#but functions in a fundamentally different way

[identitty-dickruption]

can I ask a little more about how post viral brain damage works? I have both long covid and a tbi, and I’m so confused all the time

sure!

the first thing to say is that it's disputed whether "brain damage" is the correct term. when we talk about post-viral brain damage, broadly speaking people are talking about both neurological damage and impairment to cognitive functioning as a result of having a viral illness. this can cover a broad range of symptoms (including memory loss, strokes, seizures, and chronic fatigue, amongst other things). that means that there's also not necessarily one singular Way That It Works exactly. it's also very difficult to separate brain damage from tissue damage when we're talking about such a broad range of possible symptoms

actual infection of the brain or central nervous system is incredibly rare. it is unlikely that a person will develop brain damage in the strictest sense of the phrase. instead, what tends to happen is a dysregulated immune response. one kind is when your body attacks braincells in a broad-scale attempt to attack the virus. another kind is when the hormones your body releases in the aim to fight specific viruses impact your cognitive functioning (e.g. by suppressing serotonin). this second type is the more complicated type, but also quite possibly the more common. "neurotransmitter and behavioural changes resulting from this initial infection may last the lifetime of the organism, despite the lack of any trace of the virus in the brain"

one potential explanation for these kinds of immune dysregulation is genetics, but as with anything genetics-related this is incredibly complicated to test + prove

covid brain damage tends to be temporary (~6 months) in a majority of people. this is "not specific for COVID-19 but also occurred to a similar extent in people with severe influenza disease". this is important because it hacks away at some of the covid exceptionalism* that a lot of people hold. there is no clear evidence at this stage that covid has done anything fundamentally different from any other large-scale viral illness

*covid exceptionalism is the idea that covid is/was a completely unique occurrence in a pathological/biological sense and that the impacts of covid are therefore also completely unique

to be clear, my background is in the social sciences rather than in medicine or biology. I read medical studies both recreationally + as a way to connect with my older sister, who is a nurse. most of my background here comes from my desire to push back against a lot of the social and political messaging about covid and other post-viral disability

[redhoodinternaldialectical]

"Murder is Werewolves" - Batman

I don't got the SPOONS to do this thought train justice, I have seriously been trying to write this thing for MONTHS so just, idk, have this half baked skeletal outline of the essay I guess:

I don't believe that Batman's no-kill rule is primarily about rehabilitation or second chances.

His refusal to believe that Cassandra could have killed someone when she was eight years old because "how could a killer understand my commitment not to kill" is absolute fucking MOON LOGIC from a rehabilitationist standpoint. No jury on the planet would think for even a second that she could reasonably be held accountable for her actions in that situation! Her past cannot condemn her to being incapable of valuing human life under a rehabilitation centering framework. However, Batman's reasoning makes perfect sense if he believes that killing is a spiritually/morally corrupting act which permanently and fundamentally changes a person, and that corruption can never be fully undone.

Dick Grayson killing the Joker is treated both narratively and by Batman as an unequivocally WIN for the Joker. The Joker won by turning Nightwing into a killer. Note that this is during a comic in which the Joker transforming people was a major theme! Batman didn't revive the Joker because the Joker deserved to live; he revived the Joker to lift the burden on Dick.

His appeal to Stephanie when she tried to kill her dad is that she shouldn't ruin her own life. He gives no defense of Cluemaster's actual life. Granted this is a rhetorical strategy moment and should be taken with a generous pinch of salt, but it fits in the pattern.

When Jason becomes a willful killer, he essentially disowns him, never treats him with full trust ever again, and... Well, we can stop here for Bruce's sake. Bottom line is that his actions towards Jason do not lead me to believe that he thinks Jason can become a better person without having his autonomy taken from him, either partially or fully.

The Joker is, for better or worse, the ultimate symbol and vessel of pure, irredeemable evil in DC comics now. He hasn't been just another crook in a long time. He will never get better, he will only get worse. If you take it to be true that the Joker will not or can not rehabilitate, then there's no rehabilitationist argument against killing him.

Batman does not seem to consider it a possibly that he'll rehabilitate. Batman at several points seems to think that the Joker dying in a manner no one could have prevented would be good. Yet Batman fully believes that if he killed the Joker, he himself would become irredeemable.

Batman's own form of justice (putting people into the hospital and then prison) is fucking brutal and clearly not rehabilitative. He disrespects the most basic human rights of all criminals on a regular basis. It is genuinely really, really weird from a rehabilitationist standpoint that his only uncrossable line is killing... But it makes perfect sense if he cares more about not corrupting himself with the act of killing than the actual ethical results of any individual decision to kill or not kill.

In the real world cops are all bastards because they are too violent to criminals, even when that violence doesn't lead to death. Prison is a wildly evil thing to do to another human being, and you don't use it to steal away massive portions of a person's life if your goal is to rehabilitate them. In the comic world, Batman is said to be necessary because the corrupt cops are too nice to criminals and keep letting them out of jail. I don't know how to write a connector sentence there so like I hope you can see why this bothers me so damn much! That's just not forgiveness vibes there Batman!!

I want to make special note here of the transformative aspect. You don't simply commit a single act when you kill, no, you become a killer, like you might become a werewolf.

The narrative supports this a lot!

Why did Supes go evil during Injustice? He killed the Joker. Why did Bruce become the Batman Who Laughs? Bruce killed the Joker. Why was Jason Todd close to becoming a new Joker during Three Jokers? Because he killed people, to include the Joker.

