this feels like the target i’ve been itching to catch sight of this entire time. this is the kind of story and process i would like to aspire to this year, and even though it had taken me 80k to glean what i needed from it, i’m glad i stayed with this fic as a warm-up. 

anyway. this got a bit away from me, and who knows, maybe this level of pretentiousness is only because i’m still riding the high of affection for my most recent brainchild to make it to college — but i’m not totally blind to the flaws in hairpin turns. the execution of the ending itself is clunky, not because it doesn’t resolve anything but because it does, and by then, the post-rescue section has gone on for long enough that even an ending feels like an epilogue. the story overall lacks complete confidence in what it is, with some parts shadowed by a slight hovering hesitation and others weighed down by a heavy hand showing too much kindness to my non-confidence. it’s never too heavy-handed, and definitely not so much that i’ll send it to the bin, but enough that if i want something to pick apart, there are stray choices hiding in places that i’d circle as an editor for feeling too sentimental, or the tone too dissonant with the pacing, or, ironically, not explored enough. in the genre i’m used to writing, the adrenaline rush is in finding the right balance within a new choreography for a dance style i know well, but in my first real foray into speculative fiction, i think i was just trying to find my footing the whole time. i’m still surprised i made it to the other end of the tightrope, honestly. i didn’t expect to applaud myself for the bare minimum, and i still don’t. 

but all of this is a lesson for me, too. what i do know is that it’s interesting to tell a story about what’s missing, about the unsaid and the unseen, and if that’s what it will take for me to rediscover excitement in what i write so that i don’t have to sink back into the ennui of these last couple of months, then that’s a pretty darn fun goal to spend the rest of the year unpacking. 

[bpod-bpod]

Creating Curves

Look at yourself head-on in the mirror. Is your spine straight or curved? In idiopathic scoliosis (IS), the spine curves sideways. Researchers investigate how this develops using zebrafish with genetically mutated ccdc57 protein. MicroCT revealed ccdc57 mutants had scoliosis (pictured, bottom) compared with normal zebrafish (top), and accumulated fluid in their brains due to disrupted movement of cell projections called cilia on ependymal cells, which line brain cavities. Ccdc57 is found at the base of cilia and controls the top-to-bottom identity (polarity) of ependymal cells. Fluorescence microscopy revealed that defects in ependymal cell polarity in developing mutants occurred simultaneously with scoliosis. Mutant spinal cords also showed abnormal distribution of urotensin, a hormone involved in body axis development. Human IS patients similarly showed abnormal urotensin signalling in their spinal muscles, detected through RNA analysis of muscle samples. Ependymal cell polarity defects and urotensin signalling are, therefore, key processes in scoliosis.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Image from work by Haibo Xie and Yunsi Kang, and colleagues

Institute of Evolution & Marine Biodiversity, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in PLOS Biology, March 2023

You can also follow BPoD on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook

[transition-with-the-torah]

Title: We Need To Talk About Antisemitism

Author: Rabbi Diana Fersko

Format / Cost: Free (via Libby); 2023 current/first edition.

There are eight chapters covering antisemitism, microaggressions, Christianity, the Holocaust, race, Israel, accountability, and the future.

The author is an American rabbi and quite a few of the examples are based in American culture or discussions, such as modern US-based discussions of conditional whiteness in the chapter on racializing Jews. However, I do think this seems like a pretty good overview of how historical antisemitism has functioned and affects modern strains of antisemitism, including in politically Left-leaning circles.

(This has been tagged with #reviews for personal blog organization purposes and may not be a satisfying or complete review for others. This was finished on the 21st of March but scheduled to post after Purim [23rd through 24th].)

Ch 1: We Need To Talk About Antisemitism

Section: What Even Is Antisemitism?

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance defines antisemitism as "a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities." [...] He [Rabbi Jonathan Sacks] famously taught that "antisemitism is not allowing Jews to exist collectively the way we allow others to exist collectively."

The author gives a list of beliefs that have been held together by the logic-less 'conspiracy theory' of antisemitism, which includes well-known lies (like blood libel and punishing Jews for deicide) and new to me lies (like Jews control the weather). It's why antisemitism doesn't fall apart by direct contradictions like "fascists called Jews communists while communists called Jews capitalists."

Antisemitism is a collection of contradictions, but it doesn't matter. Pick the major cultural problem and project it onto the Jews—that's antisemitism.

Section: How Do Antisemites Think?

As a cover, antisemitic accusations throughout history have been coupled with arguments that suggest the problem wasn't the Jews per se, just the things the Jews did. If we would only stop doing those things, we could live in peace. I call this If only the Jews would... type of thinking. The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that "the euthanasia of Judaism can only be achieved by means of a pure, moral religion, and the abandonment of all of its old regulations." His idea was to take the Judaism out of the Jew. It's a fancy way of saying, If only the Jews would stop being Jewish, we could accept them.

Section: How Does Antisemitism Survive?

The author presents three theories: 1) antisemitism "maintains its appeal by latching on to the highest values of any given society" (religious ideas were most valued in the medieval period so it used devilish religious behaviors, science was most valued in the Enlightenment period so it used race science and eugenics, late 20th-century and forward values have been based around civil rights so Israel [and therefore all Jews] must be the worst violator of human rights ever); 2) antisemitism is a contagious virus (so, like viral spread, antisemitism isn't isolated to one demographic or geographic area) that can mutate and lay dormant before being noticeable again, and 3) antisemitism survives when we don't talk about it.

Ch 2: We Need To Talk About Microaggressions

Microaggressions are much less harmful than the actual violence against Jews. However, they are their own type of injury, the everyday papercuts that Jews encounter. They are the slights that we can just ignore, the vaguely anti-Jewish sentiments that we feel but can't necessarily name. They come from what historian Deborah Lipstadt calls "the dinner party antisemite," the people who make casual but hurtful comments.

