#Naval Gazing

[max1461]

Hate hate hate the terms "Western science" and "Western medicine". Like, I don't want to deny that "the West", insofar as such a notion is coherent (it mostly isn't), has had a huge influence on modern science and medicine. There are aspects of scientific and especially of medical practice which are genuinely parochial "Westernisms", and it's reasonable to critique people and institutions who give these Westernisms too much weight in their conception of scientific or medical validity. But it is frankly ahistorical to suggest that modern science and modern medicine are products of "Western culture" subsequently exported elsewhere; these things were, from the very beginning, international affairs developed cross-culturally.

Up through the early modern period, mathematical and scientific knowledge filtered back and forth through Europe, Arabia, and India; just after the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan was industrializing and was a major player in the development of what we today know as modern medicine. Industrialization and the growth of scientific practice followed in a succession of other countries in Asia and Eastern Europe throughout the next century. Today, as industrialization and technicalization spread, new science is being done more and more widely in South America and Africa. It is true that Western European states experienced a scientific and technological boom in the period of, roughly, 1650-1850, during which these states had access to knowledge and technology that the rest of the world did not. But scientific booms had happened before and have happened since! This is not unprecedented, and it certainly doesn't make science "Western" in nature. Why then isn't mathematics "Arabian" or "Indian"? Those places, too, where once the height of learning in said subject. Why isn't history "Chinese"?

The widespread existence of Western-chauvinism within science does not mean that science itself is Western, and indeed to suggest that it does is in fact to cede ground to said Western-chauvinist narratives. And it frustrates me to no end! Those are the narratives you should be critiquing, not tacitly supporting!

[no2ticonderoga]

Realizing I'm in a phase of my life again where some of my most meaningful social relationships are with people I met online.

It's delightful.

This isn't to say I am short of in person relationships. (And some of those online friendships have happily and serendipitously morphed into in person relationships) Because I have an amazing spouse who I love with all my heart, two great kids, I have a sibling who I am blessedly close to, one or two close friends and some coworkers who I am friendly with(others...not, but that neither here nor there).

But in this day and age, to be able to truly connect with people about things that are interesting to *us*, specifically, is really a joy. The internet made that possible. How did people find the people who were interested in a *specific thing* in the time before? I grew up with the internet, it's been there since I was a kid (mostly, but I'm in danger of dating myself...moving on). There was always the ability to find a community.

This has been especially important to me now that I am in a phase of my life where meeting *new people* is a relatively rare occurrence. Once in a blue moon, you get a new neighbor. There are a certain number of new colleagues at the start of every school year, but you don't always interact with them, especially if they're in a different department.

Being able to connect with new people and make new friends who share my interests, even if those people are behind an anonymous screen name, or 10 time zones away, is great! The Tumblr-vese jokes about rebloging things for specific mutuals, but isn't that that thrill? When someone tags you because they know you will appreciate it? Or when your mutual reblogs your post moments after? Or even when they might message you randomly? Or ask a question because they know you might know the answer? Yeah, that's the good shit, right there.

So, to anyone who got this far down this little bout of naval gazing, thanks! You make life that much better! And feel free to drop me a line sometime!

[doomsdaywriter]

Moderate Success!

I still haven’t tracked down exact measurements for the stadium at Soldier Field, but I have found figures that are close enough for my purposes, thanks to CalcMaps – Maptools. Using their distance tool, I was able to put points on a satellite photo of the stadium itself and get a rough estimate for length and width. It’s honestly shocking to me how hard it is to find out what I’d thought would…

[docmedkneeval]

TL;DR, let's update our references

So. We Spear-Danes, in the past...

No, wait.

So. I've been writing fanfic for approximately 36 years, give or take (not sure if I wrote the MLP fanfic and sent it to Hasbro when I was 7 or 8). My dear spouse has known me (and my fanfic) for 23 of those years. He's read a handful, but started laying off what I was reading once the slash became more and more prevalent. And I'm not sure he's ever actually picked up one of the stories I wrote in my short-lived erotica career (very short, very lived). So while it's funny when he says "Captain to Engineering" because of that ONE fic I wrote back in 2003, I would love it if he'd update his references. There have been far better (and far worse) lines that I've thrown out since then.