Even if these notions of redemption being impossible aren't the whole of his reasoning (people never have only one reason for doing what they do) it is a distinct through-line pattern in his actions and reasoning, and it is directly at odds with notions of rehabilitation, redemption, and second chances.

So why does he give so many killers second chances?

Firstly because this doesn't apply to all versions of Batman. Some writers explicitly incorporate rehabilitation and forgiveness into his actions. You will be able to provide me with examples of this other through-line pattern if you go looking for them. The nature of comics is to be inconsistent.

Secondly the existence of that other pattern does not negate the existence of this one. People and characters are complex, and perfectly capable of holding two patterns of belief within themselves, even when they conflict to this degree. You can absolutely synthesize these two ideas into a single messy Batman philosophical vibescape.

Finally and most importantly to this essay: he has mercy on killers the same way that werewolf hunters sometimes have mercy on someone who is clearly struggling against their monsterous nature, especially if they were turned in exceptional circumstances or against their will. They understand that they are sick, damned beasts, cursed to always be fighting against themselves and the evil they harbor within. It is vitally kind to help them fight themselves by curtailing their autonomy in helpful ways and providing them with chances to do some good to make up for their eternal moral deficiency.

I think in many comics Batman views killers as lost souls. Battered and tormented monsters who must be pitied and given mercy wherever possible. (The connections to mental health, addiction, and rampant, horrifying ableism towards people struggling with both is unavoidable, but addressing it is sadly outside of the scope of this essay.)

Above all, the greatest care possible must be taken to never, ever let yourself become one of them, because once you have transformed the beast will forever be within you growing stronger.

To Batman, it is the most noble burden, the highest mercy, the most important commandment: Thou shalt suffer the monsters to live.

[nolongerexistingsadcatface]

Ok yes America hating the cold is funny (eh) BUT. have you considered that I like the imagery of an America sitting alone in the forest in the bleak mid-winter landscape of an east coast woods, all alone in both body and mind, agonizing over her seeming doom to be stuck in the throes of loneliness for all eternity?

[lamonnaie]

lol i've been so offline lately, but this is the first thing i come back to 😩

[icicleteeth]

Went on a tangent a bit about this on twt but the useless hill I'm ready and willing to die on is wanting these rpg worlds to have a more fleshed out (from a lore perspective) explanation to how the currency system works, because so many just use single gold pieces, which makes sense in a gameplay way but how does this work in terms of commerce... Are we just carrying around sacks of several hundreds of thousands of coins...

Just think about how much of a pain in the ass it would be to buy an enchanted weapon from an enchanter for, even just 1k gold, okay maybe we can assume there's like some standardized 500 gold sleeves (like how there are coin rolls irl) well what if that weapon is a weirder number like 1439 gold, okay well now you gotta get more specific, and the vendor's counting all the coins to make sure you got the right amount (assuming we're talking purchasing rather than bartering, but at least in TES, bartering has long stopped being a thing) And don't even get me started on large quantity sales like purchasing estates... I know we're never going to get an actual banking system like Daggerfall again, but at least...idk have a bank or mention of that stuff somewhere, even if it's just flavor text or decorative and has no gameplay function to it... I am begging....

[clenastia]

you know, there's a lot of rec lists out there, for people who liked harry potter and want something else to replace it with, that are all like "magic school books that are better than hp" and "queer witches books better than hp" and this and that.

...does anyone have a list for "books whose magical worldbuilding and political structures are just as nonsensical and full of holes as hp, but still have even semi-compelling narratives"?

...because i'll be honest my favorite thing about hp fanfiction was always how WELL you could make crossovers work with it due to just how nonfunctional and yet still present the political system was, making it both easy and enjoyable to play in crossoverland. i dont want magical world books that don't do politics and world building at all - that requires me to do all the work, and is no longer easy. i dont want magical world books that do worldbuilding and politics WELL - that doesn't leave me enough holes to drop nonsense into without having to go ten billion miles out of my way to justify how it happened.

i just want a magical world style book or series where the politics and worldbuilding ALMOST make sense on a surface level but then become completely, bogglingly, incompetently terrible upon a closer inspection to the point that realistically they shouldn't even be capable of functioning for a year let alone long enough to have a society, and has juuuuuuuust enough likable characters for me to enjoy the idea of having crossover interactions.

pls. pls im suffering why does everyone who gives hp replacement recs only ever suggest things BETTER than hp yall i need something just as poorly written to obsess nonsense crossovers with that i can then ramble about to people without risking them thinking im supporting jkr 😭

[fakeoldmanfucker]

The hardest thing about using bluesky is not being able to use tags

[sirenthestone]

@staff @support

Nobody here wants this stuff! You're just gonna lose users, and none of this makes this site competitive to new users. It's bad business!

“oh they’re not taking away chronological dashboard, well everything’s okay then” they also said in the post they’re making reblogs collapsed (like comments on twitter) so you won’t see the full conversation in a post. they also won’t get rid of tumblr live despite it being an annoying and cancerous data-miner that isn’t legal in much of the world. they won’t even let you opt out of tumblr live for more than seven days. they implemented a terrible photo viewer that mimics tiktok and makes it so you can’t zoom in on images. they took away the ability to view prev tags. they’re making it so you have to sign in with your email to view almost any thing on tumblr. they’ve already made it so you have to sign in to send asks, even on anon. they’re slowly phasing out custom blog themes.

the things that make tumblr at all usable and favored by us– the older web blog features, the anonymity– that is still being taken away. it HAS been being taken away for some time now. i am urging you people to reveiwbomb the tumblr app. force them to acknowledge that users do not like these changes.