The author proposes narrowing as "the practice of restricting Jewish identity to a specific, inflexible, and incomplete Jewish stereotype." Narrowing Jewish Looks goes into 'white skin', hooked or big noses, frizzy or unkempt hair, probably fat, and negative connotations around "looking Jewish" that erases the diversity of how Jews actually can look. Some of this has to do with current day racial differentiation in the US, some of it can overlap with fatphobia, and some of it has to do with historical differences (such as thinking Jews have literal horns). Narrowing Jewish Behavior discusses presumptions about religious observance (the less hidden your observance, the 'more Jewish' you are), skill assumptions (including Jews being better lawyers and financial professionals), and attempts to use comedy as a loophole for presenting a sliding scale of antisemitism - but only as a joke. Narrowing The Jewish Stories We Tell is about a focus on news media and fictional media for leaving Judaism (specifically how Orthodox and Hasidic communities are repressive, antiquated, and must be left entirely). Narrowing Our Own Identity is about hiding your own Jewishness, beating others to the microaggression punch, and the importance of Jews sharing what Jews are like with others [instead of letting non-Jewish people recycle these narrowing stereotypes].

Ch 3: We Need To Talk About Christianity

Even acknowledging any friction between Jews and our Christian counterparts feels like a sensitive topic. Today, Christians and Jews coexist in unparalleled peace in America. Most non-Orthodox Jews I know have Christian family members. My synagogue has Christian board members, and many people in my community have chosen to raise Jewish children in a family where one parent is Jewish and the other is not. [...] That lived reality makes it hard to believe that antisemitism was once fueled by Christianity and even harder to believe that Christian-based antisemitism still exists.

Tbh, I do not find this hard to believe, but I have a feeling that watching people reblog 'Jesus killer' type posts around Xmas 2023 isn't considered a typical exposure to this conversation.

Section: Christian Antisemitism In The Past

Historically, the goal of Christian antisemitism was to distance Christianity as far away from Judaism as possible. The early church was eager, desperate even, to show that Christians and Jews were wholly different. More than that, Jews were dangerous, we were deviants, and Christians should stay far away from us. For hundred of years, Christianity viewed Judaism as a threat. [...] The existence of both traditions was theologically inconsistent. If Judaism was theologically correct, then Christianity was theologically incorrect. Judaism therefore represented an existential threat to Christianity, to which Christian thinkers responded by calling for Jews to give up our beliefs or face violence.

Section: Jews And Money

In the medieval period, merchants and craftspeople began organizing themselves into guilds, which were sort of like professional schools or medical boards. If you wanted to do certain jobs or produce certain goods, you had to be in a guild. Guess who wasn't allowed in? At the same time, the church forbade Christians from working in banking, as they were not permitted to lend money or charge interest. And thus, unable to participate in most mainstream jobs, the Jews were pushed into the world of finance. With this, perhaps the most pervasive stereotype against the Jews became solidified. The Jew became known as a greedy moneylender, controlling the banks, trying to dominate Christian lives through money. That's why, hundreds of years later, a nine-year-old boy in Manhattan has pennies thrown at his feet.

This certainly isn't the only aspect of Xtian antisemitism that started from the early Xtian Church wanting to differentiate itself or that started in the medieval times, but this isn't trying to be a complete history of Xtian antisemitism.

Section: The Christmas Assumption

But Christian antisemitism has found a way to continue to survive. Because today, Christian antisemitism does the opposite of what it used to do. Instead of insisting that Jews are wholly different from Christians, it insists that Jews are wholly the same as Christians. [...] The Christmas assumption is a way of asserting that Jewish rituals are basically Christian rituals in disguise.

While I've absolutely run into this Xtian hegemony before, it feels like a different level of exhaustion to realize that even a rabbi is asked about observing Xmas 'because it's not religious anymore'. (Even a rabbi!)

Section: Christian Antisemitism Today

The Xmas assumption is just one way that Jewish identity gets minimized, and it's not always something that one could consider just a little bit of minimization. The Xtian day of rest and church attendance is assumed to be your day of rest, and trying to get days off from work and/or school for Jewish holidays can turn into A Whole Thing.

Being a Jewish American is also different than being a Christian American in more substantive ways. It means that your elected officials are most often not observers of your religion. It means that laws and policies are informed by Christian beliefs and sometimes violate your own religious beliefs. It means your education has a Christian-dominant perspective. [...] Being a Jew in America right now means that you probably don't casually identify your religion in public without experiencing anxiety. [...] The most significant way that being a Jewish American differs from being a Christian American is that Jews are not as safe as our Christian counterparts.

Some people will hit or physically attack someone who's wearing a Magen David or a kippah. [In some areas, this is directed at Jewish communities that are perceived to be Orthodox or have very distinctive means of dress, like Hasidim.] Others may bring a weapon into a synagogue and attempt to hurt or kill people, which isn't exactly a hypothetical. This is brought up in relation to a Xtian friend of the author who wanted to attend a service during the High Holy Days who was clueless that there would be security, and not a denial that some Xtians may also not have guaranteed safety 100% of the time (specifically, I'm thinking of the Mother Emanuel AME Church and the anti-Black shooting there in 2015, since President Biden's visit to that church wasn't that long ago).

Ch 4: We Need To Talk About The Holocaust

Sometimes the Holocaust is used for humor; other times, it's used for politics; sometimes it's used for self-advancement. But in our culture, it's almost always used. The Holocaust is no longer presented as a tragedy in its own right. Now it's a vehicle for someone else's cause. A path to something else. A metaphor.

While there is a politically Right-leaning example, this isn't just a problem in those circles.

Flat Holocaust is the culturally aggressive miniaturization of the genocide against the Jewish people. It means narrowing history's greatest crime against humanity—a crime both intimate and individual, and one incomprehensibly vast—and turning it into a vehicle, an analogy. It's simplifying something that remains unfathomably complicated. It's reducing the crime with no name, for which the term genocide was invented, into a synonym for the word "bad." It's making the Holocaust into a metaphor rather than a distinct, horrifying event in Jewish history. Flat Holocaust is not the Holocaust. It's the mini Holocaust. It's a shadow Holocaust. It's a caricature. It's a lazy, cheap way to define one's own pain. We hear about the Holocaust a fair amount in public discourse today, but we don't actually talk about it. Instead, we use the Holocaust to talk about ourselves. That's Flat Holocaust.