TL;DR, being in a long-term relationship is taking the good with the bad (much like the Smoochy Kiss episode of Bluey says), but sometimes, even an old joke becomes too tired and worn out.

This musing brought to you by a snow day that wasn't quite, and lots of baking involving pumpkin. And procrastinating on this year's NaNo.

[thedragonagelesbian]

wyll has a specific thing for rangers and here is my evidence

has flirtatious class-specific dialogue at the tiefling party but ONLY for ranger and ONLY above an approval threshold

calls minsc 'the beloved ranger'

becomes a ranger in the hells if he breaks his pact with mizora & loses his warlock levels

[hairtusk]

my copy of A Room of One's Own arrives tomorrow so i'm going to hard-reset my personality crisis with a slap in the face from virginia

[slipsthrufingers]

“I wonder how many women you've disregarded in your life, written off, because you assumed they had nothing to offer beyond the way they looked. How quickly they learned that the stuff in their heads was of less value than the shape of their bodies. I bet they were all smarter than you.” from My Body by Emily Ratajkowski

[thiefbird]

I've given in

8 pages of stephen maturin navelgazing(haha naval-gazing)

Writing this man is like writing hannibal he just Will Not Shut Up

[allalrightagain]

Oh god we’re approaching the end of the month again and I have a collection of half-finished Pocket Dad drafts and no motivation. Vote or send prompts please?

Prompts accepted (with my discretion)—

An emotion Peter (or potentially another character) might feel at some point

A canon event sometime before the end of Year 3

Something already mentioned or implied in Pocket Dad so far

[werewolfest]

I think a large part of why tlhod hit so hard for me was bc I spent a very long time working through my own gender feelings of being confused and guilty and like I wasn’t allowed or capable of being the thing that I am. Being a man and a woman at the same time is just who I am but it’s also very complicated and growing up on the internet I internalized a lot of ideas about how to do transness and gayness correctly. which is soooooooo upsetting to think about now, knowing what I do as an older person. Rules were never the point. Anyway. Tlhod is like this thing that was made way before I was around and doesn’t come at gender from the same place I do. Like obviously in the book the people of Gethen are anatomically different from me, but the function of Genly’s journey in understanding them is the same, I think, as it would be for any cis person coming to understand transgender people. And even though I have known I was trans for a long time, I see my younger self in Genly. The moment where he realizes that he had been unable or unwilling to accept Estraven as they were, as both a man and a woman at the same time, but then does, and as a result is able to truly understand them and see them as a real and whole person…… like that’s me….I’ve been there I know what that’s like. I know how freeing it is to allow yourself to exist as you are without explanation instead of putting yourself under a microscope to make yourself more understandable to people who refuse to speak your language. Yeah.

[shallowrambles]

I actually think the Benny in Dean's Werther Project hallucination was truer than Dean's idealized recollection/memory of him.

And deep down, even though he rejected it for self-preservation, Dean knew it. That's why his anxiety manifested the way it did in the first place. TLDR: It's alllll about Andrea.

A lot of this is redundant, but here ya go.

Benny was acquiescing of the execution of corrupt loved ones. Blood Brothers is a crucial Benny episode. It's illuminating...and unflattering.

Reality check? Benny was mostly okay with "a sacred executioner (Dean)" doing the painful dirty work so he didn't have to. Benny might also be particularly sympathetic to monster-suicide, as that's what he chose for himself.

Benny directly showed us in-canon that he was resolved to kill even his most beloved "corrupt family members"--like Andrea Kormos. She was quickly deemed too far-gone and corrupt, nevermind that their conversation was too short, too condescending, and too aggressive on Benny's part to explore meaningful change and solutions.

So yeah.

I think the real Benny might be totally game for Dean killing himself so his loved ones didn't have to. Especially if Dean himself posed a risk of doing harm/attacking said loved ones, as Andrea Kormos did when she attacked Benny.

That was the "real" Benny all along. And that hurts.

///

Benny didn't try to convince Andrea. He instantly judged her, offering no validation of the emotional struggle with addiction or alternative way forward.

