#but I also love turning rhetoric around if only for irony points

[volixia669]

It’s REALLY funny turning McCarthyism around for political activism.

Like, I’m one of those folks who knows McCarthyism is bullshit but also knows that the USSR and CCP loooooooooooooooooooove(d) mass surveillance so it’s great going “Do YOU want to be associated with the commies?!”

Anyways, if you don’t want tumblr, twitter, google drive, etc to start scanning every private thing you post AND would rather like your Signal, Whatsapp, etc to remain end to end encrypted AND live in the US, mosey on over to EFF’s little take action thing (tumblr is still weird about links if I recall so I’m going to pull a Biden and say to google it) regarding the EARNIT Act. Send a message to your Senators. Even call ‘em up. Tell them to Vote No and publicly oppose it.

And yeah, if you have Republican Senators, just go and tell them to say no to a COMMIE bill.

[deadlyanddelicate]

look what you made me do || 1/?

aka: me making taylor swift songs about dean winchester and/or deancas bc it’s what dean himself would want

(i will be keeping track of these with a masterpost, just in case i need to find them again or someone enjoys seeing me go hogwild on lyric analysis, lol. also, there’s a wee treat at the end of the post!)

and without further ado, our first tswift x dean song is...

the archer

combat, i'm ready for combat i say i don't want that, but what if i do?

we start off with an extremely obvious line: dean winchester is always ready for combat - he’s been trained all his life to essentially be a soldier/vigilante figure, an ultimate warrior of sorts. the thing is... he doesn’t want to. when dean is left to his own devices, without his father to order him around or a Big Bad to spur him on, what he chooses to do is is cook for his loved ones, have movie nights with them, play music, tinker with parts to build something new. at his core dean is kind, and full of care for others, and his deepest fear is that he truly IS nothing more than just a killer or a weapon - hence the ‘but what if i do’.

'cause cruelty wins in the movies  i've got a hundred thrown out speeches i almost said to you 

‘the movies’ here is just shorthand for everything he’s witnessed happening around him in real life. as far as dean’s experience goes, cruelty does win. why believe in softness and kindness when your father has taught you that either of those things is a weakness, and the world simply doesn’t care? 

as for the second line, well. you can guess what THAT’s about. dean feels so deeply, but really struggles to verbalise his feelings, often brushing them off until he explodes. we usually see him at his most vulnerable while praying to cas, but even then, you get the sense that he’s holding back on so much. (“cas, i need to say something--” “you don’t need to say it, dean.” so it goes, so it goes.)

easy they come, easy they go i jump from the train, i ride off alone  i never grew up, it's getting so old help me hold onto you 

a few points here: “i jump from the train” could easily be a callback to dean’s impulsive self-sacrificing ways, and “i never grew up” underlines how he never got the chance to evolve and grow into himself because he got essentially stuck in the “child parenting another child” role. sure, he had to be a mother and a father to sam, so in some ways he grew up really fast; in others, he was stuck as an insecure teenager, because he never got the opportunity for healthy emotional growth himself. 

and of course, “easy they come, easy they go” is a tragically accurate representation of dean’s most devastating insecurity: that everyone he loves eventually leaves him. mary died, john was constantly absent, cassie broke up with him when he tried to tell her the truth, sam left him behind for college, and then, of course, there’s cas... who just. keeps. leaving, one way or another, and dean just desperately wants him to stay - which also ties into “help me hold on to you”. the irony of it all, of course, is that dean wants castiel to choose not to leave, whereas castiel desperately wants to be asked to stay; and ain’t that just a fucking tragedy.

i've been the archer, i've been the prey who could ever leave me, darling? (but who could stay?) 

the first line is pretty self-explanatory: dean has been both aggressor and victim, both literally and emotionally. he’s a fearsome hunter who gets hunted down by monsters in turn; and he’s lashed out and pushed people away, while getting his heart broken in return too. 

but it’s the second part that really strikes me as a dean line, because the first half - “who could ever leave me, darling?” - is the bravado that dean wears like a mask. charming smile, a flirty wink, swagger in like you own the place, “i think i’m adorable”, “i’m a joy to be around”, etc. but the second part... that’s the whisper of truth behind it. for all that dean can turn the charm on and put on a brave face, he’s thoroughly convinced that he’s not worth sticking around for.

dark side, i search for your dark side but what if I'm alright, right, right, right here? 

so, can you say trust issues? remember how long it took for dean to believe an angel could be on his side, and then how deeply he came to trust cas? and remember how heartbroken he was when castiel betrayed them in s6, and how that heartbreak was covered up with anger when cas came back? yet, no matter how many twists and turns they go through, inevitably, dean ends up trusting cas with his life - he’s not only the definition of a ride-or-die, but he also trusts him in smaller, more intimate ways, such as letting down his guard and allowing himself to be vulnerable only around him, or praying to him for comfort as much as guidance.

and i cut off my nose just to spite my face  then hate my reflection for years and years 

...but because of those trust issues, and because of dean’s deeply entrenched abandonment issues as mentioned above, often dean ends up reacting to things more harshly than is needed, by lashing out in anger and pushing people away (or, in more than one occasion, through the infamous silent treatment). but we also know he immediately regrets it, because it ends up hurting him just as much, if not more. basically this correlates to his speech from 15x09 about his anger issues.

i wake in the night, i pace like a ghost the room is on fire, invisible smoke and all of my heroes died all alone help me hold onto you

there’s also the fact that having attachments as a hunter isn’t exactly safe, and comes with a shitton of fear of losing people - or remorse and regret when you do lose them. “the room is on fire, invisible smoke” - i can only imagine dean would still have nightmares of that fateful night when he was 4 years old and his mother burned alive on a ceiling (and so: “i wake in the night, i pace like a ghost). as for his heroes dying alone... mary. john. ellen. jo. ash. kevin. charlie. the list stretches way too long. it’s only natural he’d be afraid of losing cas too... especially since he’s already died multiple times, and dean has mourned him more and more devastatingly each time.

i've been the archer, i've been the prey screaming “who could ever leave me, darling”-- but who could stay? 

the same concept as the previous chorus, except that here the façade of confidence and swagger comes off almost as desperate (screaming “who could ever leave me”). but then we know overcompensating is kinda dean’s thing.

'cause they see right through me, they see right through me they see right through me -- can you see right through me? they see right through me, they see right through me  i see right through me, i see right through me 

and we circle back to dean’s constant fear of being found worthless, damaged, and unlovable. no matter how much bravado he puts on, his actual self-worth is close to non-existent, so of course he’d feel like a fraud, and it makes sense he’d fear other people seeing through his act, or wonder if they do - can cas see right through him? because dean himself certainly isn’t buying his own lies.

all the king's horses, all the king's men couldn't put me together again 'cause all of my enemies started out friends help me hold onto you 

the first line just... hurts me a lot. i guess it’s the nursery rhyme sound of it, almost trying to take the bite of a statement which is, essentially: i’m broken beyond repair. as i said above, dean’s not buying his own lies, he knows exactly how much baggage and trauma he carries. and not to go back to the trust issues again, but it is hard to believe someone could see past that when there’s so much betrayal in your history (which, yes, has included cas at one point too, as well as sam, or, say, fucking chuck).

i've been the archer, i've been the prey who could ever leave me, darling? (but who could stay?) who could stay? who could stay? you could stay, you could stay... 

and then... we have the third repeat of the chorus, which echoes the first, softer version of it, but with a fundamental difference. this time, the rhetorical question “who could stay?” finds a pointed answer in “you could stay”. because yes, maybe cas leaves a lot, but he always, always comes back. so i’d imagine dean harbours hope that one day, maybe, cas will want to actually... stay for good.

combat, i'm ready for combat

and that hope kinda gives this final line a whole new lovely layer of meaning: dean’s no longer ready for combat just because he’s been trained for combat all his life; rather, he’s ready for combat because for once in his life, he has something to look forward to; something to fight for: the happy ending he deserves, where someone - perhaps someone in a dirty trenchcoat and tired blue eyes - will finally stay.

---

BONUS: literally the day after i started obsessing over this song as a dean song, i found a fanvid of it! if that’s not serendipitous, i don’t know what is <3

[bigskydreaming]

Okay but a question from Dumbass Station Population Me, what is actually the difference between being censured and censored?

The thing about censorship is it requires actual POWER behind it, that frankly, online discoursers just don’t have. On any side of any argument. Its institutional, its something that draws upon existing power bases to use that power to suppress actual ideas or speech with real consequences or even just the threat of very real consequences.

Censureship, by contrast, is like, just being viewed negatively in the court of public opinion. Its people, as individuals or even in large groups, saying in response to things that are said or written or whatever, like....hey, we think what you said is dumb. We’re judging you super hard right now. Reap the social consequences of we, other members of society, pointing to what you just said and saying hey this is very dumb and you should feel bad. Loser.

Censorship doesn’t HAVE to just be a matter of legal power, like its not like only the government can actively censor people....like I said, its institutional, its systemic, so it can draw upon any institution....whether that’s religious and thus using the weight and social influence of religious institutions to silence people, or whether its something like white supremacy itself, racism as an institution....using the power and threat of retaliation from white supremacists who are INVESTED in maintaining their rhetoric against anyone trying to speak over it with like, actual logic.

The key difference though, is censorship HAS to come with actual consequences, or at least the potential for them.

Censureship, in contrast, doesn’t require any followup, it exists on its own merits as simply an opinion upon an opinion. Someone censuring you for something you said or did that they view negatively like....that’s all there is to it, there’s no And Then. The point of the censureship was to say “I heard what you had to say and in response I say hey that sucks and you should not say it.” The point of censorship is to say “I heard what you had to say and I am going to invest actual resources into silencing you so that no one else will hear what you have to say.”

A loooooooooooot of people in fandom cry censorship, when really all that was expressed was censureship. And ironically, this in itself is just censureship TRYING to be censorship, as its usually the last word in an argument as the people yelling most about censorship are the ones often trying to just flat out silence their opposition, while the people who were only interested in expressing censureship in the first place are often like yeah cool whatever, because.....follow-up engagement was never a necessity for saying what they wanted to say, which is “here is a thing that I personally think is bad.”

Always always ALWAYS in internet discourse, try to look past the buzzwords being thrown around and look at the argument taking place and figure out....which one is trying to raise points for consideration, even if those points are critical and negative....vs which one is trying to just end the conversation by any means necessary, without actually engaging with any discussion points. Its expansion of conversation/thought vs the shutting down of conversation/thought that’s usually the real indicator of which argument is TRULY the more progressive one, NOT just which one is most convincingly arguing “puritanical puritans are being puritanical and OPPRESSIVE again!”

Actual progressive arguments can stand up to criticism. They can look at what’s been raised as an issue, and either point to other things that the criticism might have failed to take into account and which changes the overall picture, or they can look at the criticism as an opportunity to improve upon what’s there, and incorporate it into what they do or argue in the future so it now contains additional insights/angles of thought that they previously did not arrive at on their own.

But yeah, lots of people online need to get that somebody saying your opinion sucks isn’t the thought police kicking down your door if you ever utter that foul thought again. Sometimes, its just someone saying hey I think your idea is bad.

Criticism is not consequence. It can LEAD to consequences, but it is not, in and of itself, a consequence that should be as feared as fandoms have made criticism out to be.

People need to start looking more critically at how any environment that claims to be socially progressive can do so while so often attempting to drown out or dismiss criticism....when criticism is like, the single most essential ingredient for progress in the history of humanity.

There’s way too many people, like, just fucking CONTENT with the idea that there’s nothing weird, or backwards, or REGRESSIVE about perpetuating the idea that the only valid criticism is of criticism itself. That the worst thing someone can do in fandom is tell another fan that they think something they said or wrote was toxic or racist or harmful or otherwise steeped in ideas that actively do and spread harm throughout society.

Like, there really are a ton of people who think “I should be able to say anything I want without consequence or restriction, no matter how negatively it might impact others, and nobody should be allowed to say or do anything negative in response, BECAUSE I HAVE THE RIGHT TO MY IDEAS, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, STOP OPPRESSING ME.”

Because its like, yeah, you do have that right....and every one around you has the right to also express their own idea, which is that yours sucks for whatever reason.

Quid pro shut the fuck up, y’know?

Its a two-way street but lots of people try to make it one way while using the boogeyman specter of censorship to shame people into not saying anything that might shame them instead, and the irony. It abounds.

Nobody is entitled to the freedom to act upon others without being acted upon in turn. You can speak your mind, sure, but you can also live with the consequences, especially when the only consequences are other people saying mmmm, didn’t love that.

The bottom line I wish for more fandoms to take away from these kinds of conversations is that if your convictions are truly solid, they can stand up to scrutiny and even criticism, with honesty, without trying to shy away from the things actually being said or claimed and just meeting them head on, looking at the convictions that are ‘under fire’ and examining whether or not the holes other people seem to see in them are truly there or not.

If your convictions AREN’T solid, and what people are saying IS drawing your attention to holes in them you didn’t see previously, and making your faith in the stability of that conviction waver......like, that’s a problem, but that’s a you problem. That was not a problem that was created by the criticism that exposed those flaws to you. The problem was those flaws or those holes in your convictions existing in the first place, as they were always going to be there then, whether they were pointed out by others or not.

Address THOSE, not the criticism that’s often no more than people just saying “hey, there’s a hole in that wall, sure hope someone shores that up with something actually solid before someone puts a little bit of pressure on it and the whole thing comes crumbling down instead.”

[fae-fucker]

Zenith: Chapter 49-51

Chapter 49

So the queen of Adhira, Lira’s aunt, is, like, super disappointed with Lira and her shenanigans. Lira finally explains that while she loves her aunt, she doesn’t want to be her, aka refuses the role of planetary queen once more. I honestly have no idea what reasons Alara has for making Lira her heir, because Lira has evidently never shown any interest in politics. Why she won’t just make Lon her heir? He seems loyal and eager. Idk I guess feminism or something. Oh and we need a character conflict for Lira. Doy.

Anyhoo, Alara says that she’s been in contact with General Cortas and knows about his deal with the crew. She says she can instead offer Lira a position as a pilot for Adhira’s new starfleet. Which they apparently didn’t have before? She says they need a stronger presence “in the sky” if there’s another war, and like 1) that’s not the sky and 2) you mean to tell me that this entire planet of randos that do in fact train pilots judging by Lira’s existence ... doesn’t have a starfleet already?

Oh, but the ship Alara offers Lira is “the fastest model in the Mirabel galaxy”. The fastest model of ... what? Is it a frigate? A cruiser? A fighter? We don’t even get any made-up specs or even a general specialization, all we get is that it’s the fastest and coolest ship ever that everybody wants right now but it’s not even out on the market yet! Because that makes sense for the government that just admitted they had a minuscule starfleet to have. I would’ve accepted it if Alara tied the existence and offer of the ship back to her correspondence with General Cortas and the ship was a diplomatic gift from Arcardius, but it’s specifically mentioned to be Adhiran.

So ... these guys don’t have a meaningful “presence in the sky”, but they DO have the tech, the budget, and the marketing strategy to make the most wanted and advanced starship in the galaxy?

Oh, and this starship? Lira would pilot it as a commercial ship. So the queen wants to invest in a bigger starfleet ... except this one extra fancy ship she’s willing to throw away for regular trade? I mean I guess it makes sense if she doesn’t want to put Lira in danger but does want to sweeten the deal with a sick starship, but then I have to wonder why the previous info about the general and the lacking starfleet is even in here at all?

This whole situation is just doubt dot jpeg.

We find out that the offer only stands this once, and only if Lira immediately removes herself from her current mission and also leaves her crew to stay on Adhira. Apparently the super sexy cool new ship hasn’t even been built yet, it’s literally just a sketch, but Alara has set aside funds to start construction. But it’s also famous enough of a ship already that everyone wants it?

I’m no politician but the logistics of it all make my brain hurt. It’s just really ass-backwards, is what I’m saying. It really feels like Shinsay just wrote one word in front of the other without any consideration of the words that came before.

Oh and Lon is here also. I’m only saying this because he bites his lip and his blood is blue and I need you to remember this for future reference.

Lon and Alara tell Lira to pick them and ditch her friends because her friends are bad for her and tbh are they wrong? Are they though? Lira leaves to go mope about how uninteresting her character conflict is and finds Alfie and Dex.

Alfie sat beside him on the couch. The AI was oiling his gears while Dex oiled his insides with a bottle of Griss.

I had to read about Dex oiling his insides and now so do you.

Wait ... is Dex butt-chugging this Griss? Dex, you know that’s bad for you, bud?

Lira asks Dex if there was truly no way to save both Andi and his dad, to which Dex replies something appropriately dramatic that nobody would actually say out loud (something something tearing galaxies something), and Lira mopes out of that room as well in grim understanding of their symbolically similar situations before the chapter ends.

Chapter 50

We’re back with Andi. The girls are all “training” aka playfighting out in the open and inconveniencing the people around them while Andi angsts about how broken and sad and black her soul is and how everything is her fault including Valen’s and Lira’s pain and how much she just LOVES these WONDERFUL WOMEN she calls her crew and how HARD it was to open up to them after Kalee and Dex but now that she has she would never give them up for ANYTHING.

It goes on for literally pages and I’m not going to include it because 1) it’s pretty much a rehash of shit we already know and have seen her angst about and 2) the fact that Andi’s thoughts and character “development” is happening in her mind alone and the other girls are doing something else makes this feel really jarring and ironically disconnected. There’s nothing wrong with having emotional chapters where not much “plot” happens, but maybe have people actually, like, talk and interact with each other? Instead of just having one character think about how deep and damaged they are? Idk, just a thought.

Anyway, after several pages of pointless nonsense, Andi finally starts crying and tells the other girls that the new info from Dex and Valen’s whole deal has been taking a toll on her. She also apologizes to Lira, which, bonus points, and to the others for getting her into this. Unfortunately Lira undoes the apology and Andi’s attempt at taking responsibility and admitting to wrongdoing by saying she doesn’t need an apology and only needs to hear Andi complain so she can be the emotional sponge and fortune cookie advice dispenser of the group just like Shinsay always intended.

Now, to be fair, this section is honestly quite touching and I wish Shinsay had focused more on the friendship instead of ... well, literally everything else. Observe:

“I tried to kill [Dex]. What if I’d succeeded?”

“You didn’t,” Breck said. Her dark eyes met Andi’s pale ones as she spoke. “And now you know his side of the story, and he knows yours. You both did terrible things, broke promises, ruined a mutual trust. You can hold on to your anger, if you think that makes you strong.” She smiled a little then. “But brute strength isn’t everything, Andi. Trust me, I would know.”

Man, Breck is really wasted on this book, isn’t she? Or at least the concept of Breck. There isn’t much of her to waste in the first place, lbr.

Andi admits that if Valen tries to kill her when he wakes up, she’s not sure she’ll want to stop him. Um. Shinsay ... It’s time to close the laptop and go outside I think. You are not equipped to handle this.

The crew tells Andi that they can carry some of her burdens for her, which is very sweet, if only Andi showed the same thing in return. Right now all she’s done is mope around, think about how much she loves her crew because they’re just so supportive, and then unload her emotional baggage on them. To her credit, Andi seems hesitant and tells Lira she’s there for her too. Lira’s about to spill the blue beans when Alfie interrupts to tell them that Valen is awake. Lira says that whatever she was about to say isn’t important in what I assume is supposed to be dramatic irony? But watch this actually get forgotten and resolved without her input, making Lira some sort of prophet.

All in all, not the worst chapter, but definitely bloated.

Chapter 51

Andi is pacing back and forth and trying to hype herself up before the meeting with Valen. We find out that apparently, the entire planet of Adhira has no military, because they’re just SO peaceful? Yeahh ... no. The only way I’d accept that is if they had, like, some sort of mind-control abilities and networks of spies and agents in the governments of every other planet nation to prevent any conflict to turn on Adhira, which I doubt since they’re supposed to be the peaceful hippies of the story. It would be mad hardcore if that were the case, but alas, I fucking doubt it my dudes.

Besides, wasn’t Adhira in the war against Xen Ptera? Or did they sit it out but still celebrate the victory as if they helped? What’s going on there?