Five proposed reasons for why the 'Flat Holocaust' happens: 1) The Holocaust is so large of an event that it's hard to wrap your brain around it, which can make it easier to fall into generalizations or grow desensitized to it; 2) When you nearly wipe out a particular minority group, there are fewer people to talk about what happened; 3) "Pain, trauma, and humiliation don't make people want to tell their stories" in the aftermath [to say nothing of enough time passing that there are fewer direct survivors to share their firsthand experience]; 4); With the poor state of Holocaust education in the public school system, a lot of people don't really learn about the Holocaust (or pick up random pieces of knowledge from pop culture and social media); and 5) Antisemitism.

Section: The Result Of Flat Holocaust

Holocaust denial has different shades of denial, and the author uses a pyramid analogy with total denial at the top/peak. Lower down, there's "de-Judaizing the Holocaust" by focusing on other demographic groups killed, especially if it's done in such a way as to make the other demographics the main target of Nazi persecution. There's also "Holocaust minimization" by not wanting to hear anything about the Holocaust 'because it was so long ago' or decreasing the size and scope of the deaths (there's a study cited that half of Millennials believe two to three million Jews were killed instead of six million). [This can also look like downplaying or ignoring that the Holocaust wasn't focused on one particular country and had effects outside of Europe.] At the analogous bottom of this pyramid is "Holocaust omission" where there's a lack of mentioning the Holocaust when it actually would be an appropriate time to do so.

In an effort to counteract the Flat Holocaust, there's a section after Chapter 8 with an excerpt of Fela Warschau's testimony from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and there's interviews with a few third-generation survivors as Millennial grandchildren become the latest to carry on their family's experiences.

Ch 5: We Need To Talk About Race

What is happening with the way we talk about Jews and race in America? Neo-Nazis are talking about the "Jewish race," arguing that Jews in America secretly plot to overthrow whiteness by replacing white people with people of color. Pockets of the progress left are talking about the "Jewish race," framing Jews as part of a white majority that reinforces racial oppression merely by continuing our existence, as my professor suggested [by asking if a Jew marrying another Jew was racist]. And fringe groups like the Radical Hebrew Israelite movement are talking about the "Jewish race," arguing that the Jews usurp Black identity and that African Americans are the true Jews.

Section: The Holocaust Was About Race

Before the Nazis, conversion was often a way to escape antisemitism. [...] In the Nazi mind, Jews were a separate, inferior race, so we were unchangeable, incapable of conversion. Being a Jew was no longer a matter of theology, family, or identity; it was a matter of biology.

Gestures towards race science and eugenics.

As a government, they [the Nazis] proudly and eagerly pursued the goal of breeding a more gifted race. They believed the Aryan race was morally, genetically, and intrinsically superior to the "Jewish race." This is why it is maddening to be told that the Holocaust was not about race.

For those who have not heard of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (often shortened to Protocols), there's a brief explanation of how that book combined the older Xtian ideas of antisemitism with the comparatively newer ideas of race science.

Section: The Far Right: How Neo-Nazis Racialize Jews Today

The Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 didn't pick "Jews will not replace us" as one of their chants during the march for absolutely zero reason. The great replacement theory is an idea that white people are being infiltrated by and tricked by Jews who look white but aren't white. There's also a component of Jews being in another 'secret cabal' and causing immigration, using political control to influence civil rights wins for people of color, and otherwise increasing the amount of people of color compared to white people. Basically: "Generations after the rise of the Nazis, the Nazi idea still survives. To white supremacists, Jews are a race, and certainly not a white race. Instead, we are a race that poses the ultimate threat to whiteness."

Section: The Far Left: How Parts Of The Progressive Left Racialize Jews Today

On the far right, Jews are not white enough, but on the far left, Jews are white, and sometimes the ultimate whites.

This isn't about negating discussions of conditional whiteness or some light-skinned Jews being white passing. This is more about how older antisemitic ideas of Jews having money and power take on a little modern twist to be about a White Jew essentially being a White European, a colonizer, and a white supremacist. This idea of the White Jew isn't just the very top of rich, white privilege – Jews were the 'international group' orchestrating the slave trade, absolutely zero Jews anywhere could possibly be non-white, and 'Jewish privilege' is different enough from white privilege to have its own moniker.

Section: Black Extremism

I've chosen to label this section with the term Black extremism to remind us all that these ideas are by definition extreme—they do not represent the mainstream of the Black community by any means. And they should not be confused with a discussion of Jews who are Black.

This section covers two groups. The Radical Hebrew Israelites is used to describe a subgroup of the Hebrew Israelite umbrella (formerly the Black Hebrew Israelites, but outside terminology has changed as non-Black people of color have increased their membership), since each individual group can have a different attitude towards Jews. The Nation of Islam has put forward different beliefs over the decades, but the leadership of Louis Farrakhan starting in 1981 has included him repeating Protocols-style antisemitism.

Broadly speaking, the core belief of Hebrew Israelites is that Black people in the US are considered the true modern descendants of the biblical Israelites (with some groups allowing non-Black people of color as corresponding to other biblical tribes within the Kingdom of Israel). As far as I can tell, most of the less fringe groups separate themselves from Judaism without antagonizing Jews, especially if they incorporate the New Testament and more Xtian belief and practice into their Old Testament inspired "Jewish" practice. The more fringe Radical Hebrew Israelite groups can view white Americans as the devil (or descendants of a biblical devil stand-in, referred to as Edomites), claim some amount of Jews will be killed with the Edomites during Armageddon, and whoever survives Armageddon will be enslaved by them in the post-Armageddon world. At least one group is known for antagonistic street preaching and verbally harassing people – homophobia, transphobia, anti-Asian Covid-19 stuff, anti-Middle Eastern xenophobia, and so on.