[fozmeadows]

There's a lot of conversations to be had around the current influx of Americans to Xiaohongshu (RedNote/Little Red Book) ahead of the TikTok ban, many of which are better articulated by more knowledgeable people than me. And for all the fun various parties of both nationalities seem to having with memes and wholesome interactions, it's undoubtedly true that there's also some American entitlement and exoticization going on, which sucks. But a sentiment I've seen repeatedly online is that, if it's taken actually speaking to Chinese people and viewing Chinese content for Americans to understand that they've been propagandized to about China and its people, then that just proves how racist they are, and I want to push back on that, because it strikes me as being a singularly reductive and unhelpful framing of something far more complex.

Firstly: while there's frequently overlap between racism and xenophobia, the distinction between them matters in this instance, because the primary point of American propaganda about China is that Communism Is Fundamentally Evil And Unamerican And Never Ever Works, and thinking a country's government sucks is not the same as thinking the population is racially inferior. The way most Republicans in particular talk about China, you'd think it was functionally indistinguishable from North Korea, which it really isn't. Does this mean there's no critique to be made of either communism in general or the CCP? Absolutely not! But if you've been told your whole life that communist countries are impoverished, corrupt and dangerous because Communism Never Works, and you've only really encountered members of the Chinese diaspora - i.e., people whose families left China, often under traumatic circumstances, because they thought America would be better or safer - rather than Chinese nationals, then no: it's not automatically racist to be surprised that their daily lives and standard of living don't match up with what you'd assumed. Secondly: TikTok's userbase skews young. While there's certainly Americans in their 30s and older investigating Xiaohongshu, it seems very reasonable to assume that the vast majority are in their teens or twenties - young enough that, barring a gateway interest in something like C-dramas, danmei or other Chinese cultural products, and assuming they're not of Chinese descent themselves, there's no reason why they'd know anything about China beyond what they've heard in the news, or from politicians, or from their parents, which is likely not much, and very little firsthand. But even with an interest in China, there's a difference between reading about or watching movies from a place, and engaging firsthand, in real time, with people from that place, not just through text exchanges, but in a visual medium that lets you see what their houses, markets, shopping centers, public transport, schools, businesses, infrastructure and landmarks look like. Does this mean that what's being observed isn't a curated perspective on China as determined both by Xiaohongshu's TOU and the demographic skewing of its userbase? Of course not! But that doesn't mean it isn't still a representative glimpse of a part of China, which is certainly more than most young Americans have ever had before.

Thirdly: I really need people to stop framing propaganda as something that only stupid bigots fall for, as though it's possible to natively resist all the implicit cultural biases you're raised with and exist as a perfect moral being without ever having to actively challenge yourself. To cite the sacred texts:

Like. Would the world be a better place if everyone could just Tell when they're being lied to and act accordingly? Obviously! But that is extremely not how anything actually works, and as much as it clearly discomforts some to witness, the most common way of realizing you've been propagandized to about a particular group of people is to interact with them. Can this be cringe and awkward and embarrassing at times? Yes! Will some people inevitably say something shitty or rude during this process? Also yes! But the reality is that cultural exchange is pretty much always bumpy to some extent; the difficulties are a feature, not a bug, because the process is inherently one of learning and conversation, and as individual people both learn at different rates and have different opinions on that learning, there's really no way to iron all that out such that nobody ever feels weird or annoyed or offput. Even interactions between career diplomats aren't guaranteed smooth sailing, and you're mad that random teenagers interacting through a language barrier in their first flush of enthusiasm for something new aren't doing it perfectly? Come on now.

Fourthly: Back before AO3 was banned in China, there was a period where the site was hit with an influx of Chinese users who, IIRC, were hopping over when one of their own fansites got shut down, which sparked a similar conversation around differences in site etiquette and how to engage respectfully. Which is also one of the many things that makes the current moment so deeply ironic: the US has historically criticized China for exactly the sort of censorship and redaction of free speech that led to AO3 being banned, and yet is now doing the very same thing with TikTok. Which is why what's happening on Xiaohongshu is, IMO, such an incredible cultural moment: because while there are, as mentioned, absolutely relevant things to be said about (say) Chinese censorship, US-centrism, orientalism and so on, what's ultimately happening is that, despite - or in some sense because of - the recent surge in anti-Chinese rhetoric from US politicians, a significant number of Americans who might otherwise never have done so are interacting directly with Chinese citizens in a way that, whatever else can be said of it, is actively undermining government propaganda, and that matters.

What it all most puts me in mind of, in fact, is a quote from French-Iranian novelist and cartoonist Marjane Satrapi, namely:

“The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”

And at this particular moment in history, this strikes me as being a singularly powerful realization for Americans in particular to have.

[tanadrin]

The fact that if someone posts a link to a tumblr post in a reply I cannot navigate to it using the tumblr app highlights the reason I hate apps replacing websites.

There’s nowhere in the tumblr app to enter a URL—your only option is to search up a user name and then try to find the post manually

If you copy-paste the link to a web browser like Firefox you get a login-prompt doorslam as soon as you scroll, even if you’re logged into the app.

