#sign language puns are visual

[jesncin]

Ma'al: can I ask about the menu please?

The bartender J'onn has a crush on: the men I please are none of your business.

J'onn: * blushes and looks away *

Ma'al: * suspicious *

this is a great joke with a crucial flaw! Ma'al, as someone with a speech disability, can't vocally say "menu please" ("menu" and "please" are two distinct signs in ASL). So with that in mind it would probably go something like this:

:p

[imfineitsfineeverythingsfine]

Communication and a Question for the Fandom

I started this off thinking I would end up with one conclusion and I actually found myself changing it by the end. I’ve read a lot frustration with the ineffable husbands and their lack of communication. “You don’t ever talk to each other" and "You never say what you’re really thinking.”

Now, that may be true. But also, throughout both seasons, we have seen repeatedly how they have been under surveillance too. 

Not just visual

But audio as well… Sign in Hell: Be Careful What You Say. But there’s more to the sign itself. I just can’t make it out. It’s not a sign that’s featured in the extras either, which is also interesting. 

What I could find though, in the The Devil in the Details X-Ray video was a little more of the sign, but I still can’t make out what the rest of it says:

Which brings in my Question for the Fandom. If anyone else is able to make out rest of this, I’d be interested. (This was around the 2:05 timestamp)

Moving on, that’s not the only *Clue* about their surveillance either. We know about Hell using electronics as a means of communication. They just cut in to whatever happens to be playing at the time, right? Radio, tv, Saturday Morning Funtime… so it would make sense that they’d use it to listen too. Is the Bookshop any safer, being an embassy for Heaven and all?

And it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how either side is listening in. We all remember this interaction but really… played as a joke but what if it wasn’t? Or maybe they just hadn’t figured out the specifics yet at that point.

Maybe there are certain “trigger words.” We see the reactions when Crowley is called “nice.” 

Crowley tells Aziraphale to “shut up” numerous times. We hear both them say “don’t say that” a lot. 

But also…

Closed captioning capitalized it just like that. Interesting. (If you haven’t watched the show with cc on, I recommend it)

What does this all mean? They just don’t talk to each other? Well, no. Not necessarily. We’ve also seen them find ways around directly speaking too.

Writing it down. (Which was promptly burned)

Aziraphale mouthing “Trust Me” during the bullet catch. Could they have had other short hands or code words? Emergency contingency plans? I personally imagine so. Side note: could they have also been using alcohol (laudanum) as cover for plausible deniability? 

“Safe spaces”? The backroom in the Bookshop that they kept going to for private conversations. We know they had alternative rendezvous locations in the first season too – the old bandstand, the number 19 bus, and the British Museum café. 

The Final Fifteen. I don’t want to take away from the emotion of the scene and I think Season 3 (come on Prime!) give us the rest of the story. I have faith in Neil Gaiman (pun sort of intended). But I will propose that the kiss may have been not only Crowley’s plead but also a misdirect or signal or other way to communicate between the two that we have yet to understand. In the end, Aziraphale was able to get the Metatron to break and divulge that the next step of the Great Plan was the Second Coming…before even leaving Earth…which was pretty impressive in itself. Was Aziraphale then able to relay anything to Crowley before the elevator? Sendarya’s video here does a great job with that very question (and others).

Most experts agree that 70-93% of communication is nonverbal and when communicating emotions, applying the 7-38-55 rule. Meaning only 7% through spoken word, 38% tone of voice, and 55% through body language. So maybe they’re not doing so bad after all. Those are just my thoughts and we’ll just have to wait and see and hope.

[starwarsmum]

Almost forgot it was Wednesday! So, chapter 4 of Introducing: Mousinette

Marinette stared at the architecture in the entry hall, fingers twitching with the urge to sketch a new dress idea. She barely registered Penny chattering to Dick and Babs, as she ran a hand along one of the banisters. 

She did notice, however, when Jagged launched himself at her, knocking her off her feet. He caught her up, twirling her around as he cackled. They were only interrupted when the butler, Alfred, announced that the others were waiting in the dining room, and that dinner was ready to be served.

As she entered the dining room, she tried to place faces to the names Babs had given her in the months they had been chatting. The tall man with the white streak in his hair was easily identified as Jason, which meant the one cradling a mug was probably Tim. There was a woman with black hair sitting quietly and watching her back, and a blonde who was chatting animatedly with Tim. Cass and Steph, as Babs had said that Cass was more comfortable with sign language than spoken words.

Which left a tall Arab boy, who had slicked back black hair. He was glaring at everyone else in the room, a haughty expression crossing his face as she met his eyes. They were a startling green, but he turned away abruptly, a slight sneer on his mouth.

Marinette bristled immediately. She had had enough of snooty rich people to last her a lifetime. She had learned how to hold her own against them - after all, the only thing evil requires is that good people do nothing. She had been goddamn Ladybug, she had wielded nearly all of the Miraculous at once as Multimouse and she would be damned if she let this stuck-up pretty boy snub her.

She sat down in the empty seat next to the boy and chirped a ‘hello’. She then proceeded to ignore him in favour of the quiet woman with the dark hair. She made sure to be warm and friendly to everyone else, making jokes and sharing her own anecdotes, but became inconveniently deaf when he made his own statements.

They moved to a parlour after the meal, Jagged insisting that they play games. It led to an argument as to whether they should play video games (Marinette said yes) or the classic of charades (Dick was overly enthusiastic for that one). Unfortunately, Dick won that argument which meant they started picking teams. 

Being the last one to be picked, Marinette was forced onto Damian's team - Dick was weirdly insistent that ‘lil D’ join in and be a team captain. Before they got started, their father, Bruce, said he needed to speak with Alfred about something and it couldn't wait, which left the group to chat and crack jokes.

“Those desserts were incredible, by the way, Mari,” Barbara said, smiling over at the girl. “I almost wish I'd told you to leave them at mine so I didn't have to share.”

“Aww, Babs, you don't mean that! After all, you'd never want to cause me pain,” Dick chortled, using the French pronunciation. He had been delighted to hear that Marinette grew up in a bakery, and clearly he was ready to start in on the infamous puns. Marinette rolled her eyes and groaned. 

“Dick, if you tell another bread pun, I will find a toothpick so that I can poke your eyes out and serve them on a brioche,” she said, voice completely level, her expression serious. “And that is not an invitation to tell other puns. Repeat after me: we can do better than awful wordplay to make our friends and family laugh.”

“Ouch, what a visual! Well, I certainly don't want to croissant you!” He grinned as she leapt from her seat, shoving her finger into his face. Barbara cheered her on as she proceeded to make him cross eyed in an attempt to keep her finger in sight.

The joke, of course, was that he should have been watching her other hand, which took hold of his foot and shoved him roughly off the back of the seat he was perching on. He squawked, catching himself with his hands and righting himself with a back spring. The room erupted in laughter, except for the brooding boy who merely made a loud click with his tongue and called them both children.

Marinette responded by sticking her tongue out and turning away from him. She complained loudly to Barbara and Penny that she wished she'd known there would be awful baking puns, because she never would have come if she had. This made Dick gasp loudly, placing a hand to his chest and pouting.

When she finally left, many hours later, Marinette had charmed all but one of the inhabitants at the manor. She gave them all warm goodbyes, promising to come back and see them during her two week holiday. On the way back to the apartment, she leaned back in her seat, feeling tiredness wash over her again.

She woke briefly to stumble into the apartment and into her room before passing out on the bed. But two nights of good sleep was too much for her, and she woke just past 2am, wide awake. If she had been in Paris, she would have transformed and done a route past the Eiffel Tower but, in Gotham? She couldn't risk the connection, especially as she had shared quite a lot about the situation with Barbara.

So, instead, she slipped quietly out of the apartment via a fire escape, and made her way to the roof. She scouted the rooftop before settling on a ledge, a sketchbook in her lap. She had been itching to design since she had arrived, and in the quiet she finally felt settled enough to allow her need to create.

She would have stayed there until morning, but after half an hour late she was interrupted by the thud of boots hitting the roof. She glanced around to see two of Gotham's vigilantes gazing curiously down at her.

“Um, hi,” she said, waving feebly up at them. “Nice night for some hero work."

“...sure,” the one with the red helmet said. She had done research on the vigilantes before, of course she had, she was planning to go to university here. But it had been a while since she had reviewed her notes and she couldn't remember the blasted names. “Is everything alright, miss? It's unusual to see other people on roofs at this time of night.”

“Oh, right, I'm fine,” she said cheerfully, waving her sketchbook to explain. The other vigilante leaned forward and she caught a glimpse of a garish yellow, like green and circus red. This one she remembered. Hard to forget the vigilante who voluntarily dressed as a traffic light. He scrutinised her book, before turning his face back to hers. The whited out lenses of their masks made her feel uneasy - the Miraculous magic made it rare for her not to be able to see her teammates' eyes. “I fell asleep earlier than I meant to this evening and when I woke…”

“I see,” Robin said, though Marinette had the sinking suspicion that they both thought she was crazy. She could hear how carefully he chose his next words. “It would be helpful if you could take yourself back inside.”

“Thank you for your advice, but I am happy where I am,” Marinette said pleasantly, which made the one with the helmet snort. When Robin scowled, she merely smirked up at him, refusing to back down. “You are not the first little hero to try and intimidate me, and you don't even have magic powers.” A lie, it had always been villains and akuma victims who had tried to scare her, but that seemed like an unnecessary amount of information.