Also, it’s been four years since Andi last interacted with Valen, which I belive makes her 18-19? Meaning Dex was an older teen when he boned down mid-teens Andi. Ok ok ok ok.

Anyway, today is the day of Revalia, which the United Systems celebrate as it marks the end of the Cataclysm. Andi is not hyped. She’s also not hyped for the Intergalactic Peace Summit that’s happening.

[...] leaders from each of the four systems would be present to symbolize that peace still existed in the galaxy, and would continue to exist between the planets that made up the Unified Systems.

So ... Um. I know Shinsay probably think that “intergalactic” is a really cool sci-fi word and they’ve heard it used before so they had to put it here because it sounds science-y and official, but ... intergalactic means between galaxies. Not between star systems or planets. Given how the summit is defined, interplanetary would be more fitting because they’re all coming from different planets from different solar systems all within the same one galaxy. (Not entirely sure what fancy word would be used for multiple systems, but my point still stands.)

The secondhand embarrassment is strong in this one, y’all. Who edited this?

Gilly finds a Marketable Fuzzy Space Pet and convinces Andi to let her keep it, naming it Havoc. It’s impressive how not charmed I am.

Dex enters with Valen and Andi thinks about how different they are and how fucked-up Valen looks.

What horrors had he lived through?

Being thrown down a flight of stairs, for one. He was rotting at some point also. You know, from all the torture you know he went through for two years? Feels like you should probably know that. Oh, sorry, was that a Deep Rhetorical Question?

I should also mention that Alfie is getting on my nerves big time, which is frankly impressive on Shinsay’s part since I’ll eat up any naïve and emotionless robot character, gears and all, yet somehow they’ve written him to be obnoxious in their attempt at making him charmingly socially inept. I think the fact that I’m supposed to be finding him cute or funny is what’s making me really dislike him. Observe:

“I find the name quite fitting, Breck,” Lira added. “Every beast deserves a strong name.”

“Allow me to assist,” Alfie added, walking over on silent feet. “Havoc is defined, in the Great Universal Dictionary, as ‘great destruction or devastation. Ruinous damage.’”

[...]

Valen inclined his head at Alfie. “My deepest apologies that you’re programmed to work for my father.”

Alfie’s unblinking eyes stared at Valen. “I am detecting strong levels of distaste toward...”

“That’ll be enough, Alfie,” Dex interjected. “Why don’t you go check on the ship repairs? Memory could probably use some company.” 

At the sound of Memory’s name, Alfie’s posture straightened. “I find my gears are warming at an alarming rate. Excuse me.”

Is this supposed to be cute? Endearing? What is the point of Alfie in this story? Why is he here? It feels like his entire reason for existing is to be the silly comic relief and the stereotypical weird AI with no concept of normal interactions. I’m also hardcore weirded out by how horny he is for Memory. It’s making me genuinely uncomfortable for reasons I can’t explain.

Why do we need another comic relief guy? Dex, Gilly and Breck, and now the fucking Havoc (the weird shitty pet thing) all serve that purpose already. WHY DOES ALFIE EXIST?!

Anyway, Alfie leaves and Dex suggests that they all have an “adult conversation” (lol) and the chapter ends on Andi finally greeting Valen and it’s very dramatic.

[jiminscaramel]

au: 4 , trope : 2 , prompt : 20, 26 with jooheon from monsta x please💗

AU: 4. Mafia | Trope: 2. Enemies to lovers | Prompt: 20. “it’s just so hard not to fall in love with you.” & 26. “sometimes, i sit in bed and wonder what would happen if things were different.”

I got a lot little carried away and it’s become longer than a drabble. This was really self indulgent. I tried to convey the e2l dynamic as best as I could, I hope you like!

For as long as you remember, you’ve never had any freedom. Not any real freedom, at least. Everywhere you go, someone accompanied you and although it’s supposedly for your own good, you can’t help but feel it’s more of a hinderance.

They came and went and some lasted longer than others, either dying in your place or simply resigning due to fear. You’ve lost count of the attempts on your life, preferring to distance and emotionally detach yourself from the death toll that seemed to loom over your head like a stubborn cloud you can’t shake off.

You were nineteen when when your father – the most feared leader of the country’s infamous organised crime group – assigned you another security personnel. You’d thought nothing of him, the same as all the ones before him, only he seemed a little young for the job.

You learned he was the son of your father’s close friend, looking to make a quick buck and gain valuable experience to impress his father. And although you hate to admit it, even now, there was a lot to be impressed with.

His eyes were not only cold but calculating also, able to read beyond the surface of what they see. He never smiled, seldom talked and trying to see him as anything other than a machine was nearly impossible. He simply didn’t exude emotion.

He’ll be gone soon, you’d thought dismissively. The bet was on how long he would last.

You were twenty when Jooheon received his initiation tattoo – a cross beneath the corner of his right eye – establishing his permanent role in the family. And to this day, you still cannot explain the feeling of pure anger that simmered in your throat when you found out. Perhaps you’d grown bored of him, you’d wanted a new face to look at; or perhaps it was down to the deeper meaning behind his staying.

You’d considered yourself an adult, no longer needing nor wanting any protection from anyone. You wanted to be free; you wanted to walk down the street without counting your steps, without seeing him hover in eyesight; you wanted to spend your vacation time relaxing on a beach without the sore sight of him lingering close by, straight-faced and serious. Hell, you just wanted to pee without someone listening in on the other side of the door.

You wanted to be alone.

And so the anger manifested itself within you, morphing into an acrid resentment that never seemed to go away. You began to test his boundaries in different ways, trying to find his breaking point so that he may snap and hopefully be replaced by someone else.

But not once did he crack.

You were twenty-one when Jooheon realised he was madly in love with you and twenty-two when he realised it could never work. For one thing, the feelings were absolutely not reciprocated, that he knew for sure.

He’s known you long enough to know, that if you had an inkling of feeling towards him, you would’ve acted upon them long ago. He sees the looks of undeniable distain, he hears the exasperation in your voice when you speak to him and even hears the things you say about him to your father.

But for all the stoic exterior and steel heart, a very soft boy lies beneath, subdued and hidden in the depths of his facade. He feels just as deeply as you, loves just as fiercely and he knows he would do anything to protect your life.

Perhaps that’s why it hurts so much.

A taught sigh of absolute boredom whooshes past your lips, your hands working the hangers on the clothing rails. You dismiss each garment as if it’s worth less than the dirt on your shoe, unimpressed.

With so much money at hand and too much time to spend, you often find yourself running out of ideas. You find that you frequent the same bars and strip clubs, the same shops, the same hotels. The world is your oyster yet you never expected it to be so small.

You fish out your card from your purse and hand it over to Jooheon, who’s never more than two feet away from you. “Here, Jooheon. Buy yourself something.”

He stares blankly at the plastic in your hand and firmly shakes his head no. “No thank you.”

“Oh come on, Honey,” you roll your eyes, but watch carefully as his jaw twitches at the nickname. You smirk a small smile of victory, loving when his exterior begins to show signs of weakness.

Little do you know, the name you assume he hates is actually one of the things he loves about you. You always load it with sarcasm and contempt but it’s something at least.

“Don’t be such a do-gooder. Just buy yourself something. It’s not to my taste anyway.” You pull out a toffee-coloured, loose-fitting turtleneck and hold it up against him, humming in satisfaction. “Not bad.”

You thrust it against his chest for him to hold before trailing through the rest of the clothes, picking out new outfits.

He watches in awe as you’re fuelled with passion and purpose, working hard to find a style that suits him best. He admires you in all your splendour, staring at the soft curve of your jaw, the delicate hills of your Cupid’s bow as you ramble on.

His heart swells something stupid, inflating and expanding until all that’s left of him is left bare and exposed to you. His breathing quickens and his voice gets trapped in his throat.

He manages to call your name, a soft sound, almost a whimper.

You turn around, surprised and piqued more than anything but the way your face changes...

You notice his eyes first; round and wide, sincere and open but above all else you notice a subtle undertone of sadness. It’s like he’s granted you access to a tightly guarded vault, revealing all sorts of forbidden secrets inside. His cheeks flush, red like cherries.

It’s the most emotion you’ve ever seen him wear and to be quite honest, you haven’t the first clue on how to process it.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you scoff, your own heart working double time. “You’re creeping me out.”

Though you can’t explain the strange flutter, the unexpected beat your heart seems to so easily skip.

“I’m sorry,” he rushes immediately, clutching the assorted clothes tighter to his chest. You notice his knuckles turn white. “It’s just...”

Jooheon struggles to find the right words. He can beat a man black and blue, dodge fists and bullets, execute in cold blood yet he cannot form the right words to confess to the girl he loves so. The irony almost makes him laugh aloud.

“Spit it out, I don’t have all day,” though there’s less bite and venom to your voice, your tone cautious and curious instead. You feign interest in the shelf in front of you, pretending to rummage through the items, but your attention is solely fixed on Jooheon and his sudden display of emotion.

“I don’t know– I don’t know how to say it. I– it’s a mix of things that– I need to explain–” he trips over each and every syllable, dying a little more inside at the shambles. But it’s too late to stop now.

He continues to stare at your profile, completely high off your beauty and grace, despite how you regard him. But for all the sharp replies and short quips you constantly throw his way, he sees, that just like him, behind a hard exterior, there’s a soft side to you that’s begging to be let out.

“I just... God, I just love you.” The words sound messy and clumsy, hastily thrown together and spat out to resemble a sentence. He’s mortified and if the ground could open up and swallow him whole right this moment, he wouldn’t say no.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I love you.” But the second time is much easier and a great burden seems to have lifted from his shoulders.

You simply blink back in pure astonishment, lacking a witty retort or sassy clapback. He’d said it twice, yet you still question whether you’d heard him right.

“Are you sick?” You blurt out, absently wondering whether his strange behaviour is down to a bad fever. “Do we need to go home?”

He shakes his head and steps closer. You step back. “I know you can’t stand me, you think I don’t like you either but it couldn’t be farther from the truth. I... I adore you.”

“If this is a joke, it isn’t funny.” You frown and try to keep the oncoming tears at bay, swallowing them down.

“I’m not joking. I think... I think you’re the most beautiful, wonderful, kind and compassionate girl I’ve ever met. And... I know you hate having me around, I know you do but I would give my life to protect you. Spending every minute of every day of every year together... it’s just so hard not to fall in love with you. Sometimes,” he pauses to gather his thoughts, watching your bottom lip quiver. “Sometimes, I sit in bed and wonder what would happen if things were different. If I was like you. Would you still hate me then?”

And of course the question is rhetoric but he’s surprised to see you shake your head in answer, your jaw clenching in an effort to staunch the tears. “I don’t hate you.” You startle yourself with how steady your voice sounds despite being on the brink of tears. “I hate the idea of you.”

It’s something Jooheon has already worked out for himself but hearing you confide in him like this makes his heart soar.

You shake your head again, jumbling the thoughts up in your mind, and clear your throat. “I want you to resign.”

The words hit him harder than a truck, his face falling in dismay. And just when he thought he’d gotten through to you. “You– you want me to quit?”

You nod and shove more clothes into his hands, your face unreadable. “I want you to hand in your resignation letter first thing in the morning.”

“Why?”

“I think... I think we need to get to know each other better. And we can’t do that if you’re constantly watching over me. Leave that to someone else.” A small smile paints the corners of your mouth and Jooheon lets out a breath of relief.

“I don’t think your father will be too pleased to know I quit my job just to spend leisure time with his daughter.” He sounds worried and you try not to laugh.

“He has a soft spot for you.” But you don’t elaborate, instead dumping more clothes into his arms. “Right. Go and try those on. I’m sick of seeing you in that suit.”

And although it’s quite the unorthodox confession, you can’t help but feel the promise of better things on the horizon.

send me a combo from this list and I’ll write a drabble

[uminobiruka]

...and skate fast (or, on ironies in life) // fitorious

matt doesn't like the concept of eating ass.

everyone knows that.

especially his boyfriend, of all people.

...but it isn't unlike cameron to be mischievous this early in the morning

//

can also be found on ao3 @ lizzielka, under the same name

warning: ns*w

//

cameron wakes up to his right leg asleep. he and matt must’ve rolled over in their sleep, seeing as they were almost properly spooning now instead of laying with matt’s head tucked underneath the kiwi’s chin. cam carefully frees his leg, opting to hook the other one over the american’s hips instead, pressing small kisses all over his neck, down to the collar of a loose sleep shirt. matt stirs a bit and turns his head, eyes half lidded.

[[MORE]]

“morning,“ cameron kisses him on the cheek, getting a sleepy smile in return, “we should probably go get breakfast.”

matt rolls back to his original position: “no.”

cam props himself up on an elbow in response.

“why not?”

“i want more sleep.”

“and i want food, you lazy bitch.”

matt rolls over even further, onto his stomach, one leg bent to the side, shirt rolled up and offering a peek at the boxers he was wearing. “then get off my dick and eat my ass.” the snark is somewhat muffled by the fact it was spoken into a pillow.

the kiwi snorted, “can do both, though i thought you hated eating ass.”

“i do,” matt said into the pillow, louder this time; he yelled, almost, “please do not actually eat my ass.”

“again, why nooot?” cameron was mock-pouting.

“it’s gross and unhygienic.”

“don’t tell me you didn’t wash your ass yesterday.”

“i did, thank you very much for asking.” matt vaguely notices his boyfriend moving around on the bed to rub at his thigh.

“had chipotle in the last like… i don’t know, week?”

“...no?” a weight settles on the american’s lower back, gentle, reassuring, combined with a pair of hands rubbing his shoulders through the shirt.

“then why not let me try it? we can stop anytime, you’ll enjoy it, you know, all that jazz.” the hands moved onto his neck, thumbs pressing slight circles into the nape. matt sighs.

“...i guess.” he pushes his face further into the pillow.

“matt, love, we don’t have to if it makes you uncomfortable, there are-” he slides lower, pushing his crotch into matt's ass to accentuate his point, “-other things to do, y'know?” matt turns his face to look up into cameron's, the two of them sharing a soft smile.

“alright, you horny… “ the american illustrates his point further with a vague hand gesture, and then props himself up a little, reaching the hand into a bedside drawer, pulling out a pack of wipes and a bottle of lube, ears reddening. cam stiffles a giggle at the sight, earning a sharp, embarrassed stare thrown his way. he lifts his arms in defeat.

“hey, hey, calm down, if this makes you more comfortable then sure, go ahead, but,” taking the wipes, he gets off the bed, dragging matt along, closer to the edge, “i haven't seen you blush because of anything sex-related in fucking ages.” matt attempts to swat him, the flush getting deeper by the minute, spreading to his face.

cameron isn't really in reach, having settled on the floor, head propped up on his boyfriend's outstretched leg, hand running up and down the bent one.

“relax, baby.” he kneeled properly, massaging matt's thighs as he slides his hands higher, and then finally pulling off his boxers, narrowly avoiding a kick in the head as matt is forced to stretch the other leg out too. cam reaches out for the wipes and tugs one out. his mouth is on matt's thigh, pressing wet, open-mouthed kisses, biting here and there, barely a scrape of teeth.

meanwhile, matt is so out of it. his entire body is prickling with nervosity, muscles tense, though some of the tension got out of his system. sure, the constant massaging - not to mention the fact that cameron actually did use the wipes without much more ado - helped a bit, but not enough, and damn it, why is he so stressed anyway? it isn’t like they haven’t tried things before, but this--

his thoughts faded away, somewhat, as cam's tongue pressed flat onto his entrance, slowly licking. the kiwi is holding his cheeks spread, alternating between slow licks and teasing presses of the tip of the tongue against the hole, hitting the nerve endings just so well to make matt’s eyes roll back, having forced a whimper out of him. cameron squeezes his ass in acknowledgement of the sound, his tongue goes deeper, working him open with swirls and in and out motions, fucking him, and the american is achingly hard, but just this isnt enough, his hips jerk in short stutters, going in for the friction of the mattress on his cock, and then immediately back to the probing tongue. cam attempted a chuckle that only came out as hot air, causing the american to cry out into the pillow and try and push further back, only stopping when held in place firmly by the hands squeezing his thighs. one of the hands is gently caressing him, slowly feeling his ass up again, nails scraping lightly.

cameron leans back ever so slightly, picking up the half-forgotten lube, spreading some onto his fingers to warm it up, circling the entrance with one, gently pushing in. matt melts under the touch, the head of his cock - pressed uncomfortably onto the bed - dripping precum. the kiwi laughs, adding the tongue back to lick around the two fingers stretching his boyfriend, curling just so to hit his prostate, and matt swears he can see stars, coming between his stomach pressed flat to the bed and the sheets, fucking himself on the fingers to ride through the orgasm.

cameron has leaned forward and wrapped a hand around his torso, putting kisses down wherever he can reach, dragging matt into his lap to press a kiss to his temple. matt’s eyes are closed, face red, but he gestures for his boyfriend to get up and cam obeys, sitting on the bed and closing his eyes for a few seconds.

when he opens them again, he finds that matt's slid down to kneel between his legs, looking somewhat disheveled still, pupils blown wide and lips puffed and slick with saliva. cameron bends forward for an open mouthed kiss - it's short and significantly sweeter than either of them expected - and cups the american's face with one hand, letting him break the kiss whenever he feels like it.

matt's hands have settled on his boyfriend's hips, creeping towards his crotch, so cameron just leans back on his elbows and watches as matt pulls his briefs just low enough for the darkened erection to spring free. matt licks his lips, leaning forward to swirl his tongue around the head, taking it into his mouth, sucking slightly, looking up to see cam’s relaxed face. one of his hands moves to dig crescents into the kiwi’s thigh and he feels a hand slide in the hair at the back of his head, just resting there, posing a question, so the american breathes in through his nose, letting himself get pushed lower, spit running down his chin where his lips aren’t wrapped around the cock as tight. the hand gripped his hair, turning his head enough so cameron feels the outline of the head of his own dick as he touches matt’s left cheek.

he lets out a satisfied hum, letting the man kneeling between his legs set the pace, move from sloppy to his usual confident in mere moments; and then the hand in his hair tightens into a vice-like grip, tugging sharply at his hair, before the kiwi goes slack and lets go.

matt leans back on his heels, wiping his chin. he's staring at cameron, who stares right back with a grin.

"ended up enjoying it, didn't you?" he poses a rhetorical question.

matt decides to just smack his calf.

[snowwolf1118]

Humans Are Weird: Women’s Edition Part X

Wow! We’re at Part X already! I can hardly believe I have committed myself to this point (which isn’t very far to be honest). Also, I honestly have no idea how long this series will be, but I can assure you it will last for far longer than you’d expect.

Also, my apologies for not posting an update sooner. I started writing Part X weeks ago, but then I realized it was too far ahead, so I decided to save it for a different time. Then I started writing another Part X, but again, it somehow needed to be saved for future posting. And now we have this post! The beginning took me a couple of tries to start, but then it started coming naturally. After that, it was the ending of this post that gave me trouble. I rewrote it about five or six times. Something kept feeling wrong about the endings. However, I am satisfied, or as satisfied as I can be and I hope you all are, too.

Now, let’s return to the story. It involves some POV hopping, as usual, and a good dash of humor. At least my type of humor! :)

Part I >> Part II >> Part III >> Part IV >> Part V >> Part VI >> Part VII >> Part VIII >> Part IX < > Part XI

“LET ME OUTTA HERE, YOU PIECES OF SHIT!” Straining her muscles against her restraints, Jay’va lurched toward the goons as they passed by her cell on their usual guard route, but again, she stopped short. The pirates had her bound to her cell wall, like a caged beast, but it was for their own safety after all.

When she had first awoken in the med-bay, she had caused an incident. When they transferred her to her cell, she caused another one. A few of the goons had to be hospitalized and, as a result, the others kept a tentative distance from her, even when they delivered her daily meals. At first, it was amusing, but it soon lost its luster after the fourth day.

Now it was the fifteenth day of her captivity and she was pissing mad. The accumulation of being treated like a wild beast and having no social or physical contact was driving her mad and making her mad. Cyborg always said cabin fever caused madness in humans left in isolation, but he never mentioned how it could incite anger, too. Her anger.