When it comes to the Nation of Islam, it kind of depends on when and under whose leadership you're trying to look into. Like, an ancient African scientist named Yakub actually might have created white people a couple thousand years ago, so they're not really people like whoever's descended from Africans. Or the founder, who is more important than the Prophet Muhammad, will return in a spaceship to wipe out white people and establish a Black led utopia. (When the founder's son became the leader in the 1970s, he tried to expunge these non-Islamic beliefs, incorporated more Sunni beliefs, opened up memberships to non-Black people – including whites – and officially renamed the NOI in his move to make it more of a mainstream Islamic movement.) Those who wanted to carry on the NOI created a successor group with the same name in the late 1970s, which is where Louis Farrakhan came into play as the new leader. He has blamed an international cabal of Jews for the slave trade, praised Hitler, said Jews control the media/banks/US government, claimed Jews were spreading AIDS, and who knows what else on Twitter. According to his Wiki page, he's also gotten into Dianetics since the 2010s, though he maintains that the Nation of Islam is separate from Scientology.

[Note: I also did some outside googling, so not all of these details are in the book.]

Section: Where Does Racializing Jews Lead?

Jews have a specific, painful, lengthy relationship with race that doesn't lend itself to broad brushstrokes or binary racial categories. Jews are not a race. And when we force race upon the Jewish people, antisemitism comes out the other side.

Some physical attacks on Jews are attributed to involvement in the above Black extremist groups, but it's not really about comparing the exact number of attacks from white supremacists to them (or even how many more white supremacists there are in the US). Environments that are open to and encourage antisemitism can be dangerous regardless of the political direction it comes from.

Ch 6: We Need To Talk About Israel

The way we talk about Israel in this country is infused with antisemitism. And talking about that is really, really hard. It's hard because, for those of us on the political left, naming this antisemitism involves calling out people with whom we often agree. It's hard because there is so much emotion infused into the Israel discourse from every imaginable angle.

Section: Anti-Israel Antisemitism In America Targets American Jews

Online, many insist that this shaming is about Israel's government, not about Jews at all, and certainly not about American Jews. I guess the men driving those vans screaming "Fuck the Jews" down the streets of Manhattan didn't get the message. I'm not overly interested in analyzing people's intentions in criticizing Israel. I'm interested in discussing the outcome of that criticism. And that outcome is to diminish and destabilize the American Jewish diaspora.

Section: Excluding Jews From Civic Life: When Intersectional Doesn't Mean You

As the political scientist and former Israeli politician Einat Wilf has written, "Antisemitism works by increasingly restricting spaces where Jews can feel welcome and comfortable, until there are none left." When we make Israel and its supporters into cultural pariahs, we make Jews into cultural pariahs. Because demonizing Israel results in diminishing the participation of Jewish Americans in day-to-day life.

There's a specific example from a chapter of The Sunrise Movement not wanting three Jewish organizations to take part in a rally because they were "in alignment with and in support of Zionism and the State of Israel" despite other organizations in the rally supporting Israel as well. There's also the 2017 Dyke March that didn't allow rainbow flags with a Magen David on them because they didn't want anything that "can inadvertently or advertently express Zionism" present. Really, there could be more examples, which is the point.

Section: Excluding Jews On College Campus

Like our Israel discourse in general, BDS has little effect on Israel itself. If it measured its success by its economic or political impact on the State of Israel, it would be considered a colossal failure. However, BDS has been wildly successful at one thing: toxifying Israel among younger people in the United States.

The author gives quite a few examples of antisemitism on campus, as well, but I mostly keep thinking of what I've heard from others on Tumblr: an Israeli-Palestinian organization, Standing Together, should be included in BDS because there are Israelis involved; some Hillels have been proposed for BDS consideration because Hillel International 'normalizes' Israel, even though boycotting the community space for primarily American students to access kosher food, celebrate Jewish holidays, etc. doesn't seem to accomplish anything regarding Israel; and at least one concerning incident of anti-Israel protesters trying to get to Jewish students behind a locked door. You know, historically speaking, good things do not happen when angry groups of people are chasing after a minority group they're mad at.

Section: The Way We Talk About Israel Today Is Similar To The Way We Talked About Jews In The Past

The lie that Jews are needlessly violent and collectively seek the destruction of others certainly did not begin with the fictional account of Dracula, let alone with the founding of the State of Israel. It existed for centuries before. During antiquity, a Greek writer in Egypt circulated the lie that Jews captured a Greek child every year, fattened him up, and murdered him for ritual purposes.

The previous paragraph before that quote expanded on how a rise in Jews fleeing Russia and Poland due to pogroms in the late 19th-century gave rise to concerns about foreigners that can be interpreted as related to the vampire Dracula. Unfortunately, I just heard about "Montreal newspaper's political cartoon showing Netanyahu as a vampire decried as antisemitism" today, 20 March 2024 [archival link]. Not to get too sidetracked, but also, from "The Twinned Evils of 'Nosferatu'":

[...] and yet, Mein Kampf, published in 1925, makes multiple references to Jews as vampires, bloodsuckers, and parasites as well as "that race which shuns the sunlight." These and similar metaphors were picked up by followers like the Nazi ideologue Albert Rosenberg who repeatedly used quasi-biological terms to characterize Jews as a vampire bacillus infecting their German host. Once war broke out the tone grew ever more shrill as in the 1943 Nazi pamphlet, The Jewish Vampire Brings Chaos to the World. The vilest of Nazi propaganda films, The Eternal Jew, released in 1940, specifically compared East European Jews to a plague of rats and ended with a blood-draining sequence of ritual slaughter for kosher meat.

This is clearly not the only thing written about vampires, Jews, and how vampire depictions do and do not play into this antisemitic history. Back to "We Need To Talk About Antisemitism":

Otherwise, in this section, there's some more history of blood libel with the case of William of Norwich in the late 1140s, a few of the 100+ examples from Xtian Europe, and some examples of modern day blood libel (including literal 'Jews kill babies in order to use their blood in making matzah' blood libel in 2000).

No mainstream American outlet is going to print an accusation that Jews use blood to bake matzah. But the belief under that conspiracy theory—that Jews are bloodthirsty, conspiratorial, and needlessly violent—persists, and it persists most obviously in our rhetoric around Israel.

This is about printed text of someone's quote stating such. As the referenced political cartoon above suggests, I'm not nearly as surprised that there have been political cartoons of Netanyahu drinking blood (sometimes specified as baby blood, but not always).