“You make a habit of getting on the wrong side of heroes and vigilantes?” Robin said, and Marinette was sure that if she could, she would see a raised eyebrow. He seemed like the kind of guy who would do that. She remained sitting out of stubbornness but waved a hand. She could almost feel him bristling at the dismissal. “I do not know what you think you know of Gotham but you should not be out on rooftops at night.”

“But you are allowed?” She gave him a raised eyebrow of her own. She took a moment to re-centre herself, realising that she had become overly snarky. “Never mind, I'm sorry. I had…an overwhelming evening, I hurt a friend by accident and spent  the remainder of the night with strangers. I was using the quiet up here to clear my mind, but if you think it unsafe, I shall return to my room.”

Apparently startled by her sudden shift, Robin shared a glance with his teammate. Said teammate shrugged but didn't say anything and the silence stretched on a beat too long to be comfortable. She stood and reached her arms skyward, careful not to drop her sketchbook over the edge of the building.

She could hear the other vigilante - what was his name? It was going to irritate her until she found out - murmur something and Robin made a tutting noise. She chose to ignore them both in favour of paying attention to the fire escape. She was well past her clumsiest days but when she was nervous, she tended to fumble a lot more. And two vigilantes, watching her climb down after she sassed them? Nerve-wracking.

Tikki buzzed up to her as she slid back into her room quietly. She held her fingers to her lips and ushered the Kwami out of sight. 

Back up on the roof, Red Hood glanced at Robin who shrugged and moved silently away from the fire escape. They had stopped because it was unusual to see anyone out at night, but it had been Robin's choice to move closer when he had recognised the girl from earlier that evening.

“Well that was weird,” Red Hood said, his delivery deadpan, but Robin could hear the vague amusement. “She's an odd one, do you think O knows about her tendency to wander the rooftops?”

“Tt, how would I know that?” Robin retorted, running an eye over the skyline. “She did not seem quite as compliant earlier in the evening - I anticipated her refusing to vacate the roof, at least for as long as we were here. Nightwing did mention the unpleasant interaction Oracle experienced with her earlier, that could be contributing.”

“She's a cute little thing, huh,” Red Hood continued, his voice taking on a teasing quality that Robin did not understand. Deciding that he did not want to understand he ignored the remark, which made the other man sigh for some unfathomable reason. “Come on, dude, you have to have noticed she's pretty. Isn't that the reason you were so wound up tonight?”

“I do not know what you are referring to. If I was uncomfortable during dinner, it was because we had unknown individuals in attendance, one of which behaved far too much like Nightwing. As for her appearance, I do not think my opinion is relevant and therefore shall not be sharing it. It is late, I shall be returning to the batcave and then to sleep. Try not to get yourself killed between here and your home, Hood.”

Robin left Red Hood behind, ignoring the exasperated sigh and complaints that issued from his comms. What did it matter if he did not behave around this girl as other boys his age? He was far superior to others his own age, and so that was to be expected. 

And so he endured the teasing from various members of his family as he always did when they introduced him to females his own age. But it was a relief when he reached the batcave and was able to turn off his comms, silencing their comments. Pennyworth was the only one bar his father who did not reference the young woman, for which he was grateful to the man.

Even his dreams seemed plagued by the girl with the dark hair and an almost intriguing fire burning in her eyes. When he woke the next day, he wondered if she had somehow placed a spell on him that made it impossible not to think of her, although it very well may have been more to do with the fact that his family would not stop talking about her.

Over the next few days, he learned random facts about her - she was a native Parisian, she was not Jagged Stone's blood related niece, she was planning to attend Gotham University…he would not admit it, but he was intrigued by the tidbits that slipped from his brothers. Grayson in particular seemed to be spending more time with her as she was friends with Gordon.

He hoped that when she returned to Paris, he would be able to put her fully out of his mind.

[skzoologist]

Dal Bae (Stray Kids) Profile

Stage Name: Dal (달) Birth Name: Bae Dal (裵달) English Name: Isaac Bae Position: Dancer, Vocalist, Visual Birthday: December 8, 1998 Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius Height: 191 cm (6’3”) Blood Type: O- MBTI Type: ISFJ Representative Animal: Otter Unit: Dance Racha, Vocal Racha Instagram: @bae8dal Spotify: Stray Kids’ Glacial Prince’s Favorites

Dal Facts:

-He was born in Sejong, South Korea.

-When he was young, he and his family moved to Seoul.

-He is an only child.

-He only ever lived in South Korea, but he has Swedish relatives, who visit regularly.

-He graduated from Apgujeong High School.

-He didn’t start professionally dancing or singing until he was recruited.

-His nickname given by his fans: Glacial Prince; his nicknames given by the members: Icy Prince, The Noodle, Moonlight.

-He said he became an idol because performing felt freeing, and he wanted to make others feel like that too.

-He was a trainee for 4 years.

-He said his charming point is the shape of his eyes while smiling, something the members keep telling him repeatedly.

-He can speak English and Japanese well.

-His hobbies are drawing, playing games, watching anime or reading stories.

-He’s good at drawing, but not so much at painting, something Hyunjin denies.

-He has his drivers license.

-He sometimes helps 3RACHA with the production of songs.

-His favourite season is winter.

-He loves rainy and stormy days.

-He has a beauty mark next to the left side of his lips.

-There is a small, black mole in the iris of his right eye.

-He has flexible joints.

-According to Dance Racha, he is the most flexible of them all, granting him the ability to perform more dangerous dance moves safely.

-He doesn’t have any pets, but loves to play with the other members’, whenever he meets them.

-He was the first to remember Lee Know’s cat's names, all 3 of them.

-He said he has no favourite colour.

-His favourite food is tteokbokki.

-His favourite desserts are walnut cookies.

-Before being recruited, he was learning to become a doctor, but he said he realised that wasn’t his calling.

-His dad being a doctor, he was taught by him to become one as well from an early age, which explains the medical knowledge he shows whenever he’s helping the members or staff members.

-According to Chan, he has the habit of coddling the members, their leader included.

-He can move his eyebrows separately, much like another member, Lee Know.

-He can also roll up his tongue.

-According to Hyunjin, he doesn’t spend a lot of time online, except when looking at art made by fans.

-He said he likes to wear darker coloured clothes, usually on the sophisticated side; but he likes the cooler styled clothes that the company chooses for him to wear too.

-He is often called the secret sibling of Hyunjin, because of their similarities: their visuals, love for art, incredible and unique dance styles amongst other things.

-He loves bad jokes and puns.

-He is soft-spoken, usually quietly looking over the others according to Lee Know.

-According to the others, he sometimes gets overwhelmed by their energy and loudness, needing to take a quick break.

-His anxious habits are tugging on his ears or the base of his hair.

-According to Felix, he is the perfect link between Hyunjin and the Gym Racha in their dorm, because while he does work out regularly, he still enjoys art.

-He regularly gets migraines.

-Things he’d like doing during his vacation: taking a break from all the work and chaos, being alone for a bit

-Things he dislikes doing during his vacation: spending it sick and worrying his members

-According to Chan, he helps everyone out too much sometimes, to the point of over-exhausting himself.

-He admitted that he regularly thinks in all 3 languages he speaks fluently, after the members revealed that sometimes he answers them in a weird mix of those languages.

-He has his members saved in his phone by nicknames, usually involving puns, according to Seungmin.

-He revealed that shortly after he was recruited, he was approached by several other companies, searching for models, actors and idols too.

-He is friends with Yunho from ATEEZ.

-He is also friends with Hueningkai from TXT and his sister, Bahiyyih from Kep1er.

-He can be sometimes spotted with ITZY members, being good friends with Chaeryeong.

-He gets easily flustered, something every member takes advantage of frequently.

-In the old dorm, he used to share a room with I.N and Han.

-According to Han, he likes falling asleep to music, prioritising Ghibli Studio OSTs.

-According to the others, he is the first one to drop everything he’s doing to get to the others, if they are sick or in need of help.

-His role at the dorms is to look out for the members in any way needed.

-If he wasn’t in Stray Kids, he would be a doctor or a voice actor.

-His role models are his mother, father and SUGA.

-His motto: “Trying is not failing”.

[meanypunches]

Is Camille Paglia’s “Decadence” a type of horror in modern society?

Her takedown of Kafka and the early Romantic poets starts with Wordsworth, who “wants nature without sex” and sparked a “movement in modern literature leading to . . . Kafka’s crippled cockroach”, a literary invention that “forfeits maleness for spiritual union with mother nature: wholeness through self-mutilation.” (pp. 300-301) I never thought of Kafka as a metaphorical eunuch, but then again Paglia makes the same charge of James Joyce, whom she lumps together with Henry James, “a eunuch-priest of the mother goddess.” (p. 49) Paglia traces this line of emasculated malcontents back to Rousseau and his ideas such as the ‘noble savage’. To large degree I agree with her about Rousseau, who I’ve read also inspired Pol Pot. However, sometimes I find her ideas about maleness a bit trifling, almost like her entire argument rests on a straw man (haha pun intended). Certainly most writers don’t live normal lives any more than serial killers do. It strikes me as paradoxical that Paglia would like to describe poetry and art in terms of sexual virility, yet she would have us believe that mother nature demands that her priests be castrated. Still it occurs to me I have misunderstood Paglia. She is essentially a real pagan, insofar as any materialist can worship anything, and insofar as paganism exists in modern society through ripples in the art subsystem, popular ‘new age’ movements, and even via remnants in Catholicism. G. K. Chesterton made a similar point about Catholicism being most of what’s left of paganism, which I would say includes folklore. Modern folklore would include cinema and other forms of pop culture.