I wish he was here with me right now, she thought, he always knows what to do. Always. Sighing, Jay’va tried not to let her anger mix with her sorrow. She tried not to let it get the best of her. She knew if her crew saw her like this, they’d lose faith in her. Gotta stay strong. Stay strong. As she chanted the words in her head, she heard the faint footsteps of the goons patrolling the prison halls.

Shoving her emotions aside, she forced herself to calm down. She needed to calm down. Calm down, Jay-Jay, calm down. Remember your yoga. Cy wouldn’t want you pissing like this. Though she knew that was the truth, it was difficult to follow through with her breathing exercises because just seeing the goons again pissed her off.

Bucking like a wild mookeige, Jay’va screeched at the goons just as they reached her cell. She chuckled as they gave a little start. You would think these idiots would remember me by now, she smugly thought, but they never do―

“Well, I see isolation has done nothing to damper your spirit, Col. Heth Jay’va,” the new voice startled her.

Completely taken aback, she couldn’t even think of a witty, madness-drive comeback. She could only stare at the lifeform before her and feel shame wash over her. It was difficult to explain, but the deference she felt shook her to the core. It was unsettling. Maybe this was what humans mean when they pray to their gods and God? This absolute feeling of submission toward someone greater than them.

It was terrifying.

“I see you’re speechless. Good,” said the lifeform as they lowered the quantum-particle barrier separating them, “it makes things easier. I am Captain Zeelot of the Frek’jon, the magnificent ship you and your crewmates are captive on.” Jay’va remained silent, too overcome by her emotions to respond, her mind too muddled. The lifeform, Captain Zeelot, made a strange noise. Maybe it was a sound for displeasure? She didn’t want that, but she couldn’t make her jaws move.

Whatever it meant, it didn’t matter because Zeelot was approaching her with one heavy step at a time. The fear wafted off her like smoke from a fire. “Heth,” Zeelot murmured her name and cupped her cheek with one of their hands. It was so warm; it had been so long since anyone had touched her, she leaned into their embrace. “Hmm...that’s better. Golok, Rue’oth, release her,” they ordered the two goons.

“But Captain―” “She’ll kill us― ” exclaimed the goons.

“Silence,” Zeelot cut them off, “don’t make me repeat myself.”

The goons wore wary expressions, but she hardly noticed anything. Warmth. Touch. It had been too long...

Watching as Jay’va fell to her knees once released from her restraints, Zeelot marveled at the effectiveness of the pheromone concoction Krellion had created for them. Regardless of Krellion’s mental state, he still managed to create some of the most potent pheromones to subdue ferocious H’hish like Jay’va.

It was wonderous how, just moments ago, she was foaming at the mouth, ready to kill the guards, but now she was as docile as a reika-booj. Clucking, they knelt before her and began massaging her cheek. “Isn’t that better, Heth?” they cooed.

Jay’va nodded. “...feels good...” She was completely at their mercy. It was entertaining how easily the pheromones had taken over such a vicious H’hish.

“I’m glad, Heth, because I want to keep you and your crewmates comfortable, but I’m having a rather difficult time with that. Would you help me?”

They watched as Jay’va dumbly stared at them, so lost in the pheromones. They debated strangling until she whispered, “I want...I want to help. Let me help...” With great satisfaction, Zeelot knew with this, they had won.

Rising, they motioned for Golok and Rue’oth to handle the rest before giving Jay’va with a few parting words. “Answer all their questions truthfully for me, Heth. The more truthful you are, the sooner your crewmates will find comfort like you have.”

“Yes...” Jay’va mumbled.

Turning to Golok and Rue’oth as the lifted her, Zeelot assured them of their safety. “This batch of pheromones won’t wear off anytime soon, and since this is her first time experiencing kulgo pheromones, it will take even longer for it to dissipate from her system.” And with that, they were gone, leaving the rest of the work for the two of them to handle.

Entering their quarters, Zeelot found Murakami tinkering with an old service-bot. She’s taking to her duties well, they thought as they took a seat beside her, but she still refuses give up any personal information on her crew. Cheeky. “How do you like life on the ship? they questioned her.

Murakami didn’t spare them a glance. “Can’t say. It’s only been three days, but I suppose I can say I hate it and wish you all would die.” Yes, she was a cheeky human.

“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” the chided as they absentmindedly flicked a bolt off the table, “the others may take it the wrong way.”

“And what way would that be? I’d ab-so-lute-ly would love to know,” she sneered.

“Your sarcasm is not lost to me,” Zeelot murmured as they carefully raked their fingers through her short hair. They didn’t fail to notice Murakami’s muscles tense at their touch, or how she quickly forced them to relax. She refused to show her fear, but everyone feared them. “Murakami,” they leaned and whispered in her ear, “you can betray every single filthy piece of molongo on this ship, but if you betray me...if you truly ignite my anger, I will insure your life will never end. Understand?” they rasped before leaning back into their seat.

“I understand,” she finally said, her voice trembling.

“Good,” they said, taking the servant-bot from her and tearing it apart, “because this is your only warning. Don’t dare betray me again. Now get out.”

Murakami found herself dumbly standing in the hallway outside of Zeelot’s quarters, questioning herself about their abilities. How did they know what I was going to doing with that robot? How? It terrified her, this uncertainty. She had not even had the chance to reprogram the bot, but they knew what she wanted to do. Alright, stop panicking, Murakami. Don’t let them get to you. Clear your mind. Surely a reasonable explanation exists. Maybe a different slave tried the same thing as me. Maybe that’s why the bot was out of commission? Yes, that is right, she thought, breathing in a deep sigh of relief. That was the answer. One of Zeelot’s previous slaves must have tried to escape that way. It only made sense―

“What are you doing standing in the hallway?”

Giving a small yelp, she spun around to find Mel standing beside her. “Don’t do that. You nearly gave me a heart attack,” she exclaimed.

“Father cleared you of any cardiac conditions,” he said, waving for her to follow him, “so it is highly improbable that you almost experienced a cardiac episode.”

“It’s a figure of speech, kiddo. It means you startled or frightened me,” she deadpanned, following him.

Mel blankly stared at her, clearly not believing her. “Then why wouldn’t you say that I startled you?”

“You’re kidding me, right?” she asked, dumbfounded. “Are you actually suspecting I’m lying? Don’t answer that; it’s a rhetorical question. Let me educate you real quick about figure of speech.” She held up her hand and halted whatever nonsense he was about to spout. “Figure of speech exists everywhere in the universe and probably every alternate reality in existence―except in any reality where on this ship exists―and it’s words or phrases used in the non-literal sense for rhetorical purposes or vivid effects―”

“―Like your questions from just now?”

“Yes, just like my questions. Understand now?”

“Yes, I do. I have never had a proper conversation with another human before.”

“Really, I couldn’t tell.”

“...”

“Sarcasm. It’s irony used to mock or convey contempt.”

“...Then I suggest not using it in Father’s presence. Or showing emotion,” Mel said.

Murakami cocked a brow at him. “Is that why you’re such a killjoy? ‘Cause your crazy dad doesn’t like emotions? Don’t answer that. Anyways, where are we heading?” As she asked, she glanced around, not recognizing the darken hallways.

Mel shot what she would consider a smug look. “The prison cells for the cargo.”

“People aren’t cargo, Mel.” She nearly spat the word.

Mel briefly glanced at her. “Anyone can be cargo, Murakami. It doesn’t matter how unique or intelligent you think they are. If someone wants something and is willing to pay whatever the price for it, then the Frek’jon will provide it.

“In any case, I didn’t bring you here to discuss the ethics of slavery. I’m under orders to get information from you regarding your crew. Minute details such as personality traits, likes and dislikes, special talents; information not available from their personnel files.” As he spoke, Mel placed his hand on the wall, which somehow prompted the hallway to lighten up and reveal cell after cell filled with lifeforms of species she had never met, before continuing to walk down the hallway.

Wrinkling her brows, Murakami had followed Mel up until he mentioned the personnel files. That isn’t right, she thought as she tried to rationalize his words. The EMP wave destroyed all the digital files from the ship’s systems, so how would it be possible? She didn’t believe for a second Mel was lying to her. Though she had only met him a few days prior, she could already tell he wasn’t the type to lie about something like this, which again begged the question: How?

“Don’t lag behind,” Mel barked, dragging her from her thoughts. He was already at the end of the hallway.

Fucking shit. What a brat, she cursed as she took her sweet fucking time joining him. “Didn’t Krellion teach you manners when speaking to your elders?” she inquired once she caught up to him.

“Elders? No, he didn’t, but not like it matters. Most lifeforms don’t live long enough to be considered an ‘elder’. Anyways, like I said before, I need information on your crew, and you will give it to me.”

The way he spoke commanding her got on her nerves. “And why do you think I’ll tell you? Now that I know you’re trying to get information out of me, I’m a hundred percent unlikely to give it to you.”

Mel remained stoic, ignoring her words, as he placed his hand on the wall again and revealed a holding cell with a familiar figure curled up inside.

Her lips suddenly chapped, Murakami barely whispered the figure’s name.

“Fatima...”

[humansareweirdsedition]

Humans Are Weird: Women’s Edition Part X

Wow! We’re at Part X already! I can hardly believe I have committed myself to this point (which isn’t very far to be honest). Also, I honestly have no idea how long this series will be, but I can assure you it will last for far longer than you’d expect.

Also, my apologies for not posting an update sooner. I started writing Part X weeks ago, but then I realized it was too far ahead, so I decided to save it for a different time. Then I started writing another Part X, but again, it somehow needed to be saved for future posting. And now we have this post! The beginning took me a couple of tries to start, but then it started coming naturally. After that, it was the ending of this post that gave me trouble. I rewrote it about five or six times. Something kept feeling wrong about the endings. However, I am satisfied, or as satisfied as I can be and I hope you all are, too.

Now, let’s return to the story. It involves some POV hopping, as usual, and a good dash of humor. At least my type of humor! :)

Part I >> Part II >> Part III >> Part IV >> Part V >> Part VI >> Part VII >> Part VIII >> Part IX >> Part X >> Part XI >> Part XII >> Part XIII >> Part XIV

“LET ME OUTTA HERE, YOU PIECES OF SHIT!” Straining her muscles against her restraints, Jay’va lurched toward the goons as they passed by her cell on their usual guard route, but again, she stopped short. The pirates had her bound to her cell wall, like a caged beast, but it was for their own safety after all.

When she had first awoken in the med-bay, she had caused an incident. When they transferred her to her cell, she caused another one. A few of the goons had to be hospitalized and, as a result, the others kept a tentative distance from her, even when they delivered her daily meals. At first, it was amusing, but it soon lost its luster after the fourth day.

Now it was the fifteenth day of her captivity and she was pissing mad. The accumulation of being treated like a wild beast and having no social or physical contact was driving her mad and making her mad. Cyborg always said cabin fever caused madness in humans left in isolation, but he never mentioned how it could incite anger, too. Her anger.

I wish he was here with me right now, she thought, he always knows what to do. Always. Sighing, Jay’va tried not to let her anger mix with her sorrow. She tried not to let it get the best of her. She knew if her crew saw her like this, they’d lose faith in her. Gotta stay strong. Stay strong. As she chanted the words in her head, she heard the faint footsteps of the goons patrolling the prison halls.

Shoving her emotions aside, she forced herself to calm down. She needed to calm down. Calm down, Jay-Jay, calm down. Remember your yoga. Cy wouldn’t want you pissing like this. Though she knew that was the truth, it was difficult to follow through with her breathing exercises because just seeing the goons again pissed her off.

Bucking like a wild mookeige, Jay’va screeched at the goons just as they reached her cell. She chuckled as they gave a little start. You would think these idiots would remember me by now, she smugly thought, but they never do―

“Well, I see isolation has done nothing to damper your spirit, Col. Heth Jay’va,” the new voice startled her.

Completely taken aback, she couldn’t even think of a witty, madness-drive comeback. She could only stare at the lifeform before her and feel shame wash over her. It was difficult to explain, but the deference she felt shook her to the core. It was unsettling. Maybe this was what humans mean when they pray to their gods and God? This absolute feeling of submission toward someone greater than them.

It was terrifying.

“I see you’re speechless. Good,” said the lifeform as they lowered the quantum-particle barrier separating them, “it makes things easier. I am Captain Zeelot of the Frek’jon, the magnificent ship you and your crewmates are captive on.” Jay’va remained silent, too overcome by her emotions to respond, her mind too muddled. The lifeform, Captain Zeelot, made a strange noise. Maybe it was a sound for displeasure? She didn’t want that, but she couldn’t make her jaws move.

Whatever it meant, it didn’t matter because Zeelot was approaching her with one heavy step at a time. The fear wafted off her like smoke from a fire. “Heth,” Zeelot murmured her name and cupped her cheek with one of their hands. It was so warm; it had been so long since anyone had touched her, she leaned into their embrace. “Hmm...that’s better. Golok, Rue’oth, release her,” they ordered the two goons.

“But Captain―” “She’ll kill us― ” exclaimed the goons.

“Silence,” Zeelot cut them off, “don’t make me repeat myself.”

The goons wore wary expressions, but she hardly noticed anything. Warmth. Touch. It had been too long...

Watching as Jay’va fell to her knees once released from her restraints, Zeelot marveled at the effectiveness of the pheromone concoction Krellion had created for them. Regardless of Krellion’s mental state, he still managed to create some of the most potent pheromones to subdue ferocious H’hish like Jay’va.

It was wonderous how, just moments ago, she was foaming at the mouth, ready to kill the guards, but now she was as docile as a reika-booj. Clucking, they knelt before her and began massaging her cheek. “Isn’t that better, Heth?” they cooed.

Jay’va nodded. “...feels good...” She was completely at their mercy. It was entertaining how easily the pheromones had taken over such a vicious H’hish.

“I’m glad, Heth, because I want to keep you and your crewmates comfortable, but I’m having a rather difficult time with that. Would you help me?”

They watched as Jay’va dumbly stared at them, so lost in the pheromones. They debated strangling until she whispered, “I want...I want to help. Let me help...” With great satisfaction, Zeelot knew with this, they had won.

Rising, they motioned for Golok and Rue’oth to handle the rest before giving Jay’va with a few parting words. “Answer all their questions truthfully for me, Heth. The more truthful you are, the sooner your crewmates will find comfort like you have.”

“Yes...” Jay’va mumbled.

Turning to Golok and Rue’oth as the lifted her, Zeelot assured them of their safety. “This batch of pheromones won’t wear off anytime soon, and since this is her first time experiencing kulgo pheromones, it will take even longer for it to dissipate from her system.” And with that, they were gone, leaving the rest of the work for the two of them to handle.

Entering their quarters, Zeelot found Murakami tinkering with an old service-bot. She’s taking to her duties well, they thought as they took a seat beside her, but she still refuses give up any personal information on her crew. Cheeky. “How do you like life on the ship? they questioned her.

Murakami didn’t spare them a glance. “Can’t say. It’s only been three days, but I suppose I can say I hate it and wish you all would die.” Yes, she was a cheeky human.

“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” the chided as they absentmindedly flicked a bolt off the table, “the others may take it the wrong way.”

“And what way would that be? I’d ab-so-lute-ly would love to know,” she sneered.

“Your sarcasm is not lost to me,” Zeelot murmured as they carefully raked their fingers through her short hair. They didn’t fail to notice Murakami’s muscles tense at their touch, or how she quickly forced them to relax. She refused to show her fear, but everyone feared them. “Murakami,” they leaned and whispered in her ear, “you can betray every single filthy piece of molongo on this ship, but if you betray me...if you truly ignite my anger, I will insure your life will never end. Understand?” they rasped before leaning back into their seat.

“I understand,” she finally said, her voice trembling.

“Good,” they said, taking the servant-bot from her and tearing it apart, “because this is your only warning. Don’t dare betray me again. Now get out.”

Murakami found herself dumbly standing in the hallway outside of Zeelot’s quarters, questioning herself about their abilities. How did they know what I was going to doing with that robot? How? It terrified her, this uncertainty. She had not even had the chance to reprogram the bot, but they knew what she wanted to do. Alright, stop panicking, Murakami. Don’t let them get to you. Clear your mind. Surely a reasonable explanation exists. Maybe a different slave tried the same thing as me. Maybe that’s why the bot was out of commission? Yes, that is right, she thought, breathing in a deep sigh of relief. That was the answer. One of Zeelot’s previous slaves must have tried to escape that way. It only made sense―

“What are you doing standing in the hallway?”

Giving a small yelp, she spun around to find Mel standing beside her. “Don’t do that. You nearly gave me a heart attack,” she exclaimed.

“Father cleared you of any cardiac conditions,” he said, waving for her to follow him, “so it is highly improbable that you almost experienced a cardiac episode.”

“It’s a figure of speech, kiddo. It means you startled or frightened me,” she deadpanned, following him.

Mel blankly stared at her, clearly not believing her. “Then why wouldn’t you say that I startled you?”

“You’re kidding me, right?” she asked, dumbfounded. “Are you actually suspecting I’m lying? Don’t answer that; it’s a rhetorical question. Let me educate you real quick about figure of speech.” She held up her hand and halted whatever nonsense he was about to spout. “Figure of speech exists everywhere in the universe and probably every alternate reality in existence―except in any reality where on this ship exists―and it’s words or phrases used in the non-literal sense for rhetorical purposes or vivid effects―”

“―Like your questions from just now?”

“Yes, just like my questions. Understand now?”

“Yes, I do. I have never had a proper conversation with another human before.”

“Really, I couldn’t tell.”

“...”

“Sarcasm. It’s irony used to mock or convey contempt.”

“...Then I suggest not using it in Father’s presence. Or showing emotion,” Mel said.

Murakami cocked a brow at him. “Is that why you’re such a killjoy? ‘Cause your crazy dad doesn’t like emotions? Don’t answer that. Anyways, where are we heading?” As she asked, she glanced around, not recognizing the darken hallways.

Mel shot what she would consider a smug look. “The prison cells for the cargo.”

“People aren’t cargo, Mel.” She nearly spat the word.

Mel briefly glanced at her. “Anyone can be cargo, Murakami. It doesn’t matter how unique or intelligent you think they are. If someone wants something and is willing to pay whatever the price for it, then the Frek’jon will provide it.

“In any case, I didn’t bring you here to discuss the ethics of slavery. I’m under orders to get information from you regarding your crew. Minute details such as personality traits, likes and dislikes, special talents; information not available from their personnel files.” As he spoke, Mel placed his hand on the wall, which somehow prompted the hallway to lighten up and reveal cell after cell filled with lifeforms of species she had never met, before continuing to walk down the hallway.

Wrinkling her brows, Murakami had followed Mel up until he mentioned the personnel files. That isn’t right, she thought as she tried to rationalize his words. The EMP wave destroyed all the digital files from the ship’s systems, so how would it be possible? She didn’t believe for a second Mel was lying to her. Though she had only met him a few days prior, she could already tell he wasn’t the type to lie about something like this, which again begged the question: How?

“Don’t lag behind,” Mel barked, dragging her from her thoughts. He was already at the end of the hallway.

Fucking shit. What a brat, she cursed as she took her sweet fucking time joining him. “Didn’t Krellion teach you manners when speaking to your elders?” she inquired once she caught up to him.

“Elders? No, he didn’t, but not like it matters. Most lifeforms don’t live long enough to be considered an ‘elder’. Anyways, like I said before, I need information on your crew, and you will give it to me.”

The way he spoke commanding her got on her nerves. “And why do you think I’ll tell you? Now that I know you’re trying to get information out of me, I’m a hundred percent unlikely to give it to you.”

Mel remained stoic, ignoring her words, as he placed his hand on the wall again and revealed a holding cell with a familiar figure curled up inside.

Her lips suddenly chapped, Murakami barely whispered the figure’s name.

“Fatima...”

[nothingman]

South Park turns 20 years old this summer, meaning that if those foulmouthed, crudely fashioned 8-year-olds that were first introduced on August 13, 1997 followed the rules of linear time, they’d all be adults farting down the barrel of 30. Similarly, there’s now an entire generation of people—spanning high-schoolers to middle-aged people who remember watching its early seasons in college, and who can’t believe they’re reading/writing 20-year retrospectives on it now—who were actually raised on South Park.