Benny believes in sparing loved ones the task of killing their corrupted loved ones. He was part of practicing it with regards to Andrea. See below:

ANDREA takes his hand, but stays where she is. ANDREA: Where, Benny? BENNY: What are you talking about? Anywhere. [ANDREA looks down.] You're not leaving here, are you? And you never were.

So, yeah. Okay. He's clocking her intentions here, but he's also doing a lot of heavy lifting assuming her thoughts, ascribing the most uncharitable mode to her motivations. (Using an always-and-never statement to boot.)

It comes off so condescending. It's an accusatory mode of communication.

He jumps straight to the vibe of, "you never wanted to leave here, you're corrupted!" whereas her "Where, Benny?" speaks more of desperation and fear. (It reads to me more like: "How, Benny? Why should I fight what I am, Benny? I can't do this, Benny. Can't fight this. It's too hard.")

But he...doesn't seem interested in helping her rediscover herself. He doesn't validate her feelings or illuminate a path to redemption using his own past sins to help pave the way.

He doesn't even talk about another way forward. (Nevermind that he himself did some pretty awful crimes on the high seas for decades before "redeeming" himself. (Rules for thee, but grace for me?)

ANDREA: We have everything we need right here. The operation is still perfect. We can ride the high seas, plunder together. We can have the life we always wanted. BENNY: What I wanted was to leave a burning crater behind. I wanted to put your memory to rest. ANDREA: But I'm not a memory. Benny, I'm right here. BENNY: What I loved – it ain't here anymore. It was snuffed out a long time ago by monsters like me... like what you've become.

I just want to emphasize how this conversation is barely a conversation. It's an attack on Andrea before a real conversation can even begin to take place.

The mere act of being afraid of leaving, of having Stockholm Syndrome and losing her "father," of feeling connected to the Easy Mode of vampiric hunting is met with an over-the-top attack on her character.

(You're not you. You're corrupt. You've become like me, because of me, and I don't want you anymore. You're dead to me if you're like me. You can't be redeemed...even though *I* was.)

It's a flagrant dehumanization.

///

What could he have said? Is this a tonal argument?

I guess it could be if you squint, but he directly insulted her, denying her existence to her face. That's why she reacts with a desperate, "Benny, I'm right here."

She's not a memory. She's monstered.

He could start with acknowledging how hard it is to be a 'human-ethics-centered’ vampire. He could share his own struggles. Show some empathy, or at least some sympathy! At bare minimum, he could discuss a new way forward. ("Anywhere," isn't a discussion.) Instead, we get...zilch.

He's much too busy being horrified by the apparent corruption of The Perfect Woman.

He goes straight to the vibe of: "you're an irredeemable monster."

///

Is it worse to go too far...or not to try at all?

And here's where the Sam-Bobby-Dean triad of demon detox takes on a more positive light. Their methods may have been cruel and harsh. (Detox is an ugly, horrific, twisting, screaming-and-lying thing. Detox tells you that drug dependence is who you are. It tells you you like the disease. That you perhaps ARE the drug/disease).

But anyway, Bobby-Dean-Cas did not give up on "corrupted/addicted/overly righteous" Sam.

Likewise in season 10, the methods of Sam-Cas-Charlie were evil, but they did not give up on "corrupted/disinhibited/unfeeling" Dean. Although Sam and Cas started out being resolved to kill Dean, they realized they couldn't. Wouldn't. (In season 10, perhaps Sam is in his mind resolving not to trigger the abandonment Dean got so unhinged about in season 8.)

So I guess the question is, what's more evil? In SPN, is it worse to go too far...or to barely try at all? They're both bad, perhaps, but one is driven by hope, and the other by nihilism: "we're all damned."

Benny’s arc is rooted in nihilism from start (Andrea, revenge) to finish (torn apart in Purgatory, as he probably intended to go out).

///

I think Andrea's feelings were obviously hurt; she was insulted...and with very good reason.

I mean, it's no wonder she attacks him. She cries, "You think you're better than me now?" He says he thinks they're all damned, and that certainly enrages her.

She senses, perhaps correctly, that it's really just lip service.

His actions imply that he really does think he's better than her. He did crimes and got redeemed. She's not even gonna get that chance. Not really.