You cannot easily click on a button from the webpage to load the post in the app

Even copy-pasting the URL is a PITA because the iOS tumblr app doesn’t actually let you select a portion of the text of a reply, only copy the whole thing to the clipboard.

I really hate the way apps break basic interface functionality that’s been standard for decades across different web browsers, to deliver content that is fundamentally just a webpage. @staff please fix this very annoying UI issue at least

[arayapendragon]

dr. jacobo grinberg, the scientist who went missing for researching shifting 🗝️

the man, the myth, the legend. being a keen enthusiast of the human brain from a young age, dr. jacobo grinberg was a mexican neurophysiologist and psychologist who delved into the depths of human consciousness, meditation, mexican shamanism and aimed to establish links between science and spirituality. 

grinberg's theories and research can be tied to reality shifting, seeing as he explored the fusion of quantum physics and occultism. being not only heavily established in the field of psychology but also a prolific writer, he wrote about 50 books on such topics. he was a firm believer of the idea that human consciousness possesses hidden and powerful abilities like telepathy, psychic power and astral projection. 

the unfortunate loss of his mother to a brain tumour when he was only twelve not only fuelled his interest in the human brain but also pushed him to study it on a deeper level, making it his life’s aim. 

he went on to earn a phd in psychophysiology, established his own laboratory and even founded the instituto para el estudio de la conciencia - the national institute for the study of consciousness. 

despite sharing groundbreaking and revolutionary ideas, his proposals were rejected by the scientific community due to the inclusion of shamanism and metaphysical aspects. on december 8th, 1994, he went missing just before his 48th birthday. grinberg vanished without a trace, leaving people thoroughly perplexed about his whereabouts. some believe he was silenced, while others believe he discovered something so powerful and revolutionary that changed the entire course of reality, or well, his reality. 

grinberg's work was heavily influenced by karl pribram and david bohm's contributions to the holographic theory of consciousness, which suggests that reality functions the same way as a hologram does. meaning, reality exists as a vast, interconnected macrocosm. it even suggests that all realities exist among this holographic structure. 

lastly, it also proposes that the brain does not perceive reality, rather actively creates it through tuning into different frequencies of existence. 

this not only proves the multiverse theory (infinite realities exist), but also the consciousness theory (we don’t observe reality, but instead create it). 

grinberg’s most notable contribution was the syntergic theory, which states that, “there exists a “syntergic” field, a universal, non-local field of consciousness that interacts with the human brain." - david franco.

this theory also stated that 

the syntergic field is a fundamental and foundational layer of reality that contains all possible experiences and states of consciousness.

the brain doesn’t generate consciousness, it instead acts as a receiver and its neural networks collapse the syntergic field into a coherent and structured reality. 

reality is created, not observed. 

we can access different variations of reality (which is the very essence of shifting realities)

the syntergic theory is even in congruence with the universal consciousness theory (all minds are interconnected as a part of a whole, entire consciousness that encompasses all living beings in the universe). 

grinberg concluded that 

all minds are connected through the syntergic field 

this field can be accessed and manipulated by metaphysical and spiritual practices, altered states of consciousness and deep meditation. 

in conclusion, the syntergic theory proposes that our consciousness is not a mere byproduct of the brain, but rather a fundamental force of the universe. 

grinberg was far ahead of his time, and even 31 years after his disappearance, the true nature of reality remains a mystery. regardless, the syntergic theory helps provide insight and a new perspective on how we access and influence reality. 

summary of grinberg’s findings:

the brain constructs reality 

other realities exist and can be experienced

other states of consciousness exist and can be experienced 

consciousness is not limited 

all minds are connected through the syntergic field 

shamanic, spiritual, metaphysical and meditative practices can alter and influence our perception of reality. 

some of grinberg's works that can be associated with shifting:

el cerebro consciente

la creación de la experiencia

teoría sintérgica

[reasonsforhope]

"Researchers at the National Cancer Research Centre in Spain (CNIO) have discovered a mechanism that is triggered just minutes after acute liver damage occurs—and it could lead to treatments for those with severe liver problems.

The avenues for future treatments of liver damage include a diet enriched with the amino acid glutamate.

“Glutamate supplementation can promote liver regeneration and benefit patients in recovery following hepatectomy or awaiting a transplant,” wrote the authors in a paper published in ‘Nature’.

The liver is a vital organ, crucial to digestion, metabolism, and the elimination of toxins. It has a unique ability to regenerate, which allows it to replace liver cells damaged by the very toxins that these cells eliminate.

However, the liver stops regenerating in cases of diseases that involve chronic liver damage–such as cirrhosis—and such diseases are becoming increasingly prevalent, associated with poor dietary habits or alcohol consumption. So activating liver regeneration is key to treating the disease.

Learning to activate liver regeneration is therefore a priority today, to benefit patients with liver damage and also those who’ve had part of their liver cut out to remove a tumor.

The research has discovered in animal models this previously unknown mechanism of liver regeneration. It is a process that is triggered very quickly, just a few minutes after acute liver damage occurs, with the amino acid glutamate playing a key role.

“Our results describe a fundamental and universal mechanism that allows the liver to regenerate after acute damage,” explained Nabil Djouder, head of the CNIO Growth Factors, Nutrients and Cancer Group and senior author of the study.

