#hoc projects

[liongoatsnake]

Endel Symbol History?

We've been trying to work on some things and we realized that we had missed adding the archetrope and the endel symbols to our Symbols Found In The Alterhuman & Related Communities document. So we've been working on that. However, we're struggling to find the origins of the endel symbol (the strawberry with a white flower) or any of the alternative endel symbols at the moment.

We'd love to add them if possible. Does anyone know about the origins/history of these symbols?

[houseofchimeras]

Hello! I cannot for the life of me remember if it was you who argued that Dionysius was a dog alterhuman, so my question is if that was the case?

Either way thank you for taking the time to read this. =]

*Asker sent this ask fixing a typo:

DIOGENES! I MEANT DIOGENES!

We did include Diogenes in our document, A Timeline of People with Alterhuman Experiences & Related Subjects, though I wouldn't go so far as to argue that he was alterhuman. The document's purpose is to showcase persons or beliefs that have existed outside the alterhuman communities that yet feel reminiscent to what we call alterhumanity day. The document this information is in is currently under a rework as we've been doing research into the methodology and ethics around looking back into history to find examples of people who seem to fit modern day labels that relate to identity. As far as Diogenes, we're also looking into more/better references that go into his life. As the document exists as of yet most of our sources come from the book, Diogenes The Cynic the War Against the World by Luis F. Narvia. The current text we have regarding Diogenes is this:

323 BCE to 404 BCE: Diogenes was born in Sinope. Diogenes was a philosopher from Greece. He was one of the founders of Ancient Greek Cynicism and Cynic philosophy. One of Diogenes’s most famous traits that is referenced throughout the many accounts of him, is that he personally referred to himself as or described himself as a dog and there are just as many accounts of him exhibiting dog-like behaviors or thinking from the perspective of a dog. He is also on record many times likening himself to a dog or even stating for others to call him so. When introducing himself he would call himself, translated into English as, “Diogenes The Dog” but he has also become known to be called “Diogenes The Cynic” as the word “cynic” itself means “dog” or “dog-like” in Ancient Greek. Thus, his name, completely translated into English literally meant “‘a man from God who acted like a dog’” Throughout much of Diogenes’s life he was referred to as simply “The Cynic” or “The Dog.”  [1]

Many points of Diogenes’s life were written down by other phosphors and many of the most well-known accounts include Diogenes pointing out his dog-like nature or his preference toward dogs over humans. For example, it is recorded that upon Alexander the Great meeting and introducing himself to Diogenes by stating “I am Alexander the great king,” Diogenes simply stated, “I am Diogenes the Dog.” In another account, once, Polyxenus became angry upon hearing people openly refer to Diogenes as a dog; however, Diogenes simply said to him: “‘You, too, Polyxenus, can call me a dog. To me, ‘Diogenes’ is only a name that was given to me. In truth, I am really a dog, a dog of high breed, one of those that keep watch over their friends.’” There are also many accounts of him behaving in dog-like ways: he rejected and questioned customs and societal norms, he would bark (sarcastically or otherwise) at people, and so on.[2] He is also famous for living out of a tub on the streets as well as regularly eating raw meat. As a final example, Diogenes also apparently supported the idea primitivism and the idea of humans transforming into animals, especially into dogs. [3]

The philosophy of cynicism bares its name thanks to Diogenes. As the word “cynic” in Ancient Greek means “dog” Thus, Diogenes The Dog and Diogenes The Cynic are the same name. Also, in many accounts of Diogenes he was simply referred to as “The Dog” and thus he was also called “The Cynic.” Thus, the ways of thinking Diogenes helped to found, which viewed animals as being better models of life and behavior while viewing the ways of men poorly, became tied with being “a Cynic” and thus cynicism. [4]

Diogenes was not alone in his classical cynicism. There was apparently a group called the Pasupatas, who were, as described in the book, Diogenes The Cynic the War Against the World, a “strange group of people who since times immemorial found themselves attracted to dogs and to a doglike life. They had become apparently so divorced from their human context that, instead of speaking like human beings, they would bark among themselves and at other people, seeking to imitate the behavior of dogs in whatever they did. […] The Pasupatas displayed in their doglike behavior the exhibitionism and primitivism associated with Diogenes.” [5]

[1] Navia, Luis E.. Diogenes The Cynic the War Against the World. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2005, page 7-9.

