#like: the institutional context often sucks!

[shig-a-shig-ah]

so um… ghul… I need advice (if you can give it)?

So you’re a college professor right? Well, for a while now I’ve really been thinking about going back to school (I’m 25, by the way) because I’d also like to become a college professor, ideally in creative writing/something in the writing field.

So I was wondering if there was any advice/warnings/general information you might be able to share that you think would be useful.

You don’t need to spend too much time answering. I don’t want to inconvenience you. But I could just really use any words of wisdom since this is something I really really want but am scared I’ll be blindsided by something (I did a little college back when I was 18 but ended up having to leave due to personal reasons, so I have some experience on what to expect, but not a ton).

Anyway, hope you’re having a good night.

Hi! Always happy to give advice and warnings about the dumpster fire that is academia, so I definitely don't mind the question or feel inconvenienced. I should clarify though that I'm a PhD candidate, not an actual professor--so basically, I'm a very advanced graduate student who teaches instead of taking classes. But, being a professor is the goal and I'm pretty well versed in the ups and downs of pursuing an academic job.

And I have warnings. So many warnings!

The first thing to consider is just the amount of time it takes to become a professor. While you can get some jobs with only a Master's degree, they're few and far between, and especially precarious. For anything secure, you basically have to have a PhD. That means 4-5 years of undergrad, assuming you're starting basically from scratch, and then at least another five years for the doctoral degree. Keep in my mind that most people take longer than that to finish a PhD, too--I'm in my eighth year of grad school (sixth year in my actual program because I did a master's beforehand), and the average time to degree for my department is seven years. I know people who took ten. I may take ten!

Second, the academic job market is terrible. In many, many ways. There are basically two options--tenure track and adjunct. Tenure track pays better, comes with stability, and is probably what most people think of when they think of being a professor. Adjunct positions are short-term teaching contracts that only last for a semester, and often pay worse. (Imagine cobbling together a full-time job by teaching multiple classes a couple universities to make $30k a year with few benefits, if you're lucky).

Tenure track jobs have more stability, benefits, etc., but are also really fucking competitive. It's not unusual to have hundreds of applicants for one position, and even then it likely still won't pay as much as most other jobs requiring that level of education. On top of that, you generally have to also hustle to public papers, present at conferences, etc., just to be competitive for these jobs. And, as a bonus, it's almost guaranteed that you'll have to relocate to find a position, so you could easily find yourself moving to Arkansas to make $45k a year after a decade of schooling. Things are especially competitive and underpaid in the humanities, like writing-related fields, too.

Now, it's not like it could hurt to pursue it as an option, but going back to undergrad just for that being the goal is maybe not the best idea; it's definitely better to go in with a few possible paths in mind. Because it's a big time commitment for very little guaranteed payoff, and that's without even considering that just getting through grad school is fucking hard, and pretty much guaranteed to leave you with a lot of debt unless you have a partner to financially support you. And there are things that are great about it--you get a lot of autonomy, and I really love teaching so I have a great time--but I also pretty much agree with the advice I was given before starting, which was: if you can picture yourself doing anything else, do that instead.

[exeggcute]

in a similar vein to the stuff I was talking about recently with google (unknowingly?) selling invalid ad placements, here's an interesting post I saw on linkedin the other day about advertisers who think they're buying ad space on one domain but are really buying ad space on another:

so, for context: the woman behind this post was one of the creators of the sleeping giants campaign, which was a (pretty successful!) attempt to choke out right-wing "news" websites and other peddlers of misinformation by drying up their advertising revenue. she went on to found the check my ads institute, which does a lot of the same stuff and more; one of the recurring themes of check my ads' messaging is that advertisers often aren't aware that they're running ads on unsavory websites (and are therefore inadvertently funding those websites via their ad budgets, even though they genuinely want to avoid doing so)... in part because advertisers frequently aren't aware of where their ads are running, period.

in this post specifically, she's not talking about individual advertisers but about one of the companies that exists to connect advertisers (brands who want to buy ad space) and publishers (websites who sell ad space)—in this case, an ad platform called unruly, although they recently got absorbed into a bigger company called nexxen.

nexxen is an all-in-one ad platform that's both a DSP (demand-side platform, which helps advertisers buy ad placements) and an SSP (supply-side platform, which helps websites sell ad placements). they make money by taking a cut of each transaction.

what's happening here is that unruly/nexxen worked with a publisher called yorogon.com who was selling inventory (i.e., ad space) through nexxen's platform. so if you're an advertiser who wants to run ads somewhere, you can go to nexxen and buy inventory from their available sellers; in other words, ad space offered by yorogon.com is one of the "products" for sale on nexxen's markplace. (most of these transactions happen in split-second auctions, though... it's not like shopping on ebay.)

the problem is that this seller who nexxen authorized as "yorogon" wasn't actually running ads on yogoron.com or any of yorogon's nonexistent clients' websites... they were running those ads on fucking breitbart lol. basically the equivalent of a supermarket agreeing to sell some new cereal on behalf of the manufacturer, but the boxes are actually full of thumbtacks.

we can pretty safely assume that breitbart did this on purpose because they know that a lot of the big advertisers with fat wallets shy away from publishers like them—for a number of reasons—which means that they have to sell their inventory to smaller, shittier advertisers with less money to spend. otoh there's no reason to believe that nexxen was deliberately taking part in the charade; for one, the information that led to this discovery is public, so anyone who gave half a shit could've figured it out (including nexxen or any of their advertisers lol). not exactly some vast conspiracy when your extremely public records give away the mismatch. and for two, the whole "promising to run an ad in a certain location but actually running it in a different location" is a massive fucking no-no even if the "different location" isn't andew breitbart's personal wank cave. from that last link I just shared, scroll down a bit and you can find this:

note that the warning code isn't "you're buying ads on a shitty website that sucks," the warning is "you're buying ads on a website that isn't what it says it is." but there is a dedicated warning code! because back to the cereal metaphor from earlier, this is like—okay, even if the cereal box is full of actual cereal instead of thumbtacks, it's still a problem if you thought you were getting honey nut cheerios and then opened the box and it was full of apple jacks instead. (and god knows I would never willingly buy apple jacks.)

whatever you're selling, it has to be accurate: if you offer ad space on golflovers.com but you actually run the ad on golfenthusiasts.com, that's still a major issue and the advertisers you work with will rightfully jump on your ass about it... assuming they ever find out, lol.

what's really interesting to me, though, isn't so much that an ad platform was selling misrepresented ad inventory—because as far as I can tell, that happens all the time—but more that we only know about this particular instance because it involves breitbart. check my ads is specifically hellbent on throttling breitbart's ad revenue, which is why someone was even poking around in these seller lists in the first place. anyone else could have; the advertisers who unknowingly bought ad space on breitbart theoretically could have, and nexxen certainly should have.

but for all the ad quality and transparency standards in place, any parties involved in the advertising supply chain still have to take action and check their records to make sure they're following said standards. if they get complacent, bad actors absolutely can and will try to slip through their defenses. and what's especially embarrassing in this case is how many safety partners unruly/nexxen was working with who claim to mitigate this exact scenario... although one of them was doubleverify and they kinda suck lol

[palmviolet]

true detective s1 rewatch: thoughts on the finale

— our theme for this final masterpiece of an episode is: fiction. the series has skated near this before, of course, with its context themes of seeing and image, but this is the episode that really dives into an awareness of genre and storytelling. we begin with an in-depth look at errol childress and his home, the way he lives. he truly inhabits the southern gothic archetype — the grand, decaying house, the incestuous dynamic with reference to the 'cane fields' (something i haven't really discussed yet is the role of louisiana's history of slavery, which hangs over the narrative most conspicuous by its absence; angola, for example, that fabled threat used most often to imply sexual violence, is named after the slave plantation that once occupied the same plot; the place they filmed carcosa was an old civil war fort), the faceless dolls and the mummified father kept in a shack with horrors literally inscribed on the walls (including 'cassilda', another reference to the chambers work).

— childress also watches the television and apes the aristocratic british accents on display. he absorbs fiction and inhabits it, in the same way that he puts on an irish accent to flirt with betty, in the same way that he has her tell him the story of her assault while they are 'making flowers' (a metaphor that once again suggests we are beyond the realm of reality). he and betty are deliberately, exaggeratedly gothic, full of rot — they are designed not as fleshed-out characters, as most of TD's cast is, but as avatars for a gnawing belief in the void that consumes all in its path.

— this is the crux of rust's own beliefs about the futility of selfhood — that identities are illusory defence mechanisms against the void, that all we are is 'sentient meat'. (will be talking more about this line in my reply to an excellent ask by @queixumes, so look out for that.) that life is just a story we tell ourselves. and so with the childresses the veil grows thin: as rust follows childress into carcosa, childress's impossible taunts ("come die with me, little priest") echo around him less as character moments and more as authorial interjections, a manifestation of rust's own nihilistic belief and suicidal ideation. thus when rust does not complete the narrative ("take off your mask"; rust doesn't say the corresponding, "i wear no mask") he is breaking type, paradoxically defying the vacant literary formula in which he's trapped by expressing a self.

— the final scenes of the series entail rust's struggle with this newfound self. he has turned away the offering of the cosmic void; more than that, he has been to the void and found it not as empty and personality-less as he thought, but rather a void 'like a substance', a darkness that held the love of his daughter and his father in one. their selves persevered after death — and now finally he begins to recognise his own selfhood as well.

— this is reified by marty as a sounding board. for the first time, rust experiences recognition through the other with marty as that other — marty who listens to him cry ("talk to me, rust"), marty who encourages him to tell his stories of the stars. this is the other side of storytelling — the side that is not corrupt or empty, the side that has meaning because it is sincere, because it is earnest and with feeling. childress's storytelling is directly opposed to rust's, with childress an empty caricature of the rotten southern gothic and rust as a person looking to the stars: storytelling that does not suck inward to the void but looks outward to the world.

— i think it's significant that our final image of marty and rust is marty helping rust escape the hospital several days early. marty reifies rust's selfhood by something so simple as recognising what he likes — buying him his brand of cigarettes. but this is also in opposition to the medical institution. should someone with a hole in their guts be smoking? doubtful. but that's not the point — the point is that they have to "get out from under this [hospital] roof" in order to see the stars, that rust's lasting glimpse of hope ("the light's winning") is as he flees the institution, propped up not by its mechanics, in the form of the wheelchair, but by marty himself.

— as i've discussed in the past, TD's implications of the medical institution as a further corrupt branch of the state are very veiled, but they are present. there's a further signal of this in one of the hazy, slowly cross-fading shots towards the end: we see a doctor in the hospital hallway, carrying the image of a human body, fading into a shot of the childress shack with a human body drawn on it.

placed directly one after another, this is a juxtaposition that only associates the two. the shack is where childress keeps his desiccated father, talks about bringing him water, hosing him down — in some perverse way, treating him as a patient. this isn't designed to say explicitly that the hospital is involved in the conspiracy to the same degree as the tuttles, but it implies a broader institutional sweep of wrongness. within the medical institution is where most of us will experience ourselves at our most powerless; out of necessity, medical treatment strips identity and agency away, regimenting schedules and meals and visiting hours, labelling patients with identifying bracelets. in the same way that childress's narratives of southern gothic were a seductive call to the void of nothing, the absence of selfhood, the hospital, too, denies personality and self.

— this is why we finish with marty bringing rust his cigarettes against medical advice; this is why rust leaves the hospital, if not exactly on his own terms then at least on his and marty's. it is a final reclamation of the selfhood he has been denying himself all along — and an escape into a world that contains only one story, "light versus dark", as our final shot is of the stars winking into light. he is beyond our (potentially corrupting, as sight and image has been throughout the series) interpretation; he is in the void, yes, but it is a void with substance, a void with love.

[triptychgrip]

Impact of figure skating politics on post-canon Yuri!!! on Ice

So, even aside from the rampant doping, I think many people are familiar with how the politics within the sport of figure skating really suck -- whether that's in terms of how skating federations meddle with their athletes' careers in ways these athletes clearly don't want or don't even know about, the way regulatory bodies -- the International Skating Union (ISU), and its various Commissions -- can and do remain silent when it comes to speaking out on abuse or corruption, or the complete shit-show of bias within judging, sometimes on a ludicrously visible level.

After all, this is a sport where a judge that showed clear bias at the PyeongChang Olympics was not only invited back to judge at the Beijing Games, but was given the position of being the technical controller!

Sheer madness...

It makes sense why Yuri!!! on Ice didn't delve into this stuff in a 12 episode season b/c the reality is: it's a major bummer.

But I work in public policy and am a social justice researcher whose career focuses on institutional change. So I often find myself asking the question "what would cause institutions/people/movements -- especially with a lot of history and influence behind them -- to change for the better, whether by 'force' (public outcry, insider advocacy, etc.) or their own volition?" It's a question I started thinking about a lot almost as soon as I got into Yuri!!! on Ice a few years back, and specifically, thought about in a post-canon context.

Some of the politics-related questions that surfaced for me, included:

-When Viktor returns to skating, how would his federation (the FFKKR) choose to treat his absence? Would they, perhaps, "make an example" of him at the Rostelecom Cup, purposely underscoring his performances? Or, would they have "given up" on him, trying to focus all of their attention/resources on Yurio's obvious rising star potential?

-Further, would they (with tacit or explicit media support) take a negative stance regarding his and Yuuri's highly public relationship -- perceiving Viktor's romance as a "threat" to his ability to return to the field as strong and focused as before -- or would they choose to ignore it, altogether?

-How would Yurio's growth spurt (which is hinted at in canon) impact the FFKKR's treatment of Viktor if the former is no longer able to put out the kind of performance that he did at the Barcelona Grand Prix Final? Or if Georgi retires from the field?

-How would skaters that wish to skate independently of corrupt federations -- something that is currently not possible under the way the ISU is structured with 'member nations' -- navigate their careers, and what avenues would they have at their disposal to avoid burn-out from the shitstorm of pervasive corruption?

-How would politics affect our favorite characters at an event as globally visible as the PyeongChang Olympic Games, and in its aftermath? (I say this with the caveat that I generally write yoi fic w/ the premise that it took place during the first half of the 2016 skating season, though there is no way to pinpoint the actual season).

All of these questions kept circling about in my head, and I felt highly motivated to begin writing a multichapter, post-canon "future fic". Specifically, a fic that would tell the story of married Yuuri/Viktor at the 2022 Olympic Games, but jumping back in time at various points over the previous five years to showcase how a particular scandal -- other than doping -- at the 2018 PyeongChang Games has "followed them" throughout the years (and has deeply impacted the sport/our other favorite characters).

This fic turned into a series called "Gold's On The Inside, Elevated My Feet", which currently is at 293K total words, and is being updated 1-2 times per month.

I know a lot of people aren't into long, novel-length works, especially if they're WIPs, but if you, like me, are fascinated by some of the real-world issues that might impact Yuuri/Viktor/Yurio and others post-canon, I hope you'll consider checking my work out.

I've included a spoiler-free excerpt from Chapter 11 of part 1 of the series, below, that I feel hints at the politics while encapsulating the Viktuuri fluff, friendship antics, and overall supportive themes that I've tried to weave into my stories.

I hope it piques your interest and encourages you to check the series out, or my other Yuri!!! on Ice fics!

---------

“First of all, how the hell would you have even managed to contact me from all the way over in the Kiss and Cry?” Phichit went on. “Did they imagine you had waved a wand to send a carrier pigeon flying through Gangneung Ice Arena to land directly on my head ? After which, it would peck an intimidating message in Morse code straight onto my scalp?”

Yuuri was now hiccuping giggles, and he was pleased to see that he’d begun to wipe a profuse quantity of tears from his cheeks.

When his best friend had told him that he wanted to hear all the nitty-gritty details of his International Court of Arbitration for Sport (ICAS) hearing, Phichit had definitely had some misgivings; Yuuri and Viktor had flown to Lausanne for their own proceedings directly after the latter’s retirement party in Milan, and given what they’d told him about each brutally long-winded 4 hour session, he’d known fun things were not in store for him.

“But Yuuri without his glasses on can be very intimidating…very sexily intimdating,” Viktor said with a grin, prompting a playful slap on the arm from his fiance; thanks to Yuuri’s thirsty fans, the hashtag #Yuuri’sNearsightedSexySquintTally had become a staple on the competition circuit, and both he and Viktor had taken to alluding to the phrase as much as possible.

“Yes, I’m sure that’s exactly what permanent-frown-dude-arbitrator was referring to,” Yuuri responded, sarcastically, “my nefariously sexy squinting that so very clearly spelled out that Phichit better file a claim, or else.”

He and Viktor both laughed, and he shared a few more snippets from his hearing before conversation moved along to discussion around the other Olympics claimants’ hearings.

“Oh my god, just imagine Christophe during his,” Yuuri said, before giving Makkachin a kiss, right to the top of her fuzzy head.

The poodle was splayed out across both of her dog-dad’s laps, taking up much of the bench directly in front of the rink boards at Hasetsu’s Ice Castle. After their hearing, the couple had flown to St. Petersburg, spending just a few days there to get Makka and Meni and do a round of cursory packing. They’d then taken off for Japan where they planned to stay until mid-June, which was the beginning of the rainy season.

Even from afar, Phichit had been able to keep tabs on Yuuri thanks to Nishigori Yuuko. After thoroughly bonding with her at Viktor’s retirement party – after all, a willingness to drunkenly act out the unhinged plot of The King and the Skater 3: Because Time Loops Are A Thing tended to solidify people in Phichit’s mind as lifelong friends – she had been messaging him through Instagram as well as contributing heavily in the “Yuuri Support Squad” chat.

Soon enough, he’d be able to keep tabs on him in-person, as his own trip to Hasetsu was just three weeks away.

“He’d be all: ‘And then, my esteemed arbitrators, I got distracted from calculating Yuuri’s grade-of-execution, because my eyes were too busy lingering on his delectably muscled thighs as he came out of his triple-lutz, triple-toe combo’,” Viktor said, in a deliberately put-upon Swiss accent, while lasciviously licking his lips.

Phichit barked out a laugh while Yuuri grinned at him.

“Are you sure you aren’t just verbalizing the thoughts you wish you could have expressed during your hearing?” he asked his fiance.

Viktor gasped, theatrically, and clutched Meni even more closely to his chest before responding.

“I would never think such a thing! I’ve become an expert at admiring your beautiful thighs while simultaneously calculating your GOE,” he said, sounding proud. “As any good coach should be.”

[transmutationisms]

ive always been a pe class hater but id love to hear ur words on why exactly it sucks

well the national histories vary obviously but in general, the focus on fitness in schools / early education is connected to broader state concerns about maintaining a large, growing, physically hearty population in order to protect economic interests and often also in order to maintain a standing military. in short the state needs labourers. these anxieties are also plugged into eugenic discourses about maintaining and strengthening a nation's racial stock, configuring fitness as a signifier of health and health as an asset to the state. again i don't mean to collapse all national histories together here but as an example, this is why in the usa, kennedy instituted a lot of those, like, 'presidential fitness challenge' things after being repeatedly advised that germany had much more emphasis than the us on fitness and phys ed for children. the fear was that other countries would become physically stronger than the us; it's biopolitics. (in those years in the usa obviously there was a lot of fear of russian military dominance as well, plus kennedy had some of his own body politics shit going on in relation to both his disability and the way white american protestants talked about him as an irish catholic but i digress)

inb4 someone is like "oh so you think all exercise and physical activity is evil and eugenic??" no, but i think states valuing children as potential biological assets is fucked up and i think coercive physical activity (all activity in a school institution is coercive by design) is fucked up. also always bears repeating that no matter the social or political context, there will always be people who cannot or don't want to participate in physical activity and that's not a tragedy or a cause for moral concern. and finally that the whole idea that we need to institute structured periods of physical activity presumes as its subjects people who are otherwise not going to be forced to move at all, ie who are not manual labourers, which tells us a lot about the class interests & implications of this particular endeavour to discipline bodies.

[schmergo]

I've recently done a little bit of research for some stuff adjacent to the production of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that I'm in right now and, in checking whether certain scientific institutions and inventions would have existed during the time of the play, I discovered something kind of interesting: many of the ones I've looked up were coincidentally established within 5-10 years of the setting.

The first bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories, the source materials for this play, came out between 1887 and 1893. The Natural History Museum? Opened fully in 1883. The Prime Meridian? Officially established in 1884. Tower Bridge? Built between 1886-1894. The Tube running northwest from Baker Street? 1880. London's first electrical power station? 1882. Those are just the ones I happened to look up. Telegrams are common in the Sherlock Holmes tales, and by the later Sherlock Holmes stories, he's using a telephone and even automobiles are mentioned.

Reading the Sherlock Holmes stories with that context of a world full of rapid changes and advancements, I feel like it comes across differently. It seems to say, "There's a scientific answer for everything." His unique detecting style, based on simple observations, made it seem like the age-old problems of crime and criminals could be defeated by logic and reasoning. I think there's a level of idealism, that even the most difficult crimes are solvable and bad actors are no match for modern scientific knowledge.

Reading Sherlock Holmes cases often gives the comfortable feeling of order and justice being served. I think that's the same reason true crime content is so popular today in another age of rapid digital advances-- and if we guess the solution, it's doubly satisfying. It's also why Sherlock Holmes is so easily translated to modern day.

But that also makes me think about another book and another equally iconic character that came out around that same time period: Dracula, published in 1897. And Dracula takes a lot of the same themes and seems to say the exact opposite.

I think one of the biggest things that surprises first-time readers of Dracula is how modern Dracula feels and how much technology is used in the book. Like the Sherlock Holmes stories, it was set in roughly 'modern day' when it was written. The 'good guys' use trains, telephones, typewriters, and even blood transfusions. But when Dracula, an old-world monster, arrives in their modern newfangled city of London, all of that technology is useless against him. And so is any ability of theirs to deduce a simple scientific explanation for what's going on.

When Dracula starts sneaking into their friend’s house and sucking her blood each night, the signs are obvious, right down to the puncture marks on her neck. The reader and audience knows what’s up waaaay before the characters do. It’s infuriating! You want to jump up and down and yell, “A VAMPIRE IS KILLING HER!” But why don’t they see what’s right in front of their faces? Because they’re thoroughly modern upper-middle class British people who live in a scientifically advanced world and believe in reason.

The chaos of true evil is more powerful than logic and reason. To defeat him, they need to get on his level and use superstition and religion and folklore. It's the polar opposite of a story like "The Hounds of the Baskervilles," published five years later.

All that said... I would love to see a Sherlock Holmes and Dracula crossover. How long would it take Holmes to deduce that he had run into a real vampire? Would he make all the correct observations and keep coming to the wrong conclusions? Would he be able to accurately predict the patterns of Dracula's behavior when his opponent has superhuman abilities and can transform into multiple different types of animals?

Or, given Holmes' somewhat addictive and adrenaline-driven personality, his superior attunement to his senses, his surprising revival from the dead, and his innate instinct to 'catch his man' at any cost... would he himself make the most dangerous vampire of all?

[illnessfaker]

Your recent couple reblogs has me wondering something, that maybe you have more perspective on given your own experiences with gender.

Often times I’ll hear bigender, genderfluid, and various flavors of nonbinary people talk as if they are (in a political sense) both man and woman (also sometimes TME and TMA using the same logic)

I get it in terms of self-identification, but in terms of how society treats us, I’m skeptical that the current oppressively gendered system has room for that kind of nuance.

I think it’s just because I’m a trans woman and at the end of the day I get treated as a fag regardless if people see me as a man or woman, so I don’t get the option anyway lol

But I also kinda feel like I’m just rehashing “there are only 2 genders!!” but from a leftist angle, which also sucks

i mean this is like a really tough question that i don't think there's a good answer to because there's not really any difference btwn "being a man/woman" vs. "being a man/woman politically" and by that i mean when you ask what "being a man/woman" means the only good answer to that question i can come up with is "they're labels that indicates one's relationship to patriarchy" but even that answer isn't especially helpful in this situation because 1. that's basically the function of gender identity labels is to describe one's relationship to gender and indicate how they navigate the system whether they're "binary" or not and 2. there is no litmus test for who "counts" as a man or a woman because if you go around and ask people why they identify this way you'll get a hundred different answers even if the people you ask label themselves in the same way because gender identity at the end of the day not only has to do w/ the gendered messaging you are subject to from society (which includes violence) and then how you personally rationalize and respond to it.

the thing is that there are many different avenues of being gendered so i'd say that yeah, someone can be both a man and a woman if they believe their experiences align w/ that, but the reasons for why someone believes that, like i said, are going to widely vary. someone might be legally considered female but be gendered as male in a bunch of other contexts and they might factor that experience in to their gender identity. someone might be legally considered male but be gendered as female or subject to misogyny in a bunch of other contexts and they might factor that experience in to their gender identity. but it's not as if legally being male = you can wield that simple fact to enact gendered violence (which plenty of transfem and other camab trans ppl are aware of, i'm sure) and access the gendered privileges that one might associate with maleness, and it's not as if legally being female = one is entirely excluded from enacting gendered violence or accessing gendered privileges. it's messy. those are two very simplistic examples that include the word "might" because a the end of the day, there aren't any rules that determine who is "actually" what because the series of "tests" that society subjects us to in order to determine that are incoherent, since gender has no essence to it. it's not nuance, its nonsense.

transmisogynists insist that genitalia or assigned sex determines how you're gendered but a cashier once told me that he thought i was a man because i was wearing flannel. the only assumption i can make as to why other people read me as having been camab (i say that because people often either insist i'm a man or they've told me they thought i was transfem at first) is because i have some physical features that society labels as "male" and some of my autism/ADHD traits are ones that society also labels as "male" (e.g. lack of volume control making me very loud.) those are also very simple examples because ofc much more goes into gendered violence than just how random people w/o institutional power perceive you, but the point is that gender's rules are pretty nonsensical based on how people actually apply them. i have a social experience that one could arguably call "both male and female" but that doesn't feel like at all an accurate assessment of what it's like for me whatsoever (enough that it feels like misgendering) - and i certainly don't see myself as "tma." that being said, i think i'm one of those people who can't be neatly sorted into "socially located as female" vs. "socially located as male." i think i'm socially located as a (tme) marginalized gender subject, but that kind of subjective experience isn't the norm.

that doesn't mean there aren't experiences that are typical of womanhood or experiences that are typical of manhood. if there weren't then the whole framework of patriarchy and misogyny wouldn't hold up very well. but the "typical" part is kinda key because acting as if there is some singular, concrete thing that distinguishes the "male experience" from the "female experience" is conceding the point that men and women are essentially different, which is something that reinforces patriarchy rather than deconstructing it, and "men oppress women" is not a singular, concrete thing to me in this instance because the ways in which that tangibly occurs are incredibly varied and complex, with a myriad of factors always being involved, which is a fact that people like MRAs and transmisogynists will try to exploit for the sake of their (trans)misogynistic views.

so it's like, at the end of the day, yeah - binaries are bullshit, but also we need what some might call vague generalizing/binaristic language for the sake of discussing literally anything at all in a way that is comprehensible. the frameworks/concepts of patriarchy and (trans)misogyny don't suddenly fall apart if we acknowledge the ~nuance~ of how gender works and is affected by different factors because the whole point is that these things are deeply embedded, broader sociocultural trends, not that they're absolute rules with zero exceptions in what some discussion about them might sometimes imply. (trans) men being subjected to violence that is defined by or wrapped up in (trans)misogyny or (trans) women circumstantially also wielding (trans)misogyny against other (trans)women doesn't mean that (trans)misogyny shouldn't be about (trans) women.

the issue here, i think, doesn't have to do w/ how someone identifies (that dog won't hunt) so much as how they actually grapple with that complexity and how they use it to relate to others. to use an example from that one post i rb'd earlier, someone labeling themselves as a "transfemmasc gaybilesbian" and then talking about how oppressive and evil and binaristic both assigned sex labels and the label "tme" is, is - in practice - someone who is against any concise language happening irt discussion of transmisogyny, and - in addition - any concise language that would denote whether they're someone who is capable of enacting gendered violence against trans women in the way only non-trans women can. and then it gets 10x worse when you see that same person reblogging posts about how transmisandry real and trans womanhood is not a gender category that sits beneath trans manhood on a hierarchical scale.

if trans women can't use "transfem" to talk about transmisogyny, can't use "camab/cafab," and can't use "tme/tma," then they can't use anything. this usually happens in the case of trans other trans people who are, in fact, tme, and them being tme is part of what enables them to be able to do this in the first place, because it is apparent to anyone who pays attention that trans women and other camab trans people are typically not afforded the same room to treat gender identity like a playground in the way that tme trans people are, when looking at things from the perspective of transmisogyny.

like, at that point, i can only assume you believe yourself to be incapable of gendered violence in any meaningful sense/are dodging any sense of accountability, and are using the obfuscation of difference and meaning of terms to your advantage as someone who does in fact possess privilege in terms of gender, lol. everyone does to some extent when you include factors that significantly affect one's relationship to the gender binary such as race, disability, etc.

[youcantfiremebecauseiquit]

19. What are you currently watching?

"Włatcy Móch". It's coming back all new after more than 10 years, which is something i thought would never happen (last episode came out in 2011).

Now to explain this to non-polish followers, these are polish 00's animated series that were dubbed "polish South Park" but in my opinion it has nothing to do with it, 2 completely different things besides being "animation for adults that's actually a hit among children". Everybody at school would quote characters, use them as mobile phone ringtones, wear related merch, have pencil cases/schoolbags etc. (I had a shoebag). The series were full of swears, adult themes, referencing drugs/alcohol but was also quite "problematic" by nowadays standards, like have open racist, sexist texts, LGBT slurs, parodying current world happenings and institutions, church, politics, subcultures, celebrities, nations, stereotypes, absolutely nobody was spared. Which is something i enjoyed now especially, it's refreshing to finally watch something that isn't absurdally clean-cut, militantly politically correct and SJW. I think it'd be nice for people to take it easy sometimes and allow some sarcastic humour and stop being so fucking offended by everything. But what i enjoy the most about it now is just how characters are, the animation design, the way they talk & make up their own words, misinterpret the world (since they're 8 year olds, they just parrot slurs they heard from adults but most often they don't understand it and so use it in wrong context). Also how it references things from polish culture and history etc., how colors alone well reflect shitty polish elementary schools, the sheer 00's-ness and nostalgia of it all. Some later episodes were bad and the "eating its own tail" effect happens but i still enjoy even weaker ones now.

I'm watching it all now since they're airing all the episodes throughout summer everyday and honestly it's my only reason to live right now. I'm worried new season will suck and i'll be disappointed but oh well

[enchi-elm]

Shaving in the U.S. Military

This was an amazing rabbit-hole to fall into.

Having no visible facial hair of my own and not serving in the military (not being American, besides) means I have no context for the scene I am getting ready to write and so I did what any seasoned fic writer would do, which is procrastinate with 45 minutes of research.

Starting with a Youtube search "shaving in the continental army", because you can always find the best tangents pinging away from your actual question when you search on Youtube. And man! There's so many opinions and experiences with shaving!

I started with this:

Haha, I thought. And then, what's a shaving profile?

A shaving profile, I learned, is a shaving waiver, a paper that permits you to grow a "therapeutic beard" to treat, among other things, a skin condition called pseudofolliculitis barbae (PFB), or razor bumps, which can present as anything from uncomfortable to painful and bleeding. A shaving profile can also be issued for religious reasons. When this was first instituted, the hair length of the shaving profile beard could not exceed one quarter of an inch.

Oh, so men have also realized that frequent shaving is hell on your skin, I thought, with some snark. Sucks when your social capital depends on it, doesn't it?

Or your career. Because, in fact, for people in the military, it does.

From a study reported on in 2012, 21% of air force respondents reported that their career had been negatively impacted by having a shaving profile, read, wearing a beard. And of these respondents who reported a perceived shaving profile bias, 63% identified as Black, 14% as Hispanic and 5% as Latino. PFB is most commonly found in Black men.

How strong is this stigma? Oooh, strong.

It's often couched in "concerns" surrounding looking uniform to the group, being able to follow orders, and -- failing all that -- having a tight gas mask seal. But as you can see in this funny video, the tone behind those "concerns" is anything but friendly, and it's costing these soldiers leadership opportunities and awards.

Man, these comments are fascinating.

Alright, noted, I thought. So what does that mean for the 18th Century?

Well, as it turns out, the style has changed a lot in the course of military history. All soldiers were expected to look sharp, but more important in the 18th Century was being clean. Shaving or hair cuts isn't mentioned at all in Baron von Steuben's famous Blue Book but washing frequently is. It's only through the article below that I learned that soldiers in the Continental Army had to shave three times a week, though their facial hair seems to have caused less issue than their head hair.

Shaving yourself is one thing, but there were few options for competently managing your hair, so most men wore their hair long. Those who plaited into a queue did so with flour and animal fat, while cavalrymen put their hair in a club at the base of their neck (which was just a more horse-riding resistant hairstyle).

(Thinking back now, of course, I don't think I've ever seen an 18th C portrait of a man wearing a queue and sporting facial hair (...anyone?). And certainly in TURN the tv show no one has a beard, but that's a modern show catering to modern audiences. I can just imagine the uproar there'd be if anyone other than Caleb Brewster sported prominent facial hair. And certainly we all know how Brewster's beard informs his characterization.)

In 1801, the beloved queue was officially abolished in the U.S. military and it caused an uproar among the enlisted that nearly reached mutiny. From that to the famously bushy moustaches and mutton chops in the Civil War to the long hair, trimmed moustaches, and long side burns of the 1960s and 1970s that the Navy and Coast Guard to my complete shock permitted among their ranks, hair has been a contentious issue, waxing and waning in style ever since the military's inception in the States.

So there you go!

As a final thought, because I am a fic writer with a preference for the Tallster pairing, I shall leave you with one of my favourite Tallster fics, written by the wonderful @lucyemers.

It is, of course, about shaving.

Guess I should go write that scene, now.

[marley-manson]

all that said for what it's worth i do separate my interpretation of the characters in terms of how canon wants me to see them vs in terms of how i'd feel about them irl

In those last 2 posts I went with my feelings about Mulcahy in terms of how I'd feel irl because the question being asked was how I would prefer the show frame him, and I'd prefer it if the show's sense of morality aligned more with my own

If I'm just talking about my feelings about Mulcahy in general it's more of a mix between my irl judgement and my understanding that the show wants me to see him as a good guy, and me going along with that. I often like Mulcahy and enjoy him as a character and I think he's usually fun and entertaining and v sweet and loveable.

Sometimes it's more interesting to read against the text and imagine him grappling with the moral dilemmas of trying to do good within the context of the military and catholicism as an institution, or to imagine a version of the story that condemns him rather than celebrates him, and sometimes he definitively sucks by all my standards despite narrative framing like in Identity Crisis eg, but usually I just go 'aw Mulcahy's cute here.'

[talenlee]

Magic, Eugenics, And How To Do Not That

Magic, Eugenics, And How To Do Not That

Do you have magic in your setting?

Does that magic have a genetic component?

Okay, bad news, you’ve justified eugenics.

It isn’t quite that absolute but you have to remember the gap between magically enabled humans and non magical humans is kind of categorically vast. There are ways around it, but in the default context, where magic is a thing that people can do that provides immense results compared to an individual human’s, a system of magic where a person’s genetics can influence it is a pretty easy to justify outlay for actual literal eugenics.

In the real world, setting aside eugenics’ moral or ethical framings, part of what helped to undermine it was the fact it just didn’t work. The people who believed in it weren’t receiving any inherent advantage due to their breeding, and it was kind of notable that no matter how well bred you were, it didn’t take many muddy peasants to pull you out of your castle by your feet and kill you. Eugenics is a fairy story in the real world, where a real true thing (we can change gene expressions in population through selective breeding) gets refined to a point of nonsense (we can lay out the genes of an individual like we’re picking out baby drapes). It’d be nice if eugenics failed just because of the moral reasons, but it turns out that there are lots of immoral things that get to persist despite that. Eugenics was, and is (hi there, Musk’s weirdoes) a fairy story privileged people tell themselves to justify the immense unfairness of the world.

The fact is, humans exist within such boundaries of capabilities that even the best of the best at things are not that far beyond what other humans can do, and often, the peaks of performance come at the expense of immense training regimes. Olympians live in food jail, pro wrestlers are extraordinarily good at performance and pain, and researchers specialise within their fields, and none of them mean that any one person is capable of just exceeding other people without infrastructural support. The best of the best are individually very intimidating but enough hands throwing enough bricks can make the differences disappear.

In the context of a magical setting, though, where you have individual mages capable of exerting immense force, force beyond a single human’s ability, or even a dozen human’s abilities, in first-order strategies like ‘can throw fireballs’ or ‘can fly,’ then suddenly the ability to breed that ability more commonly into a community represents a very meaningful incentive, and it seems like the kind of thing where, given enough time, the idea taking root and being acted on are kind of inevitable. This is obviously, a bad thing. Magical prowess being inborn and genetically predictable seems to directly represent a powerful incentive to begin mass producing People Of Mass Destruction.

Of course, this can be a bit of a bummer for settings to give up. After all, institutions and social structures give you a lot of stuff to work with for characters, and we have them in our world, so they can work as useful parallels. Magical colleges that pick up kids in their early tween years so you can have adventures learning magic in a school setting don’t necessarily have the same tools if there’s a hard rule that no, there’s no genetic bias or predisposition to magic, because at that point it can feel like there’s no institutional capture at work.

Alright, then what are some alternatives?

Internal Control, External Power: Sure, you can breed the best wizards possible, but they’re all only just drawing on the magic in an area. Two wizards having a duel are chucking the magical energy of an area at one another, and adding a third wizard to the mix reduces the amount of power they both have by about a third. Wizards aren’t something societies can marshall in opposition to one another because every army just fields a few dozen really crap wizards that suck up the bulk of the resources in the area.

Magic Alters Genetics: Wizards do have altered genes, but it’s the magic that they use that alters them. Kids of wizards wind up weird and all, but it’s not necessarily ‘magically weird’ as much as it is they’ve been subjected to a kind of radiation. Kids of wizards are therefore worth tracking and observing (in say, wizard colleges), but they aren’t necessarily going to do better magic than their parents, and they might just ber weird in other ways.

Magic As Unlock: In a setting where anyone can use magic, but you don’t want everyone using magic, consider the value of magic not as a sort of can-you-roll-your-tongue genetic quirk, but rather that magical access is something you can go your entire life without doing, and the longer you take to do it, the harder it gets to do. This lets you have a classical magic system where children learning magic at a ripe age is important, without completely shutting out any adults who want to get involved based on their ‘breeding.’

Culturally Genetic Magic: Okay, you have your magical colleges and dynasties and the importance of family names of wizards and they belief in breeding and all that, but also, they’re just wrong. There are lots of persistent beliefs in the world that are based on completely afactual nonsense, after all, and institutions are really good at justifying their continued existence. Plus, if magic is a cultural practice, then institutions like this will create more and better wizards, just not for the reasons they claim they are.

Personally, I favour the two ideas of Magic as an unlock and a dose in areas of culturally genetic magic. Not every kid has the concentration and focus to open that door, but there are lots of reasons you might.

One fun thing to consider, by the way, if you’re the kind of tumblr-centered author who wants the push, the population of wizards in a given city according to the old 3e DMG is about .5% The population of Australia, according to the carer surveys, that are autistic, is about .5%.

Just saying, if people want genetic magic.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Making

[uselessdancedata]

If you want to know, I really don’t like MBA because I feel like training is sub-par for it’s reputation, they prefer wins over creating employable dancers, they let Eva run rampant and do whatever she does, puts dancers on point too young and also they do not teach dancers proper etiquette in the studio or at comps. Oh and the fact that the culture there is so toxic and encourages EDs. I know a few people here aren’t dancers/don’t know a lot about ballet so I’ll try and keep it short (spoiler: I didn’t) and understandable to anyone who reads this. The training really sucks, the dancers don’t seem to be taught or corrected for their technical issues and the training provided to them is really sub par. They train around 26 hours a week and can’t even teach proper port de bras. All their dancers have glaring technical issues with turns, often they have issues with posture, core and arm placement. I don’t know why this is such a common issue but they also all bobble their turns very easily? Most MBA performances have turn bobbles. They also typically teach their dancers variations that really do not flatter them due to the lack of essential character/artistry/musicality/etc training. The main two they teach are Odette/Black Swan variation and La Esmeralda/Tamborine variation. Most of their dancers really struggle with character because I don’t believe they are taught about character/take classes on artistry and essential aspects of performance. It really shows when you have dancers in who can’t even do more than smile while performing *the* variation to perform, not just dance. Most of their dancers aren’t taught to dance in time in corps. Most of their dancers can’t even dance in time in duets. This is not all the dancers fault, their training really should provide a focus on this aspect as 90% of their dancers will never be soloists. Most employable dancers have to end up in corps. Not teaching the essential aspect of performing as a group really sets up their dancers for failure in a company. They also focus on wins wayyy too much. To the point where it impacts their training. They seem more focused on having 17 hope award winners rather than 17 employable dancers. I’ve noticed a trend with a few of their graduates where they’ll join a company for a year or two and in recordings you notice they struggle to keep in time and then they are let go. I personally think this is because mba creates soloists not employable dancers who can dance in sync. They aren’t taught enough about this because they are too busy learning Esmeralda (but not learning about the character)!! They also put dancers en pointe at age 8. I was the one who wrote the pointe essay a while back about the dangers of it so I’m not going to rewrite the whole dangers of pointe too young but basically your feet are at risk of development issues, permanent injuries and it proven to not make you a better/more advanced dancer.

okay you put this in multiple parts so i'll reply to them one by one! (sorry for the delay, school has been killing me)

everything you said in this part, i completely agree with. maybe it's a bitter outlook but i'm always kind of cynical towards studios/schools/institutions which put a lot of emphasis on social media branding (not just in the dance world, just in general). and with the context of mba being shady about eating disorders, mental illness etc, the whole eva nys thing comes across as really insidious. i don't necessarily think it started as a deliberate pay-for-views thing, i think eva and MBA's management just kind of symbiotically benefit from each other, but man i hate it anyway.

i also find myself so perplexed by their variation choices. i think that generally, they do have a running pattern of producing many dancers who lack stage presence or any kind of personality onstage, but often that's not just the school's fault and can just be a dancer's personality. i try not to judge because all the dancers are under 19 and do have time to develop after joining a company. (i don't like the idea that a dancer is done growing once they go from student to professional).

but man MBA really does not help this perception of themselves, because the variation choices seem so completely disconnected from the dancers' style and performance ability, it's crazy. sometimes they get lucky enough with a dancer like maya schonbrun who seems versatile enough to pull off anything, but most dancers are just...not like that. and it is so apparent with many of their dancers. MBA seems to choose variations exclusively by the technical skillset with no regard for "can this dancer pull off kitri/esmeralda/odile/etc?" and then apparently don't work on the character performance at all. last year one of their best/most famous dancers was assigned the odile variation for yagp finals and it was just...so sad to watch. because you know from the eva nys videos that she is very technically skilled, but as odile she just looks so juvenile because she doesn't even attempt to do swan arms, she stumbles over steps that she seems to do easily for social media, and the whole time there is just zero attempt to perform the character or dance to the music. it's just sad when you know what they can do and then they come out onstage and they do this, and they don't even qualify for finals despite being a social media superstar.

i could say more but i think you have said it all already. i know websites don't mean everything, but i think there is a stark difference between the curriculums of MBA and the Vaganova school (which i'm citing as an example because MBA claims to be a Vaganova school, which I don't see outside of, you know, springing up en pointe). of course there will be differences because Vaganova is classical and MBA is very competition-based, but you see so much more of preparation for a company in the Vaganova syllabus. those kids spend all eight years learning historical and character dances, their last year has a dedicated class towards learning all the famous corps dances from swan lake, giselle etc. not to mention the hours they spend in acting classes, learning to perform characters onstage. MBA has an equal amount of training hours per week as Vaganova but their time is not spent doing any of this. there is such little preparation for a professional life.

this is not to say that MBA will never produce an employable dancer (maya schonbrun seems to be doing very well for herself, though it's early days yet), and it's not to say that MBA is the only ballet school with these issues. the problem is way more widespread than that. but until the day MBA decides to stop taking over my youtube recommendations, they're going to remain the most prominent example of competition ballet culture gone rogue.

[bandofchimeras]

hey dude, sorry not trying to be an ass w this but I saw u had a post where in the tags you used delusional and narcissist as pretty derogatory insults towards the govt. Bashing the government is good and great but using terms that we (at least currently) need to describe mental illness (and definitely associate with it!)... in ways like that... its ableist and dehumanizing and leads to more abuse, even if it feels innocent, because if everyone who's a narc or who's delusional is dangerous....that's everyone w/ npd, or a schizospec disorder, or any other things.

Sorry this is long, and again, not trying to be rude! Just wanted to inform you and ask that you maybe be a little more careful with word choice in the future :)

hey anon, yeah thanks for your concern. I do understand the movement to change language usage around mental illness and destigmatize. And it is well intentioned.

Unfortunately, narcissistic and delusional are still pretty generally derogatory words. A person with NPD may not cause harm simply by virtue of having the diagnosis but we all agree narcissism itself isn't a fun cool trait to have. Delusions are obscurations of reality.

We still say manic, depressed, obsessive, etc in both outright negative ways and descriptive but not morally loaded ways. to me it's just part of language, and the ethics of most derogatory language does depend on who's using it.

I'm absolutely behind not calling everyone who sucks a narcissist. and would like people to stop saying "I'm being OCD" or "that's so bipolar," "he's a schizo" and so on. The "delulu" trend online is weird and fetishizes mentally ill people.

For context: I am a person with a narcissistic tendency, due to my childhood. My life has been a long train of psych symptoms... delusions of grandeur, maladaptive daydreaming, hallucinations, psychosis, derealization, depersonalization, dissociative identity states. psychology is one of my longest hyperfixations simply because I needed to understand my experience. it's been helpful and unhelpful in different ways. Pathologization is a phenomen that can't be understood separately from language, culture, history, and violence.

And yet I don't really have a problem with calling things crazy, insane, or batshit. in fact I find power in redefining and playing with these terms. I've been called crazy in a demeaning, invalidating way. And yeah, I'm a lil crizazy, a bit unhinged one might say. But if a motherfucker calls me crazy to invaldiate my argument, I instantly know they've lost. They're being weak, and abusive. It will also piss me the fuck off. I may want to show them what "crazy" looks like. The better angels of my nature will whisper "keep your head."

With the movement to neutralize mental health terms, what's always confused me is the understanding of language itself. I experience words autistically - they have multiple overlapping meanings all the time. Words are like composite images composed of billions of instances of use, fluttering and evolving as they are spoken and written. Vernacular is messy, sputtering and ever changing. Therefore words carry a multitude of connotations. When different people say them in different contexts you can see and hear different implications.

So, I really don't care if a dude at work says "that's fuckin insane bro" ...to a gnarly kickflip. Or a devastating news article. Insane delineates the magnitude of his emotion. It's out of bounds. Something normies and straights would try to contain, institutionalize, label. Christ, that's juicy. It's why I adore skater boy lingo and teen slang. It's careless and crunchy.

English itself, especially corporate and institutional English, can be a strict, bland, and often abusive language. My fellow autistic homies tend to enjoy a rousing jaunt down into the annals of historical parlance for our everyday linguistic transactions because it's fucking boring, the clinical way we are expected to speak here and now.

So therefore: thanks for your message calling attention to my words and their impact.

There are deeper better more poetic words to call the government and frankly I believe the best ones might be found in other languages.

All in all, you're right that "narcissistic" and "delusional" are not the most accurate, potent words to describe the US government. How to convey the twisted, detached from reality, spirit of that entity best in language, though, I need to expand the lexicon. Maybe using these words is cheap. Maybe it covers over the intentionality and corruption at play.

So I'm going to open this up to some language play - and ask you, anon, and anyone else what words can we find to convey the negative meaning of delusional (detached from truth) and narcissistic (inverted and self concerned to the point of dysfunction), in English? or in another language?

I hope you can take this in good faith not as a deflection but really engaging with your ask.

Being language corrected can trigger my harshest defenses. I can feel in my body all the times someone has punished, invalidated, dismissed something I've said because of using "uncivil" or foul or imperfect language. In general, trying to conform to correct ideological forms of language is like, major wretched, dude.

Hell my dorky ass disingenuous nerd of a brother yesterday called a message I sent the family group chat about Palestine "blasphemous" because I said " my god" and used it as an excuse to delete every impassioned exchange we had so the "children wouldn't see," - him be racist, cough. can't make this shit up.

But that's my background. Catholicism is a mental illness. (Sorry in advance to all mental illness havers for associating you with Catholics)

[yessadirichards]

HealthA lonely nation: Has the notion of the 'American way' promoted isolation across history?

NEW YORK

At the end of “The Searchers,” one of John Wayne’s most renowned Westerns, a kidnapped girl has been rescued and a family reunited. As the closing music swells, Wayne's character looks around at his kin — people who have other people to lean on — and then walks off toward the dusty West Texas horizon, lonesome and alone.

It's a classic example of a fundamental American tall tale — that of a nation built on notions of individualism, a male-dominated story filled with loners and “rugged individualists” who suck it up, do what needs to be done, ride off into the sunset and like it that way.

In reality, loneliness in America can be deadly. This month, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it an American epidemic, saying that it takes as deadly a toll as smoking upon the population of the United States. “Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows," he said, “and that’s not right.”

He cited some potent forces: the gradual withering of longstanding institutions, decreased engagement with churches, the fraying bonds of extended families. When you add recent stressors — the rise of social media and virtual life, post-9/11 polarization and the way COVID-19 interrupted existence — the challenge becomes even more stark.

People are lonely the world over. But as far back as the early 19th century, when the word “loneliness” began to be used in its current context in American life, some were already asking the question: Do the contours of American society — that emphasis on individualism, that spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape — encourage isolation and alienation?

Or is that, like other chunks of the American story, a premise built on myths?

Alexis de Tocqueville, watching the country as an outsider while writing “Democracy in America” in the mid-1800s, wondered whether, “as social conditions become more equal,” Americans and people like them would be inclined to reject the trappings of deep community that had pervaded Old World aristocracies for centuries.

“They acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands,” he wrote. “Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it ... throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

This has been a recurring thread in how Americans perceive themselves. In the age before democracy, for better and for worse, “People weren’t lonely. They were tied up in a web of connections. And in many countries that’s more true than it was in the United States,” says Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.

“There’s this idea that going out into those vast spaces and connecting with the wilderness and escaping the past was precisely what made us Americans," Woodard says.

Yet many frontier myths skip over how important community has been in the settling and growth of the nation. Some of the biggest stories of cooperation — the rise of municipal organizations and trade unions, the New Deal programs that helped drag many Americans out of the Depression in the 1930s, war efforts from the Civil War to World War II — sometimes get lost in the fervor for character-driven stories of individualism.

Those omissions continue. Fueled in part by pandemic distrust, a latter-day strain of individual-over-community sentiment often paired with invocations of liberty and freedom occupies a significant chunk of the national conversation these days — to the point where advocacy about community thinking is sometimes met with accusations of socialism.

Let's not consign Americans to be the heirs of a built-in loneliness gene, though. A new generation is insisting that mental health be part of the national conversation, and many voices — among them women and people of color — are increasingly offering new alternatives to the old myths.

What's more, the very place where the discussion about loneliness is being held today — in the office of the surgeon general, a presidential appointee — suggests that other paths are possible.

The ways Americans perceive themselves as solitary (whether or not it's true) can be seen in their art.

One of the nation's early art movements, the mid-19th-century Hudson River School, made people tiny parts of outsized landscapes, implying both that the land dwarfed humans and that they were being summoned to tame it. From that, you can draw a line straight to Hollywood and director John Ford's Westerns, which used vast landscapes to isolate and motivate humans for the purposes of telling big stories. Same with music, where both the blues and the “ high lonesome sound ” helped shape later genres.

In the suburbs, Betty Friedan's groundbreaking “ The Feminine Mystique " helped give voice to a generation of lonely women. In the city, Edward Hopper's work — like the iconic " Nighthawks ” — channeled urban loneliness. At around the same time, the emergence of film noir — crime and decay in the American city its frequent subject — helped shape the figure of the lonely man alone in a crowd who might be a protagonist, might be an antagonist, might be both.

Today, loneliness plays out on streaming TV all the time in the forms of shows like “Severance,” “Shrinking,” “Beef” and, most prominently, the earnest “Ted Lasso,” a show about an American in Britain who — despite being known and celebrated by many — is consistently and obviously lonely.

In March, the show's creator and star, Jason Sudeikis, appeared with his cast at the White House to talk about the issue that the show is, in its final season, more about than ever: mental health. “We all know someone who has, or have been that someone ourselves actually, that’s struggled, that’s felt isolated, that’s felt anxious, that has felt alone,” Sudeikis said.

Solitude and isolation do not automatically equal loneliness. But they all live in the same part of town. During the pandemic, Murthy’s report found, people tightened their groups of friends and cut time spent with them. According to the report, Americans spent 20 minutes a day with friends in 2020 — down from an hour daily two decades ago. Granted, that was during peak COVID. The trend, though, is clear — particularly among young people ages 15 to 24.

Perhaps many Americans are alone in a crowd, awash in a sea of voices both physical and virtual yet by themselves much of the time, seeking community but suspicious of it. Some of the modernizing forces that stitched the United States together in the first place — commerce, communication, roads — are, in their current forms, part of what isolates people today. There's a lot of space between the general store and Amazon deliveries to your door, between mailing a letter and navigating virtual worlds, between roads that connect towns and freeways that overrun them.

And if Americans can figure out more about what connects and what alienates, some answers to the loneliness epidemic might reveal themselves.

“We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately," Benjamin Franklin, not incidentally the country's first postmaster general, said under very different circumstances. Or perhaps it's put better by the American poet Amanda Gorman, one of the country's most insightful young voices. This is from her poem “ The Miracle of Morning,” written in 2020 during the early part of the pandemic.

“While we might feel small, separate, and all alone,

our people have never been more closely tethered.

Because the question isn’t if we can weather this unknown,

but how we will weather this unknown together.”

[utilitycaster]

I have definitely seen folks upset at Caleb for "going back to the institution that harmed and abused you" and that it is a sign of him still being a nationalist to the empire. The same folks also scoff at the idea of taking CA down from the inside and would like him to burn it all down.

I have another question in my inbox that's a bit more general and I'll answer more at length later this evening but part of how I like to think about this thing is to just ask "why" a whole bunch of times. Like, ok, so Caleb destroys the Cerberus Assembly in a highly destructive fashion. How? Does he survive? If so, how does he survive fights with eight archmages, one of whom is Astrid? Does he become a fugitive of the empire? Where does he go - the Coast and the Dynasty both have a vested interest in keeping the peace with the empire now, and Blightshore has a prominent Cerberus Assembly presence. What does he do after this? What happens if the Empire simply promotes 8 annexes and puts up higher security? How does he handle the idea that the political structure of the empire outside of the Cerberus Assembly remains totalitarian? How does he handle how difficult it will be to ever revisit his home or friends?

For what it's worth I am not opposed to a good revenge arc and I don't always think that you have to dig two graves but this idea just doesn't hold up to even the barest scrutiny of Caleb's story as it existed; at no point was this ever his plan, and for what it's worth, and I deleted this from one of the two posts I made about Caleb and the rest of the Nein's endings, I could in fact see the alternate ending in which Caleb does use the T-dock. I don't think it would be quite as happy or meaningful an ending but I could understand it happening; but the closest we got to any concept of revenge was Caleb angrily admitting that he wished Trent was dead - which is not the same.

I'm often hesitant to call for more nuance because I think a lot of people say "WE NEED MORE NUANCE" when they're actually referring to a need for more context and/or the ability to understand that if you want to have pure wish fulfillment you need to write the story yourself, but this is a case of needing some more nuance in one's understanding of Caleb's deeply complicated relationship with the Empire, tied up in both the fact that it is, despite it all, his home; and that his parents were proud citizens thereof and he, understandably, cannot be remotely objective about his parents and what he as a young man understood to be their feelings and wishes.

Anyway I think it would be funny if people started just going full Root Cause Analysis "ask why/how until you find it" at "fix-it" alternate endings that actually openly suck but that would probably not go over well.

[plus-size-reader]

Somebody Else

Jace Wayland x Plus size!reader

Word Count: 1978 words

Warnings: none

Summary: Clary really hurts Jace after they kiss  which leaves you to pick up the pieces, which doesn’t exactly go how you’d think

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You knew that something was wrong as soon as you saw him in the hallway, stalking around in the dark.

Jace was always moody, but this was something different.

He looked hurt.

It wasn’t a look you were accustomed to seeing on his face, as he normally wore that stoic frown, but you weren’t blind. You could tell that something was definitely wrong, it had to be.

Knowing Jace, it could have been anything, from an argument with Alec to Isabella getting the best of him during training. You couldn't tell right off the bat but unfortunately, even if you asked, he may not ever tell you what happened.

In all the time that you had known him, Jace had always been secretive with his emotions. He didn’t want people to know that he had them, or that they could be exploited, but if you paid close enough attention, you could always tell.

If you were looking, you could read him like a book.

What he was going through might not have been the most obvious with no context clues but if you had to guess, it likely had something to do with Clary.

There was just something about her.

Since she arrived at the institute, Jace had been acting strangely, worrying about what could possibly happen to her and talking more about her than you’d ever heard him talk about anyone in his entire life.

It was obvious that he cared about her, and if something had happened between the two of them, that would more than explain the mood he was in. Even a look from her could make a clear impact on him.

Frankly, there was no telling how bad it could get.

The worst thing was that he probably was going to ignore whatever he was feeling, which would only make it worse.  Jace hated to feel things, no matter how important they were, or how much more difficult it would make it if he buried them.

It just wasn’t who he was.

Still, you knew better than to just let him go on that way like nothing happened. You knew better than to leave him to his own devices, because that would be a disaster. If there was any chance you could make this easier on him, you would.

“What’s going on?” you asked, hoping that he would just tell you the truth, all while knowing that he wouldn’t. He’d been in pretty good spirits since Clary got to the institute but there was no proof of that now.

You hadn’t seen him this upset in a really long time.

“Nothing” came Jace’s grumble in reply. He hoped that you would be in bed by now, already fast asleep, but he would never be so lucky. Of course you were here, after everything else that had gone wrong today, now you wanted to talk.

You always wanted to talk.

Asking was a long shot to begin with, you knew that, but you just hoped he’d be honest with you. You were his best friend, and you loved him, so if something had happened, it seemed like something you should know about.

This was important to you, even if he didn’t want to talk about it.

“Tell that to your face” you sighed, eyeing him incredulously in the way you so often did. You had this way of dealing with him that no one else did, and right now, it wasn’t something he wanted.

All he wanted to do was go back to his room and sit in silence for a while, staring at the wall.

He didn’t want to talk about his feelings, or what had happened between him and Clary. He didn’t want to tell you about how stupid he’d been, thinking that he’d actually have a shot with her. Not only would it be a huge bruise to his ego but you would do that thing you did.

You would tell him that you were sorry, and that it was okay if he was upset. You always supported him, even when he was being an idiot, and right now, it was only going to add insult to injury.

Clary didn’t seem to care whether or not he was there at all.

If she had, that mundane wouldn’t have been in her bedroom to start with. He thought they had something special, but clearly, he was wrong.

No matter what he did, he was never going to measure up to him, and that was something he’d have to come to terms with.

The two of you walked in silence for a while, your plan to go bed long forgotten in exchange for whatever Jace needed. Right now, you didn’t want to leave him alone because no one wanted to be alone when they were upset.

Though, Jace would have surely had you believe that was false.

He wanted nothing more than to be by himself, but if he had to be with anyone right now, he was glad it was you. There was a reason you were so important to him, and a reason you’d been friends for so long.

You didn’t push too hard, but you also didn’t give in completely when he asked for space. It was a good balance, one he felt safe in.

Safe enough to let you in, just a little bit.

“He was in her room” he decided finally, not really explaining much about his situation. It was hardly an explanation at all but at least it was a start. You could build off of that, and it was more than you’d been expecting.

Normally, ‘nothing’ would be all Jace cared to give you when you asked about his feelings.

You had no idea who he was referring to, of course, not at first. However, going off of your Clary assumption, it only tracked that he must have been talking about Simon.

Simon was a mundane, and Clary’s childhood best friend who she seemed to value more than anyone else in the world.

It was no secret to you or the other Shadowhunters that Jace and Simon didn’t have much in common, and they weren’t exactly each other's biggest fans.

Seeing him there must have been difficult for Jace, especially considering how he felt for her.

You couldn’t help but briefly imagine what that must have been like for him, and what it would be like if you were in his shoes. If you had to see Jace and Clary in such a way, it would put you in quite the sour mood too.

You really couldn’t blame him for being so grumpy.

“And you know this because you were going to be...in her room?” you clarified, ignoring the tinge of jealousy in the pit of your stomach at the idea.

You thought that you had come to terms with his feelings for her, as you didn’t have much of a choice, but for some reason, that was much more hard to hear than you’d been expecting.

That reason, of course, being the fact that you were in love with him.

You had been in love with Jace for quite some time, as pathetic as that was, but it wasn’t until Clary showed up that you felt the need to be honest about that. You had kept it a secret for so long, content to bury your feelings as he did, but now that she was here, it was different.

It just wasn’t right.

Jace would do anything for her, and his love knew no bounds but Clary didn’t seem to even notice. Surely she must have noticed how important she was to him, though maybe the difference in his actions wasn’t as obvious to her.

They had just met recently, after all.

She didn’t have much to build off of, not like you did. She didn’t have years and years of getting to know him, and of falling for him in the strongest way. She didn’t see the way his eyes sparkled when he talked to or about her.

She didn’t have any idea just how much he’d fallen for her, but you did.

You could see it, even now as you walked beside him in the dark corridor, how much this new development was hurting him.

“I kissed her, and I thought there was something there but-” he started, only stopping when he realized just how much he’d said. This wasn’t his plan, of course, but he really cared about her.

It hurt to see Simon there, standing in her doorway, and the way she acted afterward did little to make him feel better.

She didn’t even bother to come after him.

It didn’t help that you were so easy to talk to, offering as much support and care as you possibly could without giving him advice he didn’t need, or forcing him to share more than he was comfortable with.

You were the perfect person to open up to, even when he didn’t want to.

“But it hurt to see someone you cared so much for with someone else?” you filled in, going out on a limb to try and get him to share just a little more. Any more insight into what he was going through would help you make it better, or so you hoped.

Really, you were going off of pure instinct right now.

You knew exactly what Jace was going through, not that you would ever admit that to him, because what he was going through was what you had gone through every day since she’d come to your home.

Watching the person you loved fall in love with someone else was worse than anything else you’d ever experienced. It wasn’t a demon to slay or a foe to be vanquished. It was real, and unavoidable, and painful.

There was nothing you could do to change it.

“Yeah, I guess it did” he allowed, thinking back to the way his heart had sank when Simon opened the door, and the way Clary backed away from him as if nothing had been going on the moment before the other male made himself known.

It sucked.

“Maybe it was a misunderstanding, maybe she didn’t know he was there” you tried, not able to bring yourself to make him feel any worse. Even if you didn’t necessarily believe that was the case, you weren’t about to tell him that.

Jace cared about her, a lot, and if she was going to make him happy, you wanted it to work out. It didn’t matter if it would make you unhappy, or if it would be hard for you, because as long as he was happy, that was all you cared about.

He deserved to be happy.

He deserved the world, if that's what he wanted.

“Maybe”

Jace didn’t sound fully convinced, of course, but you didn’t need him to be. All you had to do was get him not to give up on her, to not give up on anything, because then you would be worse off than you started.

He’d really started to open up as of late, and the difference in him was one anyone could see. You didn’t want him to start taking strides backwards because of what had happened tonight.

“Just go see her in the morning, and I’m sure everything will be fine” you smiled, doing a really convincing job of hiding just how much your heart was breaking at the idea of it. Somehow, you had ended up trying to convince the man you loved to be with someone else.

Somehow.

Still, as you considered the way you’d found him, moping around like the world was out to get him, and how he was now, nothing else mattered. If Jace was happy, you were happy, and it was as simple as that.

It had to be.