A “complex and ingenious” perspective on liver regeneration

Liver regeneration was known to occur through the proliferation of liver cells, known as hepatocytes. However, the molecular mechanisms involved were not fully understood. This current discovery is very novel, as it describes communication between two different organs, the liver and bone marrow, involving the immune system, according to a CINO news release.

The results show that liver and bone marrow are interconnected by glutamate. After acute liver damage, liver cells, called hepatocytes, produce glutamate and send it into the bloodstream; through the blood, glutamate reaches the bone marrow, inside the bones, where it activates monocytes, a type of immune system cell. Monocytes then travel to the liver and along the way become macrophages – also immune cells. The presence of glutamate reprograms the metabolism of macrophages, and these consequently begin to secrete a growth factor that leads to an increase in hepatocyte production.

In other words, a rapid chain of events allows glutamate to trigger liver regeneration in just minutes, through changes in the macrophage metabolism. It is, says Djouder, “a new, complex and ingenious perspective on how the liver stimulates its own regeneration.”

The research also clarifies a previously unanswered question: how the various areas of the liver are coordinated during regeneration. In the liver, there are different types of hepatocytes, organized in different areas; the hepatocytes in each area perform specific metabolic functions. The study reveals that hepatocytes producing a protein known as glutamine synthetase, which regulates glutamate levels, play a key role in regeneration.

According to the CNIO group, when glutamine synthetase is inhibited, there is more glutamate in circulation, which accelerates liver regeneration. This is what happens when the liver suffers acute damage: glutamine synthase activity decreases, blood glutamate increases, and from there, the connection with the bone marrow is established, reprogramming macrophages and stimulating hepatocyte proliferation.

Possible therapeutic applications

The experiments have been carried out in mice, but the results have been tested with bioinformatics tools, using databases of mouse and human hepatocytes.

According to Djouder, “dietary glutamate supplementation may simply be recommended in the future after liver extirpation, and also to reduce liver damage caused by cirrhosis.”

The first author of the paper, CNIO researcher María del Mar Rigual also wants future research to explore using glutamate supplements in humans who have undergone liver resection for tumor removal."

-via Good News Network, March 30, 2025

[jonnywaistcoat]

What’s your opinion on the contrast between “silly” and “serious” spaces? Do you think people can have very serious interpretations about a genuine piece of media and also be goofy about it? I’m asking this particularly because I’ve seen people in the Magnus podcast fandoms fight about people “misinterpreting” characters you, Alex, and the many other authors have written. Are you okay with the blorbofication or do you really wish the media you’ve written would be “taken seriously” 100% of the time?

And follow up question, what do you think about the whole “it’s up to the reader (or in some cases, listener) to make their own conclusions and interpretations and that does not make them wrong”, versus the “it was written this way because the author intended it this way, and we should respect that” argument?

This is a question I've given a lot of thought over the years, to the point where I don't know how much I can respond without it becoming a literal essay. But I'll try.

My main principle for this stuff boils roughly down to: "The only incorrect way to respond to art is to try and police the responses of others." Art is an intensely subjective, personal thing, and I think a lot of online spaces that engage with media are somewhat antithetical to what is, to me, a key part of it, which is sitting alone with your response to a story, a character, a scene or an image and allowing yourself to explore it's effect on you. To feel your feelings and think about them in relation to the text.

Now, this is not to say that jokes and goofiness about a piece of art aren't fucking great. I love to watch The Thing and drink in the vibes or arctic desolation and paranoia, or think about the picture it paints of masculinity as a sublimely lonely thing where the most terrible threat is that of an imposed, alien intimacy. And that actually makes me laugh even more the jokey shitpost "Do you think the guys in The Thing ever explored each other's bodies? Yeah but watch out". Silly and serious don't have to be in opposition, and I often find the best jokes about a piece of media come from those who have really engaged with it.

And in terms of interpreting characters? Interpreting and responding to fictional characters is one of the key functions of stories. They're not real people, there is no objective truth to who they are or what they do or why they do it. They are artificial constructs and the life they are given is given by you, the reader/listener/viewer, etc. Your interpetation of them can't be wrong, because your interpretation of them is all that there is, they have no existence outside of that.

And obviously your interpretation will be different to other people's, because your brain, your life, your associations - the building blocks from which the voices you hear on a podcast become realised people in your mind - are entirely your own. Thus you cannot say anyone else's is wrong. You can say "That's not how it came across to me" or "I have a very different reading of that character", but that's it. I suppose if someone is fundamentally missing something (like saying "x character would never use violence" when x character strangles a man to death in chapter 4) you could say "I think that's a significant misreading of the text", but that's only to be reserved for if you have the evidence to back it up and are feeling really savage.

I think this is one of the things that saddens me a bit about some aspects of fandom culture - it has a tendency to police or standardise responses or interpretations, turning them from personal experiences to be explored into public takes to be argued over. It also has the occasional moralistic strain, and if there's one thing I wish I could carve in stone on every fan space it's that Your Responses to a Piece of Art Carry No Intrinsic Moral Weight.

As for authorial intention, that's a simpler one: who gives a shit? Even the author doesn't know their own intentions half the time. There is intentionality there, of course, but often it's a chaotic and shifting mix of theme and story and character which rarely sticks in the mind in the exact form it had during writing. If you ask me what my intention was in a scene from five years ago, I'll give you an answer, but it will be my own current interpretation of a half-remembered thing, altered and warped by my own changing relationship to the work and five years of consideration and change within myself. Or I might not remember at all and just have a guess. And I'm a best case scenario because I'm still alive. Thinking about a writers possible or stated intentions is interesting and can often lead to some compelling discussion or examination, but to try and hold it up as any sort of "truth" is, to my mind, deeply misguided.