Another [antisemitic trope] is the accusation of dual loyalties, that Jewish people are not loyal to the government under which we live. Instead, we are loyal to Israel, secret agents for a foreign government. [...] Alfred Dreyfus, a French military officer, was infamously falsely accused of being a spy based on the supposition that, because of his Jewishness, he would not be loyal to the country he served. Jews were accused of dual loyalties in Spain during the Inquisition. We were accused of dual loyalties in Russia under Stalin. And we were certainly accused of dual loyalties, or no loyalty to Germany at all, under Hitler. Well before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, this accusation of conflicting allegiance was commonplace.

Unsurprisingly, there's still modern day examples, as well.

Section: But Wait, Is All Criticism Of Israel Antisemitic? How Can We Tell?

The first [guideline] is to avoid invoking classic antisemitic canards when dealing with Israel. [...] Israel has many blemishes on its society and government. You don't need to rely on antisemitic tropes and tactics to discuss them.

Please imagine that quote is a giant neon sign.

The second guideline was developed by human rights activist and former prisoner of war Natan Sharansky. He articulated the "3D test" as a way to separate antisemitic discussion of Israel from critical discussion of Israel. He argued that we must pay attention to three pathways of thought: delegitimize, demonize, double standard.

Double standard refers to holding Israel to a different, more critical standard than other nation-states. This isn't about letting everyone do whatever they want, but it is about the unavoidable amount of people who ignore or, if they acknowledge it, don't call for the same level of punishment for other countries when they engage in violent conflict compared to what they call for Israel.

Demonize refers to needing to make Israel the worst – to inflating its wrongs into the absolute worst actions imaginable, viewing societal ills as originating from Israel, and attempting to downplay/ignore/twist any possibly okay things about Israel into not-okay things. [Some people may not be able to think about anything even slightly okay about Israel, so an example could be how any progress on LGBTQ+ rights for Israeli citizens is framed as some devious PR plot for improving Israel's international image instead of being normal laws passed for internal reasons and motivations.]

Delegitimize refers to saying that Israel shouldn't exist as a nation-state, especially if you single out the sole Jewish nation-state as the only one that should not exist. [Inevitably, I've seen this type of statement summon anarchists from the ether, so: Yes, there are people who only want Israel to not exist. No, you wanting all nation-states to not exist isn't inherently antisemitic. However, when it comes to international politics and recognizing sovereign nation-states, you're clearly not the majority, in charge of anything, or really putting forward a practical suggestion regarding a nation-state that already exists.]

Section: How Can We Fight Israel-Based Antisemitism?

There are three options: 1) Don't fight it and leave the institutions and organizations that don't want Jews, and for some people, consider aliyah [moving to Israel and becoming an Israeli citizen]; 2) Stay and attempt to fight Israel-based antisemitism via education/fact checking, coalition building, not hiding Jewish connections to Israel, and insisting that there's still space for Jews to remain in America; and 3) Do nothing—the author absolutely doesn't support this option, but it is technically an option. This looks like ignoring antisemitism and making the diaspora less safe for Jews, which will just make leaving look like a better option.

Anti-Israel antisemitism is the American loophole to enter the world of Jew hatred. It is socially acceptable, trending antisemitism. It is antisemitism that feels OK and even necessary for some. The antisemites of the past didn't believe they were wrong, and neither do the antisemites in our midst.

Ch 7: We Need To Talk About Accountability

Never underestimate my ability to not recognize someone being name-dropped. There's enough explanation in the examples of people who have said antisemitic comments (and if applicable, apologized and done better) that it still makes sense, but some people may recognize more of these examples than myself.

Section: Forgiveness Matters

There must be a reentry point for people who make mistakes, even serious ones. Judaism is clear on this matter. When a person errs, there are prescribed paths to return to righteous living. Those paths can include some combination of contrition, education, restitution, reparation, and clear alteration of behavior.

Unsurprisingly, this can be easier with living people who can apologize, seek out education on the Holocaust and Jewish history, and demonstrably not repeat their antisemitic actions.

Section: When It's Time To Move On

Some people don't just make one or two comments that can be fixed with education, and some people very well may decide to avoid their contributions to society to the extent possible. As an example, Richard Wagner was very public about his thoughts on Jews – "It is an established fact that I consider the Jewish race to be the born enemy of true mankind and of everything that is noble" – and beloved by Hitler ("Whoever wants to understand Nazi Germany must know Wagner... At every stage of my life I come back to Richard Wagner."). It might seem like a small thing, but the author, as a rabbi who officiates weddings, tries not to use Bride Chorus/Here Comes The Bride [because it's from a Wagner opera]. This doesn't mean it's always easy to do this, and this can wind up being an individual choice for living people who have reached steadfast levels of antisemitism (author's example: Alice Walker).

Section: Who Decides If And How We Hold Antisemites Accountable?

The sad truth is that, despite the myths about our worldwide influence, Jews have little power over how antisemites are treated in public.

It's much more likely to be someone from that group applying pressure to someone to take action, such as a respected athlete in that sport's circles speaking up about another athlete's comments. This can look like Jewish organizations writing letters and getting nowhere because the group is silent – Dave Chappelle among various comedians, Mel Gibson among various Hollywood examples, and US politicians. Social media is, well, it's not great, and moderation about what counts as antisemitism can be unclear, not enforced, or not able to keep up with the quantity of antisemitic comments online.

Ch 8: We Need To Talk About The Future

Take The Necessary Precautions is about taking the physical threat of antisemitism seriously and adding or maintaining security measures at Jewish institutions, which currently does involves having to deal with law enforcement. [Balancing security with less police involvement is not an easy conversation, but quite frankly, there are no civilian alternatives to bomb sniffing dogs when your synagogue has gotten a bomb threat, so the boards of synagogues and security committees may not have much of a choice but to maintain working relationships with law enforcement.] Just Call It Antisemitism is about a tendency to condemn a list of hate instead of acknowledging when just antisemitism itself is happening. Don't Tokenize covers the history of Jews taking part in anti-Jewish movements briefly and reminds us: "Let's not hold up the exception as the rule and allow their existence to justify antisemitic rhetoric. If you want to fight antisemitism, don't amplify a minority view and claim it's representative."