It seems to me though, that Paglia would love to travel back to the time when art lived in “magic circles . . . sacred spaces . . . [and] sexualized spasms of creation”. (p. 328) She posits a rear guard action of premodern paganism against modern society, a “war between vision and language”, (p. 339) waged across an enchanted battlefield haunted by the godlike forms of Apollo and Dionysus, the spirits of Nefertiti and Emily Dickinson, all bound in ritual service to the demigods and demigoddesses of ‘Iconos’, Hollywood, and perhaps even ancient mystery cults reborn as the castrati of ‘the deep State’. Then you take a breath and remember that art is just another differentiated subsystem of modern society, with no more weight than politics, law, science, religion, or even sports. The pagan cinema may rule the western eye, but the written word still controls the western courtroom and the electoral college. At least that’s what you tell yourself. Even Luhmann called out modern distinctions as “illusion” now and again. The written word ironically enough does appear to still govern scholarship, but Paglia argues that the written word too can be Dionysian. (discussing Wilde p. 562 and Whitman p. 604) Certainly the word appears necessary to explain the image. Even folklore must be spoken to survive in meaningful form. Some visual arts exist in folkloric crafts, sigils, signs and dance, but meaning remains confined to the word no matter how many Amish barn hexes are photographed. Cinema which can be visual storytelling is perhaps the best example she’s got of the image as meaning, but this book isn’t really about cinema, and besides, do all of these oicotypes on the screen actually support her argument or would she be forced to cherry pick?

Regardless, I would call her a boxer, a fighter, an Amazon as she might admit but most of all a terrorist in the sense that she is a terroristic thinker. For anyone who studies academic communication this should come as no surprise as academics are in the business of erasing modern distinctions as it suits them, so long as their own professional distinctions remain intact. The terroristic thinker like an actual terrorist seeks to destroy modern distinctions but with metaphorical bombs aka words. Paglia leads with a Molotov cocktail from Egypt, then a letter bomb from the Greek theater, and then she heads for the central bank of the humanities, aka poetry and literature, to read the entrails of her hostages.

She has definitely given us something to chew, a bloody piece of chthonian meat, but will the gorgons of ancient empires or even the silver screen turn us all to stone? Paglia does hint at this separation between art and life when she says “Greek tragedy is a conceptual cage in which Dionysus, founder of theater, is caught.” This has been said about horror movies too, well before this book was written even, by film critics also influenced by Freud, speaking in context of ‘the return of the repressed’, and Paglia largely agrees when she says that “[a] play is an anxiety-formation freezing . . . barbaric Protean energy.” (p. 101) It is easy to see the Bacchae as a horror or disaster movie. I am reminded of how prominently the Bacchae features in My Dinner with Andre, a film also about the battle between society and nature. Andre Gregory would likely agree with Euripides’s assessment of a society in its “late or decadent phase”. (p. 102) Dionysus, like the horror film boogeymen of our own age, represents “the return of the repressed, the id . . . bursting from bondage.” (p. 103) Andre Gregory’s idea to use the actual head of a human cadaver in his production of the Bacchae seeks to sever the modern (‘decadent’?) distinctions between theater and life, performance and consummation, society and nature. Like terrorists both ancient and modern, Dionysus destroys distinctions and tears apart differentiation, or as Paglia says, “dissolves the Apollonian borderlines between objects and beings.” (p. 103)

Last I checked, military weapons also perform this function in modern society, both because of and irregardless of their ‘hard Apollonian edge’. This is another paradox that Pagalia does not approach directly, the idea that the hard modern edge actually destroys itself, as part of its autopoietic function, in order to allow space for ‘the individual’. As other commentators such as Matteo Pasquinel have argued in discussing the “uncanny . . . neurological traumas [of] the alien hand . . . first described by the German-Jewish neurologist Kurt Goldstein in 1908” (see Pasquinel’s article “The Alien Hand of the Technosphere. Kurt Goldstein and the Trauma of Intelligent Machines”, available at Academia.edu), trauma itself could be a part of society, a source of identity and even growth for the individuals caught up in society’s web. “The Bacchae [like Andre Gregory’s avant-garde pretensions] deconstructs western personality.” (p. 104)

Andre Gregory is surprised that his privately commissioned personal flag ends up including the Tibetan swastika; he is careful to stress its less sinister quality as “not the Nazi swastika . . . one of the most ancient Tibetan symbols”, yet he continually brings up his subtle connections (social and psychological) to Nazism. If you read his autobiography Gregory accuses his own father of having been a Nazi collaborator. Furthermore, he mentions in the autobiography his avant-garde theater company had connections to the CIA among its board members. The hydra of MK Ultra and its attendant conspiracy tales rears its many heads, a modern gorgon that has given form to American conspiracy folklore since the sixties. The paradox is also a distinction, order/chaos, and order thus also includes chaos or the Dionysian power to disorder someone’s mind. Disinformation or counterintelligence is specifically relevant, but always must contain some truth to do its work.

In context of the academic coding ‘true/false’, Paglia’s book then to me appears something of a tangled mess but perhaps it is meant to be. Paglia draws lines such as between distinctions like ‘image/word’, and then scribbles over them hastily in places, revising her theory as she goes. There are some inconsistencies here that serve her terroristic ends. Terror in its political sense, and horror in its theatrical, like tragedy I would agree with Paglia, “springs from the clash between Apollo and Dionysus” (p. 104) or one could say the conflict between order and disorder. The classical horror narrative always cycles through safety and security (order), to threat (disorder), and back to order again. (see Monsters and Mad Scientists by Andrew Tudor) Andre Gregory and his pet avant-garde (again perhaps so delicately shepherded by the CIA in both its board connections and top secret LSD experiments) would like to let Dionysus out of his cage, even if still keeping the (lower case) god on a leash. Niklas Luhmann’s riposte to all of this is that order/disorder still functions to maintain society, its autopoietic ebb and flow like nature itself, now beyond the ability of individuals to control. “Individualism and self-realization as a model” (p. 10) may easily become decadence, is what Paglia suggests and even celebrates, but without order there can be no decay. A living system or ‘nature’ has its own order that perhaps the acolytes of Dionysus are too blind to fully describe. Though Paglia never mentions him, I would say that as Jack Kerouac pointed out (more or less), decay is a part of the life of human systems like cities, society, or empire.

Paglia favors pagan empires over Christian ones, and prefers “ritual orgy” to “street carnival”. (p. 138) Her idea here could be only that ‘ritual’ is more honest than ‘carnival’. “Religion, ritual, and art began as one,” (pp. 28-29) but of late our society is differentiated as Niklas Luhmann points out. ‘Invisible hierarchies’ may be constructed to replace the premodern ‘visible’ hierarchies of the ancient world, Paglia is telling us, and with that I think Luhmann would agree. “Freedom makes new prisons.” (p. 235) Apparently modern society can repress the pagan rituals only so much as they will always resurface in the dreams and fantasies of society, aka cinema and folklore. However in a differentiated society is this such a big deal?

Just rewatching the classic 80s action flick Highlander which has a brilliant fade out from the hero’s face to a mural of the Mona Lisa on the side of a skyscraper in New York City. Paglia calls the Mona Lisa a kind of totem in the art world, “the premiere sexual persona of western art”,(p. 154) which functions as “an apotropaion, a charm to ward off evil spirits, like the giant eye painted on the prows of ancient ships. (p. 49) The Mona Lisa to Paglia presides “over her desolate landscape . . . a gorgoneion, staring hierarchic of pitiless nature.” (p. 49) The immortal catch phrase from Highlander of ‘there can be only one!’ might as well be the battle cry of every sperm on its way to the egg. The immortals here seek to decapitate all the other contenders. Alan Dundes the folklorist points out that decapitation is a substitute in stories for the motif of castration. This story then softens the harsh realities of nature for a wider audience perhaps. The story told in the film is of the efforts of an immortal few to civilize the barbarism of earlier ages. The crude and premodern Highlander calls the civilized Ramirez a “Spanish peacock”, to which Ramirez replies that he’s originally Egyptian, a detail I find intriguing in reflection of Paglia’s argument. Vampires too in the popular imagination can always be traced back to Egypt (see Anne Rice, The Hunger, etc.), and the immortals in Highlander are also compared to vampires. Also the bit about “holy ground” which is a traditional no-conflict zone that none of the immortals will violate, even the evil, barbaric antagonist, the Kurgan. I’m sure Paglia would make much of the scene where the Kurgan jokingly says “Mom” in mock affection to his carjacking victim. Yet this bit of folklore cannot escape a moral view. One can say it is merely ‘quasi-Christian’, a global universalism perhaps, with Churches still considered holy and assuming as it does a super nature without speculating much about the origins of this “kind of magic”. The “prize” here is a single unifying mind to guide humanity (a kind of monotheism?!). The failure of the heroic Highlander to secure this ‘treasure’ would be to leave this power in the hands of the Kurgan, an evil (Dionysian) force opposed to all decent, reasonable and humanitarian ends, i.e. antisocial in every sense, and with this I think Paglia would agree, that society creates these distinctions to protect the weak.