The show celebrated this existential crisis-inducing fact last year with a tongue-in-cheek ad, depicting South Park as a sort of benevolent guarantor keeping reliable watch over a girl from infancy until her first trip to college. It was a typically self-effacing joke, but it’s true: Our world is now filled with people for whom South Park has always been there, a cultural influence that, in some cases, is completely foundational to their point of view. The ad doesn’t end with the girl logging onto Twitter to complain that social justice warriors are ruining the world, but otherwise, spot on.

After all, for most of its 20 years, South Park’s own point of view has more or less been this: “Everything and everyone are full of shit—hey, relax, guy.” It’s a scorched-earth, deconstructionist approach steeped in equal-opportunity offensiveness that’s made South Park one of the funniest satires ever produced, and particularly potent in the time in which it debuted. “When we started, [it was] Beavis And Butt-Head, and us, and in some ways The Simpsons, and Married With Children—shit like that,” Matt Stone told Vanity Fair last year, putting the Comedy Central cartoon in the company of other ’90s series that diverged from the “bland… shitty sitcoms that were just so lifeless” Stone and co-creator Trey Parker were reacting against. But South Park has now lived long enough to see the experimental become the conventional. And it’s outlasted all but one of those series not just by subverting formulaic TV, but by feeding directly off current events. As a result, for many of those raised by South Park, the show has functioned as sort of a scatological op-ed—in some cases, maybe the only op-ed they’ve ever been interested in.

To these acolytes, Parker and Stone have spent two decades preaching a philosophy of pragmatic self-reliance, a distrust of elitism, in all its compartmentalized forms, and a virulent dislike of anything that smacks of dogma, be it organized religion, the way society polices itself, or whatever George Clooney is on his high horse about. Theirs can be a tricky ideology to pin down: “I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals,” Stone said once, a quote that has reverberated across the scores of articles, books, and message-board forums spent trying to parse the duo’s politics, arguing over which side can rightfully claim South Park as its own. Nominally, Parker and Stone are libertarians, professing a straight-down-the-middle empathy for the little guy who just wants to be left alone by meddling political and cultural forces. But their only true allegiance is to whatever is funniest; their only tenet is that everything and everyone has the potential to suck equally. More than anything, they’ve taught their most devoted followers that taking anything too seriously is hella lame.

So while they’ve advocated, in their own fucked-up way, for stuff like the right to abortion, drug legalization, and general tolerance for others, they’ve also found their biggest, easiest targets in liberalism’s pet causes, those formerly rebellious ideals that had become safely sitcom-bland over the Bill Clinton years—all of which were steeped in actually, lamely caring about stuff. Taking the piss out of the era’s priggish, speech-policing, Earth Day-brainwashed hippies was the most transgressive—and therefore funniest—thing you could possibly do. And so, South Park joked, global warming is just a dumb myth perpetrated by “super cereal” losers. Prius drivers are smug douches who love the smell of their own farts. Vegetarians end up growing vaginas on their face. “Transgender people” are just mixed-up, surgical abominations. The word “fag” is fine. Casual anti-Semitism is all in good fun. “Hate crimes” are silly. Maybe all you pussies just need a safe space.

“Did South Park accidentally invent the alt-right?” Janan Ganesh asked recently in the Financial Times, articulating a theory that began gaining traction as an entire political movement seemed to crystallize around the show’s “anti-PC chic” and general fuck-your-feelings attitude. Way back in 2001, political blogger Andrew Sullivan had already coined the term “South Park Republican” to describe the supposedly emerging group of young people who, like the show, were moderate on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, but also rejected the stuffy doctrines of diversity and environmentalism. They also believed, as Parker and Stone would soon illustrate in Team America: World Police, that the world needed American dicks to fuck assholes, over the objections of liberal pussies and F.A.G. celebrities. That voting bloc never actually materialized—though to be fair, the show was only four years old at the time. It would take at least another decade of people with Cartman avatars just joshin’ about hating Jews before the South Park generation would truly come of age.

Let’s be real, though. South Park didn’t “invent” the “alt-right,” even accidentally. The “alt-right” is the product of lots of things—disenfranchisement; internet echo chambers; aggrieved Gamergaters; boredom; the same ugly, latent racism that’s coursed beneath civilization’s veneer for millennia; etc. The growing, bipartisan distaste for Wall Street-backed career politicians and the epically bungled machinations of the Democratic Party certainly didn’t help, nor did the frustrating inability of the social justice movement to pick its battles—or its enemies. Furthermore, it’s always dangerous to assign too much influence to pop culture, even something that’s been part of our lives for this long. And as South Park itself derided in “The Tale Of Scrotie McBoogerballs,” you shouldn’t go looking for deep sociopolitical messages in your cartoon dick jokes. (Then again, only three years earlier, it also argued that imaginary characters really can change people’s lives and even “change the way [you] act on Earth,” making them “more realer” than any of us—so you decide.)

Still, it’s not that much of a stretch to see how one might have fed the other, if only through the sort of intangible osmosis that happens whenever an influential artwork spawns imitators, both on screen and off. South Park may not have “invented” the “alt-right,” but at their roots are the same bored, irritated distaste for politically correct wokeness, the same impish thrill at saying the things you’re not supposed to say, the same button-pushing racism and sexism, now scrubbed of all irony.

There’s also the same co-opting of anti-liberal stances as the highest possible form of rebellion: Parker and Stone used to brag that they were “punk rock” for telling their Hollywood friends how much they loved George W. Bush; Parker even told Rolling Stone in 2007, “The only way to be more hardcore than everyone else is to tell the people who think they’re the most hardcore that they’re pussies, to go up to a tattooed, pierced vegan and say, ‘Whatever, you tattooed faggot, you’re a pierced faggot and whatever’”—a quote that may as well have been taken from 4chan’s /pol/ board this morning. “Conservatism is the new punk rock,” echoed a bunch of human cringes a decade later. Whatever, you faggot, a dozen Pepes tweeted a few seconds ago.

But well beyond the “alt-right,” South Park’s influence echoes through every modern manifestation of the kind of hostile apathy—nurtured along by Xbox Live shit-talk and comment-board flame wars and Twitter—that’s mutated in our cultural petri dish to create a rhetorical world where whoever cares, loses. Today, everyone with any kind of grievance probably just has sand in their vagina; expressing it with anything beyond a reaction GIF means you’re “whining”; cry more, your tears are delicious. We live in Generation U Mad Bro, and from its very infancy, South Park has armed it with enough prefab eye-rolling retorts (“ManBearPig!” “I’m a dolphin!” “Gay Fish!” “…’Member?”) to sneeringly shut down discussions on everything from climate change and identity politics to Kanye West and movie reboots. Why not? Everything sucks equally, anyway. Voting is just choosing between some Douche and a Turd Sandwich. Bullying is just a part of life. Suck it up and take it, until it’s your turn to do the bullying. Relax, guy.

Again, it’s a world that South Park didn’t create intentionally, just by setting out to make us laugh, or by Parker and Stone trying to get rich off a bunch of farting construction paper cutouts. But even Parker and Stone seem slightly, if only occasionally uneasy about the overarching life lessons they’ve imparted—often expressing that anxiety in the show itself. In “You’re Getting Old,” South Park’s most moving half-hour, Parker and Stone grappled directly with the cumulative effects of perpetually shitting on things—of allowing a healthy, amused skepticism to ossify into cynicism and self-satisfied superiority, then into nihilism, then into blanket, misanthropic hatred. That dark night of the soul later formed the through-lines of seasons 19 and 20, where South Park wryly, semi-sincerely confronted the series’ place as a “relic from another time” by putting the town under the heavy thumb of PC Principal.

Then—after hooking its red-pilled fans with an extended critique of the emptiness of neoliberalism, epitomized by a sneering, “safe space”-mocking character that was literally named Reality—it tried confronting the audience who had most embraced their ramped-up anti-PC crusades. Last season kicked off with Cartman admitting to Kyle, “We’re two privileged, straight white boys who have their laughs about things we never had to deal with,” a confession rendered only slightly tongue-in-cheek by the fact of who was saying it. And it culminated in Gerald, who’d spent the year gleefully harassing people online, squaring off with the Danish prime minister, a stand-in for every troll the show’s ever nurtured:

I want to stand here and tell you that you and I are different, but it’s not true. All we’ve been doing is making excuses for being horrible people. I don’t know if you tried to teach me a lesson, but you have. I have to stand here and look at you. And all I see is a big fat reflection of myself.

Ultimately, of course, Gerald comes to a familiar conclusion: “Fuck you, what I do is fucking funny, bitch!” he cries, before kicking the prime minister in the balls. Fair enough. South Park is, and always will be, funnier than any of the maladjusted creeps who have spent decades internalizing the show’s many false equivalencies and ironic racism, then lazily regurgitating them in an attempt to mimic its edginess—or worse, by treating them as some sort of scripture for living. And to be certain, there are millions of Poe’s law-defying viewers for whom South Park really is just a comedy, one that satisfies the most basic requirement of saying the things you shouldn’t say, in a far more clever way than you could say them. But regardless of their satirical intent, or the humanity that grounds even their nastiest attacks, it’s clear that even Parker and Stone sometimes question the influence they’ve had on the world, and who is and isn’t in on the joke.

Which brings us (as all 2017 articles must) to Donald Trump, the ultimate troll, and one that Parker sees as a natural outgrowth of South Park’s appeal to a nation bored with politeness. As he recently told the Los Angeles Times:

He’s not intentionally funny but he is intentionally using comedic art to propel himself. The things that we do—being outrageous and taking things to the extreme to get a reaction out of people—he’s using those tools. At his rallies he gets people laughing and whooping. I don’t think he’s good at it. But it obviously sells—it made him president.

Trump’s blithe offensiveness, rampant narcissism, and faith that everyone but him is stupid makes him a natural analog to Eric Cartman. But instead, South Park made him into Mr. Garrison—a decision that makes some logical sense (Mr. Garrison is of constitutional age, hates Mexicans and women, and doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself), though it also felt a bit like dissembling. Nevertheless, as the election wore on, South Park again seemed to acknowledge its role in helping to create a world where someone like Trump could seem like an exciting, entertaining alternative to conventional blandness. And it made a real, concerted effort to stymie any suggestion of support by having Garrison declare repeatedly that he was “a sick, angry little man” who “will fuck this country up beyond repair,” all while openly mocking those who still loved him anyway as nostalgia-drunk idiots.

“Is it just me or has South Park gone full cuck?” wondered fans on Reddit’s The_Donald immediately after that episode aired, and probably not for the first (or last) time. But in the aftermath of Trump/Garrison’s election, those same, vigilant cuck-watchers were back to crowing over how South Park had really stuck it to politically correct types in a scene where Trump/Garrison tells PC Principal, “You helped create me.” That South Park positioned this as less of a triumphant comeuppance than a suicidal backfire didn’t seem to matter. And the show more or less left it there—portraying Trump/Garrison as a dangerously incompetent buffoon, but also as the ultimate “u mad?” to all those liberals they fucking hate.

All of which makes Parker and Stone’s recent declaration to lay off Trump in the coming 21st season a real disappointment at best, cowardice at worst. The duo is, of course, under no obligation to tackle politics—or anything else they don’t want to, for that matter. They’re also right that mocking Trump is both redundant and “boring,” and also that everyone does it. For two dyed-in-the-wool contrarians, Trump comedy feels every bit as bland, lifeless, and sitcom-safe as an episode of, say, Veronica’s Closet. Furthermore, Parker’s complaints of the show just “becoming CNN now” and not wanting to spend every week endlessly restacking the sloppy Jenga pile of Trump-related outrage is completely understandable. Believe me, I get it.

That said: Man, what a cop out. South Park has already spent the past 20 years being CNN for its CNN-hating audience. Meanwhile, Parker and Stone have proudly, loudly thumped for a “fearless” brand of satire that’s willing to mock everyone from George W. Bush to Scientology to Mormonism to Muhammad, even under death threats. To shrug now and say, as Parker did, “I don’t give a shit anymore”—right when, by their own admission, the influence of the show’s worldview has reached all the way to the White House—feels especially disingenuous, and suspiciously like caving to the young, Trump-loving fans with whom they have forged such an uneasy relationship. (“South Park bends the knee on their fake-news-fueled portrayal of President Trump,” one The_Donald post gloated, followed by many, many more.) If they truly believe that those trolls in the mirror are “horrible people” who are helping to “fuck the country up beyond repair,” it would be truly fearless to tell them why, with no hint of ambiguous, everything-sucks irony that can be willfully misinterpreted.

Instead, Parker now says he’s eager to get back to “the bread and butter of South Park: kids being kids and being ridiculous and outrageous.” Which is great! South Park is absolutely at its best when it focuses on that stuff, and I look forward to watching it all on my hurting butt. Still, after 20 years, even they seem to realize that many of those ridiculous, outrageous kids for whom it’s “always been there” have long since grown up—and some of them have gone on to do some real, destructive adult shit. Like their inspirations, South Park’s generation of trolls are tiny but loud, and they’ve had the strange effect of changing the world. It sure would be nice if South Park would grow up as well and take responsibility for them.

Or, you know, maybe I just have sand in my vagina.

via A.V. Club

[louartspace]

Sian Hill Artist Talk

Sian’s work is about the personal which is often frowned upon in art although the personal often has wider implications; ‘the personal is political’ - anything personal reflects life as we all experience it in similar ways. 

Video from Level 3 - made out of frustration about her hometown becoming one of the most deprived towns in Wales. It used to be a bustling seaside town and popular tourist destination. The video presents themes of the everyday and shows this contrast of the towns past with its current desolate state. The video is split screen, 1 of the old town and 1 of the new. Sian got in touch with someone who had archive footage of the town when it was booming and used this in her videos.

Explorations of the working class community play a huge part in Sian’s practice, and is crucial to her work, which includes painting (mainly earlier works), print, photography and video. 

Sian also questions notions surrounding working class women who are often forgotten in society. Her work is political and is a protest against the portrayals of the working class; the media today is awash with anti working-class rhetoric, for example, Jeremy Kyle, Can’t Pay We’ll Take it Away - these shows present the working class as irresponsible and inferioir to a point where the working class become entertainment. 

Another crucial part of Sians work is her past and in particular her mother’s past which she explores in a detached and objective manner that can resonate with all audiences. She expresses her grief of losing her mother through her work and delves into her mothers past by looking through old photos, speaking to her father and gathering found footage.

This grief was initially expressed through her work as an MA student, inspired by photo booth images of her mother. Sian decided to paint in response to these but found the images were too much of a reflection of herself and seeing herself in her mother. Sian wanted the work to remain detached in a sense so it was a celebration of her mother’s life. 

These paintings were inspired by William de Kooning and abstract expressionism. 

The work that resonated with me most was the book Sian made from recorded conversations with her dad after mother died and her dad had experienced a stroke. Sian recorded and transcribed these conversations and documented them in a book along side family images. the images were cropped to just her mothers hands and had text beneath. In this way the work remained anonymous. 

The juxtaposition of the photographs and the words is really powerful and touching - the context of the conversation was serious, yet blunt and the images delicate respresenting the feminine motherly notion yet contrasting this with the masculine words of her father. The content of the conversations are serious and truthful - and this really brings you into the reality of family life, the past, the future and the idea of the ‘temporary’ and transient. 

Sians love of music feeds into her work and is a clear inspiration and has importance within her work.

Sian talked of exploring this narrative of someones life, not in terms of birth or life death but in term of cultural geography, visiting places where she and her mother lived and the proud working class identity of her family. 

Sian visited places of importance to her mother and photographed the spaces. 

In her text, print photography and objects. 

Influence: Nan Goulding - archived her life and her friends lives. 

We're not here for ever and the work stands as a reminder of mortality and the temporary and fleeting nature of life. 

For her end of year show, Sian displayed a range of works - print, photography, film, a book and also writings. For example, a compiled list of words she associated with her mum - like a stream of consciousness - a stream of thoughts that come to mind when she thinks about her mother. 

The works are an archive of mother’s life but from an outsiders perspective. Feeling she had to give her mother a voice.

A lot of Sians work is concerned with family and these changing nature of the way you view the people around you from being a child and seeing the innocence and only seeing the good things, to slowly learning more and more as you get older and highlights this realisation of the point you grow up and realise the people you thought the world of are not the people you thought they were. This happens to everyone - you have these ideas and memories of being a child and family until you get older and become able to realise the truth. 

Current and new works relate to social housing, gentrification and the working class. 

Sian takes photographs on old film and old cameras, using a range of different apparatus for her work. 

Visiting places she lived a child, she was frustrated visiting her old street where there was pictures of her mother holding her -  labour said they were going to regenerate it, knocked down the houses and then it got turned into a ‘meadow’ - waste land. her work explores the changes taking place in contemporary society and also has an irony to it and humour in a sense . In the photographic works containing numerous images of the British flag and St Georges flag - in context since Brexit, displays the irony that working class people are still being patriotic when the country does nothing for the working class. Sian talks about her disillusionment with this country and communicates this through these ironic images. 

Influence: Painter, George shaw 

Risograph prints - quick process - but they gave the image a sense of ambiguity like film.

Current work - since Grenfell tower - been angry at the treatment of working class people,  instilled values from a child 

‘Social mobility’ - patronising term as a working class person - housing crisis - whole council estates border up - the irony of a St Georges flag painted on the wall. Captures images around estates in Salford. - England flags reoccur in her images - this idea that patriotism is important - it is most common from the working class - we shouldn't be patriotic as the country does not do anything for the working class.  

Influences: documentary youtube - End of the Street - about regeneration 

Pierre bourdieu - symbolic violence 

mis education social mobility and the working class - Diane Reay 

note: peak imaging 

I really enjoyed the talk by Sian today, it shared a lot of the same themes of my work and helped me realise the direction I want to go with in my work with photography and video, inspiring me to want to explore more with different cameras and photography techniques. The talk was political yet close to home and very touching and emotional. I am also fascinated with my past and that of my friends and this idea of temporality and change. My work is concerned with the personal but like Sians has political roots. 

[ecocore]

FUCKING PANSIES:

Queer Poetics, Plant Reproduction, Plant Poetics, Queer Reproduction

Caspar Heinemann

with images from Lee Pivnik

‘Waking, I was certain my room was host to a demon; terrified, I watched the remorseless eyes in the half light, till dawn gave me the courage to bolt shivering with fear to my parents’ bed. My father laughed: ‘Don’t be such a pansy, Derek.’ -Derek Jarman, Modern Nature

Don’t be such a pansy, Viola tricolor, violet, heart’s-ease, love-in-idleness; Pansy goes by many names, and many names fit into and fall under ‘Don’t be such a pansy, _______.’ Don’t be such a pansy, even if there’s a remorseless demon in your room, crouching in the dark, ready to tear you apart. Even if there’s a whole remorseless world out there, even in your parents’ bedroom, ready and waiting to tear you apart.

The pansy has remained a staple in anti-queer lexicon since the last century, the humble violet symbolising weakness, effeminacy, all things effete, wimpy, and generally flowery. Propagating alongside its siblings sissy, fairy, and faggot, the pansy is a resilient flower. However, its roots as an insult are not strictly horticultural. The etymology of pansy (flower) is the French pensée, the past tense of ‘to think’, and a feminine reflexive. This occurred when, in a dubious feat of anthropomorphising, the pansy was seen to resemble a person leant over in intense contemplation, which in turn led to it becoming a symbol of remembrance. As an insult, it was applied to the ineffectual intellectual, implying an emasculating failure to embody a forceful, active, masculine ideal. The quality of thoughtfulness was already both feminized and feminizing, but the first known use of the word to describe gay men was not until 1925 (Partridge, 1984).[1] At some point along the way, the studious pensée became the flamboyant pansy, the femininity of the insult taking precedence over any other qualities. With ‘pansy’ having no non-floral meaning in English, in popular usage any association with remembrance is forgotten. The intellectual intellectual basis of the insult becomes obscured through time and translation and all that we are left with is the ontological relation of a human subject to the Viola tricolor itself, and the vague sense that there is something not right in the boy who thinks too much, looks too closely.