Avoid Groupthink provides some historical context to how unsafe a mob mentality can be for minorities, specifying massacres of Jews during the Crusades and just some of the pogroms that happened in the 20th-century. On Denying Our Own Antisemitism is about self-honesty concerning the small ways we contribute to antisemitism, such as not speaking up about the less obvious stuff. Don't Use Jews is about not using Jews as a collective as a metaphor or using the Holocaust as a go-to comparison. It's also includes not using Israel as some sort of metaphor: "The State of Israel, just like the Jewish people, is not a concept, a cause, a project, or an idea. It's a real place with real people. We must let it exist as it is, not as we project it to be."

Allow Jewish To Be An Identity is about how Jewish is viewed as a non-identity that doesn't really need to be specified like other identities should be. "Are we a religion, a culture, an ethnicity, a nation, a race? [...] This fluidity, this tendency to pass through categories, can lead people to misinterpret the Jews. Sometimes people try to cram us into one category. Other times, they insist that, because we are not fully in one box, we don't belong in any."

Celebrate Jewish Life is about embracing living Jews instead of focusing solely on dead Jews [see also: "People Love Dead Jews"]. It's not about ignoring history, which does include Jews dying, but the comfort of only thinking about Jews when they're dead and less inconvenient (especially to modern discussions). Judaism has an interest in living and surviving, so there's a section on being proudly, openly Jewish.

[neptunzs]

⊠    ɪᴅ  .  .  .  ʟᴏᴀᴅɪɴɢ    ››    mercy  headquarters  is  pleased  to  officially  introduce  MALEE “MAY” PAWITYAKUL.  they  have  been  apart  of  the  organization  for  six  years,  serving  as  A  INTELLIGENCE AGENT  and  has  been  assigned  the  codename  AGENT  NEPTUN.  it's  worth  noting  that  their  file  indicates  they  have  not  undergone  the  solaris  treatment  and  DO  NOT HOST  A  MUTATION.  according  to  our  dossier,  the  agent  exhibits  a  combination  of  ADVENTUROUS and  OVERCRITICAL  traits,  fitting  for  someone  reminiscent  of  the  sight  of  a  soft  hand  offering  help  while  also  wanting  to  fight  in  solitude.  prior  to  embarking  on  any  mission,  they  find  solace  in  listening  to  the  song  “borderline”  by  TAME IMPALA.

template credit: oppalus

GET TO KNOW THE BASICS FIRST !

full name:  malee "may" pawityakul / code name: neptun date of birth:  march 1st, 2023 / age: twenty-six ( 26 ) zodiac sign:  pisces sun, moon and rising to be determined  gender:  cis woman / pronouns: she/her birth place:  bangkok, thailand ( moved to the us during her teen years )occupation: intelligence agent for mercy current location:  apex city, united states family: parents ( both alive ), two siblings languages spoken: thai, english, more tbd

LOOK AT HER… CLOSELY !

height:  1.75m faceclaim:  mint ranchrawee eye color:  brown / hair color: brown dominant hand: right  other notable features: n/a

NEWS WOULD SAY THAT…

people know her as: the girl who is always willing to lend a helping hand. she’s sweet, tries to welcome everyone into her life but she’s also careful and over analyzes everyone before trusting them fully. overcritical of herself, not others. into risk-taking and new adventures. 

BACKGROUND AND OTHER FUN FACTS…

born in thailand but raised in california during her teen years;

grew up with a middle child mindset of being mostly ignored by her parents and literally doing whatever and still not being good enough for their standards;

the type of girl that would fight off bullies with the most serious face but was also known as the sweet, all smiley, princess that everyone loved and looked for when needed help;

started doing soft hacking and coding when she was still in high school, mostly as a way of revenge/finding out stuff of those bothering her or her friends/siblings ( she did get in trouble in the beginning because god knows, she knew shit about what she was doing );

but may truly never had many goals in life and barely even knew what she wanted to do when she reached the age to get into college. eventually was doing freelancing ( programming ) after she finished high school, much to her parents disappointment;

not having many goals and into exploring new things: may thought it’d be worth a try, when she was reached by mercy, even if she didn’t get in. the main goal of the organization kinda spoke to her heart and she thought it’d be cool to be somewhat of a hero ( of course she didn't really think much about how it'd be a tough journey at first )

went through her training and her junior agent era and then joined the intel division ( it all made sense, she didn't even complain )

i kinda had usagi from alice in borderland in mind when i thought about her personality because in my mind she wants to help others and she’s probably the first one to offer help to anyone new in the organization and all that but, at the same time, she works super well alone. she wants to fight the bad and bring good things to those who need it. she wants people to feel understood and to feel like they have someone to count on. may is very passionate about those things. and she’s super nice and sweet but also very strong and direct when needed to be.

she crochets to get over the stress, just a fun fact. she is very nerdy in the sense that she knows too many useless facts about a lot of stuff, so i had in mind that her code name came from that, facts that she would probably let out during the day about planets and stars ( but she wanted to be cool and so it became neptun and not neptune... because the e makes a huge difference lmfao... i totally didn't make a typo in the app... totally! )

didn't take the solaris drug because, despite being very intro trying things and into adventures, the thought of having a superpower of some kind scared her way too much

WANTED CONNTECTIONS…

will be adding them, little by little !

[galusaurus]

✨Mutation March - Day 24: Antelope✨

Accidentally turned this antelope into the biohazard symbol, but that seems fitting.

Cantaloupe antelope.

I’m always happy to draw inspiration from centipedes, so depending on your feelings of those creatures, this may be an anteNOPE.