[2] Navia, Luis E.. Diogenes The Cynic the War Against the World. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2005, page 62-65.

[3] Navia, Luis E.. Diogenes The Cynic the War Against the World. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2005, page 166.

[4] Navia, Luis E.. Diogenes The Cynic the War Against the World. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2005, page 9-11.

[5] Navia, Luis E.. Diogenes The Cynic the War Against the World. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2005, page 103-104.

~ Ocean Watcher (he/they)

[whetstonefires]

The reason I keep banging the Jiang Fengmian drum so hard is not that he did nothing wrong--he's definitely in contention for best parenting in this book but that bar is in the ground--but because most of the takes I see about him are so extremely bad.

If you want to slag him off for trying to make choices that would hurt no one, and winding up properly protecting no one as a result, that's valid! That's an interesting and text-based critique, which opens into his parallels with Lan Xichen!

If you want to blame him for being weirdly over-invested in Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng being bffs, that's fair, that definitely contributed to the weirdness between them. If you want to say he was a poor communicator, that he fundamentally misunderstood his son, that he failed to be emotionally available in a way his kids could get much use out of, even that he should have figured out a way to stop Yu Ziyuan from creating such a hostile environment, all of that is fair game!

If you want to tackle how the worst thing he did to his kids was die I am so interested in how Wei Wuxian went on to abandon A-Yuan by going to his death, and how that might be tied to how his primary adult role model tied him to a boat and went off to a fight he knew he was going to lose.

After his parents had already left him like that once before, presumably less intentionally.

But no, instead I keep seeing that Jiang Fengmian didn't care. That he never expressed affection. That he actively participated in Yu Ziyuan's fucky game of forcing proxy conflict onto the boys instead of constantly trying (and failing) to shut it down, or that he ignored her bad behavior because it didn't affect him, or that he fought with her constantly, or that he was too much of an unmanly coward to stand up to her when she wanted something.

All of which are directly in contradiction to every scene he's in, and several of which manage to invert or erase the actual conflicts between him and his wife that were the source of all that tension.

And which are really interesting, because some of the most intractable elements are ideological--Yu Ziyuan is fundamentally a conservative and Jiang Fengmian seems to want to be an egalitarian, which ofc matched poorly with his hereditary authority as patriarch of a large sect.

The fact that the bit where we get to actually see him failing to parent Jiang Cheng consists of him gently and firmly trying to correct Jiang Cheng's ethics when what was actually needed in that moment was reassurance for the well-founded insecurities that were causing him to be a little bitch, only for Yu Ziyuan to charge in and make everything fifty times worse, is so much more interesting than literally any version of this family dynamic I have seen in fic. It's to the point I'm relieved when writers kill Jiang Fengmian off, because it means they probably won't feel the need to character-assassinate him too badly.

The number of people I've seen come right out and say some variation of 'men can't be abused' is killing me here. No, Yu Ziyuan wanting to hurt her husband does not constitute sufficient proof that he abused her first and deserved it! That's not how anything works!

[the-one-that-weeps]

Still not over the fact they chose RUI to be part of the furry— I mean dog set. Even though he doesn't have a dog or has no apparent relationship with the and IN FACT has been deemed a catboy since the dawn of the earth.

Something about belonging. Something about family. Something about blind loyalty even to the point of destruction. Something about wanting to be tamed while sobbing into your hand.

Congratulations Rui Kamishiro you have achieved both genders

[an-inspired-eternity]

(eng lyrics by will stetson)

^ this is a hoc rui song. by the way. "that's showbiz baby" acceptance and fake neutrality of the things around him whilst also the abandonment issues and being fearful and hesitant to accept that he wants this companionship

[kerizaret]

I'm giving you a hug. But it's going to be a very long one

Bold of you to assume I would let you go quickly once you give me a hug. You're trapped now. Say goodbye to your breath I am crushing into your chest for the next 2 hours!!!

[just-some-castaways]

~

Hello Lovelies!!

I understand there are not many people who have happened upon, or will happen upon, this blog, but I find motivation seems to stem from writing as if for an audience. It adds a feeling of urgency, a desire to write well instead of just writing for oneself.

So for those who do happen upon our blog, welcome!

Myself, and a few of my fellow authors, are working on a novella titled "The House of Crows." It's set in the early 2000s, primarily centered around a group of beings known as "Wardens." It's a gothic-mystery, with some psychological thriller on the side. - The story follows a young woman named Alice Miller, a farm girl pursuing her dream of working in police forensics. She did not however, foresee that it might lead to her helping to track down a shape-shifting, arcane magic wielding psychopath after the brutal murder of her boyfriend.

She will soon come to find that the realm of the arcane, pacts dating back to the Salem Witch trials, and well known ghost stories are far closer to the truth than to fiction.

-

We're very excited to share what's been our passion project for the last several years, and bring this world from a jumbled bundle of thoughts into a tangible (and hopefully legible) piece of fiction.

Cheers! (Primary author: Madeline) (World building and character creation: Nathanael) (Editing and planning: Katie)

P.S. This blog will continue to be the platform for future posts about this project, because realistically it's unlikely to get enough traffic to justify a separate blog. So every House of Crows post will be tagged with #HoC in case you'd rather not slog through dozens of random midnight ponderings XD

@petrichor-poet <33

[mcmansionhell]

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! Student loans just started back up!

[vaspider]

Listen, if you are on Twitter and you haven't recently downloaded your data, you really need to. Like, now.

With the recent layoffs, I am willing to bet money that Twitter is going to implode very soon. Maybe not permanently, but dramatically, and very, very soon. Like "Liz Truss vs a head of lettuce" soon.

I base this quite simply on knowing the kind of shit my wife deals with every day, and listening to people on the news who have talked to Twitter employees about the site at all. Not only do I think there's some Thing that will cause Twitter to puke all over itself like a 19yo who just discovered wine coolers, but I think there are multiple Things, and they are not in the future. They are occurring right now.

They fired the people who know which software licenses are up for renewal next. They fired the people who know that this cache needs to be manually emptied, and yeah they should have written a script for it but there were so many other projects that it was easier for Bob to just manually do it on Friday mornings while on his 2nd cup of coffee. They fired the people who know to not poke this thing in that way bc this thing works in a non-standard fashion, but it works, so even though the software manual says "poke it," don't do that. They fired the people that know that this queue getting up over X number of tickets means it starts eating tickets and erasing half the data you need to fix issues, so you have to compress the ticket numbers at least every 2 days with an ad hoc utility script that Jane wrote after your team discovered this issue. Not all of the institutional knowledge is gone, but a lot of it is, and once that knowledge is gone, it's not coming back. Once that knowledge is gone, things unravel quickly at an institution that size.

Whatever happens on the social end of things - and that's a fucking mess - make your contingency plans for not losing touch with people now, and get downloads of your shit. Now. Not later. This will not fizzle out like LiveJournal. I'm willing to bet that it will simply cease to be one day soon. It might come back once it disappears.

I'm just not counting on it, and neither should you.

[liongoatsnake]

We keep really, really wanting to write an article up going deep into the topic of species dysphoria (& species euphoria). Explaining what dysphoria is, defining species dysphoria, showcasing when the term has been used, etc. Maybe if were ambitious, even some basic categories of releaving dysphoria and encouraging euphoria? But damn we're history majors, not psych majors. We feel like such a document is a bit too outside our wheelhouse to make something proper.

[houseofchimeras]

I wanted to let you know your published work has been used to shut up one professor about otherkinity being considered a childish topic and another for a final :> thanks for the research!

Oh that's so cool and flattering. We're very happy they were useful and good enough to be useful. (Our perfectionism keeps making us think they still need a lot of work to be yet Good™.) We hope to make our stuff better and more presentable in the future.

~ Sky Singer (he/him, red-tailed hawk & Sinornithosaurus polytherian, Jim Hawkins fictionkind)

[whetstonefires]

A LA MEME. MDZS, Really nice guy who hates only you, hate at first sight?

It was totally inappropriate for a corpse to be popular.

But there it was: the Ghost General was more well-liked every day. He seemed to spend all his time wandering around rescuing maidens from monsters and lifting wagons off of old men. In a few years he'd be a hero of the people.

Even the cultivation world didn't expect harm from him anymore. Most of Jin Ling's peers addressed the corpse as qianbei; Jin Ling didn't, but he seemed to get on with him well enough.

Jiang Cheng hadn't actually said out loud, when he saw Wen Qionglin parting ways with Sect Leader Jin with an exchange of polite salutes, he killed your father, but he'd looked it. Jin Ling, fluent in Jiang Cheng's expressions, sighed.

"It was an accident," he said. "And he's apologized. And, you know, uncle, he was held prisoner by Jin Sect almost my entire life, you can't say he hasn't paid for it. And..."

And they had killed his whole family. And his older sister.

Jiang Cheng looked away. "Huh."

When Jiang Cheng had made his first, clumsy attempt at mending a little of the gruesome breach between himself and Wei Wuxian, the Ghost General had been there, glaring daggers at him from behind the Yiling Laozu.

It had been more disconcerting than it should have been, and Jiang Cheng had stumbled, interrupted himself, and fallen silent enough times that eventually Wei Wuxian had taken pity on him, reached out, patted him on the arm one time, said, "Good talk, Jiang Cheng," and extricated them both from the situation.

Freed from the burden of conversation, he'd returned Wen Qionglin's glare, and lost. Corpses didn't need to blink.

He didn't want the bastard to like him. Which was just as well since it was out of the question. Jiang Cheng had never for a second in his life liked Wen Qionglin; from the first time he'd laid eyes on him when they were youths he'd interpreted him as a pathetic, burdensome coward, and despised him for it.

Owing the man his life had made it worse--he hadn't even wanted to be saved, and it was Wei Wuxian's stupid horrible charm and habit of interfering where he wasn't wanted that had done it, and like hell had he owed anything, when that person's family had murdered his. (I owe him nothing, he'd told himself once, because Wen Qionglin had been the reason he lost Wei Wuxian.)

Another time, he found himself in both their company and drew apart, letting the Yiling Patriarch and the Ghost General play at being mentors to the youth. Neither of you lived to see twenty-five, he wanted to shout. What do you think you have to teach them?

Even Jin Ling...it made him furious. Furious to glance over and see a corpse's stiff face conveying softness.

Furious to look past the crowd and see Lan Wangji's eyes falling on Wen Qionglin with an unmistakable resentment. And to know that it wasn't the stiff propriety of the Lan Wangji of their youths, objecting to the heresy of that fierce corpse's existence; that it was the look of a petty, jealous man resenting the way Wei Wuxian knocked his shoulder together with the Ghost General's and laughed.

"Where do you get off hating Wen Ning?" he asked the next time he found himself alone with Lan Wangji. It was a stupid thing to ask, but if he let himself think about how they were threshing through the underbrush looking for Wei Wuxian, about the last time they had looked for Wei Wuxian together...

Lan Wangji ignored him.

Jiang Cheng snorted. "Okay. So maybe you don't hate him. But he likes you! He's so deferential it makes me want to puke."

Lan Wangji favored him with the merest hint of a sneer, just enough to show he was listening to Jiang Cheng talk.

"You're disgusting," said Jiang Cheng. "Do you really think he shouldn't have anyone but you in his life? That he's your property?"

Lan Wangji's stride broke. It was a triumph, in a way--Jiang Cheng had never thrown him so badly in all the years they'd known each other.

"Each man judges others by his own heart," said Lan Wangji, thick with contempt, and then he was walking ahead with pointed rapidity, determined to separate from Jiang Cheng, until staying together would have meant chasing after him, and Jiang Cheng turned and went the other way, muttering blackly.

In the end, fittingly, neither of them caught up in time to be of use. Wen Ning, with his homing sense for Wei Wuxian, had shown up out of who the fuck knew where and bailed him out.

Jiang Cheng stumbled upon the haunted spring just in time to see a sodden, bedraggled Wei Wuxian launch himself away from his pet Wen's supportive arm and fling himself against the upright form of Hanguang-jun, which bent around him with a reverent murmur.

Jiang Cheng was already turning away in disgust to head back home, hating that he'd let himself be dragged into this, when he heard Lan Wangji say with careful, solemn deliberation: "Thank you, Wen Qionglin. For taking care of him."

Jiang Cheng glanced back against his will to see the Ghost General saluting deeply, wide-eyed, infinitely humble, his murmur that it was nothing special, Hanguang-jun, nearly drowned out by Wei Wuxian's delighted shouting about how good his Lan Zhan was and how much Wen Ning deserved to be appreciated.

Jiang Cheng walked away.

Wen Qionglin wasn't rude to him. Not in any way you could point at. And he knew full well he'd be making an ass of himself if he tried to pick a verbal fight.

After all, they had killed Wen Qionglin's older sister.

The whole cultivation world had done it, but only Jiang Cheng had done it after Wen Qionglin saved his life. He'd told himself he owed no debt for that, and perhaps he hadn't, but the fact remained: of the two of them, one had been brave and virtuous and earned the loyalty of Wei Wuxian.

And one of them had been pathetic, a coward, a burden.

Jiang Cheng could never look at the man without seeing the look in his dead eyes across the length of Suibian.

Jiang Cheng had never been good at lying to himself, especially if the lie was meant to be comforting. He always tried it anyway. Comforting lies used to sound so true, in Wei Wuxian's mouth; he should never have gotten into the habit of relying on that. To letting that person think Jiang Cheng was someone who needed to be swaddled in falsehoods to give him the strength to bear up under his own duties.

Wen Qionglin was a kind, gentle, courageous dead body, shy and courteous and increasingly appreciated for his virtues, in this strange new world created in the wake of Jin Guanyao's disgrace. And whenever his eyes fell on Jiang Cheng they were cold, hard, flat, contemptuous.

Every time he looked at him Jiang Cheng could nearly hear him thinking, like a cold wind against the back of his neck: I should have left you in that heap of corpses with the rest of your family.

What are you worth, Jiang Wanyin, that so many should be spent in saving you? That Wei Wuxian would drag us all into the shadow of death to make you whole, only for you to turn your face aside when it was me lying there, and let him die for us without lifting a finger?

Selfish, whining coward. If only I had left you there to die.

If only, Jiang Cheng imagined spitting back, anger hot and bracing in his throat. If only! I never asked for any of it! How dare you expect me to repay you!

But Wen Qionglin never spoke any of the words out loud. He only looked, cold dead flat black eyes. A frozen river. Sometimes Jiang Cheng thought that if he lashed out hard enough he would break a hole in the ice, and be devoured whole.

[the-one-that-weeps]

I need people to start showing more traumatized Toya to me. He is not one of the most abused characters in pjsk for nothing.

Make him have a breakdown over not being able to open a popcorn bag (he's never done it before), watch him collect the little blobs with tears in his eyes when he opens it the wrong way.

Make him lock all the doors behind him (he was never allowed to) just in case someone bad comes in. Just in case he gets kicked out for good.

Make him jealous of the littlest bits of affection; of the hugs and kisses and frolicking that parents do with their children (he never needed it anyway, so why did it hurt so bad?)

Make him hitch, make him flinch, make his eyes bloodshot like those of a sacrificial lamb. Make sure he knows he's not safe. Make him wait for it with white knuckles and soundless steps.

Make him struggle with tying his shoes (nobody ever taught him how to).

Make Vbs tell him they'll teach him. All these little insignificant things that shouldn't matter— they'll teach him. They'll take care of him. They'll support him through it all.

Make Toya Aoyagi suffer — but most importantly — make him heal.

[an-inspired-eternity]

assorted few shuffle au memes i haven't yet posted. both with rui and an and rui and nene for that first one bc they both fit

[sanctus-ingenium]

I'd looove to hear a little about your worldbuilding process if you don't mind sharing. How do you go about it? I know you have shared in a few posts already but just wanna know moree. Also where did it all begin? What inspired you? (eating it all uppp!!!)

hi!! I know I wrote a big long thing like last year or the year before about the process to making a setting but I cannot be arsed to find it rn so here's some disconnected thoughts

Overall I don't really make Headworlds or Worldbuilding Projects the way a lot of people do (which is why u keep hearing me say 'setting' over and over) because mainly what I make are stories in the order of characters -> plot -> world. those three things have to serve one another in that order of importance, so the world itself bends to serve the narrative. for example, ultimately idgaf where the holy beasts' skeletons come from, that is not important because the beasts are basically just a big plot device to serve the story. i can make some post-hoc justifications for their existence (and i did) but at the end of the day it will not and does not matter how they work or where they come from. the world is full of mysteries that will never be solved because the characters are not in a position to solve them. aside from a single border conflict, the world outside the mezian empire is nebulous and unimportant.

I don't enjoy working in a world -> narrative order because what I want to produce isn't just a series of info posts or artpieces about a setting, but a closed and self-contained story which is the justification for the entire world's existence. Headworlds that are all world and no character don't interest me.

So basically in the process of worldbuilding, I have to serve the story. A while back I made a post about continental history around Inver, all these wars and occupations and schisms and so on. All of those exist solely to provide a particular political climate, justification for Aquitan's theocratic structure, and the spread of the southern church north into Inver. I already had the idea of this church, that it would be integral to the country as a main political faction, so now I have to figure out how it got there and the political ramifications of that. It's all worldbuilding for sure, but it's a support structure underneath the story about how that church eventually changes world history, because i wanted to write a story about a church lol.

I guess if I wanted to explain The Process for a world -> characters setting i'd just be giving you How To Write A Story 101 lol. But basically: I think of a concept which interests me (big mechs yay). Then I think of a conflict that might arise (where does the fuel come from? who controls that supply? what might that do to the concentration of power in this area?). Then I put a character in what I consider to be the most interesting position to observe the effects of this conflict (a knight, an enginesmith, an exile), and honestly the main plot generally writes itself after that. I extrapolate the hook from that.

In terms of characters, I try to avoid calling them 'ocs' because in my mind 'oc' tends to be a very static stand-alone thing. Like I couldn't make a useful ref sheet of my characters because they are all changed by the story. I couldn't say 'he has a carefree personality' because in a few chapters no he fucking won't. in the same way i struggle a LOT to talk about my Siren setting which as close to a specbio 'headworld' as i'm ever gonna get, because I am worldbuilding in vastly different time periods at once in a world which is always changing, i can't make a post about for example a map of Siren because that's just a map from one era, I'd need to make a dozen maps to show how things change, how time affects it all, etc.

Because nothing is ever static and everything is in flux, pretty much the only way I can handle a setting like this is, again, just to focus on a few small stories centered around a cast of characters separated by time (i have... 4 distinct stories in Siren. maybe more). this is actually a frustrating barrier to me sharing any information at all about this place lol i'm the struggler

Where did it all begin? When I was 11 I used to write stories in my copybooks in class. There has never been a time where I was not making stories and where my stories were not the only important thing at all to me, superseding literally everything else. I learned how to draw digitally in 2011 because I wanted to draw my characters.

What inspires me? Everything lol. I actually don't have time to Consume Media much, I struggle watching movies or tv and I mostly hate video games because I would much rather be productive and sitting and watching a screen feels like a waste of my time. but I like reading books because I can take them with me on my phone. I get ideas from all sources but mostly non-media sources, like obviously mythology but also my history with the church and my scientific education. Usually nonfictional sources interest me the most (i was going to write a whole story that was a post-apocalyptic plague plot based on canine transmissible venereal cancer haha and even to this day that's where "the Immortal Hound" title comes from, little easter egg in inver)

[gael-garcia]

Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) is an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people. Drawing together writers, editors, and other culture workers, WAWOG hopes to provide ongoing infrastructure for cultural organizing in response to the war. This project is modeled on American Writers Against the War in Vietnam, an organization founded in 1965.