When the insult ‘pansy’ is thrown, there exists the obvious implication that the victim is themselves, physically, a pansy. But alongside this, to be a pansy is most likely to also be someone with an affinity for pansies, someone who would rather draw flowers in the garden than kick a ball around, a boy who would rather have a bunch of arum lilies than a brace of pistols (Jarman, 1992, p28). Being a pansy is seen as both a cause and an effect of an underlying affection for the delicate, the pretty, and the decorative. Pansies love pansies because they are pansies, which is why they are pansies. The love of pansies is a red flag on the slippery slope to becoming a pansy, and the pansy is a pansy because pansy is the word for people who love pansies. This is not an intentional morphing, but rather, after all those hours in the garden someone turns and says ‘Don’t be such a pansy’, and then there is a demon in your room, and it is clear a pansy is a bad thing to be, which is strange to consider for someone who loves pansies, but lots of things are going to be strange from now on.

The homophobia of the insult pansy is not just the implication of effeminacy from association with the flower itself, but the homophobic condemnation of perceived sameness. The pansies love of pansies is taboo in part because they are a pansy, there is no heterosexual difference in pansy desire. However, the pansy-pansy identification is not the same as Narcissus falling in love with his own image, not the egocentric self-adoration of the daffodil leaning into the pond. The pansy is intensely relational and curious, and loves other pansies (and daffodils and geraniums and buttercups and snowdrops). Remember, the pansy becomes a pansy through perceived similarity and/or attachment to other pansies. The initial recognition was with something they were yet to become. In this way, pansy is inherently a collective identity, inhabiting a multiple temporality. To clarify, this is not an essentialist argument that all pansies like pansies, as in, ‘all people perceived as queer men like Viola tricolor.’ But rather, that its formulation as a generalised homophobic insult, potentially applied to any queer man, or any person read as such, means that ‘queer men like queer men’ (uncontroversial) can be read as ‘pansies like pansies’. The collision of this meaning, with the horticultural association, begins to create a framework for a positive understanding of queerness, reproduction, survival and the natural.

As with many anti-queer insults, an underlying assumption in pansy is that there is an unnaturalness to effeminacy, that it signifies something gone astray that would never thrive or even survive in the state of nature, a rupture in the normatively gendered Arcadian ideal. The pansy clearly cannot be a real man, because he is a flower, and flowers are not men, and men are not flowers. But even the most ardent homophobe would find it hard to argue that flowers are not ‘natural’, even in all their selectively bred garden centre glory. Whilst not wanting to perpetuate the myth of queer sex as inherently unreproductive, it is important to not deny that queerness still exists with a turbulent relationship to reproduction, in the biological sense. At the heart of this is the existence of queerness in relation to a medicalised discourse that understands the queer subject in terms of biology, in a way that is inherently naturalised, assuming queerness as something to be located in genes and hormones, glands and chromosomes.

This is not a form of acceptance or understanding, but rather a naturalisation that implies a failure, a departure from the script of healthy, normative heterosexuality and gender. When the queer body is accepted as a natural form, it is always a defective natural body, an abnormality that reinforces the norm. Homophobic and transphobic discourse has adopted this position in recent years, in reaction to the realisation that an understanding of the queer body as unnatural has the unintended consequence of devaluing any biologically based understanding of gender and sexuality, rendering the cisgender heterosexual body equally unnatural.[2] In reference to the earlier (and still present) form of anti-queer rhetoric Greta Gaard (1997) points out the irony that when homophobes use the argument that to be queer is to be against nature, they are insinuating that they care about ‘nature’, which is rarely the case. This is especially true for people coming from a fundamentalist Christian theological perspective in which man’s dominion over nature is central. She writes that ‘in effect, the "nature" queers are urged to comply with is none other than the dominant paradigm of heterosexuality.’ Nature becomes a weaponised synonym for reproduction, and everything that does not directly contribute to the survival of a the species becomes an affront.

As much as the queer is being called a flower, the flower is being called a queer. As much as the pansy lends its prettiness to the queer subject, the queer subject lends their effeminacy to the pansy. Although this could be read as a reductive anthropomorphising, there is also the potential for something else if the relationship is not read as one-way mapping of human characteristics onto flowers, but also flower characteristics onto humans, with implications for the agency of both. Gaard asks us to think not only in terms of the dualisms traditionally associated with conversations around gender, race, and nature, but the ‘vertical’ associations, ‘between reason and heterosexuality, for example, or between reason and whiteness as defined in opposition to emotions and nonwhite persons […] the ways queers are feminized, animalized, eroticized, and naturalized in a culture that devalues women, animals, nature, and sexuality […] how persons of color are feminized, animalized, eroticized, and naturalized. Finally, we can explore how nature is feminized, eroticized, even queered’ (1997). Taking this as a call to arms, there is the potential for a queer identification with what is termed ‘nature’ to have positive political implications not just for queerness, but for a wider ecological and social struggles.

When read against a binary understanding of human reproduction, flowers are inherently queer. This is not a modish application of the term ‘queer’ to anything remotely ‘strange’, divorced from its roots as a slur or any analysis of human sexuality and gender, but rather a comparative statement about human understanding of gendered bodies across species.[3] While the term ‘queer’ is referring to a very specifically human (and mostly white, Western) subjects navigation of a social world, it is also inaccurate to think of plants (and other species) as exempt from and untouched by this discourse. Given the prevalence of anthropocentrism, the reading of gender in plants inevitably reverberates and affects human understanding of human gender, and the reverse. As well as not wanting to make an anthropocentric imposition onto plants, I also want to avoid essentialising queerness in humans. To borrow from Nicole Seymour, I do not want to ‘claim that queer individuals necessarily have a particular kind of relationship to the non-human; [but focus] primarily on the queer relationships that humans might develop with the non-human, and how environmental ethics might emerge from queer practices and perspectives’ (2013, p29). I would add to this an investment in thinking through how queer ethics might emerge from environmental practices and perspectives. The queer anarchist collective Baedan define queer as ‘the inherent decomposition which afflicts gender […]; not this or that historically constituted subject category, but all the divergent bodily and spiritual expressions which escape their roles’ (2014). Rather than a positive, universalising usage of queer, queer is a contingency. I hope the clumsiness of attempting to talk about how plants fuck spills over, somehow, into somewhere productive (or unproductive).

The number of scientifically validated genders for plants far exceeds those commonly understood and accepted for humans. At the most basic level, single flowers are either male, female, or bisexual (also referred to as ‘perfect’, hermaphroditic or androgynous). However, categories proliferate due to the fact that different plants grow different combinations of male, female, or bisexual flowers. This does not mean that all species have male, female, and bisexual flowers - it is possible for plants to only have either bisexual or female flowers, for example. This is complicated further by the fact that in some species, the flowers will change gender. It is important to clarify here that when we are talking about plant gender, we are potentially discussing at three different scales - the gender of an individual flower, the gender of an individual plant, and the morphology of the species as a whole, all of which determine each other. Although obviously not directly translatable, these multiple scales of plant gender provide a nuanced and useful framework for thinking through human gender, in that we are always referring to a complicated enmeshment of biological sex, individual identity, collective identity and socially enforced role, none of which can be considered independently of one another.[4]

To avoid reducing the link between the flower body and the queer body to being purely to do with reproduction in a mechanical and biological sense, it is important to think though the specificity of the situation. For one thing, many species have reproductive practices entirely contrary to the ideals of human monogamous heterosexuality.[5] For another, the conceptual reduction of reproduction to a process of sexual reproduction and the continuation of a species is profoundly anti-queer, both in a literal and abstract sense. There is clearly a specificity to flowers that has led to the association with queerness, beyond ‘flowers are not straight and have multiple genders’. Whether or not explicitly acknowledged, research and discoveries into non-human lifeforms are always embroiled in human social questions, both in process in terms of methodology, and in their consequences and applications. In their essay Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters, Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers begin to explore this tension between botany and ideology. They write of Charles Darwin’s flower experiments, and his downplaying of the evolutionary role of self-pollination (reproduction by an individual plant possessing male and female reproductive organs) in favour of cross-fertilisation (reproduction by two plants, via insects) which was seen to be necessary for the survival of ‘higher organic beings’. Hustak and Myers write, ‘Orchids, it turns out, were caught in a queer interspecies assemblage that disrupted normative Victorian sexualities and species boundaries’ (2012, p82). Flowers must be kept at arms length to prevent them from contaminating human sexual norms, but the mapping of those norms onto the flowers becomes necessary to attempt to rationalise what is found when those flowers are not kept at arms length.[6] The flower is constantly indexed onto human sexuality and yet remains impossible to entirely understand within or assimilate into a human heterosexual framework.

CAConrad is a queer poet who for several years has been working with what he refers to as ‘soma(tic) rituals’, ritualised bodily practices which he completes and then writes from his experiences of. One of these is called Security Cameras and Flowers Dreaming the Elevation Allegiance (For Susie Timmons). CA describes his frustration at the prevalence of security cameras in his home city of Philadelphia (‘FUCK YOU WATCHING US ALWAYS!!’). The ritual resistance he describes involves taking a basket of edible flowers to the scene (‘I eat pansies, I LOVE pansies, they’re delicious buttery purple lettuce!!’). He then looks directly into the camera and proceeds to place his tongue in the flower ‘in and out, flicking, licking, suckling blossoms.’ When confronted by a security guard he responds ‘I’M A POLLINATOR, I’M A POLLINATOR!!’ As soon as it is declared, it becomes obvious that of course he is, undeniably, a pollinator. Despite not being able to facilitate the actual reproduction of the plants, due to species constraints, the small act of resistance towards the security cameras becomes an act of potential pollination, a pollination of politics and ideas and poetry and joy, both a self-pollination and a cross-pollination.[7] The security cameras that CA is resisting are a part of an ecosystem, and he uses his agency as a being within that ecosystem to make a somatic and semiotic intervention against a mode of biopolitical control.

In CA engaging in a sexualised public ritual with flowers, there is also an implied parody of straight anxieties around queer sexuality, such as the argument that legalising gay marriage is a slippery slope towards people being allowed to marry their dogs. Apart from the obvious association of queerness with animality and the non-human, these anxieties are often explicitly or implicitly predicated on the notion that all unreproductive sexual practices are on some level unethical, prioritising pleasure over the continuation of the species. CA’s pollinator intervention gains another dimension when understood in terms of certain species of orchids that have the ability to attract pollinators without a material prize (nectar), but purely on the basis of their imitation of insect sex pheromones, attracting insects on the basis of desire, rather than physical sustenance.

In Animacies, Mel Y. Chen discusses linguistic animacy hierarchies, the way in which language is used to assign different levels of agency to matter, both living and non-living. In English, firmly at the top is the white male subject, everything else placed on a scale somewhere between him and a rock, or other perceived as wholly inactive matter. The argument is that to be compared to anything lower down inherently operates as an insult, in that it implies loss of agency, which is then linked to intelligence, ability, value, and social standing. Chen asks us, ‘If language normally and habitually distinguishes human and inhuman, live and dead, but then in certain circumstances wholly fails to do so, what might this tell us about the porosity of biopolitical logics themselves?’ (Chen, 2012, p7). What are the implications when a being higher up the animacy hierarchy (a human) chooses to align themselves with a ‘lower’ being (for example an insect pollinator)? The act of solidarity both implies a rejection of the value system which places life forms on such a hierarchy, attempting to level the playing field, and recognising how in certain situations it can be desirable to disassociate from the expectations associated with being ‘human’. The situating of ‘homo sapiens’ as something that can be disidentified with and opted out of, rather than a taxonomical fact, finds affinity with Giorgio Agamben’s assertion that ‘Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human’ (2003, p26). In addition to active verbal identification with other non-human agents, In The Greenhouse by Veronica Forrest-Thomson highlights how simply the experience of embodied encounter with the non-human can render taxonomies feeling arbitrary and redundant:

The silent rhythm of pulsating pores

filling my lungs with filtered earth

is all I feel or know of alien shapes

that once were flowers.

I breathe their breath

until all definitions are dissolved,

and homo sapiens is nothing more to me.

Perhaps less aligned with Agamben’s definition, these lines find more affinity with Karen Barad’s position that ‘“Humans” are neither pure cause or pure effect but part of the world in its openended becoming’ (2003, 821). Acts of Youth by the late queer poet John Wieners provides another instance of flower-consumption as symbolic of freedom from oppressive power structures.[8] He writes:

The fear of travelling, of the future without hope

or buoy. I must get away from this place and see

that there is no fear without me: that it is within

unless it be some sudden act or calamity

to land me in the hospital, a total wreck, without

memory again; or worse still, behind bars. If

I could just get out of the country. Some place

where one can eat the lotus in peace.

Give me the strength

to bear it, to enter those places where the

great animals are caged. And we can live

at peace by their side.

‘Some place where one can eat the lotus in peace’ is presented as the ultimate sanctuary from the fear and violence of his world, both inner and outer. Flower-eating operates as a literal form of, and metaphor for, spiritual survival precisely because of the low nutritional value of flowers, especially when compared to their high symbolic value. To eat a flower is to aesthetically nourish the body. Eating the lotus in peace is to embody a form of consumption not predicated on a violent conquest, but a gentle taking in of the other into the self, a pleasurable participation in an affective-aesthetic ecology. Wieners desire to live at peace by the side of the great animals in their cages demonstrates an identification with the feral and a siding with the non-human over the human (for who put the animals in cages?). But it is perhaps telling that even in the potentially limitless space of poetics, Wieners chooses to live with caged animals. Trans poet Verity Spott ends her piece Against Trans* Manifestos (2015) with the lines: ‘Determined as it is by a start and a finish, a false double, something that contains at least five harmonic falsities on a liberal map of social reality. Perhaps this is why we have a fetish involving cages; everything impossible to communicate.’ Read against this, Wieners collective desire (‘we’) to live with caged animals becomes a recognition of the contingency of pleasure, and of the description of pleasure as itself a form of caging, and how agency can be enacted whilst being trapped ‘inside’.[9] There is also the issue of temporality within cages, and to what extent temporality is defined by a sense of history and progress, necessarily implying movement and action. Hustak and Myers identify the stationary nature of plants as part of the reason they are placed near the bottom of ‘hierarchies that identify outward motion and action as signs of agency’ (80). This has resonance with the origins of pansy as an insult, as rooted in an notion of thoughtfulness and introspection as effeminate and inferior to active, assertive masculinity. In Our Lady of The Flowers Jean Genet describes the gender identity of the character Divine:

‘Her femininity was not only a masquerade. But as for thinking woman completely, her organs hindered her. To think is to perform an act. In order to act, you have to discard frivolity and set your idea on a solid base. So she was aided by the idea of solidity, which she associated with the idea of virility, and it was in grammar that she found it near at hand. For if, to define a state of mind that she felt, Divine dared use the feminine, she was unable to do so in defining an action which she performed. And all the ‘woman’ judgments she made were, in reality, poetic conclusions.’ (1988, p176)

Solidity and action are associated with the masculine, but this is complicated by the assertion that ‘to think is to perform an act.’ Divine dares to use feminine pronouns for her states of mind, but not in defining her actions. If thinking is an action, then ‘state of mind’ has to be referring to something other than thoughts. The ‘‘woman’ judgements’ she made, which are emphatically not thoughts, are ‘poetic conclusions’. The distinction between active masculine ‘thoughts’ and feminine ‘states of mind’ and ‘poetic conclusions’ is that in order to act, ‘you have to discard frivolity and set your idea on a solid base.’ Solidity and virility are found in grammar, and therefore poetic language is disqualified from the realm of ‘thinking’ due to its frivolity and instability. Its exclusion from thinking as a masculine exercise, outside of solidity and grammar and certainty, means that poetry is in a unique position to express possibilities and potentials outside of dominant thought.

In an essay entitled The Queer Voice: Reparative Poetry Rituals & Glitter Perversions CAConrad describes the somatic rituals he performed to write poetry and attempt to heal himself from the trauma of the homophobic murder of his boyfriend, Earth. One of these rituals results in a dream, where CA finds himself in a garden with Earth, although they do not meet human face to human face. In the garden Earth communicates with CA through flowers who explain to him the difficulty of Earth’s time on earth, acting as prophets from the spirit world whilst remaining entirely grounded in earth and syntax. CA explains that the flowers did not speak with mouths, but ‘their centers mashed up and down as they told me [Earth] could not see me now because he was busy repairing.’ In German the phrase ‘Durch die Blume Gesprochen’, literally ‘spoken through a flower’, means to subtly hint at something without giving away all the details, a minor verbal obfuscation to soften blows or gently allude to an issue. In English, there is ‘flowery language’, with some similar implications and an added air of assumed affectation and pretension (remember the origins of ‘pansy’?). There is also the Latin phrase ‘sub rosa’, literally meaning ‘under the rose’ and used to indicate secrecy and confidentiality. Flowers are seen as untruthful, dishonest in their embodiment, as hiding something under their opulent exteriors. However, in CA’s prophet-flowers the exact opposite is the case, the flowers are messengers of the deepest, most vital truths.

In common parlance there is something in the overtly elaborate and ornate that becomes read as at best wasteful, and at worst deceitful. As a bridge between morphology and semiotics, Georges Bataille colludes with this perspective in The Language of Flowers when he writes, ‘Thus the interior of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty; if one tears off all of the corolla's petals, all that remains is a rather sordid tuft.’ (Bataille, 1985, p12) The flowers insides are seen as a betrayal of its exterior form, despite that exterior form existing partially for the purpose of attracting insects to the interior. Whilst admitting that some flowers (again, orchids) possess ‘elegant’ stamens, for Bataille this beauty is ‘satanic’, and ‘one is tempted to attribute to them the most troubling human perversions.’ (12) It feels redundant to say that flowers are sexualised, in the sense that they are literally reproductive organs. To be more specific, the sexualisation of flowers is both a cause and consequence of their status as feminine. Bataille makes this misogyny explicit, going on to state that once flowers die, they do not age ‘honestly’ like leaves, but wither like ‘old and overly made-up dowagers.’ (12) Flowers are singled out for their aesthetic qualities, objectified for their external beauty, and reduced to their reproductive function, a feminised position. Simultaneously, they are seen as performing in excess of that role, of being too flamboyant and melodramatic for the task at hand, their beauty seen as a form of deception and trickery. In addition to the obvious analogy with women under patriarchy, this mistrust on the basis of perceived inauthenticity and frivolity also has resonance with a queer position.

To deal first with inauthenticity, I want to suggest that the treatment of artifice as falsification and dishonesty is a feature of straight culture, with little relevance to most queer people. Despite the limitations and dangers of this kind of essentialising, there are material issues at hand. For example, for trans people there is often the sense that an external presentation that could be perceived from the outside to be inauthentic is in fact the most honest expression of their inner selves, and many queer people must keep their desires or certain aspects of their lives internal, or at least restrict who has knowledge of them. To exist as queer in the world requires a certain amount of ‘speaking through flowers’, acknowledging the impossibility and possible undesirability of an entirely transparent existence. Michel Foucault in A History of Sexuality describes the transition from sodomy as a practice into the homosexual as a subject position, ‘a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology […] [sexuality] written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away’ (1978, p43). The assumed knowability of the queer body through its naming as such, and that naming giving rise to the presumption of a specific sexual morphology, provides some context for the ambivalent relationship of many queer people to visibility and representation. Speaking through flowers could be a mode of engagement simultaneously flaunting and obscuring one’s ‘indiscreet anatomy’, operating as a form of resistance to and avoidance of biopolitical control, a tactic of conscious illegibility and subterfuge.