[palilalia]

PAL-076 Zoh Amba / Chris Corsano / Bill Orcutt LP

"The Flower School"

The Flower School by Zoh Amba & Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt

BUY LP

Since exploding on the improvised music scene a couple of years ago Tennessee native Zoh Amba has found herself engaging with an ever-widening group of collaborators as she tours across the US and Europe. She’s forged some enduring partnerships, working regularly with drummer Chris Corsano, bassist Thomas Morgan, and pianist Micah Thomas, among others, but one of the deep pleasures of improvised music is when a first- time meeting produces sparks. Indeed, that’s certainly the case with The Flower School, which bottles some serious lightning. In March of 2023 Amba and Corsano had finished up a duo tour of the west coast with an explosive performance in San Francisco. The next day the duo entered the studio with guitarist Bill Orcutt—a trusted collaborator of the drummer stretching back a decade. It was the first time Orcutt and Amba had ever played together, but it sure doesn’t seem that way.

Although Amba has often recorded a bunch of tune-oriented albums for Tzadik she’s a free improviser at heart, and this trio arguably provides the most effective, elastic context for her playing yet. Yet what’s most astonishing about The Flower School is how it elevates and transforms the playing of all three participants. It appears that there was more than enough trust in the room to allow each player to push-and-pull. Anyone who pays attention already knows that Orcutt and Corsano are mercurial figures, perpetually adapting, adjusting, and challenging one another so that every performance by their duo seems to spring from a different inspirational source. Inviting a third person to the party could threaten a slowly cultivated balance—whether between Orcutt and Corsano or Corsano and Amba—but in this case the addition only heightened various dichotomies: soft vs. loud, bruising vs. tender, furious vs. lyric.

Much has been made of Amba’s debt to the free jazz of 1960’s, particularly the way her vibrato-drenched tone dips into valley of sacred music, but here she carves out a space that’s entirely hers. On tracks like “The Morning Light Has Flooded My Eyes” and “What Emptiness Do You Gaze Upon!” she reveals a meticulously sharpened gift for motific improvisation, taking a single phrase and chiseling away it until she’s discovered every possible permutation, all the while driven by the feverish energy and empathy of her cohorts. This group also displays Orcutt’s masterful support skills, as he often takes a single chord or two, letting them float in mutate in the background or splintering them into patient, reserved arpeggios that ripple alongside Corsano’s circular sculptures and the saxophonist’s edgy blowing. Two of the album’s five tracks are duets between Orcutt and Amba. The collection is bisected by “Sweet One,” a delicate lattice formed by Orcutt’s tremulous electric guitar arpeggios and Amba’s spike acoustic pointillism that basks in its own leisurely beauty for a couple of restorative minutes, while the album closer “Moon Showed But No You” is a searingly beautiful ballad where the guitarist unspools clusters of notes somewhere between vintage Loren Mazzacane Connor and a distorted kalimba, while Amba puts an upwardly arcing melodic line through its paces, finding new wrinkles at every turn. Here’s hoping that this recording is the start of something, but even if this album is the beginning and end, the level of communication and rapport feels eternal.

[dinosquad-central]

For women's history month, we're gonna focus on one particular historical woman. The prompt for March 2023 is:

What was Ms. Moynihan’s life like during the millions of years between mutating into a human and becoming a teacher? | Ms. Moynihan or her dino form in a historical setting.

[sonicnerd]

Lego Ninjago AU

Ok, so this Au, Nya doesn't become one with the water.

A few years later, Nya and Jay have a kid named Ashton aka Ash.

Ashton has the element of water and lightning. He's always overtraining since he has to master both elements, he's excellent with his water but not so much with his lightning.

The surpenten signed an agreement for them to live on the surface world, so, Scales Jr aka SJ as everyone calls him, can see his human friends at any time.

Ashton and his friends, Emily, SJ, Vincent, and Miles, all hang out and go to highschool together.

Yes, even though SJ and Vincent are adult snakes, they don't have that much human education so they are learning at a human highschool.

Vincent is the son of Acidicus, the leader of the venomari.

Emily lives with her grandmother and met Ashton and Miles in middle school.

Miles parents are Toxx and Shadow, Shadow is his stepdad.

Ashton has a necklace that Jay gifted to him on his fifth birthday that hds a secret

Now onto more of the Au after giving some background info

After the serpentine leaders signed an agreement with the mayor, the serpentine were allowed to go to the surface world and even live there if they wanted to. Sure lots of people didn't like that but, overtime everyone got used to it and they were all close friends.

Ash, SJ, Miles, Vincent, and Emily are always hanging out together. It doesn't matter were, they could be at the monastery, the floating bounty, at School, no matter were, there always seen together.

SJ, Vincent and Emily will always watch as Miles and Ash train with their elements. They'll even join in too if Wu gives the ok.

Everything was all fine, life was good, no bad guys, no danger, no evil curses that were unleashed.

Until...

One day in the island of Sticks, the people that lives there found out that the strangle-weed was mutated and they had to flee.

The ninjas found out about this and so did the five kids. They had lots of time to strategize a plan, but first, they needed to go to the dark island.

Ash and his friends convinced them to let them come along and when they reached the mountain, something strange happened.

Instead of the Ninja's getting a power boost, the kids did.

Ash's elements got stronger, so did Miles toxic element

As for SJ, Vincent and Emily..

Emily got the Fire element.

Vince got the Ice element.

And for SJ, he might have gotten Lloyd's element.

Everyone was shocked at this, they understood if Ash and Miles got there powers upgraded, but, for a Emily, a simple girl and for two snakes to get elemental powers?

That was a lot to take in.

Now, the Ninja's have to teach SJ, Vincent and Emily how to control there powers.

But, back in the bounty, where Ash went to get a few things to study about strangle-weed, his necklace glowed and a ghost came out of it.

Morro... The master of Wind...

Morro's ghost had lots of time to change and agreed to help Ash in this situation, as long as Ash doesn't tell anyone about him..

------------------------------------------------------------

That's the Lego Ninjago AU explained for you, maybe I'll add more if you wanna know

Have a good day/night!!

March 26/2023

[theculturedmarxist]

[...]

Cases aren't the only thing dropping either — so is surveillance of the virus. We're doing less testing and less sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 genetics.

Given all this, the question begs to be asked: Are we letting our guard down while waving the Mission Accomplished flag?

When asked if there is adequate surveillance for new variants happening, Dr. Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO), flatly said no.

