#personal: research topics

[unoreversecowgirl]

i recognize and acknowledge not everyone likes hasanabi. i understand why people disagree with and even dislike him-

however, as war pushes on against Palestine hasan piker’s coverage remains consistent and intelligent. he knows what he’s talking about, does an incredible job of weeding through propaganda and bogus stories and is actively supporting the people of Palestine.

if you struggle to find sources to trust or don’t know where to start when researching/understanding Israel’s apartheid against Palestine i would suggest watching his clips on youtube.

**if you can’t stomach watching him, i have links to the vid he reacts to that are good for understanding what is happening to Palestine.

***please learn so you can support🇵🇸

[opens-up-4-nobody]

:-P

[nebulotica]

alhaitham be winning the idgaf wars until kaveh ‘ the exception ‘ kshahrewar walks in the door and it’s sooo funny

[cielkie]

idk how this would work in the OIAR bc i just feel like they wouldn’t let anyone from outside look at their files, but i think it would be really funny to have like. a college age researcher show up to the og magnus institute or the OIAR who’s like studying the paranormal or folklore or some shit (cue guy with an actual degree in parapsychology which makes martin shit himself when he tries to start conversation HELPP) who’s just like oh hi guys this is my honors project! :) can i look at some spooky stories? 🤗 and the OIAR/MI staff are like NO. DO NOT LOOK INTO THIS ANY FURTHER RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. but i feel like elias would 100% require that they help this person out, bc he’s evil and he’d want a fear to eat them, and like… it’s just funny to imagine like. the staff trying to keep the true nature of the institute/OIAR away from this totally clueless 22/25 year old and feeding them the silliest statements possible that don’t connect at all to throw them off track so this poor kid is confused and hopefully gives up. but also kinda bittersweet imagining them all coming together to protect a stranger from falling into a world they can no longer escape… the old “it’s too late for me but it’s not too late for you” makes my heart hurt

[catominor]

you ever open a book and start reading and immediately think thaaaat sounds like bullshit

[jrwiyuri]

Will people ever learn that being rude / condescending to people genuinely asking simple questions has never and will not ever be beneficial to activism. It will almost never get people on your side it will always make people dislike you and if people dislike the speaker they will be more likely to dislike the message.

[muffinlance]

After reading the tags on your latest post I was wondering if it would be possible for you to make a brief overview of the iffy tropes/details your sensitivity reader helped you pick up on? Of course it wouldn't replace doing research ourselves, but I'd love to hear about it regardless!

Have not run it by them yet because it is in no fit state for human consumption at this point; the tropes are just from reading their blog + others on Tumblr + general Internet research including the excellent "blind people walk you through normal activities from their perspective" videos on YouTube. But off the top of my head:

Face touching. Where the blind person gropes someone's face to see? Sighted people made that up. I rewrote a chapter in Towards the Sun when I realized that one. Which makes sense, because why would a blind person be any more inclined to run their hands all up in your facial juices. Eww.

Negating blindness with magic and pretty much ignoring the blindness henceforth. Which is why Zuko isn't going to learn to see with firebending. There are very interesting discussions on how Toph herself fits and doesn't fit into this trope; finding them is left as an exercise for the reader.

Token blind character, AKA only having one blind person in the narrative who represents All Blind People. Going to have a few blind NPCs running around, with various levels of sight and accommodations, to thoroughly negate this one.

Being Depressed and/or Overly Inspirational about the blindness. AKA character devotes a large chunk of the story to bemoaning their blindness, with bonus inspirational "overcoming" at the end. Think about how it would feel if the majority of characters like you spent vast word counts hating the thing that makes them like you. And then solving it, in a way you can't, so they don't have to have the tragic fate of Being Like You. ...So Zuko is not getting cured, and he's also not wasting much time wallowing in an angst puddle.

Etc.

Basically, I want this to be a story that low vision folks can read and go "that was fun and less offensive than 70% of actual media representations", and sighted people can go "that was fun and hopefully I internalized some positive things that will make me less likely to grab a blind person's arm and forcibly Help Them Cross The Road, Try To Pet Their Dog (and Get Huffy When Asked to Please Not), or Call People Out On Not Being Blind Because They Don't Fit The Stereotypes".