However, Paglia’s idea is that these good intentions are illusory, or at least ‘on the road’ to somewhere entirely unintended. Always underneath the good intentions of society, there is a destructive darkness, she would say. As a social systems theorist might say, there is no perfect system. “Every road from Rousseau leads to Sade” is Paglia’s Nietzschean gauntlet cast down at the feet of modern pieties. (p. 14) She points out correctly that in movies we can also see this in the example of “the femme fatale [who] reappears, as a return of the repressed”. (p. 13) In communication one can only observe what is not discussed as an ‘unmarked space’ according to Luhmann, and Paglia makes a similar observation when she says “what is not said presses upon what is.” (pp. 615-16) So each communication one could say ‘represses’ that which it does not discuss, an inevitable result of the reduction in complexity necessary for communication to occur. (This is perhaps one reason why autopoietic communication may never stop—there is always something left out of the previous system operation.) I’m surprised that so far Paglia doesn’t address directly the possibility that horror movies are a modern version of Sade. Of course she mentions pornography, but reading her descriptions and quotations from Sade, I was struck forcefully with the connection between Sade’s writings and body horror. Sade was perhaps an aristocratic version of Ed Gein, at least on paper. Too bad Tobe Hooper never made a movie about the French Revolution. Again, I had to repeatedly remind myself that despite the bombastic and nearly apocalyptic tone of this book, it is mostly about the art subsystem.

I suppose after awhile it appears to me this is also about a moment in our own contemporary history, the rise of gay rights, feminism, and the impact on our society of these movements. Paglia is a defender of “Decadence”, which she equates with “aestheticism”, (p. 512) and ultimately she connects these concepts to the creativity of both modern (differentiated) society and specifically the art subsystem. Paglia apparently has no concept directly equivalent to system differentiation and I would say she goes too far when she claims that “Romanticism freed art from society and Christianity”. (p. 513) So for Paglia, writing within the academic subsystem, she would describe the differentiated subsystem of art as “freed”. It makes sense to me that an academic would say that, but is it accurate? Certainly modern society has a place to stash its decadence, and no erstwhile Oscar Wildes will be thrown in gaol (aside from perhaps in a few extreme national segments within the global order that still entertain such a possibility). At least many artists continue to believe in the heresy that ordinary rules of society do not apply to them. A true Romantic might argue that Oscar Wilde’s power derives paradoxically and in some small part from his persecution. Niklas Luhmann argues that segmentation (such as into different national jurisdictions in the legal system) can facilitate global social system evolution by increasing variety and I would think the same holds true for differentiation. So Paglia’s case perhaps is a bit overstated or even hyperbolic. I won’t go so far as to call it ‘hysterical’, as that is out of fashion.

However, she does correctly diagnose the difficulty with all human systems of communication, which is the ultimate ‘tenemos’ (sacred or unobservable space)—consciousness. In rather spectacular fashion she gets at the root of all social system ‘problems’ which is to map the mind or personality. ‘As above, so below,’ as they say. Now humans are really attempting to build artificial brains that may outperform our own! Paglia correctly points out that older systems, social ‘maps’, or ‘models’ were essentially about the same problem, even if based in less than scientific methods. The “predictive part of astrology is less important than its psychology.” (p. 222) Setting aside for the moment the idea that nearly all of civilization can be traced back to writing and the theory that writing is founded in the practice of divination (prediction!), we are back to the ‘New Age’ and older ‘magical’ systems as ‘self-help’. (see Freemasonry for example) A dash of Jung’s “synchronicity” (p. 222) and the idea that the “Greek word zodiac means circle of animals” (p. 222) and we can return again to folklore and its animal fables, along with the ultimate end game in the west of all this theatricality, the hardest edge of all as far as personality goes, the sociopath, psychopath, antisocial or ‘predatory personality’.

The Zodiac killer perhaps not interested in scholarship but only in codes, even social codes or conventions, the cypher of the identity of ‘the individual’ as the ultimate secret, unobservable by even the most determined Quixote or tradecraft specialist (aka the classic ‘fool/detective’ or even ‘writer’). The text becomes a dream/nightmare for only a moment before we wake up to discover we have never left the art subsystem entirely. “Things happen in complex patterns of apparent coincidence, noticed by the keen eyes of the artist.” (p. 222) David Fincher (or George Smiley) couldn’t have said it any better. Paglia delves into what one might call the ‘philosophy of serial murder’, which she describes as “a perversion of male intellect. . . . There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.” (p. 247) Funny I find out later this is one of her most quoted lines. The folklore around serial killers is thick. However, Paglia’s high end taste has no room for “horror films . . . of the splattering kind” which she finds “pedestrian.” (p. 268) Nonetheless she argues “[h]orror films are rituals of pagan worship.” (p. 268) I would say they entertain modern audiences by allowing social description of a collapse of differentiation within the ‘cage of theatricality’, i.e. at a safe distance. Serial killers such as Edmund Kemper may claim to collect their victims as ‘spirit wives’, and the Zodiac claims to collect the souls of his victims as ‘slaves’, but no matter how much art goes into a work directed by David Fincher, like the “run-of-the-mill horror film” such killers remain “anti-aesthetic and anti-idealizing”, expressing “the form-pulverizing energies of Dionysus.” (p. 268) Yet no one who is not a specialist can recall the names of Kemper’s victims, or the Zodiac’s for that matter. They remain ‘slaves’ at least in a social sense, to serve their murderers in a social afterlife if not metaphysical, a true decadent ‘dead end’, as Paglia might admit.

Paglia sometimes fights against her own pessimism it seems though, arguing that “great literature and art [even if] never affirmative”, may still be celebrated “in order to win victory over something else, something uncontrolled.” (p. 383) So perhaps her end is control, steering. Luhmann says you can’t steer society, but he agreed that ‘problems’ are the ‘catalyst’ of social system function. I recall at this time Paglia’s discussion of Elvis, whom she calls “a myth-maker”, and when my wife and I visited Graceland, I pointed out a book (that belonged to and may even have been read by Elvis) in a glass case about ‘the Age of Aquarius’ opened to a page that had text underlined about how this age would be characterized by an empowerment of women. Oddly enough while raking leaves on a Saturday, the thought occurs to me how powerful Christ remains, despite his critics and the differentiation of modern systems of communication on display here. The words Paglia uses ultimately come across to me as defensive, a charge she often seems to level at the Romantic poets she studies. It strikes me that she feels compelled to compare all of this analysis against the example of Christ, even if she gets it mostly wrong. Her understanding of Christian doctrine on Gnosticism I would suggest is woefully lacking, to cite one example. All these petty magicians and artists, along with the bomb throwers accompanying them, cannot compete with the truth of Christ, no matter how many armies of academics hue and cry that modern society has been “freed” from the Holy Roman Empire. (see Radiohead for example) Religion remains as important as art for understanding society, precisely because so many seem compelled to attack it. With a description of the “social ostracism” of lesbianism as “heroic”, according to Walter Benjamin no less, even Baudeaire writes from a “world-view [that] is Christian” according to Paglia. (p. 426) To quote Gang of Four, “no escape from society.”

Paglia approaches this idea when she admits Oscar Wilde’s “glittering great chain of being is . . . not the actual world of law, finance, or aristocracy.” (p. 567) One could add ‘or religion’, but like Wilde, I would say Paglia remains trapped within her own academic “visionary construction” close to what some call ‘the genital chakra’. Such illusions of spirit or theory appear as a (false) method of escape (transcendence), to join with the too-serious scholars of Tao, other types of intellectuals, serial killers or similar ‘statistical unpersons’ desperate to communicate but unwilling to compromise a singular vision of either self or society. All of this ‘decadence’ may be not much more than the fracturing of identity under the weight of the differentiation of subsystems in modern society such as art, religion, economy and politics. I recall some studies show schizophrenia increases in many urban areas. Paglia herself points out scholarship indicating “the nineteenth century self came apart or ‘pluralized’” (citing Van den Berg, p. 493) As Luhmann points out in his treatise on the religious subsystem, the shaman does not always return from the trance journey aka ‘vision quest’. Poets too carry this risk. Any seeker of associative knowledge may become trapped in phantasms of dissociative agony, especially in a fragmented/differentiated society so keen to uphold individuality/trauma as a model of self actualization. If the shaman or the poet runs the risk of merely trading one form of trauma for another, then one can see this mirrored in the complexity and differentiation of modern society. Mother nature as much as man it seems is looking for the hard Apollonian edge of a rocket to carry her children off world. What could be more natural than to reproduce life on another planet? Conflict, both sexual and social, may be as much required as stability in order to self-generate these systems, whether psychic (individual) or social.

Still Paglia hardly touches the gleeman poets, mostly keeping to the scholar poets (or those with sufficient wall of scholarship around them to guarantee a labyrinth). She scratches the surface of Elvis yes, briefly comparing him to Byron, but fails to remark on the long-standing feud between the scholar poets and the gleemen poets (or minstrels as they say). I’m not sure if the gleemen side would entirely support her thesis but she seems determined to add “the King” into her mix. Elvis though obviously a sexual icon is only barely androgynous. He owned a .45 with a turquoise handle initialed ‘E’ on one side and ‘P’ on the other. Fairly masculine I’d call that. Then again William S. Burroughs was fond of shotguns too. I think the Beat poets as I mentioned Kerouac above might also throw a few solid punches at Paglia’s thesis. I base this on watching the documentary about Kerouac where Gregory Corso said it best: “Spirit is a hard, tough baby.” Is Kerouac too a deformed priest of the mother goddess, or was he beaten down by Madison Avenue usurping and twisting his message? I suppose he did have some issues with his mother, who was also a drunk. I wonder where does Johnny Cash fit into her scheme? He walks the line yes, but that ring of fire is suspect. Or Bob Dylan? The resolution of the thousand year feud between the scholar poets and the gleemen finds this Nobel Prize winner calling for a truce! He just wants to be friends with mother nature one could say, and doesn’t want to get pulled down in a hole by those who are deformed by “society’s pliers”. (Paglia does finally get around to mentioning Bob Dylan, though she indicates he isn’t upset enough with Christianity for her tastes or Emily Dickinson’s haha.) Even the likes of Tom Petty might have a line or two about this ‘American girl’, but perhaps nothing that would satisfy Paglia, who nonetheless claims “[w]e still live in the age of Romanticism.” (p. 358) To my line of thought it is another example of a certain type of scholarly hyperbole when she calls Edie Sedgwick an “androgyne” who most men would say remains precisely female regardless of her haircut.

Ridiculous also when Paglia agrees with Bloom that Robert Graves is wrong about Keats and “his White Goddess”. (p. 385) Paglia has a real problem it seems with Graves whom she calls homophobic (p. 672), a decadent slur if ever there was one. As in her analysis related to Christianity, I detect some defensiveness on her part. Graves’s analysis more than any other agrees with her position on Wilde who in “trying to remove the chthonianism from nature, trivializes her, an error for which he will . . . suffer.” (p. 565) I’ve heard some folklore that editors who turned down Graves’s book The White Goddess suffered too. From Paglia’s perspective, Graves perhaps trivializes homosexuality or androgyny in relation to his ‘White Goddess’. The charge may be accurate but is Graves actually more correct in his reading of the relationship between poet and muse? My own reading of Graves suggests his analysis is more deeply connected to the poetic. Graves would never say the White Goddess demands castration of true poets, admitting though that seeking this prize may lead to madness or death. Graves also offers escape from Paglia’s ‘cult of self’ when he suggests that self-knowledge can be properly left in the care of a wife or mistress. I should note that Graves addresses Paglia’s concerns even more directly when he says that the real sin of Socrates was not homosexuality, but only the idea he could know himself “in the Apollonian style”. (see The White Goddess, p. 12)

Perhaps the problem here is that Paglia is merely a critic, and no poet so far as I know. She relies on the “principle that the western objet d’art is an Apollonian protest against the chthonian.” (p. 388) Yet the range of human emotion and personality, one might argue at least, transcends the sexual. She screams that the “eye” of decadent late phase art “becomes its own prison.” (p. 419) (Yet I searched for any reference to Georges Bataille but nothing in the index haha). She does get around to mentioning surrealism, but in the context of Dickinson’s ‘surreal’ poetry. I would maintain (and I think Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory supports me in this) that the eye is only perception and not all encompassing of society (communication) or personality (consciousness). Paglia finds the opposite to be true, namely that if “psychic . . . therefore sexual”. (p. 436) I would argue that this central assumption of her analysis rings false. For Paglia “sexuality, even at its most perverse, is implicitly religious.” Certainly this concept is blasphemous even for academia, which allows for study (observation) of sexuality as a purely biological function. One might as well say that physics is implicitly religious, certainly a collapse of differentiation. In accepting only a material interpretation of reality then, religion is only a connection to nature, a pagan concept for Paglia, and essentially premodern. “Sex is the ritual link between man and nature” is her claim, (p. 436) but is it the only such connection? In removing any possibility of ‘super nature’, Paglia essentially removes the connection between man and God, something which can exist both inside and outside of nature. Perhaps then her idea of decadence as “abandonment of . . . duty” (p. 437) at least is consistent with something (“duty”) which can be described as transcendent. Paglia rejects duty in favor of androgyny, but her idea about androgyny is a false idol.

After reading this book, I’ve never been so sick of the word “androgyne” in all my life. Perhaps it is because my father is a narcissist. The “androgyne” (like the narcissist) is the perfect monster, a “[s]elf-complete” being that needs “no one and nothing.” (p. 441) When I was a teenager for a few weeks one summer I became half-convinced my father was planning to murder us (the whole family) with a shotgun. I say ‘half-convinced’ in that I almost believed it, and even took some actions to disrupt his possible plans, like hiding his shotgun shells for a week or so, before I suddenly put them back, nervously thinking I would be discovered, and telling myself I was being foolish, that my father wasn’t really planning on murdering us all, that it was only a strange notion in my head. I now see this anxiety as my conscious mind struggling with what my intuition (my ‘unconscious’) already knew, that the family was merely an accessory to my father’s monstrous ego. He could discard us at any time, as it suited him. So long as we served his purpose of perhaps securing his own position in society as ‘the breadwinner’ and ‘family man’, he would keep us around, but if we ever got in the way of his desires, he could cut us out of his life as easily as he cut out cancerous lungs from his patients. Years later, sitting out on a deck at Chimney Rock, my mother tells me that it has emerged through their marriage counseling sessions that my father is a narcissist. This all came out into the open due to a ‘blackmail attempt’ caused by my father’s ending of a long 20-year affair (that she knows of only because he had been forced to confess after the attempted blackmail). I would later connect all these dots to my anxiety that one summer from my youth.

This is one thread that goes through my mind reading Paglia, a little personal experience of decadence that contributed to my own fairly unsuccessful sojourn in the art subsystem during the 90s. By the time she gets to Swinburne, the journey through the narcissistic prison of the genital chakra has worn me out. “Decadence is about dead ends.” (p. 494) Is Paglia’s criticism itself decadent, a dead end? Oscar Wilde is close to the coup de grace. His “one liners . . . [owe] something to ‘the Irish—perhaps originally the theological—habit of paradox.’” (quoting Brigid Brophy, p. 545) In the old world I recall, the only one who could criticize the king was the court jester. Comedy in English, Paglia explains, depends on the conflict between order and disorder, aka “the context of British formality.” (p. 550) This connection between slapstick and zombie films is brought more fully into the light—perhaps the reason for the pie fight sequence in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). The zombie, like the ‘androgyne’ or narcissist, is self-sufficient (aside from a hint of cannibalism). Comedy and tragedy united in horror, together at last, “darting into the linguistic infinite on a jet of the English epicene.” (p. 550) Finally I feel quite dumb, a middle manager, not at all qualified to hang out with these sophisticates in their “matrix of perverse fantasy”. (p. 371)

She wants to somehow be able to cast certain decadents, or libertines, as defenders of civilization, as “Apollonian”. So to believe this line of thought, one must accept that “[f]or the idealizing Wilde, the chthonian is literally an alien realm”, and he desires somehow “to keep his native tongue in a state of Apollonian purity.” (p. 562) Isn’t the word always Apollonian at its root? Again as I’ve already pointed out, Paglia suggests it can also be Dionysian in the case of Wilde and Whitman. (pp. 562, 604) However by the terms of Paglia’s own argument, decadence can never be entirely Apollonian but always essentially Dionysian, as it creates chaos in the social order through abandonment of duty, a line that could be said to define modern society at the most basic level within every subsystem. For example in the law of tort we find its standard of care which all people in society owe to one another. In religion they call this ‘the golden rule’. Does the academic subsystem have its own version of this? Certainly tenure and other social structures such as rules against plagiarism could be seen as rigidly hierarchic and imposing of duty. Art in modern society of course faces a precarious position with its coding of ‘art/non-art’—those like Wilde who would like to live through their art, risk violating the only moral rule that does apply to the art system, namely that anything outside (‘non-art’), anything which steps beyond the ‘conceptual cage of theatricality’ reserved for the Apollonian/Dionysian battle in our society, no longer receives the same special dispensation generally granted to the genius to act outside the rules so to speak, as the village idiot, jester, fool, madman, or visionary he or she may claim to be. Artists like to play with this edge I agree.

As for Paglia’s claims, despite the brilliance of this book, I’d say she is hyperbolic and sometimes clearly false. “Mythologically”, she claims, “there never has been a purely masculine vegetation deity.” (p. 588) Osiris? Yes in the myth cycle he is castrated and then reborn, but clearly masculine and so she’s off base about this claim. I wonder though if any man is ‘purely masculine’ enough for Paglia? Any man that shows tenderness is ‘homoerotic’ it seems, there is no such thing as a comrade in arms or a friendship, and any verse or man who is too masculine is repressing something—there is no escape from her labyrinth, her analysis has no doors or windows for the light to enter this oubliette, no opening in her vision for transcendence through the “umbilical noose” as Kurt Cobain called it. Trauma it would seem is a part of life, for both men and women, but does all art have to be erotic? Paglia's analysis is suddenly reminding me of that film by David Cronenberg, They Came From Within. Everything becomes sexual for Paglia. Anything “light and frothy” is actually “perverse psychodrama”. (p. 642) When the poet says “I had rather be loved than to be called a king in earth” this cannot be the simple cry of loneliness expressed by an emotional and physical shut-in, but must be “the option of a future sex change.” (pp. 640-41) Paglia accuses Melville of being “[w]hipsawed between paradoxes” but she ignores her own. (p. 589) I would say the biggest gap in her analysis is the New World, i.e. America, clearly a break in the ice of the ordinary decadent amusements of Europe, but she skates around these incongruities. For Paglia, Mark Twain is “completely out of sync with the internal development of major American literature.” (p. 623) She hates anything sincere or kind it seems, and imagines that writers and poets must follow her own theoretical time line and frame.

So I ask her, are poets not allowed to grow up? Is everything truly perverse or is that only her hope? Is there nothing outside this obsession with self? Has Paglia cherry-picked art that only supports her case? Perhaps all critics must do this to a degree but her choices sometimes break under close scrutiny. For example, she invokes traditional folklore in her analysis of Emily Dickinson when she argues “[t]he shoe is a male gift, not a prince’s glass slipper but a paternal tyrant’s iron boot.” (p. 645) Alan Dundes the folklore critic (another admirer of Freud) too describes the glass slipper or a shoe as metaphor for sex. Still I find Paglia’s analysis overwrought and avant garde, i.e. divorced from popular (‘folk’) meaning. Folklore and film critics make the same mistake when they call John Carpenter's Halloween ‘conservative’ in the political sense, ignoring the popular (and modern) thrill in watching social authority fail to stop the threat. For Emily Dickinson, a day at the beach, and the sea is a ‘he’? “His Silver Heel” fills up her shoe. (p. 645) Where is ‘mother nature’ in these words? How does this not express some degree of heterosexual desire? It has me thinking, could the ‘he’ be akin to Poseidon? Paglia does not comment on this pagan association but to me the line suggests another ‘nature divinity’ that is masculine and throws a wrench in her efforts to lay it all at the feet of mother nature. The unmarked space in this book is vast as the sea - so sweeping in its ambition, yet so narrow in its focus. I am reminded of Shakespeare: ‘the lady doth protest too much’. To return here to where we began, Paglia accuses James Joyce of writing a maze of words, lumping him together with Henry James as “a eunuch-priest of the mother goddess”. (p. 49) My thought here though (to borrow a phrase from childhood) is ‘takes one to know one’, i.e. that Paglia has also created a brilliant but “tangled reality of a labyrinthine construction . . . to entangle intruders”, (p. 49) a mess of a book as part of her own pagan worship of art amidst this “frigid, godless universe”. (p. 656) It drags at the end and feels masochistic to even finish it. I dare say I’ve had enough psychic vampirism in my own real life to want to read anymore about Emily Dickinson and this cult of necrophilia. How Paglia can find this to be invocation of the muse seems to privilege death over life, when love cannot exist without both sides of this distinction. Ultimately this tome reminds me more than anything of how C. S. Lewis described Narnia under the white witch, to paraphrase, ‘like winter without Christmas’. Finally though, what this odious quagmire of a book suggests more than truth is this unmarked space, that our merely human efforts to describe nature and even ourselves are forever incomplete.

[rhapsodynew]

10 black and white clips that don't need Coloring

1. Subterranean Homesick Blues

Bob Dylan

The video clip for Subterranean Homesick Blues is considered one of the first video clips in the world. And since all the first things look natural according to custom, then this clip seems exactly like that. Young Bob Dylan casually and hurriedly goes through posters with selected words and phrases from the lyrics of the song on camera, which will become a common technique in the future, and in the background his colleagues – folk singer Bob Newvert and poet Allen Ginsberg - are talking about something of their own. In addition, there are intentional typos and puns on the posters, so instead of the correct spelling of the word ‘success’, ‘suckcess' is used. The video was shot in an alley near the Savoy Hotel in London, but there are also alternative versions, one was shot on the roof of the hotel, and the other in a park nearby

2. Every Breath You Take

The Police

MTV and VH1 TV channels, as well as Rolling Stone magazine, recognized the video clip for the song Every Breath You Take as one of the best video clips of all time. The Police, accompanied by a string section and a piano, perform the song in a darkened ballroom, while at the same time a man washes a window in the background. As a curiosity, Sting does not play the bass guitar, but the double bass, thereby emphasizing his significant figure

3. My Valentine

Paul McCartney

The fabulous ballad My Valentine found the perfect visual embodiment in a very simple and sensual black-and-white video clip starring Natalie Portman and Johnny Depp. In the video, they translate the lyrics of the song into sign language. Johnny Depp even plays a guitar solo, but in fact the track was recorded with the participation of Eric Clapton. Interestingly, the video was directed by Sir Paul McCartney himself, and the idea belonged to his daughter, Stella.

4. My Secret Place

Joni Mitchell & Peter Gabriel

The music video for Joni Mitchell and Peter Gabriel was shot by Anton Corbijn, known for his work with Depeche Mode and U2. Corbijn has always given music a vivid visual form, and this picture was no exception. The director managed to find the very secret place that Joni Mitchell tells Peter Gabriel about in the minimalistic scenery. Sitting at a table, they conduct their isolated dialogue from the world, and then go to look for paradise in a hut.

Into My Arms

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The black-and-white and very contrasting video clip directed by Jonathan Glazer is full of the deepest human stories expressed in portrait photography, where in the dark the light draws wrinkles and tears on faces. Of course, the figure of Nick Cave himself comes to the fore, his monologue intended for everyone and a specific person. And although Nick Cave noted that the director's work causes depression, and should have caused melancholic optimism, nevertheless the picture formed into a single whole filled with meaning

6. Street Spirit (Fade Out)

Radiohead

The video clip for the song Street Spirit (Fade Out) was also shot by Jonathan Glazer, in many ways, he released a surreal picture in which the audience will have to find their meaning. Frame changes and strange gluing follow the lively and metaphorical lyrics of the song. Glazer created a separate city for the clip, in which the action unfolds against the background of trailers. And this city has its own well-established mechanism…

7. God Put a Smile upon Your Face

Coldplay

The bizarre video for the song God Put a Smile on Your Face draws a parallel with the radiohead video Just, so even in this field Coldplay cannot escape from annoying comparisons, but this is not accidental, since Jamie Travis became the director of both videos. The clip shows a vivid storyline: a businessman, played by British actor Paddy Considine, meets a barefoot stranger on the street. Soon after the fateful meeting, he is horrified to discover that he is beginning to disappear into thin air. According to the classics of the genre, the plot shots are mixed with staged ones, where Coldplay perform a song, and black in this space fits perfectly on white.

8. The Importance of Being Idle

Oasis

The video clip for Oasis' "greatest pop song" is presented in the purely English genre of kitchen sink drama, which was popular in the 1950s and 1960s, reflecting the everyday reality of that time. That's why director Dawn Shadfort decided to shoot the video in black and white to recreate a bygone era and stylize it as a film. In addition, it was based on the script of the British film "Billy the Liar", based on the novel of the same name. For the video, the popular Welsh actor Rhys Evans was invited to play the role of Billy, exhausted by everyday life, who works in a funeral home. Billy doesn't want to live a boring life, but wants to have fun and be at ease, he invents tall tales – and so, he becomes a participant in the funeral procession, moreover, its main and direct participant, since he himself is being buried. Shadfort's funny and hilarious interpretation will not make you bored, as the director has never been better able to combine music and text with a visual picture.

9. 3WW

alt-J

Director Alex Takax shot not a video clip for alt-J, but an exciting short film made in black and white and set in the landscape scenery of the Mexican city of Real de Cators. The video shows a funeral procession. Residents of the city are carrying a coffin containing the body of a young girl. At sunset, they are replaced by her lover, who then has to carry the coffin himself. A young man is faced with bad weather and unforeseen circumstances and dies. But only in another world does love resurrect everything.…

10. Back to Black

Amy Winehouse

It seems that the black-and-white clips are shot only for scenes with a funeral procession – this is the third video on a similar subject. But an exception can be made for Amy Winehouse, especially since the video clip does not bury a person, but the singer's heart. In addition, the black-and-white aesthetics perfectly match the words of the gloomy song and Amy herself, who through a storm of emotions expounds her drama about love and pours a handful of earth onto a miniature coffin. The video became prophetic for the singer; in 2011, Amy Winehouse died at the age of 27.

[deafaq]

couple questions

1 you have mentioned rules about what can be a sign name & sign name grammar a lot, could you explain what those rules are?

2 I am hoh, finally learning sign language and wanting to get more involved in the Deaf community. any ideas on how to do that? (and is there a point at which you might consider someone raised in hearing community part of deaf community?)

Hello,

well... I am vague on purpose because each sign language has different grammar and I don't know all sign languages in the world. (I know *one*. And its not ASL)

To explain it generally, each sign has 5 parameters. Those are:

Hand shape

Palm location

Movement

Placement

Non-,manual features

All of these have a set "library", its not infinite number of placements on the body or any hand shape. And each sign language has different ones - there is often big overlap, but its not universal.

Lets look at a simple example:

I think all of us know this hand shape - raised middle finger. And we all know what it means.

However, this gesture actually isn't acceptable hand shape in ASL and most of western sign languages. As in, Deaf people of course use it and know what it means, but it isn't used as a part of any proper signs. (or if it is, its a joke/visual pun) However, is is acceptable hand shape in some Asian and African sign languages. You can have a name sign featuring it if you are Japanese Deaf person, for example. (and it wouldn't be offensive)

So, to create a new sign, you have to know the "libraries" of the sign language you are using. Plus you have to know the vocabulary, so you don't use a sign which already means something else.

You might say, but what if I use existing sign? I want my name sign to be "FLOWER".

Well, first of all - again, vocabulary. Lot of signs can have several meanings or variations and if you are not familiar with sign language, you can end up with something nonsensical or unintentionally funny/rude/weird. Secondly, only Deaf person knows if that name is already in usage. You don't want to end up with same name as someone like Donald Trump... Okay, that's a joke. Trump's sign is very distinct I doubt someone would use it accidentally. Other existing name signs though? Sure.

Apart from grammar rules, there are also cultural rules which basically is "you do not give a name sign to yourself".

As for your second question - online communities. Deaf clubs and events. Volunteering, etc.

There isn't any official cut-off or "you are now Deaf member tm!". Its very individual and also dependent on the community. Also, some Deaf people think that if you were raised hearing, you will never be properly Deaf and will always have "hearing thinking", some think otherwise and welcome new members happily. Some will accept anyone who has hearing loss...

There really is no universal answer I can give you, I am afraid.

Either way, good luck.

Mod T

[icarusthelunarguard]

This Week’s Horrible-Scopes

It’s time for this week’s Horrible-Scopes! So for those of you that know your Astrological Signs, cool! If not, just pick one, roll a D12, or just make it up as you go along. It really doesn’t matter. Better yet! Check out “Heart of the Game, Fredonia” - they can sell you those D12’s with the symbols on them! Get in contact with them on Facebook, shipping to the U.S. only, and tell them “Shujin Tribble” sentcha. “Hail, Hail, Fredonia!” Home of the Blue Devil!

In honour of TinyTribble graduating college, we’re sending a special Not-So-Horrible Horrible-Scope to all of you graduating this spring. For some of you it’s high school, for others it’s college. No matter what, we’re taking the time to wish you well on the next journey ahead. 

Aries 

You started off wanting a degree in Material Science and Engineering. And now look at you! Adding a third part to it all with, of all things, Music. You wanted to build literal bridges, got inspired by Galloping Gertie, then discovered a new passion you had no idea would take - Designing and Constructing Musical Instruments! So This Week… Your education isn’t done yet. You’ll need to add Electrical theory if you want to design things like Electric Guitars, or wireless transmitter systems, or MIDI instruments. The frontier for you is still Out There!

Taurus 

You wanted a degree in Business Management, then found an interest in History - and what a wild ride this has been, right? Putting them both together has you perched between a career in either Advertising or Contract Lawyer. So This Week… Whichever way you go we’ll still accept you, just so long as you don’t go into SALES! 

Gemini 

Now that High School is over, it’s time for you to take that Off Year before you take on College Courses. International Travel might be a tough sell, but there’s nothing wrong with planning an intra-country trip to sample all the countries represented in your own; Little Italy, Little Germany, Little Africa. So This Week… If you want to REALLY rough it, make some Traveling Music CD’s for the road. There’ll be areas you might not have radio reception. It’ll keep your sanity.

Cancer Moon-Child 

With your family firmly in the, =ahem=, ‘Waste Management Business’, it’s been expected that you wouldn’t bother with college, but join the Family Business instead. But your Uncle Orilio? He knew better. He’ll be making sure you go to college not just out-of-state, but out-of-time-zone! You need to learn without your family name hanging over you. So This Week… You know how to make Sunday Dinner for an Italian Army; take as many Culinary Courses and Economics courses as you can. Being a restaurateur is tough on your own, so find a decent family-owned one and make it amazing. Make Nona Proud!

Leo 

With your love of the limelight, pun intended, a degree in Stage Performance was expected. The fact that you added a minor in, of all things, Optics, was a massive surprise to everyone. At least, it would be a surprise until they found out your college roommate was a film student who taught you about the old black-and-white film with the first visual effect in it. So This Week… We’re expecting BIG ideas from you in the realm of Theatre Special Effects. Brainstorm everything you can and figure out how to make them happen later.

Virgo

We have some Good News and some Bad News for you. The Good News is, all those lawns you mowed in High School? Between that money and the scholarships you were able to get, you made it through Pre-Med without needing a loan. The Bad News is, that ringing in your ears? You have Tinnitus - it’s a sign of permanent damage to your ears. We’re really sorry. So This Week… Check into a new cell phone plan with unlimited data. You might need to speak in sign language and video calls will kill any data caps you’ll have.

Libra

Now we gunna get good! Before you finished High School you learned about Fabrication - specifically Welding. HYPER-Specifically Underwater Welding. We’re sorry that college is going to be out of your financial ability for now, but we found something that might get you a job in that field. See about becoming a fabricator and repair person for a Hydroelectric Plant! So This Week… Remember what they used to say in the movie ‘Dune’ - The Electrons Must Flow! –or something like that. Been a long time since we last saw that movie. All we really remember is Sting’s codpiece.

Scorpio 

You always wanted to become a card shark, so you took Maths Classes like crazy. Statistics and Probabilities and Permutations, all with the dream of making it big on the Poker Scene. You gamed the system well, but you forgot the human factor in everything. So This Week… Re-enroll so you can get a second major in Psychology. Once you can properly research your opponents, then you’ll have them at every turn of the cards. 

Sagittarius 

Of anyone on this list, you’ve had it the roughest. First off, we’re gunna tell you that we, in NO uncertain terms, are FREEKIN’ PROUD OF YOU! Make no mistake, being a full-time student is a job. The fact that you managed a full time JOB-job on top of that so that you could pay your own way? Wow! Seriously, that’s something special. So This Week… It doesn’t matter WHAT your degree is in. You’ve shown that you can survive practically anything, are goal-focussed, and can handle any stress that comes your way. You. Are. Mighty. And we salute you. Take the week off - you’ve earned it.

Capricorn 

You managed to juggle a part-time job along with your High-School years so you had some spending money. But now that you succeeded in getting a degree in Finance, the company you used to work for is interested in having you back to help with that department! So This Week… Don’t Take The Job! Look, it sounds great - knowing most of the people there already, but that’s the problem - you won’t have a social distance from your friends. It’ll be awkward as hell needing to order some people around. Thank them, explain the reasoning, and let them know that MAYBE you can do it after some time at another company. They’ll respect you and give you a good reference.

Aquarius 

You wanted to get away from the hustle and bustle of the suburbs and head out into the country with a diploma in something worthwhile. The hardest part about your degree is in pronouncing it! Ecogastronomy which makes you aware of things like sustainable food production, nutrition in health, and food and beverage management. Most who get this degree want to use it for the end of the production cycle, like hotels and spas. You want to learn how to make things better from the head end. So This Week… If you don’t know how to ride a horse, learn now. This way you don’t get friction burns on the insides of your knees.

Pisces  

We don’t know if we should be proud of you or terrified of you. You went through a bunch of Independent Studies and made your own diploma - which was something we had NO idea was possible to do! You combined chemistry, organic chemistry, botany, fermentation science, atmospheric… Look, we won’t begin to understand all of these areas of study you delved into, we only know what you managed to accomplish for your senior project. YOU MADE CARBONATED COLA WITHOUT ANY MACHINERY?! Not even a CO2 canister?! Just… HOW?! So This Week… When someone asks us if we knew you before you started on your Mad Scientist Arc, we will proudly say, “Who? Us? Nope - Never Heard Of Them Before!”

And THOSE are your Horrible-Scopes for this week! Remember if you liked what you got, we’re obviously not working hard enough at these. BUT! If you want a better or nastier one for your own sign or someone else’s, all you need to do to bribe me is just Let Me Know - or check out the Ko-Fi page ( https://ko-fi.com/icarusthelunarguard )! These will be posted online at the end of each week via Tumblr, Facebook, Ko-Fi, Discord, and BLUESKY.

[ameliasoulturner]

Unleash Your Inner Genius: Hilarious Jokes Only the Truly Clever Will Crack

Alright, listen up, brilliant minds! Ever feel that smug little spark of satisfaction when you finally get a joke that left everyone else scratching their heads? Today, we're diving headfirst into that glorious feeling. Forget the dad jokes and the slapstick – we're talking about humor that's a mental workout, the kind of wit that tickles your intellect as much as your funny bone.

Over years of exploring the vast landscape of humor, I've learned that the jokes that truly stick are the ones that make you think just a little bit harder. They play with language, twist logic, and often hide a clever little surprise beneath the surface. So, buckle up for a curated collection of these brainy gems – enough to really get those neurons firing and maybe even spark a few "aha!" moments around the water cooler.

Think of this as your personal comedy challenge. Are you ready to unlock the hidden layers of wit and emerge victorious with a broader smile and a sharper mind? Let's dive in!

Why don't scientists trust atoms?

Because they make up everything!

The Brainy Breakdown: This classic relies on the double meaning of "make up" – to invent or fabricate, and to constitute. It's a playful jab at the very foundation of scientific understanding.

Parallel lines have so much in common...

It's a shame they'll never meet.

The Brainy Breakdown: This joke personifies a geometric concept, giving parallel lines a relatable human experience of longing and missed connection. It adds a touch of poignant humor to a mathematical truth.

Why did the scarecrow win an award?

Because he was outstanding in his field!

The Brainy Breakdown: A visual pun that plays on the literal location of a scarecrow and the idiomatic expression for excellence.

What do you call a lazy kangaroo?

Pouch potato!

The Brainy Breakdown: A cute and clever portmanteau blending the kangaroo's defining feature with the slang term for someone who's perpetually lounging.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

The Brainy Breakdown: This witty observation highlights the ambiguity of language and how the same grammatical structure can yield wildly different meanings based on context.

Why did the bicycle fall over?

Because it was two tired!

The Brainy Breakdown: A simple yet effective pun playing on the literal "two wheels" and the feeling of being exhausted.

What musical instrument is found in the bathroom?

A tuba toothpaste!

The Brainy Breakdown: A phonetic pun that relies on the similar sounds of "tuba" and "tube of."

A photon checks into a hotel. The front desk asks if he needs any help with his luggage. He replies, "No, I'm traveling light."

The Brainy Breakdown: This joke uses the dual nature of light – as a particle (photon) and the idiom "traveling light" meaning to have no luggage.