(She has the "chance," I suppose. Technically. Sorta. But he purposely agitates her with his nihilistic lamentation of man-woe, spending much of his time judging her, not trying to convince her.)

You see, even when he messes up, Benny still "gets to be" himself. Even if that's a corrupted vampiric self. He's still "Benny." Not Andrea. When Andrea is a struggling addict, a vampire, Andrea "just is a memory."

Andrea is immediately disallowed her own identity simply for voicing that it might be easier to stick to the vampiric ways of hunting to live. It's black-and-white, abruptly cruel judgement, even before Dean gives the killing blow.

///

Later in the season, via deleted scene, Benny completely falls off the wagon, insisting "Dean doesn't wanna know (about his feeding off innocents)."

Benny is a symbolic perfectionist here. (As Dean himself can be when it comes to hero-worship and people.) Benny wants to remain idealized, just like he wanted Andrea to remain idealized. They're eaten alive by the symbolic, cooing Empty: "Wouldn't you rather remain a fond memory than a constant, festering disappointment?"

Benny's okay with that. And in the end, Dean's okay with that, too. That's why both Amelia and Benny feel like mirages. If Benny is "away," Dean can fantasize that maybe Benny got to be “King of purgatory,” and most importantly, Benny gets to live in the idealized space Sam could never live up to: "brother who never let me down."

(Dean is struggling to cope with life in this season. I think his hero worship of people is something he tends to do to help combat the abandonment he feels is inevitable. And yes, as I've said before, I think this is because John was a hot-and-cold caretaker!)

The deleted scene implies that Dean could perhaps be content not knowing all the ways Benny fails to live up to the cartoon of Benny he's drawn in his head (as a means to cope with the disappointments of living). Benny was good because he was at arm's length, not close enough to wound, hurt, or disappoint. And as Benny's organ donor/blood donor/drug dealer, there's a comfortable dependance Dean can fall back on, giving him control and feeding into his specific brand of abandonment-neuroses.

Benny never clawed his way back the way other characters did, because the writers decided to strip away his complexity and cut out the meat of him. Give me the guy who fell off the wagon. Give me the guy in The Werther Project. That's the real Benny, and he's great. He's, to quote Amara, better than the false ideal. He's real and complicated.

//

As for Andrea's redemption, perhaps in Benny's mind, if Benny's not *immediately* enough on his own to change her behavior by *checks notes* coming at her with the least charitable assumption and denying her personhood, then she's a Lost Cause (TM). If Benny's not enough for her to change, as she was enough for Benny to change, then "no one/nothing is."

So, he goads her with harsh, black-and-white words. "It was snuffed out a long time ago by monsters like me... like what you've become." I.e. I'm a monster reformed, but you're a monster that deserves to die before we even validate your pain or talk about the chance of recovery/healing. (You were ruined/corrupted by my father in our game of war. Ouch.)

She is hurt and ofc attacks, and the sacred executioner (Dean) strikes her down (so Benny doesn't have to).

It's also potentially a kind of family annihilation/self-nihilism. That in Benny's mind both he and Andrea deserve to die for being "damned." (Indeed, Benny will submit to his own murder with nary a complaint.) I think this latter one is perhaps more charitable, that Benny was always in a bad place--suicidal.

Again, Benny’s dependence on Dean as drug dealer was comfortable for Dean, allowing him to both keep Benny at arms’ length/not let him close enough to be de-idealized and hurt him the way his family and loved ones have, while at the same time being forever on the hook of blood donor/organ dependency (the symbol of the in 8x03 cooler). Benny’s life on the show was like Benny’s death: a figurative open door that you never intended to open. And Season 8 is all about surreal, idealized figments.

ANDREA: You think you're better than me now? BENNY: No. I think we're all damned. ANDREA snarls and her fangs descend. DEAN stabs her from behind and then cuts off her head. BENNY and DEAN look at each other before BENNY looks down at ANDREA’s body.

Anyway, that's why I wanted Andreas Kormos for Purgatory II. I still do.

I was also so partial Andrea's rage, disappointment, and confusion. I wanted to see Andrea versus Benny. At minimum, I wanted Andrea back as The Stockholm bookend to the Nihilism, even if Benny was ripped to pieces (as his nihilism would predict). Andrea still had a will to live, even if it was evil/vampiric, and that's far more interesting to me.