Statement of Solidarity

October 26, 2023

Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people. This war did not begin on October 7th. However, in the last 19 days, the Israeli military has killed over 6,500 Palestinians, including more than 2,500 children, and wounded over 17,000. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison: its 2 million residents—a majority of whom are refugees, descendants of those whose land was stolen in 1948—have been deprived of basic human rights since the blockade in 2006. We share the assertions of human rights groups, scholars, and, above all, everyday Palestinians: Israel is an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians, heedless of the many Jewish people, both in Israel and across the diaspora, who oppose their own conscription in an ethno-nationalist project. 

We come together as writers, journalists, academics, artists, and other culture workers to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation. We stand firmly by Gaza’s people, victims of a genocidal war the United States government continues to fund and arm with military aid—a crisis compounded by the illegal settlement and dispossession of the West Bank and the subjugation of Palestinians within the state of Israel.

We stand in opposition to the silencing of dissent and to racist and revisionist media cycles, further perpetuated by Israel’s attempts to bar reporting in Gaza, where journalists have been both denied entry and targeted by Israeli forces. At least 24 journalists in Gaza have now been killed. Internationally, writers and cultural workers have faced severe harassment, workplace retribution, and job loss for expressing solidarity with Palestine, whether by stating facts about their continued occupation, or for amplifying the voices of others. These are instances that mark severe incursions against supposed speech protections. Specious charges of antisemitism are leveled against Zionism’s critics; political repression has been particularly aggressive against the free speech of Muslim, Arab, and Black people living in the US and across the globe. As was the case following the September 11th attacks, Islamophobic political fervor and the widespread circulation of unsubstantiated claims has galvanized a US-led coalition of military support for a brutal campaign of violence.

What can we do to intervene against Israel’s eliminationist assault on the Palestinian people? Words alone cannot stop the onslaught of devastation of Palestinian homes and lives, backed shamelessly and without hesitation by the entire axis of Western power. At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “human animals”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed white phosphorus in Gaza City, the New York Times editorial board wrote that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”; establishment media outlets continue to describe Hamas’s attack on Israel as “unprovoked.” Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects this perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide. We condemn those in our industries who continue to enable apartheid and genocide. We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, buttogether we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing. 

We act alongside other writers, scholars, and artists who have expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause, drawing inspiration from the Palestinian spirit of sumud, steadfastness, and resistance. Since 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has advocated for organizations to join a boycott of institutions representing the Israeli state or cultural institutions complicit with its apartheid regime. We call on all our colleagues working in cultural institutions to endorse that boycott. And we invite writers, editors, journalists, scholars, artists, musicians, actors, and anyone in creative and academic work to sign this statement. Join us in building a new cultural front for a free Palestine.  

Signed,

WAWOG Interim Organizing Committee

Hannah Black

Ari Brostoff (Senior Editor, Jewish Currents)

Elena Comay del Junco

Kyle Dacuyan (Executive Director, Poetry Project)

Kay Gabriel (Editorial Director, Poetry Project)

Kaleem Hawa

E. Tammy Kim

Shiv Kotecha

Wendy Lotterman (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Muna Mire

Perwana Nazif

Brendan O'Connor

Alex Press (Staff Writer, Jacobin)

Sarah Nicole Prickett

Dylan Saba

Zoé Samudzi (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Jasmine Sanders

Claire Schwartz (Culture Editor, Jewish Currents)

Janique Vigier

Harron Walker

Chloe Watlington

Gabriel Winant (Department of History, University of Chicago)

Audrey Wollen

Hannah Zeavin (Founding Editor, Parapraxis)

Signed, In Solidarity

Fatimah Warner (Noname)

Saul Williams

Susan Sarandon

Janeane Garofalo

Gael García Bernal

Danez Smith

Ocean Vuong

Aria Aber

Saidiya Hartman

China Miéville

+ full list here