Authorial statements can provide interesting context to a work, or suggest possible readings, but they have no actual transformative effect on the text. If an author says of a book that they always imagined y character being black, despite it never being mentioned in the text, that's interesting - what happens if we read that character as black? How does it change our responses to the that character actions and position? How does it affect the wider themes and story? It doesn't, however, actually make y character black because in the text itself their race remains nonspecific. The author lost the ability to make that change the moment it was published. It's not solely theirs anymore.

So yeah, that was a fuckin essay. In conclusion, serious and silly are both good, but serious does not mean yelling at other people about "misinterpretations", it means sitting with your personal explorations of a piece of art. All interpretations are valid unless they've legitimately missed a major part of the text (and even then they're still valid interpretations of whatever incomplete or odd version of the text exists inside that person's brain). Authorial intent is interesting to think about but ultimately unknowable, untrustworthy and certainly not a source of truth. Phew.

Oh, and blorbofication is fine, though it does to my mind sometimes pair with a certain shallowness to one's exploration of the work in question.

[piraytoro]

I also think these discussions make the mistake of taking 'anti-natalist' arguments at face value and ascribing to them their stated function rather than their actual function. I don't think that forced sterilization is actually any more about preventing the potential existence of a child than anti-abortion sentiment is about protecting it; it's about controlling the bodies of marginalized people—largely women—with the specific intent of furthering the infantilizing idea that they can't be trusted with the care of their own children; this is also the function of the welfare policies mentioned above. The system of child removal is a force of assimilation that also ultimately powers the prison industrial complex and other forms of slavery. Cutting these kids off from their communities both accustoms them to state control and shows that people like them have no recourse against the system.

I don't think eradication is really the end goal because eradication undermines the functions of the system as it exists and removes the source of labor. The incredibly loud minority who actually call for complete eradication are necessary even if that end goal is undesirable because. well. they're a minority. They don’t really have the power to push through the extremist ideal. The existence of these extremists is greatly beneficial to those for whom the current status quo is desirable and who need things to stay as-is: both because their rhetoric increases the number of people who are ambivalent or hateful toward disadvantaged groups and because they make this quieter majority seem reasonable and even generous in comparison, allowing them to push the narrative of unfitness as a gesture of apparent benevolence.

Again, the system wants marginalized kids removed from their communities. And so, the narrative must be upkept that marginalized people should not be allowed to have children, because they WILL have children, and then the people who benefit from this system can argue that, since these people are unequipped to and therefore shouldn't have children, it is in the best interest of the child to take that child away. They want marginalized people to have children because the subjugated class is necessary for the survival of the system that profits off their labor—they just want you to think they don't want those kids to exist. Because, if they can get you to agree that those kids shouldn't exist, then you've already dehumanized them and then they’ve won. Which is how the infantilization of people of color leads to their unchilding—another thing that seems 'contradictory' until you look into the mechanisms behind it.

If the system was really after eradication, marginalized groups wouldn't be disproportionately affected and targeted by abortion laws. Under capitalism, it's not ultimately about wanting to get rid of certain bodies; it's about wanting to be able to control them and their output, both in terms of children and in terms of labor (the former just to assure the latter). If the average white middle/upper-class person thinks marginalized people are a burden on society, no amount of forced or underpaid labor will seem unjust. And this forced and underpaid labor is what allows not only billionaires but also the middle/upper classes to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed. And everyone knows it! Everything I’ve just described is what allows them to know this and yet not see it as wrong, so that they’re never moved to do anything about it. They’ve been fooled (and incentivized) into seeing a meritocracy, and ultimately a just world, where none exists. This process underpins the entire system. It’s always been there, by design.

hiii caden, any chance you could simplify/reword this post? as written it is rather difficult for me to parse. <3

hiya, sorry, stuck this in drafts and forgot it was in there 🙈 let me try to rephrase

there's a common issue i see (not just on here) where people try to make blanket statements about how motherhood / parenthood / children are valued socially, but they're thinking only in terms of individual attitudes and misunderstanding why the relevant politics result in statements that might seem contradictory at first. so for example, someone observes that there is, broadly, pressure to have and raise one's biological children. however, someone else points out that this logic doesn't apply to all people equally: in particular, racialised people and poor people are actively discouraged from having children, including by overtly eugenic means like forcible sterilisation (this still happens today!) and welfare policies.

what i was saying in the post was that there is not actually a contradiction between these two positions, despite one appearing 'pro' natalist and one appearing 'anti'. the trick is that the politics that drives both positions (the state's efforts to manage and exploit its population; a politics of human beings as biological resources; hence, what foucault termed 'biopolitics') demands not just the reproduction of a labour force and military reserve, but also the designation of subaltern populations who are considered as a biological threat to the nation / race / national future, and who must therefore be discouraged from reproducing and ultimately eradicated. the politics that highly values one population (eg, the white / 'native born' / able bodied / straight / cis couple and their biological children) is the same politics that inherently also devalues all others (indeed, the attributes that are valued are defined in part through the process of comparison/contrast; these are political designations in the first place).

it's just a common frustration of mine that people try to discuss this as a matter of personal attitudes and are therefore unable to connect natalist and eugenic policies to the biopolitical logics that drive them. it leads to really pointless conversations where people just kind of throw up their hands and act like these attitudes are contradictory or internally inconsistent; they're not. the consistency is not in a uniformly 'pro' or 'anti' position wrt childbearing; it's in the logic that demands and prizes certain bodies and populations, and scapegoats and attempts to eradicate others.