///

All in all, it would be completely in-character for the nihilistic Benny we got to know to be comfortable seeing Dean go the way of a corrupted Andrea. We didn't see Benny’s nihilistic worldview develop or shift in a meaningful way during the course of the show. Indeed, his nihilism actually became more severe the longer he drifted.

If "one friend" (Dean) abandoning him and some hunters tailing him is enough to get him to fall off the wagon, he had a very tenuous grasp on resilience indeed. We should all support one another and not seek to violently undermine (Hi, Sam), but at the same time we are not responsible for another person’s addictions.

Benny can be an off-key parallel like how Sam sometimes shifts the burden of his "wellness responsibility" to others? (The Benny-as-idealized-surreal-brother and Sam-as-real-imperfect brother hits hard. Benny’s addiction is excused and enabled as necessary; Sam’s is framed wholly as a choice, which...addiction is complicated. We're much less kind to family about it.)

All in all, I think it's foolish for Dean (and the audience) to think that Benny would treat Mark of Cain!Dean in any way meaningfully different than he treated Andrea Kormos.

Dean's hallucination in Purgatory was more in-keeping with what we saw out of the real Benny. The box knew that Benny was in fact the most likely of Dean's friends to argue for suicide, and it was probably uncomfortably right about that because Benny did not arc towards growth on any occasion. Dean's self-soothing narrative was the false one. Hopeful, maybe. But false.

Makes you wonder if the killing of Andrea was something that was subconsciously actually haunting Dean in a very real, gloriously complicated way. (The way I think Cas's taking of a human vessel subconsciously haunts in him 14x10 Nihilism).

I think Andrea haunts him especially in light of his own newly devolved disinhibition/loss of free will/corruption.

(The real Benny wouldn’t encourage a friend to die? We saw him do just that: tell someone they were too gone…and then watched Dean kill her so he didn’t have to.) Deep down, I think this is an example of Dean’s anxiety over the reality of what happened with Benny and Andrea. Charitably, he’s not seeing through an illusion so much as choosing to live for himself in this moment! Which is fine. We all need our fictions.

Disclaimer: I like Benny. I think all of this makes him crunchy and interesting. And it makes him make SO MUCH SENSE. He, like so many many characters in SPN...fell to nihilism. :(

[shallowseeker]

Thinking about the concept of the punishment resurrection

And yes, I know Fergus was a tailor, but his mother was the tanner's daughter. And in a game of werewolf/mafia, the tanner only wins if he dies. There's something to Rowena and Crowley being unkillable, choosing their "real and permanent deaths" very carefully.

I do think the whole (cut line) “Even when I lose, I win!” is about this tanner role.

(The narrative "tanner" hates the job.)

By the end, Crowley has no family ties, not even Rowena. Liike Raphael, he "just wants it to be over" and has devolved to pure nihilism.

Contrast to AU Kevin Tran, who is Crowley-adjacent (ambition to be President, whip-smart, son of a single mom...and also GAVIN-coded)

13x20

"I just want it to be over."

"Even if you win, you still lose."

That's because for human beings (not just vampires, werewolves), losing family members is almost never worth the cost of war. (War indeed is the domain of the "village" mob's war, searching for scapegoats and trying to champion a Cause at all costs).

///

EDIT: Crowley's threat is so interesting. This aspect of his story has been with us since very early.

5x20

[thedragonagelesbian]

hmm ok but what if i go skald instead of bard for most of cyrus' extra 20 levels... it skews a bit more toward martial utility than support, and rather than simply being a return to cyrus' initial martyr abilities without the personal cost (since martyr is 'paladin-bard but you have to take constant damage to power your inspiring songs') it's more... an evolution of his bloodrage powers, so overwhelmingly certain & secure in his righteous fury--and the underlying love for others & himself that it derives from--that it spills out & empowers his allies

[hairtusk]

you people are fucking insane oh my god

[gentrigger]

With the anxiety buzzing in our heads about the failure of a social media platform I'd like to acknowledge the new opportunities presented as we build from the wreckage.

I've been introduced to so many more creators that I definitely would not have met if I was going about business as usual on Twitter.