[marzipanandminutiae]

his wife was like the Serena Joy of this whole operation; I'm not letting her off the hook(ed rug) either

the fact that there's a guy who made up a bunch of bullshit images of Generic English Colonial North America (you know, an entire 200-year span of history covering several distinct regions) that still incorrectly influence our vision of that period

and his name was Wallace Nutting

just. you can't make this stuff up

[popsicle-stick]

I don't know anything about England but I'm interested in how the characters' locations inform their characters like Seward's. I'd like to know more about the implications of being from Purfleet/Essex for example (Though iirc Stoker immigrated from Dublin well into adulthood so I don't know how well he knew all the cities.)

there's so much to be said! i really don't think that stoker meant much intentionally, but the placement of the asylum in purfleet specifically is interesting.

long post so i'm cutting this!

the asylum at purfleet, essex, is an example of the common 19th-early 20th century phenomenon of establishing psychiactric hospitals in the rural counties surrounding london - simultaneously serving as a 'tranquil' location away from the city, while also serving the dubious, cruel purpose of squirelling away would-be patients into residences away from the city - out of society, out of sight, out of mind.

in terms of jack seward himself, purfleet is a kind of an in-between, nothing place - things and people pass through, not much stays. (there's a reason why whitby is remembered as 'the dracula place', and not purfleet.) it's quite literally on the edge of london - of society - and in that scene where jack's looking despondently towards the sun setting west over london, his own isolation becomes palpable - from society and from the world as a whole. the endless, transient, liminal feel of the essex saltmarshes just....gives the vibe. this was a scene that felt particularly gothic to me - jack is the custodian of his very own haunted house, here, in all its bleak, isolated glory.

It was a shock to me to turn from the wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul water, and to realise all the grim sternness of my own cold stone building, with its wealth of breathing misery, and my own desolate heart to endure it all.

this is an fascinating parallel with the count's situation in transylvania, which is NOT the topic du jour here so i'll stop before i ramble but compelling nonetheless! like the count, though, he's a liminal figure - in london, but not quite in london. in the group, but not in the group. alive, but not really living. wide awake in the witching hour, unsure how to re-integrate with society.

it's also worth noting that the opening of dickens' great expectations has pip in his childhood home on the kent marshes - which would pretty much be the opposite bank of the thames from purfleet. in great expectations, pip's village serves a similar role - the quiet, bleak, nowhere-place directly placed against the bustling cosmopolis of london.

in terms of other characters and locations, i've written a bit before about jonathan (and mina possibly) hailing from exeter, devon, in the south west of england - which is much further from london.

jonathan and mina, in terms of the group dynamics, are outsiders: they're very much lower middle class, hyper-aware of the importance of money and societal etiquette as a means for survival and social betterment. this is a personal hc of mine, but i like to think of jonathan as having the long supressed remnants of a devon accent. south west accents are often the subject of a lot of ridicule and mockery in the UK (akin to a southern US accent) and hiding that regionalism, in both the 1890s and today's britain, would be a means of survival and progress for him - i think the fact that he's always given a standard home counties RP accent in adaptations cuts out a major aspect of his character. he's a devon boy!

in contrast to all this, lucy's hampstead residence shows her affluence. it, too, at risk of breaking my social isolation metaphor, was on the edge of london at the time - but was known more as a wealthy suburb with huge areas of greenery at hampstead heath and highgate. there's something to be said, though, about a place like highgate cemetery - a liminal place between the dead and the living, between city and country, haunted at night by a vampire - and the same could be said for purfleet.

arthur is hard to pin down - for the life of me i CANNOT work out where 'ring' is supposed to be - at first i thought it might be a shortening for ringwood, hampshire, which could work! but i just don't know. his character does scream privileged southern/home counties though, and if anyone has any followups on 'ring' and its wherabouts i would LOVE to know because this has been bugging me for ages. lmao

tl;dr, psychology and sociology as informed by place is SO fucking fascinating to me like it just. it affects so much. from the liminality of certain places lending themselves to the supernatural, to characters being mirrored by their surroundings and vice versa, to the social implications of where you call home. it's just!!! interesting!!