A concept closely related to inauthenticity is unnaturalness, both related to the idea that there is a true form that is being betrayed. When Bataille talks of being tempted to attribute to flowers ‘the most troubling human perversions’ it becomes clear that despite falling under the rubric of what is commonly referred to as ‘nature’, the sexuality of flowers is only tenuously perceived as natural. Timothy Morton describes nature as a ‘transcendental term in a material mask’, and the end of a potentially infinite metonymic list: ‘fish, grass, mountain air, chimpanzees, love, soda water, freedom of choice, heterosexuality, free markets…Nature’ (2009, p14). When we accept that there is no actual criteria for naturalness, apart from vague essentialist subjective perception, there is the awkward reality that if something is described as unnatural then it is unnatural, inasmuch as something becomes natural through the same process. As flowers are often read as suspiciously unnatural, they are in some sense are. The unnaturalness of flowers has to do with excess, which is to say wastefulness, which is to say floweriness. To be natural is to fit into a straight human logic of heterosexual reproduction, whether through direct participation or resemblance to the model, to refuse this demand is to be against nature. It is here that both queers and flowers fall through the cracks.

Historically, a large element of what we now refer to as ‘homophobia’ was religiously grounded in the Christian belief that any sexual practices not entirely related procreation were a sin, as they were wasteful of semen. There is an association therefore between queerness and wastefulness, as well as refusal of sexual reproduction, leading to a queer understanding of the necessity of what has been deemed trivial and non-essential, a celebration of earthly pleasures, and a respect for the temporary and fleeting. Nicole Seymour suggests there is something ‘admirable’ and ‘thrillingly ironic’ in queer environmentalism, ‘that those with a foreclosed relationship to “the future” in heteronormative terms would be deeply concerned about the future in ecological terms’ (2012, p63). In In A Queer Time & Place Jack Halberstam makes the argument for queer time as operating within a different logic from straight time, writing that ‘queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience-namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’ (2005, p2). Halberstam ties this specifically to the AIDS crisis, making links with Lee Edelman’s argument for queer anti-futurity (2004). Despite how it is sometimes characterised, this is not a case of ‘positive’ versus ‘negative’ models of queerness, because in theorising anti-futurity as a feature of queerness Edelman betrays a desire for some sense of ‘queer’ as a meaningful, and ultimately positive (by some definition), cohesion. Neel Ahuja argues ‘we might thus benefit from thinking more broadly about reproduction than Edelman does, recognizing that bodies and atmospheres reproduce through complex forms of socio-ecological entanglement.’ Without wanting to reinforce ‘repro-centric’ discourse, I would argue in parallel that what is taking place in queer culture is not a refusal of reproduction, but a cultural, which is to say unnatural, reproduction based on something other than the straight nuclear family unit.[10]

In a soma(tic) ritual entitled Suspension Fluid Magnificence (For Samuel R. Delaney & Stephen Boyer) CA describes approaching men on the street and requesting that they rate their semen on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being ‘thin and creamy’ and 5 being ‘cottage cheese.’ He describes this as an attempt to think through ‘how wilderness is memorised in the body’, looking for men to ‘step up to the quiet, feral interior.’ Dealing explicitly with the materiality of biological reproduction, CA does not dismiss the power or significance of semen but rather thinks through how it retains this power and significance as an aesthetic, semiotic, and social material. He writes ‘Semen is fascinating […] The orgasm the flash of light reconnecting to the original proliferation of cells and the construction of sensate flesh, which is a very marvellous thing, being here, all of us.’ In what could have easily been a glorification of straight reproduction CA manages to create an inclusive networked cosmology, a glorification of pleasure and the animistic power of sensate flesh, the wonder of being here, all of us, but no dads. #nodads was a meme originating in 2012 from ultraleft circles on Twitter. Being a meme, its meaning was variable and plural, however the central theme was rejection of the father figure in his oppressive patriarchal role, but equally in more paternalistic caring capacities. In his analysis of the meme Aaron Bady describes it as ‘a rejection of the category [of dad] itself—and of the manner in which it comes to seem a higher order category than many others—it doesn’t necessarily have all that much to do with actual dads, but only by the sociological matrix that makes biology into destiny’ (2012). This feels like a useful model of thinking through biological reproduction, which is to say that none of this is a rejection of the continuation of the human species but rather a thinking through of how reproduction operates when enmeshed with a heterosexual culture which formulates it as the only form of reproduction and life worth celebrating. In this context CA’s cum poetry gestures towards a reconciliation whereby bodily functions can be celebrated as feral and joyous outside of a normative matrix.

To reiterate, this is not to suggest that queer sex is inherently biologically unreproductive, but a reminder that there is a historical context in which queer sex has been framed as wasteful due to its association with unreproductive pleasure. Additionally, there is the factor that biological reproduction is not an organising principal of queer culture, as opposed to straight culture where ‘community is imagined through scenes of intimacy, coupling, and kinship; a historical relation to futurity is restricted to generational narrative and reproduction’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998, p554). If a function of the straight nuclear family is to reproduce the straight nuclear family, queer family cannot rely on this means of reproducing itself, queers cannot take for granted the immortality of reproduction, but this leads to more creative forms of intimacy, kinship, survival and ‘immortality’. Within this framework, it is precisely what is deemed nonessential that is the means of survival: art, poetry, music, fashion, and what Berlant and Warner refer to as ‘parasitic and fugitive elaboration through gossip, dance clubs, softball leagues, and the phone-sex ads’ (p561). In parallel, in flowers it is the colours and scents and delicate forms that are commonly read by human eyes as elaborate and ostentatious that are the bread and butter of survival. Hustak and Myers describe Darwin’s delight in orchids as he saw them as ‘a demonstration that even beautiful forms had utilitarian, adaptive value.’ (75) Although this could be read as an insinuation that forms only have worth if they have utilitarian value, it can also be an understanding that the form and function are inseparable, and the beauty is its own functionality. In a poem referencing the homophobic Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn, CAConrad writes:

i need a soda to

wash this glitter down

it's dark in the stomach

next morning

bathroom light catches

glint of turd covered

in glitter

disco log in the bowl

fecal poetry ranges from

shocking to absurd

this is neither

this is pragmatic

it's my life as i need to live it

Ed Dorn i would kill myself if

i were you but i'm not and

get to live this spectacular

life of sparkling hygiene

CA refuses to frame his glitter consumption as anything other than a practical everyday ritual needed for survival, alongside eating or sleeping, he refuses to draw any distinction between physical, emotional and spiritual survivals. The reality that queer survival is inherently predicated on something other than the physical continuation of the species manifests in a personal sense as survival being about more than the day to day physical maintenance of a body, or more accurately, redefining what constitutes the day to day physical maintenance of a body. This is not to say that it is an abstract and disembodied survival, as what could be more embodied than eating and shitting out glitter? But rather that it treats the body as a vessel for a modest, everyday spiritual joy, no matter how temporary. Pleasure for pleasure and survival’s sake, and always the twain shall meet.

Another poem in the series includes the lines ‘Ed Dorn thinks faggots should drink directly from the sewer / i want to dress special for this.’ There is a provocative knowing that dressing special is not unrelated to why Dorn thinks faggots should drink directly from the sewer, and that dressing special for this punishment will add to his annoyance. In Dorn’s initial comments there is also the implication of queers as wasteful, as undeserving of the privilege of clean tap water; If the ultimate goal is reproduction, queers are a waste of resources. The poem goes on to imagine Dorn asking CA, ‘what camouflage will you wear to hide in the gingerbread house?’ and CA replying ‘none, I want the witch to find me EAT ME!’ This acts as a subversion of survival narratives and demonstrates a lack of belief in the inherent goodness of physical self-preservation and security at all costs. This is not say that physical survival is not important but rather that sometimes it is important for your spiritual survival to allow yourself to be eaten by a witch rather than accept a life of homophobe-endorsed camouflage in the gingerbread house. What are we potentially missing out on when we hide in camouflage in the gingerbread house? Is being eaten by the witch the worst that could happen? In Darwin’s Plots Gillian Beer describes the moment in which the intersection of evolutionary theory and psychological theory became important as it began to ask ‘what emotions and what reflex actions help the individual and race to survive’ (2009, p201). This instrumentalisation of affect seems to shut down the possibility of an ‘affective ecology’ (Hustak and Myers) based on anything other than reproduction.

When asked in interview about his reasons for becoming a writer John Wieners answers, ‘Immortality, in the sense of living after one’s own time has run out’ (1993). Again, there is the sense of ‘life’ as existing beyond an individual’s lifespan, attached to an individual but not necessarily to their physical form or genetics.

Dancing dandelions

and buttercups in the grass

remind me of other summer

flowers, simple blossoms

roses and tiger lilies by the wall

milk pod, sumac branches

lilacs across the road, daisies, blueberries

snaps, cut violets

three years ago still grow in my mind

as peonies or planted geraniums, bachelor buttons

in downy fields filled with clover

lover, come again and again up fern

path upheld as memory’s perennial

against stern hard-faced officers of imprisonment

and cold regulation more painful than lover’s arms

or flowers charming but not more lasting

No, the wild tulip shall outlast the prison wall

no matter what grows within.

In Wiener’s 1969 poem Private Estate, reproduced in its entirety above, a flowing list of flowers ebbs seamlessly into a lover, before the scene is abruptly cut by ‘stern hard-faced officers of imprisonment and cold regulation’. The ambiguous line break after clover leaves the possibility for the ‘clover lover’ as the lover made of clover, or the lover of clover. Years are things that continue to develop and change after their official endings, growing towards the sun, if only in the mind. The cyclical, nonlinear queer time of lover’s arms or flowers is sectioned off by the harsh linear institutional time of the prison or mental hospital. Despite this, these seemingly concrete and immutable structures are presented as ultimately more precarious and fleeting, being outlasted by the wild tulip. In an essay on feminist applications of Darwin, Elizabeth Grosz describes the sense in his work ‘in which the domination of species or individuals is inherently precarious and necessarily historically limited’ (2008, 42). The fragility of power structures and a nondeterministic time is drawn out as a central point where social struggles and biology could find affinity. The tulip is a perennial plant, meaning simply a plant that lives longer than two years, in opposition to biannual and annual plants, which must be replanted more frequently. The taxonomical listing of the poem suggests however that it is not a single tulip that will outlast the prison, but rather wild tulips as a whole, or perhaps even just the idea of the wild tulip. When Wieners speaks of ‘memory’s perennial’ it invites the possibility of the plants having not physically survived at all, yet continuing to grow and thrive in his mind.

This mirrors his statement of desire for immortality through writing. The lines ‘lover, come again and again up fern / path upheld as memory’s perennial’ operate on this ambiguous perennial time, the flirtatious talk of lovers mixing with the seasonal dying back and reblooming of the plants, taking place as a specific memory but also the substance of memory itself. In The Imagination through Time, Wieners speaks of the hour and minute as ‘false divisions of the moon’. The poem ends:

the cautious breath of a friend,

presumably, also up,

in the dark of his house,

who alike hears your thoughts,

wondering; that is a true meeting in eternity.

Not this petty worry

about days, months, proximities

to warmth. There are always fires

on earth, that burn immortally.

For Wieners, human intimacy is a form of immortality, only the ephemeral can come close to touching the eternal. The constant anxiety of looking for comfort and stability (‘proximities to warmth’) is quelled by the knowledge there are always fires burning immortally, somewhere on earth. In another poem about his murdered lover, I Loved Earth Years Ago CA explains, ‘He named himself Earth when planet extinction was clearest.’ The naming decision itself and CA’s recalling of it operate simultaneously as morbid foreshadowing and a hymn to survival and resilience. There is the triple, triangulated meaning of Earth to refer to CA’s lover, the planet Earth, and earth itself, the mud and soil of the world. There is the sense that CA used to love Earth, but there was some rupture that necessitates the use of the past tense, coexisting with the feeling that he has been loving Earth for a long, long time. The statement that he loved Earth years ago does not mean he does not love him now, but there is an acceptance of change. The temporality of the title can be read as an example of Wiener’s ‘perennial time’, neither endless reproduction nor something constricted to a single discrete moment, but something seasonal, ebbing and flowing, perhaps not itself forever, but something, somewhere. In Julia Kristeva’s essay Women’s Time, she suggests that despite being seemingly opposed, eternal and cyclical time, both associated with women, might be closer than they first appear as they both operate outside of linear time (1981). Not wanting to replicate the essentialism of Kristeva’s thought, and in reference to Halberstam (2005), I would argue that this exclusion from (or rejection of) linearity (or straight time) is present not only in women but all who fall outside of the timeframes of normative heterosexuality and gender.[11] In CA’s title there is the evocation of a measurement of time outside of ruling time, a different temporal space: ‘Earth Years’. Earth Years act as a counter to heteronormative timescales, of the years and milestones of straight reproduction, or possibly as a calendar more in tune with the seasons, a rejection of the arbitrary timekeeping divorced from them and enforced as a tool of (re)productivity.

In Permission Please To Be a Stone but You Are A Clock We Say CA writes ‘no wonder clocks aspire to granite’, becoming, ‘don’t allude to my spurt / don’t look at my thighs / you pernicious clocks / make the worst stones’. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen makes the argument that despite being seen as stable and fixed ‘stone is fluid when viewed within its proper duration’ (2015). Clocks can only aspire to the timekeeping abilities of stone, their constant sense of movement and progress overshadowed by the eternal. The honest breaking down of stone into sand usurps the arbitrary time of the constantly flipped hourglass. In Wieners’ words: ‘a true meeting in eternity. / Not this petty worry about days, months, proximities to warmth.’ Tim Dean proposes that ‘queer theorists of spectrality embrace asynchronous temporalities because they regard being haunted as an opportunity to produce a different future, one that the past did not generate but still might’ (2011, p92). This text began with the thoughtful pansy both as a symbol of remembrance and of queer effeminacy, occupying a place of perceived fragility and permanence, its individual lifespan coming up against its collective, symbolic lifespan. Thinking through what I’ve termed queer reproduction, I want to suggest this intersection as politically vital from an ecological perspective for imagining what abundance and joy could mean outside of cycles of physical re/production and consumption. Eternity is not present in static monoliths but in variable, shifting networks of pleasure and affect. In speaking through flowers, which is to say poetry, the consequences of communication are non-linear, cross-pollinated and dispersed, the eternal and cyclical affectively and effectively meeting to produce models of life which could be described as pragmatically opulent. Poetry becomes the language of survival in excess and weaponised floweriness, everything that is ‘too much’ pushing back against false scarcity and repressive taxonomies of gender and sexuality, creating breathing space for a politics of cornucopia, possibility and, propagation outside the already-existing. Fucking pansies speaking through flowers.

‘Do not think of the future; there is none.’

-John Wieners, 6th January 1934 – 1st March 2002

1. From Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang & Unconventional English, 8th edition (1984): pansy, n. A very effeminate youth; a homosexual: from ca. 1925. Cf. Nancy (boy). Also pansy-boy: from ca. 1930; New Statesman and Nation, 15 Sep. 1934, concerning the fascist meeting in Hyde Park on 9 Sep., notes that there were, from the crowd, 'shouts about 'pansy-boys'". ↩

2. The term ‘cisgender’ is used to describe someone who is not transgender, i.e. someone whose gender identity is broadly aligned with the gender they were assigned at birth.  ↩

3. See: The Molecularisation of Sexuality by Jordana Rosenburg for a fuller critique of the problems of infinitely abstracting ‘queerness’.  ↩

4. Luciana Parisi’s Abstract Sex thinks through these questions of scale and transferability, for example: ‘The biophysical organisation of sex questions the accounts of a human-centred evolution that assimilates sex to sexual reproduction and sexual organs determining the progressive evolution of the body – from bacteria to humans – and sex – from unicellular to multicellular sex’ (p22).  ↩

5. See Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden (2009) for wide-ranging accounts of gender and sexual diversity in non-human species. ↩

6. This issue is explored by Eva Hayward with reference to marine life: ‘With the aquarium, the unnerving sexual variation of marine life moved from ocean depths—which was a gothic scene for Victorians—into the inner sanctum of social order and bodily regulation, the aristocratic home. Efforts to know, classify, and conquer the oceanic, and otherwise capture nature for visual pleasure, resulted in a counter conquest of the home by monsters and sexual deviants (2012, p166) ↩

7. This has echoes of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on the contagion: ‘We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again every time, gaining that much ground’ (1987, p241).  ↩

8. The flower-eating theme is potentially non-coincidental, as CA has cited Wieners as an influence, and recently edited a collection of his work, Supplication, in which the above poem appears.  ↩

9. For more on animal captivity, see Hayward (2012).  ↩

10. ‘Repro-centricism’, i.e. the centring of reproduction as the default mode in all discussions of sexual difference, is a term borrowed from Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson in their introduction to Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010), p11.  ↩

11. For perspectives on what ‘gay men’s time’ might look like, see: Edelman (2004) and Dean (2011). ↩

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[dustfromthestepsbefore]

Alright. Here is the master post.

I got 7 messages after I answered all of those other ones earlier. SEVEN.

I’m gonna go ahead and make some general points here and then add a little individually to each ask. I will probably reference some of these points in those individual answers to save time for me. Because I’m sure that this post will end up taking me over an hour to make. (Yes, everyone. Answering anon asks and the like is a great expenditure of time and effort. Especially when you put thought into every answer.)

1. This blog has and will always stand up for what I believe in. I will continue to call out things that I think need to be changed and I’m not okay with. Even including something that I even originally called MINOR and was just an offhand comment that was NEVER the main point of anything. I don’t care if you call me overly sensitive or too PC or whatever term you want to call me. I was raised this way (I promise you that I let my family hear my opinions more than anyone and they disagree a ton), my faith leads me to be this way, and I feel like it’s my duty to stand up for things that I think is right regardless if it “affects” me or not. Thank you for all of these asks. Because it 100% gave me a kick in the ass and showed me how much harder I need to work for making the world a better place.

2. The irony of so many asks telling me that me and others are “too sensitive” when you can’t handle a minor critique of your favorite is not lost on me. I’m too sensitive to point out something that is a societal issue that sexism is so ingrained in society that people don’t even realize it, but if I say one small negative thing about your favorite then my inbox is flooded. Even to the point that people tell me that I obviously dislike Blake or think Gwen is too good for him. 🙄

3. You are correct. I am very sensitive. And I honestly think that is one of my best qualities. I am very stoic on the outside and hold myself together well. But I have so much empathy for others that I tend to actually be very emotional on the inside. Empathy is such an important part of my life that my future career is based on it. The ONLY reason I’ve gotten into medicine is to help people. And I’m hoping to work as a family medicine doctor in an area that is in desperate need of them. Being sensitive for others is NOT a bad thing. And I don’t know why people try to act like it is or use it as an insult.

4. The whole “It didn’t bother/affect me or most people” line is honestly probably the most upsetting thing that I keep getting in my inbox. History is plagued by people having that exact same attitude in situations that are MUCH MUCH MUCH worse than a dumb minor sexist joke. But if you can’t take a moment to sit back and go “hmmmm, that probably isn’t the best joke. He probably should come up with something different. He is funny enough to do that.” then wow. I’m not sure I would want to be around you when something actually important shows up. If you can’t take a stand for the small stuff, how can you take a stand for the bigger and harder things. That response is from being in a place of privilege. Instead of trying to help others, you just ignore it since it isn’t bothering you.

5. I never once came about this discussion trying to say that Blake is an awful person. You can have discussions about something you wish a person would stop doing without considering them horrible. This isn’t a black and white world where a person does one thing that you disagree with and you immediately have to hate them.

Anon: People are too sensitive today that's my opinion. Like why should that bother someone? It's words. Now if they were harming someone that's different. Ever heard of sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never heart me? Ignore people! Girls do some shitty things too. We all aren't perfect. Everyone's going to be offended by something no matter how much you stand up and fight for BeingPC.

Me: See point 4. And also points 2 and 3. 

Being in the medical field, “sticks and stones will break...” is one of the most untrue phrases ever. Words can be extremely hurtful and you shouldn’t just brush that off. I understand trying to help somebody cope and learn how to deal with mean people. But you should never act like words can’t really harm a person. 

And I don’t know why you turned this is in a guys vs. girls thing. I never presented it in that way. I also never said that anyone was perfect.

Anon: You know what there are things that both of them do that are not PC, but if you look at the big picture, they are great people who love hard and are nice to everyone. Why must we knit pick at every little thing they do or say. They are not harming anyone.

Me: I agree with you for the most part. But see point 4.

Just because it isn’t hurting you, doesn’t mean that it isn’t hurting anyone else. Once again, I said from the get go that this was a MINOR problem. People on here have escalated to something much bigger. But I still think that this is an important point about everything in life.