[handweavers]

something that comes up for me over and over is a deep frustration with academics who write about and study craft but have little hands-on experience with working with that craft, because it leads to them making mistakes in their analysis and even labelling of objects and techniques incorrectly. i see this from something as simple as textiles on display in museums being labelled with techniques that are very obviously wrong (claiming something is knit when it's clearly crochet, woven when that technique could only be done as embroidery applied to cloth off-loom) to articles and books written about the history of various aspects of textiles making considerable errors when trying to describe basic aspects of textile craft-knowledge (ex. a book i read recently that tried to say that dyeing cotton is far easier than dyeing wool because cotton takes colour more easily than wool, and used that as part of an argument as to why cotton became so prominent in the industrial revolution, which is so blatantly incorrect to any dyer that it seriously harms the argument being made even if the overall point is ultimately correct)

the thing is that craft is a language, an embodied knowledge that crosses the boundaries of spoken communication into a physical understanding. craft has theory, but it is not theoretical: there is a necessary physicality to our work, to our knowledge, that cannot be substituted. two artisans who share a craft share a language, even if that language is not verbal. when you understand how a material functions and behaves without deliberate thought, when the material knowledge becomes instinct, when your hands know these things just as well if not better than your conscious mind does, new avenues of communication are opened. an embodied knowledge of a craft is its own language that is able to be communicated across time, and one easily misunderstood by those without that fluency. an academic whose knowledge is entirely theoretical may look at a piece of metalwork from the 3rd century and struggle to understand the function or intent of it, but if you were to show the same piece to a living blacksmith they would likely be able to tell you with startling accuracy what their ancient colleague was trying to do.

a more elaborate example: when i was in residence at a dye studio on bali, the dyer who mentored me showed me a bowl of shimmering grey mud, and explained in bahasa that they harvest the mud several feet under the roots of certain species of mangroves. once the mud is cleaned and strained, it's mixed with bran water and left to ferment for weeks to months.  he noted that the mud cannot be used until the fermentation process has left a glittering sheen to its surface. when layered over a fermented dye containing the flowers from a tree, the cloth turns grey, and repeated dippings in the flower-liquid and mud vats deepen this colour until it's a warm black. 

he didn't explain why this works, and he did not have to. his methods are different from mine, but the same chemical processes are occurring. tannins always turn grey when they interact with iron and they don't react to other additives the same way, so tannins (polyphenols) and iron must be fundamental parts of this process. many types of earthen clay contain a type of bacteria that creates biogenic iron as a byproduct, and mixing bran water with this mud would give the bacteria sugars to feast upon, multiplying, and producing more of this biogenic iron. when the iron content is high enough that the mud shimmers, applying this fermented mixture to cloth soaked in tannins would cause the iron to react with the tannin and finally, miraculously: a deep, living grey-black cloth.

in my dye studio i have dissolved iron sulphide ii in boiling water and submerged cloth soaked in tannin extract in this iron water, and watched it emerge, chemically altered, now deep and living grey-black just like the cloth my mentor on bali dyed. when i watched him dip cloth in this brown bath of fermented flower-water, and then into the shimmering mud and witness the cloth emerge this same shade of grey, i understand exactly what he was doing and why. embodied craft knowledge is its own language, and if you're going to dedicate your life to writing about a craft it would be of great benefit to actually "speak" that language, or you're likely to make serious errors.

the arrogance is not that different from a historian or anthropologist who tries to study a culture or people without understanding their written or spoken tongue, and then makes mistakes in their analysis because they are fundamentally disconnected from the way the people they are talking about communicate. the voyeuristic academic desire to observe and analyse the world at a distance, without participating in it. how often academics will write about social movements, political theory and philosophy and never actually get involved in any of these movements while they're happening. my issue with the way they interact with craft is less serious than the others i mentioned, but one that constantly bothers me when coming into contact with the divide between "those who make a living writing about a subject" and "those who make a living doing that subject"

[togglesbloggle]

For the Reverse Unpopular Opinion meme, Lamarckism!

(This is an excellent ask.)

Lamarck got done a bit dirty by the textbooks, as one so often is. He's billed as the guy who articulated an evolutionary theory of inherited characteristics, inevitably set up as an opponent made of straw for Darwin to knock down. The example I recall my own teachers using in grade school was the idea that a giraffe would strain to reach the highest branches of a tree, and as a result, its offspring would be born with slightly longer necks. Ha-ha-ha, isn't-that-silly, isn't natural selection so much more sensible?

But the thing is, this wasn't his idea, not even close. People have been running with ideas like that since antiquity at least. What Lamarck did was to systematize that claim, in the context of a wider and much more interesting theory.

Lamarck was born in to an era where natural philosophy was slowly giving way to Baconian science in the modern sense- that strange, eighteenth century, the one caught in an uneasy tension between Newton the alchemist and Darwin the naturalist. This is the century of Ben Franklin and his key and his kite, and the awed discovery that this "electricity" business was somehow involved in living organisms- the discovery that paved the way for Shelley's Frankenstein. This was the era when alchemy was fighting its last desperate battles with chemistry, when the division between 'organic' and 'inorganic' chemistry was fundamental- the first synthesis of organic molecules in the laboratory wouldn't occur until 1828, the year before Lamarck's death. We do not have atoms, not yet. Mendel and genetics are still more than a century away; we won't even have cells for another half-century or more.