"Current trends in reported COVID-19 cases are underestimates of the true number of global infections and reinfections as shown by prevalence surveys," Harris told Salon in an email. "This is partly due to the reduction in testing and delays in reporting in many countries. Reduction in testing means a reduction in genetic sequencing, as you need to find the virus first in order to sequence it."

"We continually call on member states to maintain strong testing and sequencing in order to identify new variants but also to understand the level of SARS-CoV-2 transmission going on in their populations," Harris continued. "This virus remains unstable — it has not settled into a predictable pattern, which means surveillance systems need to be sensitive to pick up the early signs of another surge."

XBB.1.5, nicknamed by some as "Kraken," is thus far the dominant variant for most of 2023, with estimated cases of Kraken exceeding 70 percent since the week of Feb 11. It has far eclipsed the BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 variants. Meanwhile BA.2 and BA.5, the two variants that dominated case counts for most of 2022, have all but disappeared.

According to the latest CDC variant tracking data, the only other variants really circulating in the U.S. are XBB.1.5's offspring: XBB.1.9 and XBB.1.5.1. Meanwhile, XBB.1.16 is spreading rapidly in India and could eventually make its way to North America. Notably, XBB was first detected in Singapore before its offspring made the jump across the Pacific, though XBB.1.5 was first detected in the U.S. and likely originated in the Northeast.

All these names may sound like gobbledygook to most non-experts — and there is a reason it's so confusing. When variants of the virus mutated and evolved into new strains with significant advantages over old lineages, the WHO began giving these "variants of concern" names from the Greek alphabet. Hence, variants like delta and gamma made headlines when they emerged and began to spread — but the WHO has yet to assign any variants a new Greek name since omicron surged in late 2021. Instead, we have this alphabet soup of named variants, all of which are technically different sub-strains of omicron.

Even a minor variation in a virus' genetics can equate to a huge difference in how well immunity from vaccines and previous infections can stop them. If the virus evolves some kind of advantage — as viruses are prone to do and just as SARS-CoV-2 has done many times throughout the pandemic — another surge is not out of the question.

In mid-March, the WHO updated their definition of what makes COVID variants threatening and currently classifies XBB.1.5 as a "variant of interest," which means it is seen as less threatening than previous variants of concern.

Nonetheless, some virologists have argued that XBB and its close relatives are so genetically different from the very first strain of SARS-CoV-2 that it should technically be renamed a new virus, SARS-CoV-3.

"XBB.1.5 does show a growth advantage and a higher immune escape capacity, but evidence from multiple countries does not suggest that XBB and XBB.1.5 are associated with increased severity or mortality," Harris said. "In countries where the variant has driven an increase in cases, the waves are significantly smaller in scale compared to previous waves."

That's good news, but as the virus bounces between hemispheres, it may gain new mutations that allow it to infect more effectively or evade immunity. Some of our treatments, but not all, have stopped working against XBB strains. Monoclonal antibodies don't stop it, but antiviral drugs like Paxlovid and bivalent booster vaccines are still very effective.

But the combined lack of public interest in the pandemic, exemplified in victory marches from political leadership, has led to a shrinking pool of data on COVID as there is less funding afforded to tracking and research. As we've seen in previous surges, the situation can change without warning. The situation is made worse by wild animals that harbor COVID, a viral reservoir that could spill back to humanity if given the opportunity.

"The level of genomic surveillance has been dropping off, and there are also indications that funding for wastewater monitoring will be ending in some places," Dr. T. Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary and genome biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, told Salon in an email. "We have far less information than we used to, which hampers the ability to detect and track new variants. It's also worth noting that India and China include about one-third of the world's population, and we have very little information on variants there."

While overall trends are down, many people would be especially vulnerable to a COVID infection right now, according to Dr. Rajendram Rajnarayanan, an assistant dean of research and associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology campus in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

"Very few of us have had the bivalent booster, so in terms of protection, we are kind of vulnerable," Rajnarayanan told Salon. He noted that COVID is still a serious, life-threatening disease for immunocompromised people and those over 70. Most people who got bivalent booster shots — if they did so at all — received the jab in the fall. By now, that immunity has likely waned and there hasn't been much communication about when or if a new booster will come out later this year. According to NPR, the Food and Drug Administration has said it will allow some people over the age of 65 to get a second bivalent booster, but it hasn't been officially announced yet.

So while infections are trending downward, immunity is as well. In the past, major gaps in immunity have been followed by major surges, such as with delta and omicron.

"When there is a big pause, and some new variant comes, we are not really protected. But when there are repeated waves, the previous wave usually protects the next wave." Rajnarayanan said. "Every time the variant goes down, something goes up later on. Just the gap between the two peaks has changed."

Despite the unpredictability of SARS-CoV-2, the strategy for fighting it hasn't changed. Masking in public, improving indoor ventilation, testing when appropriate, staying home when sick and keeping up with vaccines when possible are good strategies for keeping the virus at bay. But overall, it's not enough to say the emergency is over. We need to be strategic and keep a close eye on the evolution of COVID as well.

"People have changed, our approaches have changed, and we don't need any modern approaches to defeat this virus," Rajnarayanan said. "We know how to do this . . .  we have to do it collectively. That's all there is to it."

[bpod-bpod]

Traffic and Travel

Carrying messages to and from our moving limbs, neurons rely on signalling endosomes to ferry supportive chemicals along their branches or axons. Although ten million times smaller than postable parcels, here researchers use intravital imaging to capture a bustling traffic of endosomes (highlighted in blue) shuttling through a mouse’s sciatic nerve. The technique involves anaesthetising the mouse and exposing its nerve under a microscope – it reveals endosomes carrying BDNF, a type of neurotrophin which helps to keep neurons healthy. Certain genetic mutations can block BDNF traffic at junctions where nerve meets muscle, leading to weakness or muscle wasting. The team hopes designing drugs to boost BDNF may restore endosome transport and bring relief to human patients with disorders like Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease.

Written by John Ankers

Video from work by James N. Sleigh and colleagues

Department of Neuromuscular Diseases, Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK

Video copyright held by James N. Sleigh

Research published in JCI Insight, March 2023

You can also follow BPoD on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook