#but that really only works in the anglosphere

[astarionspocketpussy]

Thought too hard about how I name Tieflings and started considering the role of "common" in DND and how different real life languages might fit in that framework. Needless to say now I want to write an essay but alas. Its midnight.

[alpaca-clouds]

The history of Solarpunk

Okay, I guess this has to be said, because the people will always claim the same wrong thing: No, Solarpunk did not "start out as an aesthetic". Jesus, where the hell does this claim even come from? Like, honestly, I am asking.

Solarpunk started out as a genre, that yes, did also include design elements, but also literary elements. A vaguely defined literary genre, but a genre never the less.

And I am not even talking about those early books that we today also claim under the Solarpunk umbrella. So, no, I am not talking about Ursula K. LeGuin, even though she definitely was a big influence on the genre.

The actual history of Solarpunk goes something like that: In the late 1990s and early 2000s the term "Ecopunk" was coined, which was used to refer to books that kinda fit into the Cyberpunk genre umbrella, but were more focused on ecological themes. This was less focused on the "high tech, high life" mantra that Solarpunk ended up with, but it was SciFi stories, that were focused on people interacting with the environment. Often set to a backdrop of environmental apocalypse. Now, other than Solarpunk just a bit later, this genre never got that well defined (especially with Solarpunk kinda taking over the role). As such there is only a handful of things that ever officially called themselves Ecopunk.

At the same time, though, the same sort of thought was picked up in the Brazilian science fiction scene, where the idea was further developed. Both artistically, where it got a lot of influence from the Amazofuturism movement, but also as an ideology. In this there were the ideas from Ecopunk as the "scifi in the ecological collaps" in there, but also the idea of "scifi with technology that allows us to live within the changing world/allows us to live more in harmony with nature".

Now, we do not really know who came up with the idea of naming this "Solarpunk". From all I can find the earliest mention of the term "Solarpunk" that is still online today is in this article from the Blog Republic of Bees. But given the way the blogger talks about it, it is clear there was some vague definition of the genre before it.

These days it is kinda argued about whether that title originally arose in Brazil or in the Anglosphere. But it seems very likely that the term was coined between 2006 and 2008, coming either out of the Brazilian movement around Ecopunk or out of the English Steampunk movement (specifically the literary branch of the Steampunk genre).

In the following years it was thrown around for a bit (there is an archived Wired article from 2009, that mentions the term once, as well as one other article), but for the moment there was not a lot happening in this regard.

Until 2012, when the Brazilian Solarpunk movement really started to bloom and at the same time in Italy Commando Jugendstil made their appearance. In 2012 in Brazil the anthology "Solarpunk: Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável" was released (that did get an English translation not too long ago) establishing some groundwork for the genre. And Commando Jugendstil, who describe themselves as both a "Communication Project" and an "Art Movement", started to work on Solarpunk in Italy. Now, Commando Jugendstil is a bit more complicated than just one or the other. As they very much were a big influence on some of the aesthetic concepts, but also were releasing short stories and did some actual punky political action within Italy.

And all of that was happening in 2012, where the term really started to take off.

And only after this, in 2014, Solarpunk became this aesthetic we know today, when a (now defuct) tumblr blog started posting photos, artworks and other aesthetical things under the caption of Solarpunk. Especially as it was the first time the term was widely used within the Anglosphere.

Undoubtedly: This was probably how most people first learned of Solarpunk... But it was not how Solarpunk started. So, please stop spreading that myth.

The reason this bothers me so much is, that it so widely ignores how this movement definitely has its roots within Latin America and specifically Brazil. Instead this myth basically tries to claim Solarpunk as a thing that fully and completely originated within the anglosphere. Which is just is not.

And yes, there was artistic aspects to that early Solarpunk movement, too. But also a literary and political aspectt. That is not something that was put onto a term that was originally an aesthetic - but rather it was something that was there from the very beginning.

Again: There has been an artistic and aesthetic aspect in Solarpunk from the very beginning, yes. But there has been a literary and political aspect in it the entire time, too. And trying to divorce Solarpunk from those things is just wrong and also... kinda misses the point.

So, please. Just stop claiming that entire "it has been an aesthetic first" thing. Solarpunk is a genre of fiction, it is a political movement, just as much as it is an artistic movement. Always has been. And there has always been punk in it. So, please, stop acting as if Solarpunk is just "pretty artistic vibes". It is not.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk, I guess.

[sl-walker]

OTW Candidate Anh P.

I had a very long and interesting discussion with OTW-board candidate Anh P.

They tracked me down because they wanted to talk about how @squidgiepdx and I got otw-a working (for SquidgeWorld Archive and Ad Astra Fanfiction) and what we might suggest to make otw-archive more easily deployable to other, independent archives.  What might make it easier to use.  It was a really productive conversation, too, enough that Walter and I have decided to start tackling the setup documentation from the outside to see if we can’t make it as easy as possible for others to deploy otw-archive, and to test a few things we think might make it more not-OTW userfriendly.  (Like changing the hard-coding of OTW/AO3 to something that can be configured from the local.yml file.)

Anh P. is Vietnamese, very aware of the situation re: racism, AI, and the consequences of PAC being overridden.  They’ve been a volunteer for both Fanlore and Open Doors and have been for long enough to be able to run for board, but not so long that they’re completely assimilated.  They also have deep connections to the pan-Asian fan communities, including those currently marginalized by OTW’s present administrative structures.

Mostly, I'm impressed as hell that they not only wanted to talk to two people who have definite Opinions on OTW, but were genuinely and actively seeking our thoughts, good or bad, about what we would suggest to make the software more easily used by others seeking to do the same as we did.

I know I don't have a real stake in the debate over racism, being white and American and unable to understand the lived experiences of those who suffer it both in everyday life and in fandom, but they made excellent points about how decentralizing fandom and otherwise helping people be able to curate their own, inclusive spaces with their own rules might help with that.

They showed me a script a Chinese user made which is frankly brilliant to translate the AO3 Work posting page, and which could easily be translated to other languages, it’s so intuitive.

The part that sent my eyebrows up was their desire to use OTW's platform to help support independent fan archives in order to keep them afloat, rather than just let them sink and import them to AO3 via Open Doors, including not-Anglosphere archives and communities.

So, take it as you will, but I was very impressed someone was doing some of the harder legwork and seeking outside opinions, especially opinions that aren’t necessarily OTW-friendly, and with an eye towards actual measurable hard action that can be taken to start addressing some of the problems OTW is having right now.

[imminentinertia]

How to get me to nope the fuck out of a fic part 172: Doing Profanity Wrong

Please don't. I'm begging here. I'll do it Ray style if it helps.

First, let's talk a bit about types of profanity. Just so you know, there will be a bit of vulgar language here (in case that first "fuck" in the title of the post didn't turn you off already).

I'm not going into the functions of profanity, the why we use it and how we use it to achieve our goals for using it, Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought is a good starting point for functions if you're interested. What I'm most interested in right now is the what.

The what is often a taboo of some sort, like mocking something sacred, referring to body parts that are considered filthy, fears of invoking dangerous situations like illness or natural disasters. The words used can be grouped into these categories*:

Sex

Religion

Bodily functions

Disease

(Derogatory terms may be considered a function, the why is to cause harm, but it tends to contain terms that don't always belong in the four other categories, and those four tend to bleed into this. I consider it a fifth category of types of words)

Languages and cultures don't use these categories in the same ways. For instance, there's very little left of disease swearing in English ("a pox on you" sounds just a tiny bit outdated, wouldn't you say) but it's alive and kicking in Danish (all word constructions with the word "kraft" refers to cancer, and there are a lot of those constructions). The British Isles and Denmark are pretty close geographically and not enormously different culturally, but the swearing takes different routes.

English uses a hell of a lot of religious profanity. East and South East Asian languages, not so much. There are examples, like mara (まら), a quite rude Japanese word for dick that has its root in the demon Mara (I don't know the precise etymology, but it's possible it has to do with temptation), but it's not anywhere near as prevalent as in Christianity-heavy cultures.

Which means that "for Buddha's sake" does not, I repeat NOT, work as local colour swearing. At. All.

It really is not a problem if you write an English profanity in an English sentence, in your English fic set in a culture that isn't in the Anglosphere. Don't worry about it - the point is that the story needs to flow well, and trying to fit in unfamiliar swearing is likely to end up stiff and awkward.

What you might want to think about is the categories. It's not that E/SE Asians never say "oh my God" or "fuck" in English, we who have other mother tongues often like a bit of English profanity mixed in with our native language, but the patterns for when to swear in English may be different.

So if you pay a bit of attention to how the shows are translated and what swearing choices are made (disregard the bowdlerised translations on fudging IQIYI entirely) and what category the characters seem to use the most, it becomes easier to make the story flow well without anglofying it too much (brimming with "oh my God") or stumbling in asiafying your own language ("oh my Buddha").

Sex and bodily functions tend to be safe bets because there are a number of taboos regarding both in so many cultures they're probably near-universal and only differs in exactly how they're used, but trying to make that super authentic for the source language and culture doesn't necessarily fit well into the language you're writing.

In other words, "shit" and "fuck" and such are likely to work fine for anything.

Also, there are a number of ways to be rude as fuck without uttering a single vulgar word. You can be rude while speaking and acting very politely, even. That's not something that's easy to show in a fic, it's easier to tell it ("he's speaking very politely yet it's the rudest thing she's ever heard"). Not to mention that it's easy to get it wrong when it's a culture you don't know extremely well, so a little vague telling is likely to make your story smoother than a detailed description of a rudeness situation.

The point is that one of the characters is rude to another, and that can be communicated well to the readers in several ways.

*Sources what sources. Actually there are lots of sources, but they tend to leave out disease. This is how I categorise and I'm sure there are researchers who agree with me, somewhere.

[echidna-auxiliatrix]

I don't think I've seen this posted on Tumblr before, so I'll go ahead and share it. I took this screenshot while making gifs a minute ago.

From this screenshot, we can glean a few interesting things. Yuri's birthday is June 8th, 2002, Kasumi's is July 1st, 2002, and Kumi's is September 11th, 2002. This makes them a Gemini, a Cancer, and a Virgo respectively. Kumi is the only one without a summer birthday, though with climate change, September may as well be a part of summer in many parts of the world where it wasn't previously.

Also, they all have type AB blood (misspelled as "brood," since Japanese doesn't really have the sound the letter "l" makes in English). In Japan, blood type analysis occupies a similar cultural space as astrology does in the Anglosphere. According to this article from waldenu.edu, those with type AB blood are thought to be "cool, controlled, rational, and adaptable" yet also "critical, indecisive, forgetful, and irresponsible." However, it's obvious that western astrology plays a part here, since many intelligent, rational anime characters have September birthdays that fall within the Virgo window, as Kumi does. I find the way different school system work interesting. If this series was set in the US, Kumi would likely be in 5th grade, not 6th, and would therefore not even be eligible to be in the party.

I'd be interested to analyze the kanji for their surnames to see if anything can be gleaned from that, but some of them just look too grainy to decipher here.

Also, the fact that the girls are referred to here as "mates" gives some...interesting connotations, considering [REDACTED MANGA SPOILERS].

Finally, whatever data Ms. Hisakawa has entered there has been scrambled into wingdings, lol. Maybe there's something to decode there? Idk.

[paradoxcase]

Harrow the Ninth Pronunciation Guide

I keep coming back to that idea that he might have picked this name because of Caesar. It would be so funny if that was actually the case. Like, it would be like if in some future where the US had somehow ceased to exist, I don't know, conquered, destroyed, disestablished, whatever, only subject matter for historians now, etc. and some world leader was like, man, George Washington was really cool, I really admire that guy, I want everyone to think about George Washington when they hear my name. So I'm going to change my last name to George, because who else was there even who was named George? I bet this is exactly what the ancient Americans did to invoke this great man

But now I'm curious about how much of Earth's old cultural whatnot was still public knowledge 100 years after the Resurrection. Like, people don't seem to remember anything about that era anymore, but surely the people who were resurrected all knew about it, and I doubt all that knowledge just disappears in a generation. Did people know John's name back then, and its links to Christianity and at least that Gaius was a Roman name?

Ok, so, not really related to the pronunciation at all, but it occurs to me that we've now learned that Augustine and probably also Mercy and Gideon and their cavaliers would have been born on pre-Resurrection Earth and resurrected by John, since they are the founders of their Houses, right? And if supposedly all of the people who were resurrected spoke English, and English is still the operating language of the Nine Houses, they should have English names, right? Alfred is a perfectly traditional English name; Cristabel is not exactly traditional but perfectly believable as a name that someone would be given; Gideon, sure, biblical names never go out of fashion in the anglosphere, even the weird ones, for real I went to college with a guy named Cain; Augustine, well, Augustus has a fine tradition as a name, that seems like a believable variation on that. But are we meant to believe that there were English-speaking people on Earth before the Resurrection named Mercymorn and Pyrrha? I could buy Mercy by itself as a woman's name given by some incredibly religious Christians or something, but "Mercymorn" seems to be following the standard we have in these books of two part names like Harrowhark and Coronabeth and Jeannemary, which is not something that i think came from any Earth tradition. And I can't imagine anyone would have been named Pyrrha. Maybe her parents were Classics nerds, or something?

Augustine and Alfred were like quite possibly the very first people to ever have an arithmonym. How could there possibly have been any implications about any use of them at that point?

Honestly, I feel like it works much better as a reference to Pyrrhus, just in terms of names being significant in the context of the story, because of what happened to Gideon in the fight against Number Seven

It's kind of funny that she wrote a whole paragraph about this, but at no point did she actually define "dactylic enneameter" for anyone who didn't recognize the roots, as, presumably, a poetic meter where each verse consists of nine metric feet, which each consist of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one

This pronunciation makes me realize this is supposed to be apo + pneumatism. But the pneuma root is about movement of air. Is thanergy a force that only moves or exists or emanates/radiates due to the presence of air molecules, like sound? Is that why there is so little thanergy in space, and not just because there isn't a source of thanergy nearby? Light can obviously travel for huge distances from the source through space, because it doesn't rely on air molecules

I'm fairly certain that every other English word that derives from Greek meso- is pronounced either /mɛzoʊ/ or /mɛsoʊ/, so why is this one /misoʊ/?

[piduai]

I’m not sure if you’ve seen it but an English interview with Ryoko Kui came out the other day, some of the questions were kind of cringe. One question was them asking if Laios was intended to be written as autistic (a large chunk of the western fandom treats this as canon and takes it really really seriously btw) and she basically said it wasn’t, that she intended on writing him as some every day guy and somewhat based him on herself.

As a result, a weird chunk of the fandom responded to the information of her partially basing Laios on herself by like… somewhat armchair diagnosing Kui as undiagnosed autistic, as copium as to why their headcanon could still be canon if I had to guess?? Very strange.

LMFAOOOOO this is what you get for fandomizing a DISABILITY and treating it akin to horoscopes and stuff like mbti instead of what it is. to most people outside of the terminally online anglosphere, autism is a very scary, clinical word, because in the real world most people who have it are actually displaying behaviors incompatible with an ordinary independent lifestyle lol it's more than hyperfixating on my hero academia yaoi and only eating mac n cheese

armchairing kui is so fucking rude and demented though. i've seen a couple of people armchair noda as autistic as well it's so weird... people can have strong, all-consuming interests and hobbies and passions and be dedicated to their work and art and craft without any diagnosis believe it or not. going as far as armchair diagnosing a real person you know nothing about just because they challenged your worldview a tiny bit is peak fandombrained behavior, it's so vile and intrusive

[cheonmaneechan]

What sucks about being a fan of a notably more obscure otaku medium than anime at least in the anglosphere like visual novels or light novels is that as soon as an anime adaptation releases, no matter how much it sucks or is inferior to the original and doesn't do it justice, it will almost immediately consume most of the awareness and discussion of the work in question. Even with the highlights of their medium like the visual novel Muv Luv Alternative for instance, the shitty anime adaptation litters itself all over the tag in places like tumblr where the original was hardly talked about to begin with. Hell, even when the anime is good like with Clannad or Steins Gate, the phenomenon of the anime adaptation consuming all notice and conversation can get really annoying. I do not envy Fate Stay Night visual novel fans, and I am one of them so you know, and its two thirds anime adaptations don't hold up to the visual novel, but it's the only version that most people have experienced despite the vn being a highlight of the medium due to said vn not getting an official english release til this year lol.

[androxys]

20 Questions for Fic Writers Tag Game

Thank you @cuephrase for the tag!

1. how many works do you have on AO3?

Time of posting, I have 18 fics publicly available under my name. I have one or two tucked away in anonymous collections though.

2. what's your total AO3 word count?

343,227!

3. what fandoms do you write for?

Right now I'm pretty heavily involved in the DC Universe. There are a few different characters within DC that I like to write for, but it's primarily Batman and his expanded cast. At one point I had a pretty lengthy original work series up too, but I've moved it out of the public sphere because a) I don't personally feel it's within the AO3's mission and b) I keep telling myself I'm going to polish it and see if it can go anywhere.

4. what are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Can't Prove It - Murder-mystery AU where Jason never died and Tim joins the family. I understand its popularity entirely.

What Does the Fourth of July Mean to You? - Timber identity reveal fic set around a Wayne family cookout. This is also one where I understand why people like it. It's a fun romp.

Deux ex Machina - Jason and Death of the Endless. People really like the fics I write with Jason in them, and I think this one got bumped when the Sandman TV show came out.

Bernard Dowd Week 2022 - 7 fics at 500 words each celebrating Bernard. I'm honestly surprised this one is all the way at #4! This was written pretty soon after Tim and Bernard started dating, so it was fun to celebrate the relatively new status quo for Bernard.

Cautionary - Steph and Jason talking. This is the first fic I ever posted, and honestly I have to suspect that its age is what's buoyed it up. I love that people love it, but it's one I look at now and think about how I would remaster it.

5. do you respond to comments?

Yes! I love chatting with folks on AO3. I think there's only ever been one comment I ever chose not to respond to, and it was because the person was just asking me to update an unrelated fic.

6. what is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Definitely Can't Prove It. I won't say any more than that.

7. what's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

My Kingdom for a Thin Mint is really fluffy, which is nice. Other than that, Fourth of July.

8. do you get hate on fics?

Thankfully, none so far!

9. do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Yes, but all my currently published smut is in anonymous collections, and the rest is still in my drafts while I try to figure out how to make this blowjob plot bearing.

EDIT: Wait I'm an idiot, yes I wrote Tim/Bart/Kon smut for a Thanksgiving joke challenge. People with superpowers like to tease their friend.

10. do you write crossovers?

I have! The Vigilante is a Welcome to Night Vale crossover, written in the style of a WTNV script. Ghost Dragon is a gen Miraculous Ladybug fic (I know, I know) set in the Batman: Reborn era that reimagines the Miraculouses as having a connection to DC's Lords of Order and Chaos. I took a break from it to dive deeper into the lore, but then never got back around to actually finishing the fic.

11. have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not to my knowledge, and I hope it doesn't happen!

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope. Right now my fics live exclusively in the Anglosphere.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I haven't, but one of my dream projects is to do a round robin-esque, comic book event style fic where three or four authors each write a single chapter with a single character following their own plot, where the chapters all add up to a larger story.

14. What's your all-time favorite ship?

Ooh, this is tough. Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon are eternally one of DC's premier couples in my mind... they have history together, they're both stubborn, they know each other like the backs of their hands.

Overall, I'd say I'm pretty ship neutral. It's just not the primary thing that pulls me through media. Write it compellingly, and I'll probably go for it.

15. What's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you will?

I had brief and lofty dreams of a reimagined Final Crisis fic that was a little more Kirby and a little less Morrison. (The fact that it would have more of my favorite characters was a perk) It's just a big project to really get into, and I don't know if it'll ever fully get there.

16. What are your writing strengths?

Hmm... it's always hard to pull our praise for yourself, because I think most artists often get stuck on seeing the things that didn't quite make the leap from their head to the world. That said, I think my dialogue is pretty good--I generally try to make it always sound like characters talk like real people. I'm also fond of big Plots with moving parts, though I fully accept that's something I'm still in the process of working on.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

I don't often do it, but I do actually have thoughts about it, so I was glad to see this question! Personally, I have come to be against italicizing non-English words. I did it in Ghost Dragon when characters were speaking French, but whenever I update the fic I'm going to change it.

I only like to write dialogue in another language if the characters/readers are not necessarily supposed to immediately understand what's being said. In the case of Ghost Dragon, I had parallel chapters--in Ch 1 we know what the characters are saying, because we're meant to understand them, even though they're technically speaking in French the whole time. But in Ch 2, when it's from a non-French speaker's POV, I write out the French dialogue because the francophones are specifically trying to have a conversation between themselves, excluding those who they think can't understand them.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

First fandom I ever wrote for was either Batman or Star Wars, but which one is anyone's guess.

20. Favourite fic you've written?

I wish The Town O'Mallow got some more love, because it's probably my favorite thing I've written so far. Jean Paul Valley and Selina Kyle go into a Southern Gothic Omelas to save a soul. Other than that, I'm pretty excited for this Oracle: Year One fic I'm working on currently.

I'll pass on some no-pressure tags to @zahri-melitor @upswings @havendance @scintillyyy and @silverwhittlingknife, but if any of y'all have already done this or just don't want to, no pressure! And if anyone else sees this and wants to answer, take this as your tag! Just tag me back so I can see ❤️

[adamsvanrhijn]

Don't know If he's good or not, but Oscar is the last person/character I can imagine swimming as a sport... It's too tedious and repetative and disclipined if you actually do it as your thing. John would be good. But then again, Oscar has a goal-oriented mind and ADHD which could lead him to be a complete addict to any sport, and also be SUPER annoying about it :3

John really just has the vibe of someone who is going to stick to something until he Can't Take It Anymore. with a very high tolerance for what counts as not being able to take it anymore such that many things will probably not cross his threshold there. Whereas oscar is only going to do tough long term things if he has a compelling outside reason to do so. I think oscar could become a skilled swimmer if the stars aligned such that he learned how in formative years and had the need to like win a race or something around the same time as he was learning, but I think these are the conditions for oscar to do anything physically strenuous at all. Like if he went to school he was attending school during the mid 19th century transition to valuing physical education and you just know that on top of that he needed to beat a boy he hated-because-he-thought-he-was-cute at tennis or something.

I don't think John had competitive energy with boys he liked, I think he wanted to be on the same team as the boys he liked and to impress them and help them win with the power of friendship and teamwork or whatever. Competitive energy is for when the boy you like tells you you are both too old to kiss in secret now.

Anyway swimming is so technique oriented that I think Oscar would plateau very quickly if he wasn't consistently motivated to work on it, and IIRC the most common competitve stroke at this time in the Anglosphere was breaststroke, which is not reliant on a particular body type if technique is strong (narrower bodies are more streamlined on the glide and broader bodies have more power on the kick and pull so it evens out) (this is as opposed to like, butterfly, where broad shoulders and wingspan so to speak can make or break you once your technique is solid, and crawl strokes, where taking up as little lateral space as possible without sacrificing technique is helpful) which means neither of them especially has the cards stacked against them

[girlboccaccio]

Ok so,

to startIt’s from this early summer that I’m thinking of take part to the Tumblr book club initiative and, because I’m italian, partecipate in it with a classic piece from Italian literature (I’m also well navigate in spanish and french lit but I want to play at home).

Because I’m a Master’s degree working students, anything that had nothing to do with with university/work/all the time left for me to go outside and touch some grass has always been postponed, but now I finally managed to pick up this idea and try to make it happen.

So still in June I brainstormed some ideas about lit classics all in public domain and if I not started yet is because I’m pretty indecise; I hypothesize that the newsletter on substrack could start next year and, accounting to the amount of material, I still have to decide if do it daily, weekly, monthly.

Considering that the idea of a Divine Comedy Weekly has already been taken by @lefthandedleague and if you’re interested you can find the link here, the other ideas that come to my mind are:

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, yes the original novel, there are actually 36 chapters so I could made it weekly, there’s a movie coming out each year about it and the novel is of course public domain, so still a pretty popular piece. Is children literature but still a smart novel and so easy to read in a newsletter framework. Finally, I have decided for this one, at least only to start and see how it goes. You can find the link here.

Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, this was actually my first idea lol but I debunked at first because organize a newsletter of 100 precise novels + interludes isn’t the easiest job and I’ll need help. If done weekly it could take approximately two years no stop to complete, if done daily I don’t know if it could be too much. In any case, Netflix is planning a series about it and it could be still possibile or at least interesting.

Michelangelo poems, ok this idea came to my mind only because I have two different editions of Michelangelo’s poems in ita/eng. It isn’t the greatest poetry imaginable, but both the editions do a great work to match the sonnets with Michelangelo’s artpieces, so I thinked about a substrack newsletter with each mail that have a poem + artpiece from the artist put together. The poems collected are roughly 300 (yeah he was pretty prolific), it could be done daily covering a year or weelky with 5 poems maybe (or less) for each mail.

The Facetious Nights by Giovanni Francesco Straparola or the Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile, for those who don’t know there are considered the first European storybooks to contain fairy-tales, I actually thinked about the collection by Italo Calvino at first, but there aren’t of public domain so idea cancelled. Both the collections contain old stile fairy tales with dark themes and some of them are an early version of worldwide famous tales, like Cinderella, Rapunzel or Puss in Boots. There are various novels so daily or weekly is pretty free the choice.

Some work by Emilio Salgari, to anyone who don’t know him, he is basically the Italian Jules Verne, in Italy some of his stories are national folklore, is pretty know in hispano-speaking countries but in the anglosphere he is basically nobody :( sad to consider that I grew up reading both Verne and Salgari at the same time. Daily or weekly I have to decide which work take for him, some pieces aged badly according to contemporary sensibilities and could be seen slighly problematic, others I think could be understood still today (Sandokan for example).

Other ideas that came to my mind but I’m :/ about it:

Vita by Benvenuto Cellini, he was a renaissance artist who knowed many ppl of that era like Catherine de’ Medici and this is his autopiography, they also made a lot of films about it. Still I don’t know really how much it could be interesting, still isn’t too long done it weekly.

Histoire de ma vie by Giacomo Casanova, same thing as above (+ I’m not the greatest fan of Casanova, I’m almost from the same city which he grew up and in Venice his myth is strong but still I’ve never been interested in his predatory sheningans).

I have some editions of Leopardi’s works at home including the Zibaldone and his letters translated in eng, but is too much for a newsletter so idea:cancelled.

Other epistolaries that comes to mind apart the Leopardi one are the one of Salvator Rosa (another painter from baroque who was actually pretty punk) or the one of Artemisia Gentileschi, it could be interesting but I have still to read it.

If someone from italian tumblr could have other ideas or take part to the project is free to collaborate :)

[apilgrimpassingby]

Why I Reject Feminism

So, I did a post of the same name all the way back when I started my blog. But I figured I might as well redo it, now that I have more complaints and more followers.

Keep this in mind all through reading: when I say feminism I mean modern, mainstream feminism. I am not necessarily referring to all the things people call "feminism", but to the movement that most people think of when they hear "feminism" in the Anglosphere in 2023. I maintain that women should be able to vote, to profit equally from work and are equal bearers of the image of God and recipients of His grace with equal and identical salvation.

With that out of the way, on with the complaints.

A lot of feminism, to me, seems to have decided on its views independent of reality and then made judgements, hinged on said views and also independent of reality. That's not meant to be snarky (well, it probably is, but only a little bit); for example, gender differences have grounding in sexual biology (women are more suited to raising children, by virtue of pregnancy and producing milk, and men are generally stronger than women). The standout example to me is Lindsay Ellis' video on Twilight, where she notes people saying that "Twilight encourages toxic relationships" and accuses this position of being sexist for assuming teenage girls can't tell what's good and bad in media. But the fact is that there is a non-trivial correlation between young women reading this kind of media (the example this study used is "Fifty Shades of Grey") and having abusive relationships .

To me, a lot of modern feminism seems to not be opposing patriarchy but to be opposing gender. Their ultimate objective is a society where men and women are and are seen as totally interchangeable. And I don't think this is a useful or practical path for society to go down. And this goes on at a micro-level. For example, the "X job is mostly male/female, so we need more women/men in it" just strikes me as bizarre. What we need is a society where the jobs we have decided, for whatever reason, are male and female are viewed as equally important and valuable.

The whole "we need more women as CEOs and doctors and scientists and so on" argument is pretty weird/frustrating to me. Our modern economy will damage the environment, alienate you from labour and create inequality regardless of how many women are CEOs.

A lot of pop-feminism assumes that "girly" things are bad or less interesting than "male" things. For example, the infamous strength reduction of female player characters in 1st edition D&D. Many, many people have decried this as sexist by making women worse at fighting. I submit that the problem goes deeper; a game where fighting (a primarily male activity in all cultures I am aware of) is almost the only activity. I'm not saying D&D is bad, I'm saying the lack of any more feminine counterpart is bad.

Most modern, mainstream feminism is pro-choice. I am pro-life because I believe there is no safe, ethical way to distinguish "human" from "person" as someone interested in autism history and Nazi Germany. And also a lot of pro-choice rhetoric seems grounded in ableist and/or classist assumptions about a good life.

Many of the women working in day-cares or as nannies to make career women possible are working-class and/or immigrants. So I basically think (modern, mainstream) feminism is a Ponzi scheme designed by and for upper-middle-class women and the capitalist economy. But the thing that really makes me think this is the next point.

The thing that really made me reject feminism, though, is going "pro-sex work." No woman's movement should do this. Street prostitutes, adjusted for age, are 12 times more likely to be murdered than any other women in the UK, 47% of UK sex workers* have been the victims of crimes and 49% don't trust the police to solve them, and globally 63% have PTSD, 68% have been sexually assaulted, 71% have been physically assaulted and 89% want to leave but can't.** And yes, you might argue that legalising prostitution will make it safer because it will make it regulatable, but it will also increase sex trafficking considerably. And, as the links show above A) policing of prostitution, at least in the UK, has historically been abysmal so there's much room for improvement B) rehabilitation campaigns for "johns" can have tremendous positive effects. And OnlyFans is no defence; it was through OF that Andrew Tate ran his sex trafficking operation.

So that's why I consider myself to reject feminism. Any comments, additions, criticisms or questions?

*Yes, "sex work" is hideous exploitation, not work. But I use the term "sex worker" because it includes strippers, porn actresses, etc. as well as prostitutes, and because "prostitute" has often been used as a demeaning and dehumanising term.

**And I'm aware that Melissa Farley has been accused of inflating her figures, but the lower estimates are still hellish. Those lower estimates include 17% for PTSD rates; the lifetime PTSD rate for Vietnam veterans is 10%.

[carriershoukaku]

7, 24, 26?

7. I love rays and also pinnipeds (seals and sea lions) if the aquarium has them. I went to this really cool aquarium in the U.S and there was a very cool room where you could enter and you were surrounded by rays. They look so funny and goofy and they are so cool too.

24. When I was in primary school way far away from the Anglosphere I was taught the Commonwealth Nation form of English as it was "standard" but now that I work and live here in the U.S and I'd probably be here for a while since it's too hard to go back to China or Taiwan. I used to talk REALLY weird in English because I only knew how it was in the form of literature and academia. I'm adjusting to spelling "colour" as "color" etc.. I refuse to stop using metric though. I still occasionally say "petrol", "jumper" but have been stopping to seem more relatable to Ameriburgers.

26. Great although I came from a Northern Chinese family and we didn't really eat spicy food at home lol, I decided I just wanted really spicy food on my own money and time. Stopped eating it as often though because I'm ageing and now it actually just sours my stomach and throat really bad sometimes.

[csvent-2]

First of all, english is not my first language. That's why I pointed that out 'xenophobic' anon, and maybe it's because my experiences in species is different from all of y'all but I've been in quite a few bilingual/multilingual species where there's another channel for Russian, Portuguese, Chinese etc. However it seems like most of the anons here seem to be from the Anglosphere, and that's why writing may seem more accessible than art to them. In my case, it really, really isn't.

A picture's worth a thousand words, haven't you heard of that saying? The issue can be comparable to how fanart can be sold but fanfiction? You'd get banned of Ao3. It's the matter of IP, artform, purpose, etc. With that context in mind, maybe you'd understand why I say writing isn't as valuable as art in a closed species setting.

CS events are more akin to artfight than nanowrimo. When appraising a character, do note how even species that allow writing to earn currency don't count written pieces in the appraisal value. Only personal/commission artwork.

I'd say that art has more uses than writing in a CS. It's much more accessible than writing to anyone who knows any language. And even in species that allows writing to earn currency barely anyone uses those channels. Maybe it's just my personal experience, but there was over 50 submissions in the art event, and like, 1 submission in the writing event. And that 1 submission was me, because I thought why not try that out?

I'd also like to counterpoint the bullshitting: in my opinion, it is much easier to bullshit writing than to bullshit artwork, being that art takes much more time to become polished than writing. With writing you have access to all the spelling tools and grammar checks you need. With art? Everything has to be hand made. This is my experience with school as art projects will take up so much more of your time as compared to every other subject that requires an essay. Heck, even in 'Study of Visual Art' where you have to write essays about artwork, it's so much easier to bullshit than the project.

I don't get the AI argument, because it is much easier to spot AI art than AI writing, at least to the species because with AI artwork the character will not be the same with all those traits. With AI writing however? I'd be shocked if mods even read more than a sentence with writing.

Because the inverse is true: art is much easier to be judged and seen than writing. Reading takes more time than seeing a piece of artwork in its entirety. I'm not sure how anons will try to twist my words for this.

Also in my experience, any time an artist switches from art to writing is because they are 'out of time'. Or maybe it's because they're 'busy'. Writing is more 'accessible' than art in that you can work on it in any situation. Like in a lecture, you could write. Or at work. The typing motion is just much easier to explain away your real life responsibilities than having to put a pen to a piece of paper / a tablet. Not to mention travel time. Or even speech to text if your hands are busy with something else. All that I'm saying, is that I've yet to seen a speech to art programme, and so that's why writing is easy.

To sum it all up, writing is harder to judge, easier to fake and bullshit, and also less accessible on a global population level than art. What was the point of all this? I don't even remember, but I had to give my thoughts on the argument here.

If fanfiction can't sell but fanart can, I don't see why not the same logic can be applied to Closed Species, and honestly it's not an obligation for species to cater to writers, when their contributions and stake in said species is minuscule to the artists in a species.

All I'm saying is, I've never seen a written adopt. Also, if you spot any issues with my writing, reminder: English isn't my first language. (and I admit, a major reason is to call out that anon for calling me 'xenophobic' when I do face those issues. I'm not fucking white, nor am I in a western nation, stop assuming shit)

I haven’t seen a written adopt but I do want to say I personally have been in multiple species that DO count writing among appraisal.

[lovejustforaday]

2022 Year End List - #4

¡Ay! - Lucrecia Dalt

Main Genres: Experimental

A decent sampling of: Dark Jazz, Chachacha, Art Pop, Electroacoustic, Minimal Wave, Bolero, Ambient Pop, Darkwave

Golly, that is some list of genre tags, huh?

Okay so this one was a bit of a late entry. Well, actually it was a very, very late entry. Meaning, I first listened to this maybe a little over a week before I started really writing the year end list. But holy crap did this ever take me by surprise.

Like many of my more esoteric discoveries, I found out about this record by religiously browsing the rateyourmusic.com yearly charts for some interesting genre tags and musical anomalies.

What else can I say? This one simply called to me, all while having no idea who Lucrecia Dalt was at the time.

Unfortunately, Spanish language alternative music does not tend to make big waves in the music hipster spaces of the Anglosphere (unless your name is Arca or Rosalia), especially something this caliber of, well, weird.

Or rather, I would say that, but then I later discovered that this was actually The Wire’s album of the year. So clearly some people in the Anglosphere have been paying attention.

But who is this mysterious artist who I speak so highly of having only known of her for a month?

Lucrecia Dalt is a Colombian musician based in Berlin, who composes music that incorporates a good mix of experimental genre infusions and sounds. Her tastes are eclectic, idiosyncratic, and iconoclastic. She also seemingly really likes earth, mountains, geography, geology, and just science in general.

On her latest project ¡Ay!, Lucrecia Dalt delivers the music of the American tropics, but highly deconstructed from the inside of a mysterious echoing cave, with eerily soft synths and strange electroacoustic modulations. The entire record is positively dripping with a dark, damp, and fluid atmosphere that is wholly captivating. I feel like there is an entire ecosystem of tiny undiscovered organisms living inside this record.

The album opens with the arresting calm of “No tiempo”, a hair-raising work of softly fluctuating organ, minimal percussion, and a clarinet that eases the listener into a sort of spellbinding daze. Strange droplets of vibrant sonic colours make tiny twinkles across the gaze of the mind’s eye as this tune slowly takes a firm hold of the listener’s imagination.

This leads into “El Galatzó”, a soft-spoken word piece accompanied by bass and trilling flutes, and an ode to the almost supernatural properties of magnetic fields and the beauty of the Puig de Galatzo summit.

“Atemporal” plays like the most uncanny chachacha music ever, as if it were the backdrop to a Cuban ballroom dance that took place in the extradimensional ‘red room’ from Twin Peaks. Bizarre in the most pleasing way.

“Contenida” is an ambient whisper of dark jazz, with a smooth upright bass and airy “oohs” and “aahs” that reverberate off of what sounds as if it were massive cave walls surrounding the entire song. The track ends with some really fascinating danzón percussion, filtered through thunderous electoracoustic production.

The penultimate “Enviada” is a magnificent climax, indeed the greatest musical climax on any record this year. The omnipresent, creeping tension of this bolero-meets-minimal and darkwave track delivers on all of the promising pitch dark atmosphere that the record slowly, subtly hints towards. This culminates in an infernal jazzy beat drop that bursts into a dazzling show of glowing blue sonic flames. All the while, Dalt is singing about the triumph of eternity over time itself. An unforgettably chilling experience all around.

The album closes with a leisurely instrumental ditty simply titled “Epilogo”, featuring a rotary organ that fades in and out of subtle modulations that serve to make the song ever so slightly off. The final notes are that of decaying, shambling clarinets which excellently ties together all of the restless, uneasy vibes that this record gives off.

Not everything here sticks with me. There are one or two spots on some of the other tracks that don’t necessarily contribute to the atmosphere in a way that moves me nearly as much as a song like “Enviada” or “No tiempo”, and there are a few instances that feel like repetition of greater moments on the record.

But overwhelmingly, I am deeply immersed in this album. ¡Ay! is the most oddly engrossing record I’ve heard this year, and Lucrecia Dalt is some kind of musical magician fooling all of us with her fascinating audio tricks. And I, at least, am more than happy to be caught in her spell.

9/10

Highlights: “Eniviada”, “No tiempo”, “Contenida”, “Atemporal”, “Epilogo”, “El Galatzo”

[seeingteacupsindragons]

I mentioned in another post that Yuukoku no Moriarty is an adaptation that plays with adaptation as a form, and no one asked me about it, which kind of makes me sad because I really wanted the impetus to talk about it to override my executive dysfunction. But it turns out I think it was interesting enough to write anyway.

Maybe it’s not as interesting a realization as I thought it was when I thought of it…whenever that was. This year, sometime. Maybe this is because I said that literally hours ago and didn’t want to wait.

So, Yuukoku no Moriarty is an adaptation. A loose adaptation (very loose), but nonetheless an adaptation of not one, but two different very well-known stories in not only the anglosphere but pretty much globally. I have never read a Sherlock Holmes story in my life or seen literally any other adaptation of it. I still knew who several of the characters were before I even started the series. I have never read a James Bond novel or seen literally any of the movies. I still knew the character’s names and often roughly what the did, before I started the series. I could recognize a lot of the names of the story arcs and what they were riffs on.

That is how well-known and famous these stories are. They are stories people know just through existing in the world and bobbing along as osmosis.

And this story would not work if it were not an adaptation.

Now, there’s a lot of way to approach adaptations. For instance, when adapting a book to a movie, changes are usually made so that the material in the book can get crunched down to fit into a movie of reasonable length, which means scenes or characters might go. Some lines that were thought will be said. Things like that, in order to make the story work in the new format. Takeuchi-sensei says in his notes in volume two of the series to think of Sherly as just another flavor of Holmes because each adaptation’s version is slightly different. That’s just how adaptations are, no matter how faithful. Changes have to be made to tell the same story properly.

And then there are looser retellings and adaptations that tend to be less strict about trying to tell the same story. Something like Elementary is not really trying to tell the same story as the Sherlock Holmes canon did. Like. The events are not the same. The characters are different. They gender-swapped someone and set it somewhere else. They just used the same pieces of the story—some of the characters and their dynamics, etc.—to tell a different story they wanted to tell.

Yuukoku no Moriarty is doing both at once: It’s a loose retelling that’s dramatically changing the story—and also acknowledging in-universe that this is a different story from the one it’s “supposed” to be.

It helps, because the original Sherlock Holmes stories were narrated primarily by one of the characters acting in the story, and he was, in the original canon, writing them to sell them for money. There’s a bit of a strange fourth wall there that YuuMori is taking full advantage of.

YuuMori’s story starts out with a flashforward: a flashforward to one of the most famous scenes in the original canon, a scene which was reliably recognized for what it was as Reichenbach Falls and Moriarty’s end.

And then tells us a story about how narratives are artificial. How they’re crafted to serve an end. A story about a villain who casts himself into a role as one and calls his plans a “play.” A villain who chooses someone to cast into the role of his nemesis and make the protagonist, intentionally trying to craft a poetic contrast between the two to make the story really impactful. And all this despite the fact that neither of them ever properly fit into the roles they were imagined as and the story demanded them to be: William’s cast listing for his play, as upfront as the cast list in a play might be (if you’ve ever noticed, a play will have the entire cast and their roles in the front), is fake and not true to reality.

It tells us a story about a doctor who writes stories about his best friend and hid the messy details to make sure neither of them came off too terribly and no one got too angry at the details. A doctor who fudges the story of him proposing to someone for a ploy to avoid making his fiancée upset and buried stories completely at his friend’s request for the greater good.

It tells us a story about how the world was told a woman was dead and gave her new life as a man, and the two sides were easily enough to slip and blur between. It tells us a story of a blackmailer who tells the truth in ways that would cause the most harm, and it tells the story of how lying about a man’s actions help save the country because it was a horror they did not need to know.

YuuMori is constantly telling stories about lies being given to people to make a story easy and palatable, to serve the ends of the one lying about the story, of about people crafting narratives and stories, and the more the lie, the closer they put the character to us.

And then it shows us that the story we thought we were seeing from the start in the flashforward was also a trick. You know this story, it said. You know this story and how it ends. Everyone does. It’s one of the most famous endings of a character in the anglosphere.

But did we really? Or do we just know how we were told to story goes and how it ends?

Yes, we had a flashforward. But that one panel would have meant nothing if we did not know that Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty faced off at a waterfall in Switzerland, and that Professor Moriarty died there, the victim of his eternal nemesis and enemy. And we only knew that because it’s an adaptation of one of the most-adapted canons in English literature.

The story fundamentally would not work if it were not an adaptation. It relies on that premise to tell a story. Not because it’s using the same copyright pieces. Not because it’s trying to tell the same story.

But because if we didn’t think we knew the story, then the twist couldn’t have happened.

And I think that’s an amazing use of the form.