I also don’t think this is knit picking? It was literally an offhand comment about something that I wish he wouldn’t do. The anons on here are the ones that blew it up and made it a big deal.

Anon: Well what he said didn't offend me and I'm sure it didn't offend a lot of women. They honestly probably didn't even catch it so who really cares. Not a big deal. It's not harming anyone if he calls Adam a girl.

Me: POINT 4. POINT 4. POINT 4. POINT 4. POINT 4.

Anon: I'm sorry but calling someone out for making a sexist comment is calling them a sexist. Poeple are so weak thease days. Once mind needs to know better to know when is someone making a joke and when are people serious. We all take all things to serious. It includes you and everyone. No one can say anything anymore without affecting and or a fending someone and taking hate for it. It's a big problem in this world. People need to learn to not take everything so seriously and tuff up.

Me: See points 2 and 3.

I could not disagree with your first sentence more. If that is your criteria for labeling somebody sexist and then I’m assuming racist, homophobe, etc. then basically everybody you know (including me) is one of those if not all of those. I’m sure that almost everybody out there has messed up and said something a long one of those lines. Hopefully somebody (nicely) called them out on it at some point and it made them change their ways. Constructive criticism is a thing and hopefully people grow and become better people throughout their life.

Anon: But what about times when Blake said he wants to be a girl (G sang JAG) and sang Every Woman or he wants to live like a girls dream etc. Contradictory

Me: See point 5.

I don’t really see your point. You can say something cool and then something totally awful. That happens all the time. Just look at politicians (or don’t, they are depressing). 

Anon: I am a woman of almost 30 years old and I can honestly say I see nothing wrong with Blakes "like a girl" comments towards Adam. Maybe it was the way I was brought up or the community I was raised in but I learned to be strong minded from the beginning and not let anyone's comments or opinions bring me down. The whole over sensitive nature the world is adopting towards sexism and other subjects is making the world a even meaner and hateful place.

Me: See points 2, 3, and 4.

I 100% disagree with your last sentence. What is happening is that people are now being called out on their hateful and mean rhetoric that they didn’t even realize was happening. Objecting to something that you are used to isn’t being mean or hateful. It’s trying to stop the ingrained mean and hateful things.

Take for example my mother. A wonderful Christian woman that grew up in Mississippi in the 50s/60s. California in the 60s. And Arkansas in the 70s. She mentioned that she wished to head back to the 50s a couple of weeks ago. People were “so much nicer and well mannered.” I turned and looked at her and said, “Yes, if you were a middle class white person, Mom.” Her eyes got really big and she kind of stammered. She even said something like “I didn’t even think of that.” So yes, the world was a much better place for the privileged when people when everybody kept silent. But the world as a whole is much better.

Anon: In my opinion, the reason he calls Adam a girl is solely because of his high pitched voice which of course he admires. Also people need to lay off as other perspective exist. Insulting is not the intension but people do get offended. Like I remember people getting offended by sushi and cow milking skit. PS: Old BSer here. Peace ✌

Me: See point 5.

Yeah, I get you. And I agree that I don’t think it’s from a place of meanness/hate/etc. I just don’t even think that Blake has thought about it.

But my problem with it being about his voice is that once again kind of reinforces the stereotypes of girls with high voices and guys with low voices. I personally grew up with a lot of girls that had lower voices and people were cruel to them about it. I also have a guy friend that is always embarrassed at drive thrus because he always gets a “Thank you ma’am” over the intercom. And at least 1/3 of those encounters involve a “I thought you were a woman!” exclamations at the window. 

And then on the famous side, if you have ever followed David and Victoria Beckham, the number of times that they have addressed David’s voice being higher than the “average” guy is unbelievable. I just don’t think that’s what you should focus on. And Blake is such a funny and loving guy, I would just love if he would switch to something else to joke about.

And that is the last of them. I’m not going to answer any more asks on this. I think my position is clear. And the same rebuttals keep repeating themselves.

[phoenixtakaramono]

I need to get this off my chest.

TL;DR please do your research before jumping on the bandwagon. Also, the reason why something could be popular is the amount of attention that is generated which, in turn, generates curiosity. Publicity of all sorts–both negative and positive–brings awareness to any sort of medium.

Why are certain franchises/ fandoms doing well? How is hype contributing to its overall popularity and sheer existence? The answer we usually say is, “well, it’s the fans, right?” Some people might also say, “because the content’s good due to so-and-so!”

Not just that. It’s also largely due, ironically enough, to the contribution of naysayers (the “antis”) or those who jump on the bandwagon of whatever’s popular at the moment.

Both crowds raise awareness to any franchise. You have the support of its fans and you have its controversial side. Counterculture and counter-counterculture feed into the franchise’s relevancy.

I’m going to use ‘Killing Stalking,’ a R18+ manhwa by Koogi, as an example for the current Tumblr hype on the latter end of 2016 to 2017 presently. I’ll admit I have a bias, but I’ll do my best to stay objective. For those who don’t know, it’s a controversial Korean webcomic about a stalker with BPD who chooses the wrong “favorite person” to fixate on. Little did he know, upon breaking into his victim’s house, that the very same handsome bloke he’s grateful for having saved him from a traumatic experience in the military is actually a serial killer with a Mother Complex.

…Yes, what a Shamalyan-ian plot twist. (Honestly, this is not that big of a spoiler. It is called ‘Killing Stalking,“ after all.)

Thusly we find ourselves reading a story about the stalker stuck in a delicate situation as the captive of the very man he thought to be the charismatic nice guy that society loves (you know the type). Think the Korean version of 'Misery’ and 'Psycho’ if you want the basic idea. Although, fair warning, that description doesn’t encompass everything.

You wouldn’t necessarily think this IP would become viral, right? KS can be graphic, its contents can make the audience feel squeamish, it has shock value, it features an unlikely protagonist, the story revolves around two blokes in an unhealthy situation, etcetera etcetera. If I was being honest, it’s a bit overrated. It’s not some groundbreaking IP that its dissenters are making it out to be. However, some pluses: the art’s decent considering it’s a Korean manhwa, I will give Koogi that (even with the curious artistic decision to forgo the eyes at several panels, and their amusingly panda-eyed main characters). Also, the main character…wow, what a turnabout. Questionable actions notwithstanding, I honestly never thought I’d come to root for him (currently what I feel up to ch17), but his POV is the vessel for how we see this situation unfolds between him and his captor. There is something to it that makes me morbidly curious for how Koogi is going to end this.

Everyone came to KS for some reason or another (usually because it’s the hottest trend of the moment), with certain expectations already set. I’m certain how people have noticed tumblr users popping up, asking “just what is this franchise I keep hearing about anyway?” Or even “why is this franchise popular?”

I’d discovered KS because of the number of discourse on my dashboard. (Yes, “antis.” How ironic. Also, big irony, the bigger the fuss is made, the more people find out about it. Any vocal disinclination, however noble it was intended or perhaps self-serving if someone was doing this to get attention, is bringing the franchise they hate relevancy instead of letting it fade into obscurity.) Case in point, being the curious person that I am, ignoring my hipster tendencies (wow, this is like once a blue moon), I went to check KS out to see what has gotten the tumblr subculture in a tiff over this time. And I am certain all of us have seen more and more people jumping on the hype train.

I can see why some people would be deterred. KS is not for everyone. And there are those, keeping in mind that not everyone is a writer or have not become desensitized or are perhaps younger/ inexperienced, who legitimately want to warn others of reading such disturbing content. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s better to just let them be because, a mood-killer as negativity is, let them vent or express their opinion. Like fans, this is how they form their community: finding other like-minded people.

However. Misinformation. Yes, let’s discuss this.

The Internet is prone to exaggerations. And however objectively we write, there will always be a small hint of bias leaking through. That’s why it’s better for us to form our opinions ourselves once we have done our research. This way, we can tell claims from facts than relying on hearsay.

If you’ve done your research and have read the whole thing before forming a opinion, what you write publicly online will probably sound legitimate to other strangers if you’ve done your research. You’ll sound credible. You’ll sound like someone who strangers could believe to an extent. What you’ve learned about making persuasive arguments/ essays and whatnot is shining through. It means those lessons have actually stuck in your head. (On that note, there is psychology to getting people to listen. It’s the same for effective constructive criticisms; you shoehorn in the pros with the cons, to soften the blows.)

You do your reading first, form an opinion, and you go about arguing against or for it to convince your audience. Very few people can pull off skimming the readings and then writing an objective opinion piece that fools readers into thinking that you know what you’re talking about. You’ll have to have experience pulling bollocks out of thin air, and not everyone can do that.

So, if anyone claims this-and-that without doing their research, but those who have read it to its entirety know that claim isn’t true…then that person has lost credibility. There’s no point seriously reading their opinion anymore. If someone also devolves into insults or juvenile rhetoric (or the written equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and then sticking their tongue at you, blowing a loud raspberry), there's little point talking to a brick wall.

I’m of the opinion that if you truly loathe something, the ultimate revenge is not letting it get to you. Don’t give them attention. Let them fade into obscurity. The more you shout, the more attention you’re bringing to it…and it may not always be the result you want. There’s no point wasting effort on something that is just going to drain you emotionally. Your time is valuable. Just let a franchise run its course, and eventually hype will wane as hot trends always do.

Do I think KS is for everyone? NO! GOLLY, IT’S R18+ FOR A REASON. In my childhood, I remember Korean webcomics were infamous for their depiction of horror and urban legends that were suppose to jumpscare you as you scrolled down.

Do I think though KS deserves the attention it’s getting? Ah, that’s debatable…but it’s certainly not the demon-spawn people are making it out to be. The contents are certainly not impacting my opinions negatively of people who have mental illness or have suffered trauma. If anything, KS has brought the notion of BPD into my awareness. I also doubt anyone is genuinely desiring to be in the main character’s situation, or wanting a relationship like that. (That’s the beauty of the Internet. You learn to take such assertions with a grain of salt. I’d like to think they’re usually tongue-in-cheek exaggerations rather than genuine romanticization. Also, fantasies are just that. Imagination. Which means it is in their head. In their own privacy, which we cannot control, unless this is some freaky Orwellian schtick.)

It’s good to have both good and bad representation. How do we know what is bad representation if they don’t exist? If we only see good after good (well, realistically, it gets tiring to see the same ol’ portrayal whether it’s good or gruesome), then we eliminate people’s understanding of what is bad. The scarcity of something means an increase in demand.

I’ll leave it at this: you seclude several people in a cave. They have never been outside. Chained down, they are not allowed to turn their heads. All they see is the blank wall before them, projecting writhing shadows because of the fire behind them. This wall is all they know. The wall is their world. “The inmates of this place do not even desire to leave their prison; for they know no better life.” Now, assume you let one prisoner go from their bonds. Are they enlightened by this newfound burden of knowledge about the manufactured reality or do they wish to go back to that reality in denial?

[coldtomyflash]

Wally West Speech Patterns

So I wanted to do this speech patterns post as separate from what turned into the body language post because then I can focus more exclusively on the language aspect, but I’ll mention a bit throughout for how to combine that with body language.

Precise Word Choice

Okay so importantly, one thing that really stands out about Wally is his actual word choice. Unlike a lot of people I’ve looked at so far, even when he’s not using technical language (like Cisco and Caitlin with physics and biology), Wally actually uses a lot of multi-syllabilic and more specific words. He doesn’t say he “we dropped him off in iron heights”, he says “deposited” in Iron Heights. That shows a more precise use of language. Not “I don’t know” but “unclear” (so cute in that scene).

He uses words like “required” instead of “needed”. 

He doesn’t go for the simplest words, not because he’s trying hard to pick complex ones, just because he seems naturally strong in linguistic intelligence. 

Even when he’s trash-talking villains and might opt for a more punchy “yo metal mouth,” he’s equally likely to go with “A little quaking in your boots might not be inappropriate,” when he’s not pressed for time. 

And look at that word choice! It’s brilliant. The use of a double negative (”not” and “in-” before appropriate) fluidly rather than simplifying the statement to a positive (”a little quaking in your boots might be appropriate”) which would make his statement more direct and come off as a little less clever-sounding. He wants to sound clever when he’s being cheeky.

And I mean, look how he uses words here to tease even while displaying some discomfort (which, note, more restrained posture and body language). 

He’s chose a four-syllable word for his adjective (interesting), a highly specific and less common word for the noun (venue) and his comment is noticeably tongue-in-cheek in part because of that word choice. And then talking about the ‘theme’, which is more an abstract word (and not all of the characters like to deal in abstraction when they make remarks, for the record). He didn’t say “style” or “decorations” or anything, but chose ‘theme’. He likes to use some metaphor and abstraction in his language.

So we get from that that Wally likes words a good deal, and enjoys word-play, a little bit at least. Please please write him with a love of language, even though it’s subtle.

Plainer/Punchier Words

But note that you don’t have to always have him going for longer or more precise words. Don’t strain yourself. Because he sure doesn’t. He’s happy to be direct and even to swear, a bit more than some of the other characters, but still sparingly.

I’d say that Wally doesn’t mind to swear, and does maybe slightly more than some of our other characters, at least in Flashpoint. “Who the hell are you?” and “I’m so gonna kick your ass” come easily to him. But he’s never vulgar, and the swears come out mostly when he’s challenged and when he’s being Kid Flash. 

Wally is also perfectly happy to opt for the word “weird” as one of his preferred adjectives. Really, he uses it more than once.

It’s great. (He’s also one of the few characters the word ‘dude’. Joe also does sometimes. I kind of love it). Another word he likes to use is ‘awesome’ actually, which he’ll use totally without irony. He uses it here again, with a ton of other adjectives too, more specific ones as he’s searching for words to describe a feeling, and maybe not used to not having the exact words he wants at his fingertips. 

(Though note, like the tic-tac-toe theme example from above, Wally isn’t above sarcasm. He’s just very dry when it comes out, and it’s often when he’s annoyed or tired of something, or exhausted maybe. It’s not his base mood, but it certainly can come out). 

Both ‘weird’ and ‘awesome’ come out when he’s feeling comfortable in his surrounding though, more relaxed with who he’s talking to. And he uses them appropriately. He remarks on things that genuinely are weird.

Practicality

Which brings me to another point. Wally is very practical. Like, as a person, and in his speech. That’s part of the precision thing. But he’s often the one voicing when things are strange or awry, remarking on the improbability of their situation. He’s also the one to jump to the simplest solution to a problem:

He likes to cut to the heart of things and see them as they are, and isn’t one to over-complicate an issue if it doesn’t have to be. Which means he also cuts to the heart of interpersonal problems, even personal ones, in a flash:

Ouch. 

But note that he’s well aware of his own feelings and showing a real clarity of understanding the situation. He feels that people don’t have faith in him and his abilities here and he’s not wrong. They’re more worried about him being hurt than they are trusting of his ability to succeed. Wally sees the core of things and it shows in his speech, getting there concisely. 

Even though he likes adjectives, he’s not overly flowery when he talks, at least unless he’s really upbeat about something. Particularly when upset, he’s more short and to the point with his word choice (”it sucks”) but there is nothing overly simplistic about his phrasing.

Sentence Structure

Wally uses full sentences. Like, almost always. I mean, not if he’s responding “yeah” to someone, or there’s a good cause for him to be short and speak in phrases. But unlike some people (*cough*Leonard*cough*) he never drops the subject of a sentence. He doesn’t even drop descriptors that he could. “That dude gets weirder every time I see him” and not “dude gets weirder every time I see him”. 

Even here, conveying a very complete thought when asking for help (this could be transcribed as a single two-clause sentence instead of as two sentences, because he very often uses two-clause complex sentences if you listen to him).

So Wally’s more naturally verbose than some people. He uses full sentences and lots of adjectives -- all that ‘weird’ and ‘awesome’ to qualify nouns, even the word ‘inappropriate’ about the Rival quaking in his boots, ‘greatest’ to explain the feeling of running, and just generally across the board. There are so many adjectives (and sometimes adverbs) popping up in his speech, helping to stretch out those sentences.

Softening His Speech

And you know what else there is? Qualifiers and hedging! 

I love talking about how people qualify and emphasis, which you might know by now. Because this really gives insight into a person and also into specific little things that will make their speech sound like ‘them’ instead of same voice. I’ve said that Len very seldom qualifies anything (I think he uses the word ‘really’ once or twice?) and that Barry mostly only qualifies into making things more absolute (adding “at all” to something). But Wally? Wally hedges properly, to soften something. To qualify it. Thank you, Wally. I mean, not that he never uses a qualifier as an adverb for emphasis:

But look at how he hedges this statement, even jokingly: “I think”:

He’ll often say “I think” in front of something to make it less absolute.

This ties in to how he turns imperatives (orders) into questions sometimes. He softens a command by seeking agreement from the person he’s giving it to.

And he also does this a bit with declarative sentences. Check out this gifset where he’s angry and shouting at Joe (season 2) but still says “okay?” mid-rant in part because he’s still unsure of himself and is hiding behind bluster (I’m guessing) and in part because he probably isn’t too comfortable with shouting people down and being so abrupt with them. 

He’ll ask questions for clarification too, especially when unsure of himself. Because he doesn’t shy away from bolder statements when he’s confident or needs to feel confident, building up someone else or else sure of what he wants:

But questions are a definite facet of his speech. Most of them don’t require an actual answer, they’re rhetorical or just phrased that way. And I think that Wally uses questions a lot to soften his speech. Not to seem soft but not to have sharp corners and bold demands. He’s incredibly personable and likeable and it shows through in this way. 

Contrast how in this gifset where we saw him use ‘awesome’, how he says “are you kidding” instead of “you gotta be kidding me,” which we’ve seen Leonard do in a way that came off as quite sharp. That’s the difference.

Emotions

I should point out, since I just brought up anger, that a lot of Wally’s speech, like anyone’s, is impacted a lot by his emotions. I’ve made reference to that already, about how he’ll say ‘weird’ and ‘awesome’ more around people he’s comfortable talking to. About his dry sarcasm at times, that irony. But his anger is important too. He was pretty understandably angry when we first got to know him in season 2, but you can tell he isn’t used to being angry and shouting people down all that often, like I just said. 

It’s especially noticeable because his go-to response when others are shouting or else are angry with him is to trail off and get quieter. You see it a lot and I reference it in my body-language post. Wally retreats and processes what’s going on, verbalizes (often to someone else, for example like to HR) to get his thoughts in order, and then he talks to the person about what’s going on, cutting to the heart of the issue fast, like I said. 

But if he is going to fight back (because he knows what he wants to say and what the issue is already) he’ll often bring a question into it instead of pushing back with declaratives.

His anger brings out his prouder and more stubborn side though. Which definitely exists. Although when he’s in a good mood, Wally will comfortably admit if he doesn’t know something in order to learn, when he’s upset or less comfortable, he seems to shut down and let pride keep others at a distance. This was the whole issue with how Joe first approached asking Wally to move in with him, for instance. But note that in Flashpoint, he’s like “is that like, a thing, ‘flanking’?” (lol yes, Wally, it’s a thing). 

And when he’s not angry or frustrated with someone, he admits to needing help.

So he is at least a little bit ruled by his emotions in his speech, but for the most part, he doesn’t let it get in the way of his good sense, even if he can be a bit stubborn. His strong ethics tend to be what guide him though, a deep sense of loyalty but also the desire to do good and help others, and he places that above his own anger and pain every time.

Final (Minor) Notes

I mentioned that Wally will hedge a statement with “I think” but that fits into a broader pattern he engages in. He’ll often praface a statement with some minor addition like “I think” or “wait” or “hold up” (the latter two I find ironic, for a speedster).

And while I’ve talked about how he uses adjectives a lot, I find that interesting because he means he doesn’t have to be quite as short and declarative in his sentences. For instance, when he says “cool skateboard” to that kid in Flashpoint (and notice he softens this whole interaction even more by adding ‘though’ at the end), we can contrast that to someone like Mick, who uses simple declarative sentences for his preferences a lot, and would probably say “I like your skateboard” instead. When it comes to matters of taste and preference, Wally doesn’t state, he describes.