Lamarck stepped in to that strange moment. I don't think he was a bold revolutionary, really, or had much interest in being one. He was profoundly interested in the structure and relationships between species, and when we're not using him as a punching bag in grade schools, some people manage to remember that he was a banging good taxonomist, and made real progress in the classification of invertebrates. He started life believing in the total immutability of species, but later was convinced that evolution really was occurring- not because somebody taught him in the classroom, or because it was the accepted wisdom of the time, but through deep, continued exposure to nature itself. He was convinced by the evidence of his senses.

(Mostly snails.)

His problem was complexity. When he'd been working as a botanist, he had this neat little idea to order organisms by complexity, starting with the grubbiest, saddest little seaweed or fern, up through lovely flowering plants. This was not an evolutionary theory, just an organizing structure; essentially, just a sort of museum display. But when he was asked to do the same thing with invertebrates, he realized rather quickly that this task had problems. A linear sorting from simple to complex seemed embarrassingly artificial, because it elided too many different kinds of complexity, and ignored obvious similarities and shared characteristics.

When he went back to the drawing board, he found better organizing schema; you'd recognize them today. There were hierarchies, nested identities. Simple forms with only basic, shared anatomical patterns, each functioning as a sort of superset implying more complex groups within it, defined additively by the addition of new organs or structures in the body. He'd made a taxonomic tree.

Even more shockingly, he realized something deep and true in what he was looking at: this wasn't just an abstract mapping of invertebrates to a conceptual diagram of their structures. This was a map in time. Complexities in invertebrates- in all organisms!- must have been accumulating in simpler forms, such that the most complicated organisms were also the youngest.

This is the essential revolution of Lamarckian evolution, not the inherited characteristics thing. His theory, in its full accounting, is actually quite elaborate. Summarized slightly less badly than it is in your grade school classroom (though still pretty badly, I'm by no means an expert on this stuff), it looks something like this:

As we all know, animals and plants are sometimes generated ex nihilo in different places, like maggots spontaneously appearing in middens. However, the spontaneous generation of life is much weaker than we have supposed; it can only result in the most basic, simple organisms (e.g. polyps). All the dizzying complexity we see in the world around us must have happened iteratively, in a sequence over time that operated on inheritance between one organism and its descendants.

As we all know, living things are dynamic in relation to inorganic matter, and this vital power includes an occasional tendency to gain in complexity. However, this tendency is not a spiritual or supernatural effect; it's a function of natural, material processes working over time. Probably this has something to do with fluids such as 'heat' and 'electricity' which are known to concentrate in living tissues. When features appear spontaneously in an organism, that should be understood as an intrinsic propensity of the organism itself, rather than being caused by the environment or by a divine entity. There is a specific, definite, and historically contingent pattern in which new features can appear in existing organisms.

As we all know, using different tissue groups more causes them to be expressed more in your descendants, and disuse weakens them in the same way. However, this is not a major feature in the development of new organic complexity, since it could only move 'laterally' on the complexity ladder and will never create new organs or tissue groups. At most, you might see lineages move from ape-like to human-like or vice versa, or between different types of birds or something; it's an adaptive tendency that helps organisms thrive in different environments. In species will less sophisticated neural systems, this will be even less flexible, because they can't supplement it with willpower the way that complex vertebrates can.

Lamarck isn't messing around here; this is a real, genuinely interesting model of the world. And what I think I'm prepared to argue here is that Lamarck's biggest errors aren't his. He has his own blind spots and mistakes, certainly. The focus on complexity is... fraught, at a minimum. But again and again, what really bites him in the ass is just his failure to break with his inherited assumptions enough. The parts of this that are actually Lamarckian, that is, are the ideas of Lamarck, are very clearly groping towards a recognizable kind of proto-evolutionary theory.

What makes Lamarck a punching bag in grade-school classes today is the same thing that made it interesting; it's that it was the best and most scientific explanation of biological complexity available at the time. It was the theory to beat, the one that had edged out all the other competitors and emerged as the most useful framework of the era. And precisely none of that complexity makes it in to our textbooks; they use "Lamarckianism" to refer to arguments made by freaking Aristotle, and which Lamarck himself accepted but de-emphasized as subordinate processes. What's even worse, Darwin didn't reject this mechanism either. Darwin was totally on board with the idea as a possible adaptive tendency; he just didn't particularly need it for his theory.

Lamarck had nothing. Not genetics, not chromosomes, not cells, not atomic theory. Geology was a hot new thing! Heat was a liquid! What Lamarck had was snails. And on the basis of snails, Lamarck deduced a profound theory of complexity emerging over time, of the biosphere as a(n al)chemical process rather than a divine pageant, of gradual adaptation punctuated by rapid innovation. That's incredible.

There's a lot of falsehood in the Lamarckian theory of evolution, and it never managed to entirely throw off the sloppy magical thinking of what came before. But his achievement was to approach biology and taxonomy with a profound scientific curiosity, and to improve and clarify our thinking about those subjects so dramatically that a theory of biology could finally, triumphantly, be proven wrong. Lamarck is falsifiable. That is a victory of the highest order.