I like to construct worlds and narratives about the things we find when a world collapses, and how that experience is unique and profound in itself. That focusing on anxiety about things lost can blind you to the path ahead. As skateboarders rode in the empty pools drained by Santa Monica's droughts they found a land that they could belong to, and just the same we'll belong to the places we end up.

[emptymanuscript]

Not a Nazi stochastic terrorism dog whistle at all. *eyeroll* This is the equivalent of sticking your pinkies in your mouth to whistle and then yelling, “hey,” instead.

I think the eternal shocker for me is that Trump’s approval rating is as high as it is among Jews. Subtlety just isn’t his thing. I suppose it’s just means that a quarter of us are Nazis as long as you don’t use the word.

I feel like Mother Night had it right.

I have stuck deep in my head that first image of Frankie Faison as Robert Sterling Wilson, the Black Fuhrer of Harlem, all dressed up in his fancy Nazi uniform and smiling brightly because he knows his mere presence upends what people think is reality.

Anyone can be a Nazi.

Even a Jew. It’s an ethic not an ethnicity. A Jewish Nazi just has a different group of people they think they should scapegoat as the source of all the world’s problems and so they’re absolutely justified in exterminating that group.

Trump’s not a Nazi because he is literally a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. He’s a Nazi because he believes people can be broken up into “good” and “bad” by basic traits and he’s just fine harming the “bad” people for the “greater good” which is somehow always a synonym for his own benefit. And he’s very content for the arc of history to favor his outlook, no matter how that looks. He would never personally look me in the eye and push me in an oven. He’s far too much of a coward. But if, having said this, someone happened to proudly take these words a little too seriously so that they looked me in the eye and pushed me in the oven for him, that would be ok.

Oh, he would deny culpability and say there were fine people on both sides. After all, Jared Kushner is an excellent “good” Jew. There are great Jews. Trump loves the Jews. It’s just that there are some “bad” Jews like me who happen to be both Jewish and “Woke.”

It’s so sad that the “some” happens to be the significant statistical majority. It would be so much easier, too, if you could tell just by looking at someone if they were “woke” or not. Of course, Trump can tell. All he has to do is look them in the eye - cue scene of Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan having something in his eye, could you have a look, is it still there - and he knows. I mean we all know what bad Jews look like, right? They’re just so good at hiding and blending in. Why if they didn’t have identifying bumper stickers, they might be able to hide inside a decent neighborhood. Right inside YOUR neighborhood. They might feel welcome to talk to you. To talk to your CHILDREN. To put their heathen Mosque, sorry Synagogue, but you know how all those non-Church Churches just look the same. You would have to see with the eyes of God… or Trump to really tell. That’s why I say kill ‘em all and let God sort it out.

I mean that’s easiest, right? Just one simple policy. Kill the “bad” people until they’re all gone or they’ve all finally gotten “reality” and turned “good.” Of course you have to be ever vigilant about that. It’s easy for someone to just pretend to be one of the “good” ones. They could hide in plain sight. Infiltrate. You gotta watch for them. Weed them out. Make guides to help others how to spot them. I mean, if you didn’t carefully analyze it, why, a man might pass as a woman and seduce YOU into being a Woke Jew. Because we all know that’s what they really want: us. To be like us and do to us what we need to do with them. They’ll hunt us down and weed us out and seduce us with false promises and then throw us in the ovens when we let our guard down.

Le Sigh. So much hate. I’m always profoundly disappointed to realize, once again, that of all the people who should know better, my own people just haven’t learned the lesson of our experiences. 27%. Ugh -_-. That number is too high. Way too high. History and experience should have taught Jewish Americans not to be Nazis. Not to trust demagoguery, despotism, and destructive rhetoric. We should have learned to distrust the destroyers. We should be honor students, not barely passing. Though, perhaps that’s me making the same fundamental error as the Nazis. There’s nothing intrinsically “good” or “bad” about a people. Not even my own. History’s most basic lesson is that a people, any people, as a general group is a terrible definition for how any given individual will act. It would just be easier if we could generalize better.

I wonder when someone will act on this post of Trump’s. The high holy days are going to make it easy to target Jews. Lots of people gathered in easily identifiable places.

Fucking Trump.

-_-