Wally’s speech also gives rise to the notion that he has a strong grasp of intrapersonal (self) understanding and a sort of existential mindset, a calling to a higher purpose. His desire to help people comes out time and again and he doesn’t hedge that desire ever. He questions his purpose and looks deep into some personal questions. 

And in an amongst a lot of the other things I’ve said about his word choice, sentence length, cutting to the heart of issues, and phrasing things as questions, this gifset (and the sentence at the bottom) really showcases all of that in one place and also puts something else in perspective: Wally, especially when emotional, is comfortable going on for a few (long) sentences at a time. Although short sentences or a single-sentence-at-a-time is perfectly common, don’t hesitate to write him going off for a while when needed, especially if he’s upset and calling people out.

He has a longer speech again here too, with more of that intrapersonal understanding (and vivid word choice) showing through.

And okay, I think that’s all I’ve got for now. I hope this helps. There’s probably more to say about his speech (of course there is) but with any luck, this will provide a good starting place for people who aren’t sure how to write him.

[Link to the body movement post]

[gracebolton]

The Australian Greens – Election 2016

The Australian Federal Election has been called for the first weekend in July. Like all these political things, its bloody hard to escape. The big parties are making the usual noises, but could The Australian Greens sneak up on them with a solar-powered stick?

One Bloke’s Perspective

I’ve don’t consider myself politically active. No time for student politics when you’re drinking at University. No set opinions on voting, except maybe putting the hard line religious parties dead last on any ballot paper, if they dare to show up in my electorate. Separation of church and state!

A firm belief that politicians get paid too much. That’s a point on which I’ve had many arguments. Australian politicians are among the best paid in the world, and have some ridiculously good retirement benefits.

Look, I’m quite sure parts of being a Member of Parliament suck, but there are parts of every job that suck. For that kind of money ($195K base + extras) I could put up with some crap – I already do for much less!

So I’ll stick my hand up and say that I’m opinionated, and probably naive in terms of deeper politics. But, as with art, I know what I like.

Australian Political Landscape

It has always seemed, to me at least, that the great irony of the political system in Australia is compulsory voting in a nation where, on average, people could care less about politics.

Yep, that’s right: you need to register to vote once you hit 18, and you can get fined if you don’t vote at either State or Federal level.

How I see two-party politics…

Oh sure, there are some dyed-in-the-wool supporters, who will unleash spittle at a rate of knots in support of their party. I’ve seen people nearly come to blows on election day; old dudes who look ready to go into cardiac arrest at a moment’s notice.

If you want a rundown on the major Australian political parties, go have a read here: the Liberal Party (conservatives) are in a Coalition with National Party (farmers) to form our present Federal Government. While they have their own little internal horse trading, the Coalition, as they are known, are fairly solid when it comes to opposing stuff from the other side, and pushing economic liberalism.

At the moment, the other side are the Australian Labor Party (progressives). In a similar vein to their opponents, they love nothing more than saying “Those guys bad! We good! Vote Us!” but politically are all about social democracy.

The fanatics of either side probably think everything is great when their lot are in power, and rubbish when they’re in opposition.

There other other parties, the most prominent of which is The Australian Greens (progressive environmentalists). However, they only hold a small number of seats, and along with some independents and minor parties, form the “conscience” of the Australian people on certain issues.

The influence of the Australian Greens is obviously limited in the bigger picture, but occasionally they’ll hold the balance of power in either house (upper house = Senate; lower house = House of Representatives) on specific issues, often forming a voting bloc with independents who haven’t already done a deal with a big party.

When you live on a continent with this much good weather, natural beauty, quality beer, and generally high standard of living, it doesn’t really seem to matter. Most people I know are of the belief that, regardless of who wins, there will be pros and cons, and its not worth getting worked up about.

The majority of Australians probably fit in the middle of politics, and will vote based on their conscience, guided in some cases by the media (who have their own agenda).

Combined with compulsory voting, and a hyped up news cycle feeding on social media, it makes Australia an interesting political minefield. This has resulted in some states recently suffering single-term governments for the first time in decades, as one notable fact.

It seems that people are just willing to throw out whoever is in power; parties don’t win elections, they lose them.

In turn, the major party politicians constantly play he-said/she-said in terms of trying to score points. Its quite tiresome when there are more important issues to address – things that affect all of us, and are largely being ignored.

The Biggest Issue

Across the world at the moment, the threats posed by environmental destruction, and ongoing threat of man-made global warming, are going to affect us all.

It is right there. People know it is right there. If you’ve been paying attention in the last 10 years, you know there is a lot of rubbish talked about how its not right there. It is one of those things that some people see as a threat to their way of life, or some kind of charlatan’s trick to cripple the economy, so they work to undermine it.

In Australia, we have such a very large investment in coal, across all of mining, export, and thermal power generation. There is even a campaign called “little black rock”, which I will not dignify with a link, which seeks to tell people how releasing carbon is awesome.

Australia has an abundance of bright sun and strong wind, as well as the emerging wave power we can generate. We have the highest level of rooftop solar PV penetration at around 1.5 million households. We have some of the best researchers in the world on Solar PV, and lots of space to build the necessary infrastructure, both domestic and industrial.

Renewable Energy – Why So Negative?

The Coalition government are definitely not keen on it. Under their leadership we’ve had wind farms called “visually awful” and cited other impacts, all of which have been long held in contempt by science.

One of my favourites – click image for story @ Independent Australia

They reduced the RET (Renewable Energy Target) and have had an ongoing campaign against change in the status quo, in order to protect their conservative interests in mining and export markets.

They have run the clippers over our peak scientific body, the CSIRO, valued here and internationally for scientific research and technology development. The move is ostensibly to move from “analysis” to “adaptation” of climate change, but when you look at the CV of their CEO, and hear some of the comments about his time in Silicon Valley, you have to wonder.

It won’t surprise anyone to note that the coal and energy lobbies pour money into the Liberal Party like water.

The opposition Labor Party (yes, that is the correct spelling) have also got a quandary on their hands, particularly as they seek to protect their traditional battleground of workers’ rights and family issues. They can’t simply shut coal off tomorrow, because it would leave a hell of a lot of wreckage on the social landscape of towns supported by coal.

Nevertheless, they have announced some targets, which are nice, but really could be more ambitious. Labor have strong ties to Unions, and the CFMEU (Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union) are a big player.

The gradual decline of mining has seen job cuts aplenty, and IMHO Labor need to work harder to convince people in the Unions that Australia can pivot into renewable energy.

Ironically, both the major political players are running the dusty political principles of “jobs and growth”, but aren’t really putting up alternatives to the status quo, despite Australia’s recent exit from manufacturing and the ongoing slide in the mining sector.

There is also a genuine fear of fundamental change, in part due to the historical allegiances the big parties have, and the unknown quantity of renewable energy in a nation historically riding on coal. The latter is understandable, as mining is what kept Australia bouyant during the GFC.

But, we’re at record low interest rates. Record high housing prices. Coal prices are falling, mining is shrinking. This isn’t 2008 any more and the government can’t just muddle through on the back of the mining giants.

Where is the next big wave coming from? When all signs point to a new revolution, neither of the big parties have used renewable energy as a pillar in this campaign, both as an environmental and economic winner.

The Australian Greens – The Little Engine That Might

At present, The Greens are under the leadership of Richard Di Natale, who has brought a kind of pragmatism from his Senate position in Victoria.

© The Australian Greens

It is unlikely they’ll win many seats, but the growing youth vote has seen them take several inner-city enclaves away from the big boys in the recent past at State and Federal level.

Along with disillusionment with the major parties, forthright leadership from Di Natale will assist the Greens wrest more of the vote away from the majors in years to come. Is this a good thing?

Perhaps, if for no other reason than getting the incumbents to change their thinking. More promising is the option to add a third voice to the decidedly binary view of Australian politics.

This change in rhetoric from the Australian Greens also dispels the myth that they are just a bunch of left-wing loonies, ready to bring down society and take us all back to peace-loving hippies with unrealistic expectations of love and peace. And kale … or something.

Renew Australia

Subtitled “Powering The New Economy”, the Australian Greens have released a document (PDF downloadable from that page), where they lay down the high-level principles behind fundamentally changing the energy economy, and several industries along with it.

Its worth a read, if for no other reason than to show that somebody is thinking about “jobs and growth” in terms that require a bit of a paradigm shift. The summary points are:

Ensure increases in energy efficiency

Get energy generation to 90% renewable by 2030

Establish a new authority to plan and drive the transition

Create a transition fund to assist coal workers and communities

Implement pollution standards to stage a gradual shut down of coal power stations in a suitable manner (dirtiest first)

All of these seem to be pretty reasonable, though I don’t doubt when some people read that – particularly those in the coal/energy industry – they’ll freak out a bit. And that’s OK, because change blows. We fear change.

The good news is, the Greens have released more detail about the transition process as it affects miners directly, as well as some dialogue on other policies via their website. Recognition of the issues facing people is not unexpected, as The Greens have a heavy emphasis on social equality.

Perhaps people still have this image of “Greenie” protesters who get all angry about people chopping down forests, or chaining themselves to mining equipment. Successive Greens administration have started to develop a more sophisticated approach to politicking, and it appears to be having an effect.

When I started this article, I’d planned a breakdown of the policy and the pros and cons of each bit. That would take a lot of words, and probably be a waste of time when you’re smart enough to figure out what the policy is about, by reading it yourself. So I’ll just look at one of the points above from a perspective close to my heart.

Energy Efficiency

When looking at how efficient the average Australian house is, people in Europe would be mildly shocked. The reasons why are probably more eye-opening, in terms of our building industry hitting the trough, and hard.

Overseas building industries started their push for better quality and efficiency decades ago. In Australia, labour costs are high and house prices surging, so adding extra cost is tough to accept. Consumer apathy is also a big factor, when you’ve got relatively cheap, abundant coal energy.

“Just turn on the Air Con!” is a pretty common statement. I’ve previously discussed the issues in my own house with ducted A/C (and associated muttering).

As a result, a lot of new housing in the last two decades is single-brick house with minimum ceiling insulation in the form of glasswool batts. If you wanted wall insulation, you’d pay extra in your new build in a lot of cases. Some didn’t even offer it, and I understand its extremely difficult to retrofit (i.e. ripping out internal walls)

We generally don’t do double/triple glazing, and just stick big reverse cycle air conditioners into new builds to cater for hot/cold days. No wonder we’re big electricity consumers!

People living in older weatherboard houses might as well be in a wooden tent. The farmhouse I grew up in had louvered windows and a big pitched roof, and yet somehow we got away without air conditioning in summer, and just a potbellied stove or combustion fire for winter.

Cold in Sydney right now – could really use one of these. AND, of course, the wine…

The great thing about seeking better efficiency, besides the obvious saving on heating/cooling requirements for the household, is the boost to the building industry in terms of jobs and growth (are you listening, major parties?). It also adds a layer of new requirements for retrofit options.

As new procedures and technologies are brought to bear, new opportunities crop up to establish service industries. This is especially important for people who might have skilled up in the practical arts of mining, and find themselves at a loose end.

A lot of people who went into mining got the training they needed, and can re-train to do something different in the building industry. Same for people no longer in car manufacturing after 2017. They’re smart people, and know the value of hard work. They need employment.

Better building practices can limit the upward growth of energy usage, as well as using the energy more intelligently. Along with home battery storage installed by companies like Natural Solar, smart control from Reposit Power, and better knowledge about how we use power, we can help limit the impact of change and minimise long-term costs.

The End Game for Coal

The Greens have put a shorter time limit on coal than the other political parties in Australia, recognising that this country has abundant natural resources for renewable energy generation.

They also acknowledge the practicalities of shutting down coal, and the social and financial cost in doing so.

However, their target of 90% renewables by 2030 leaves less than 15 years. In a political arena where The Greens won’t have the traction in Parliament to implement this kind of policy for at least the this Federal election, and probably the one after, you have to wonder where the impetus will come from.

With the falling price of solar PV, as well as the emergence of battery storage and the expected price drops there, I suspect we’ll see consumers have a big say in where the energy industry goes. The acceleration of uptake into battery storage, in particular, will force a rethink on network deployment and maintenance.

As I discussed in my last post, the Networks are interested in deeper consumer understanding.  They realise that working with the consumer on grid-connected battery storage is preferable to alienating them into off-grid battery storage.

The increase in domestic renewable generation will have a knock-on effect to the domestic coal market for power generation.

External forces like the falling world coal price will apply pressure from the other end. Mining for coal will come under serious pressure, particularly if it requires more generous subsidies from the taxpayer.

We have existing oversupply on our current networks, which presents the opportunity to shut down the dirtiest power stations (looking at you, Hazelwood) in the shorter term.

The white knight for mining companies could be other resources, such as Lithium. The demand for lithium will only increase over the shorter term, as battery factories (like $11B facility planned by Volkswagen) ramp up production.

It almost seems like closing the circle: moving energy away from coal requires more lithium, which allows mining to move away from coal into lithium.

Or is that too good to be true?

I think  even with these factors considered, we’re still going to need one of the major parties to help the Greens get this type of initiative across the line before 2030. I wouldn’t be putting money on the incumbent Government to help if they get back in.

After all, you can’t spell Coalition without “Coal”.

from https://www.sustainablefuturegroup.com.au/48/the-australian-greens-election-2016/ from https://sustainablfutg.tumblr.com/post/627957773469204480 from https://gracebolton.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-australian-greens-election-2016.html

[gibsongirlselections]

The Democrats Want to Be the Americanist Party

I don’t care what people think, I love political conventions. In an age of deconstructive irony and post-political wonks who think they can graph their way to a better tomorrow, the DNC and RNC are some of our last remaining throwbacks to good, old-fashioned, American electoral camp. That’s true even as they’ve become more scripted, and especially true if you attend in person and venture outside the convention halls, where the activists set up shop. It’s a spectacle that cries out for the gonzo treatment: gulp down a bunch of Quaaludes and sally forth with your steno pad. Alas, the coronavirus intervened, leaving us all stranded on the couch in front of the TV.

So it went with the Democratic National Convention this week. The proceedings ostensibly took place in Milwaukee, though they kept throwing to Democrats all over the country, sometimes to schizophrenic effect: Andrew Yang tossing to Julia Louis-Dreyfus tossing to a calamari supremacist from Rhode Island tossing to Maggie Rogers stranded on the Maine coastline tossing to a man in a Kansas field. It was all very, dare we say, unconventional, which led many on Twitter to disapprove, accusing the Democrats of putting on a glorified infomercial-cum-Jerry Lewis telethon.

Not to defend the party of abortion, but that seems unfair. The Democrats, and the Republicans next week, have no precedent for anything like this. They’ve been forced to start from scratch, and ultimately what the Democrats came up with ended up seeming almost healthy. Despite their perpetual warnings that democracy will die if Donald Trump is democratically reelected, the Zoom-meeting aesthetic of the convention was refreshing. It undermined the hysteria, contextualizing the event as something less important than it otherwise would have been. The election was no longer a clash of the titans before roaring crowds; it was just another browser tab at the top of the screen, a subdued and rather bureaucratic affair. If you believe, as I do, that the nationalization and glamorization of our politics is ruining the country, then this was justice of a kind. Even the Democratic A-listers felt like a B-roll.

First up was Andrew Cuomo, who compared racism and xenophobia to the coronavirus he’d failed to contain and our government to an immune system. Bernie Sanders, who’d once praised Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union, warned that Donald Trump is “leading us down the path of authoritarianism.” Michelle Obama encouraged empathy, a major theme of the convention. Bill Clinton appeared live from Chappaqua, not the Lolita Express, as many were expecting, after photographs published that same day showed him receiving a massage from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Dr. Jill Biden strolled into an empty classroom and proved herself one of her husband’s best decisions. Kamala Harris gave a rather banal speech (“there is no vaccine for racism”) from what appeared to be the headquarters of some intergalactic command.

And then it was over to Ol’ Joe. It seems like a stupid thing to say, but Biden was without a doubt the biggest winner of this year’s DNC. That isn’t always the case with presidential nominees: Barack Obama outshone John Kerry in 2004 and Bill Clinton arguably eclipsed Obama in 2012. With left-wing activists muttering under their breath and Uncle Bernie still rattling around the party attic, there was no guarantee that something similar wouldn’t happen this year. Yet while the Democratic convention was nowhere near as personalist as the Republican one is likely to be, while it focused on issues and party history as well as the candidate, I thought the narrative they crafted around Biden was a winsome one. For four nights, the man was all hands-on-your-shoulders empathy, personal grief, hardscrabble Scranton origins, Amtrak trips.

It was a rejoinder to snarky pundits like me, who like to reduce Biden to his supposed senility. Yet the former veep is much more than that. What he lacks in policy detail and verbal continence, he’s always made up for in social IQ, an essential trait for a politician, perhaps even more essential than attention to detail. That personal connectivity was on full display during his speech on Thursday. It was a success, I think, in that it was almost jarring in its normalcy, a reminder of the way politics used to be. This was an utterly conventional Democratic address with all the utterly conventional kitchen-table issues: jobs, unions, health care, equal pay. Amid a radical and surreal year, it felt disarming. The speech was more proof that Biden is, as Curt Mills has argued, the return-to-normalcy candidate, the Warren Harding of this century’s ’20s.

That isn’t to say, however, that the Democrats didn’t succumb to the feverishness of the times. One of the major rhetorical themes of Biden’s speech was literally darkness versus light, with Trump embodying the former and Biden (conveniently) a paladin of the latter. That made me flash back to a nutty San Francisco Chronicle essay from 2008, which declared Barack Obama to be a “Lightworker,” meaning “that rare kind of attuned being…who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.” (True enough, if you were a Yemeni civilian.) Biden is no Obama but there was still a slightly messianic feel to his presentation. The Democrats have apparently decided that this election is a space opera, a titanic showdown between good and evil, with themselves in charge of saving their country. That might ring true to the average left-wing door-knocker, but it’s also self-flattering to an unseemly degree.

I skipped over Barack Obama’s convention speech before, only because it was the best example of this Manichean tendency. The former president appeared in front of a giant backdrop of the Constitution and proceeded to inform us that our very founding was under threat. Obama’s understanding of the Constitution was reductive; it said nothing about, say, secretly spying on AP journalists or launching a war in Libya without congressional approval. The Fourth Amendment and the Tenth Amendment were not mentioned. Instead it dwelt on a single word (one many of the Founders happened to disdain): democracy. Our founding documents, Obama said, contained the blueprint for a democracy, which Trump is now menacing. America was portrayed as a glowing democratic arrow, pointing ever forward, demanding that opportunity and the franchise be continually expanded.

And that overall was the narrative of the convention, simplistic and incomplete, yet also familiar and firmly in the American tradition. In addition to Obama, it was espoused by, of all people, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who in an otherwise lackluster speech that felt like one of the lesser State of the Union responses, said, “That’s the story of this great nation. Action begets action. Progress begets progress.” Well, there you go. Donald Trump sees America as one afflicted by carnage and crime, which only he can fix (this time for real). The Democrats’ narrative, on the other hand, is one that affirms our history as a sequence of collective actions, of communities working with government to set aside self-interest and better the condition of the least among us. The 1619 garbage was (mostly) taken out; incremental progress was back in. Listening to these people, you would have never guessed that only a month ago the left was playing footsie with a cultural revolution.

The Democrats are thus making a play to be the Americanist party, conflating the United States with its democratic character and painting its president as a sinister and (ironically) almost foreign outsider. Trump next week will have to turn that on its head, to show that Democratic governance in fact impoverishes the marginalized and imperils democracy through chaos. Yet that’s still two days away. In the meantime, the parties have logged off and I’ve been left feeling jilted. I’m no Democrat, but everything I grew up liking about the left—its opposition to the Iraq war, its hatred of the imperial executive, its support for civil liberties—was MIA this week. Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t invited. Foreign policy was subordinated to the greater theme of democracy, as speaker after speaker promised that Biden would push back on overseas dictatorships. Biden himself threatened to break a pool stick over Vladimir Putin’s head.

The Democratic Party has moved on from the mid-2000s. That might be wise politically, but it will always leave some of us looking not forward but back.

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