[filia-floris]

An attempt to not forget about the sketchbook

The doodles are better as always

[gender-euphowrya]

spell of explode all transphobes Activate

[skitskatdacat63]

Here is a badly drawn comic of my terrible, awkward group project experience from yesterday. I thought it was very absurd so I wanted to share it other people lol :)

Let me know, how do you find their conduct 😭

[fitzrove]

[shaking and biting] but what does it MEAN. what does it SAY what is the THEME

[uncanny-tranny]

how old were you when you started testosterone? i want to start before i’m 18 so i don’t have to deal with that while applying to/starting college. i want to have it all figured out by the time i leave home. i thought 16 would be a good age because i also want to start while i’m in high school so i can catch up to the other boys and pass better. but my mom has been reading studies and she says it interrupts brain development and doesn’t want me starting hormones until i’m at least 18. but i don’t know if i can make it that long and i really don’t want to have to wait.

I started when I was an adult since it can be simpler, so I don't know on that end if it will be easy for you.

However, it is odd to me to say it will interrupt brain development as though hormones can stop your brain's development. Your brain will still develop, and indeed, it will continue to do so even after you are over eighteen. I won't contest that hormones might alter your brain in the way it responds to stimuli, but it won't be stunted. Like... you've already got testosterone in your body, and what HRT does it raise those levels to what is more "typical" as if you were a cisgender, perisex (i.e., not intersex) man.

Here's a 2020 metastudy I found about this if you want to read on your own, which includes studies done on those seeking both testosterone and estrogen treatment.

Much of these discussions are hindered by small sample sizes. However, with data, it seems as though hormone treatment isn't drastically reducing cognitive abilities, as much as I've seen people act as though it does. Your brain will continue to develop well after any puberty because that's what brains do. Hormones can surely influence your brain, but it is not like it will kill it.

[aphantimes]

idk if anyone else thinks about this but i headcanon that whatever language the knuckles clan spoke would have changed a lot while they were isolated to angel island

the group that went to form and live on angel island had been alone up there for 3000 years, that's more than enough time for the language to evolve until it's probably unintelligible to what was spoken back on the surface.

and if we take into account that a part of their population also stayed on the surface for an unknown amount of time, the two groups may have developed the language in very different directions

if knuckles knows the language at all, what he speaks would be a completely unique dialect found only on angel island

[eenochian]

it’s very funny how this fandom suddenly cares so much about sensitivity, meanwhile no one was up in arms about folks calling valeria shit like “cartel mommy” and simping for her. and, if you point this out, you get told that it’s “less important” or incomparable. way to tell victims of cartel violence that they don’t matter. y’all can’t preach about sensitivity and mindfulness while doing the exact opposite of that.

sensitivity is something that needed to be brought up a long time ago. people need to be mindful about the content they’re engaging with and producing. COD and its characters are based on very real issues and very real situations, mindfulness is needed for every single character.

seeing this only be brought up in the context of makarov and graves is honestly so, so frustrating. they’re not the only problematic characters that you need to consider when making content. western militaries like the US and UK are incredibly controversial and have devastated vulnerable people and their countries. price, ghost, soap, gaz— any member of the military, especially the special forces, is problematic. they’re not good people and should not be treated like saints, nor should they be idolized for what they do.

that all being said, the concepts of “be mindful and sensitive when making content” and “let people enjoy problematic media” can absolutely, 100%, co-exist. art is not meant to be a paradigm of moral goodness, it has always been a medium for people to explore things that are considered "taboo" in a safe space. there's a reason why "dead dove: do not eat" exists as a genre – with proper warning and precautions put in place, people can explore darker topics. for some, it's morbid interest. for others, it's a way of coping with trauma and experiences they've had in real life.

i want to repeat this just to make it very clear: be mindful and sensitive with the content you're producing. do not romanticize topics that should not be painted in a good light. don't minimize the impact of characters' actions or act like people are in the wrong for being uncomfortable with them. in this fandom especially, people treat atrocities like jokes because we're becoming desensitized to them. it's up to every individual to ensure that they don't forget how impactful a lot of this stuff is in real life. war is not a joke. terrorism is not a joke. people dying is not a joke. do not romanticize any of these things in your content, even if you're exploring the different sides of the people behind these things.

humanize the characters all you want. horrible people are still people, after all. humans are not one-dimensional beings. humanize them, but do not romanticize them.

be kind to victims, be sensitive, and be mindful about what you engage with. no one is perfect, no thing is perfect, but we can always do better. we need to approach every topic through this lens instead of picking and choosing who to support. everyone is deserving of it, everyone is entitled to basic respect. we don't need to compete and argue over who has it worse, we just need to be better across the board. support real victims. don't let media warp your perceptions of reality. be conscious of the content you make and consume.