Why did the golfer wear two pairs of pants?

In case he got a hole-in-one!

The Brainy Breakdown: A pun playing on the golfing term "hole-in-one" and the literal meaning of having a hole.

What's the best thing about Switzerland?

I don't know, but their flag is a big plus.

The Brainy Breakdown: A visual pun referencing the prominent white cross (a plus sign) on the Swiss flag.

Hear about the new restaurant called Karma?

There's no menu: You get what you deserve.

The Brainy Breakdown: This joke humorously applies the concept of karma (actions having consequences) to a dining experience.

Why did the math book look sad?

Because it had too many problems.

The Brainy Breakdown: Simple personification, giving the math book human emotions based on its contents.

What do you call a fake noodle?

An impasta!

The Brainy Breakdown: A classic pun combining "imposter" and "pasta."

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

The Brainy Breakdown: A witty twist on a well-known proverb, suggesting that sometimes caution and observation are more rewarding.

Why was six afraid of seven?

Because seven eight nine!

The Brainy Breakdown: A number-based pun playing on the phonetic similarity of "eight" and "ate."

What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary?

A thesaurus!

The Brainy Breakdown: A clever portmanteau combining "thesaurus" and the dinosaur suffix "-saurus."

There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, those who don't, and those who weren't expecting a1 ternary joke.

The Brainy Breakdown: This joke requires understanding binary (base-2) and then throws in a surprise with "ternary" (base-3).

Why did the hipster burn his tongue?

He drank his coffee before it was cool.

The Brainy Breakdown: This plays on the stereotypical hipster desire to be ahead of trends, even to their own detriment.

Helvetica and Times New Roman walk into a bar.

"Get out of here!" shouts the bartender. "We don't serve your type."

The Brainy Breakdown: This relies on an understanding of typography, with the bartender using "type" in a literal sense.

A sandwich walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve food here."

The Brainy Breakdown: A humorous reversal of expectations.

What do you call a boomerang that won't come back?

A stick.

The Brainy Breakdown: A simple but logical observation that undermines the very definition of a boomerang.

Why did the electron break up with the proton?

Because they had too much static!

The Brainy Breakdown: A pun based on electrical charges and the common meaning of "static" in relationships.

What's the difference between a hippo and a Zippo?

One's really heavy, the other's a little lighter.

The Brainy Breakdown: A classic play on words, using "lighter" in both the weight sense and the object sense.

Why did the invisible man turn down the job offer?

He couldn't see himself doing it.

The Brainy Breakdown: A humorous take on the literal meaning of not being able to "see oneself" in a role.

What did the grape do when he got stepped on?

He let out a little wine.

The Brainy Breakdown: A pun based on the process of making wine from grapes.

[noisycowboyglitter]

Ah. Men: The Significance of Religion in LGBT Pride Events

The phrase "Ah. Men" is a playful twist on the traditional religious utterance "Amen," often used to express agreement or affirmation. In this context, it takes on a double meaning that celebrates masculinity, particularly in LGBTQ+ circles.

Buy now:19.95$

"Ah" suggests a moment of appreciation or realization, while "Men" directly references the male gender. Together, the phrase could be interpreted as an expression of admiration for men, especially in gay or bisexual male communities.

This clever wordplay might be used in various settings:

As a catchy slogan for a gay men's clothing brand or store

The name of a drag king performance group

A title for a photography exhibit showcasing diverse male beauty

A hashtag for social media posts appreciating male aesthetics

The theme for a queer party or event celebrating masculinity in all its forms

Buy now

The period between "Ah" and "Men" adds a pause for emphasis, enhancing the pun and inviting the reader or listener to consider the dual meaning.

While lighthearted, the phrase also touches on deeper themes of identity, attraction, and the subversion of traditional religious language. It exemplifies how LGBTQ+ culture often reclaims and reinterprets mainstream concepts with humor and creativity.

"Ah. Men" encapsulates a spirit of joy, appreciation, and pride in male identity and attraction, particularly within queer spaces.

The "Funny LGBT Gay Pride Jesus Rainbow Peace Flag" concept combines humor, spirituality, and LGBTQ+ pride in a playful, potentially provocative way. It reimagines religious iconography through a queer lens, depicting Jesus with rainbow elements or peace signs.

Buy now

This imagery might feature on flags, t-shirts, or memes within LGBTQ+ Christian communities or among allies. It challenges traditional religious narratives, suggesting a more inclusive, accepting interpretation of faith.

The humor comes from the unexpected juxtaposition of religious and LGBTQ+ symbols. It could show Jesus with a rainbow halo, wearing pride colors, or making peace signs. The flag aspect implies visibility and celebration.

Buy now

While some may find it irreverent, others see it as a powerful statement of divine love and acceptance for all. It's a visual representation of the belief that spirituality and LGBTQ+ identity can coexist harmoniously, promoting peace and inclusivity.

[psychologeek]

Yes, this.

Give us disabled characters! Where the disability isn't the main plot!!

(in this rb: 1. Spesific + examples from my fic; 2. implications of "cure magic" - and why there still be disabled ppl)

Fanfic+examples

(bc I love my fanfic, and think it's interesting and well written. A batman, Cass-centric fic. )

The fic isn't about disability, but MC's recovery is tightly related to it - to have a self, a name, and ways to communicate with others. There are also at least 6 different communication ways.

It's also about culture, and how it shapes one's understanding of the world.

There are also many references to the Mayan myth of the twin heroes, puns, Jason and Cass as twins, and a LOT of misunderstandings and identity porn.

~

In my fanfic, MC wasn't taught/allowed to speak as a child. And also autistic.

At the beggining, MC is pre-verbal: the concept of language is strange.

(tw: self dehumanising ("it"), violence of a minor.)

Weapon don't know what. Weapon know this was people want and then touch Weapon and then move-confused-scared and noises. And then dagger in-and-out, and red and small noise, and people fall down and heavy and no more people . Just A sand sack. But it's liquid and heavier. And Weapon doesn't have the words or images or anything to even think about it. It just run, just keep going because -

Weapon can make people into sacks. ( No, please no ).

Later, they learn language (ASL), but they still use mostly functional language. Their thinking is very visual, which give us both tragic and comic moments of misunderstanding.

"What's Eh-Di-Ey?” They want to know. They want to capture all the little words, like bags in a jar they can recognise for the next time. “ADA is the Americans with Disabilities Act.” They blink. “It means they need to help people who need special help. Or they get in trouble with the law. So I told her that you need help with reading and writing.” Cass knows law. It's people with hammers and big white wigs. They think about Hammer-Man gives Old Lady a pencil and tell her to write for Cass. It's a funny picture.

They learn to speak, but it's not easy - and there are scenes about how learning to make spesific sounds is hard and frustrating. They also struggle with understanding spoken.

"No, You Purple. You not Robin." Batgirl try to find the right way to explain.

"Nice to see you too, Batgirl," Purple-in-new-colors puts hands on her hips. "What, like you're the first in the suit? And by the way, fuck you – it's eggplant!"

"Little-tree omelette?" Batgirl signs, confused.

"No, just– just eggplant, in one word. It's a vegetable. What do you mean I'm not Robin, huh? What, you think I'm not good enough for that?"

Batgirl is confused.

Very very confused. "Why not good?" "Then why'd you tell me I can't be Robin?" Huh? "You're Purple. Not Robin. You're Purple."

On chapter 5+-, they are hit with a spell that make them understand language (which is canon) and I tried to portray what it's like to be overwhelmed by words. Because it's hard.

The thing, the- (alien, medium, telepath) did something and it hurts (ache, sore, agunish) and everything together and all at once like words hit the brain (noises become words, turn into pictures too much, too fast to understand. It's overwhelming. Exhausting.) The pictures-in-head keep going like movie night, keep see  it - like buildings fall on little people. But the building isn't concrete or bricks, it is made of words and all fall down and cover and hard to breathe. Everything push down and then fall, fall, fall like – But words still come after and cover– (It's like being buried alive, by the weight of words and sounds that all of a sudden has a meaning. It's hard to notice anything else. It's hard to understand, to read the bodies of everyone around.)  Yes, they can still fight. But it's so much harder to understand what happens. It's hard, it can no longer be a Weapon. (And it's scares )

They still use mostly ASL after that. They still use functional language (for example, "apple" instead of "please hand over the apple". ) And there are struggles and misunderstanding related to "speaking different languages".

"Oracle to Batgirl, do you copy?" Batgirl tap twice for yes. (Copy like "I hear you," not copy like "make another exactly like." Important difference to remember.)  "Good. Robin is heading your way, you'll work together tonight. Pay attention. Standard Patrol Protocol. Oracle out." Batgirl waits a second to understand everything. Robin is coming, work together tonight. "Heading" like "going this way," not "fall face first." Oracle… out? Of the house? For another mission? Maybe. She will ask Robin.

For more: the fic

Implications

Disclaimer: I have several disabilities, but not an amputee.

Also, "magic solutions" tend to ignore the environment.

For a simple example:

Ok, so your character regrew leg/had a leg-like magic. Cool.

Does it mean they don't have phantom pain?

How do they relearn to move with the new limb?

Aesthetic: If it's a re-grewed leg - it would be paler, as a new limb with no sun exposure. Magic - still keep the looks and overall looks from the environment where there's a "not leg". Which is a real issue for amputees irl.

Mentally - how your character adjusts to having a limb? Is there an equivalent of phantom pain?

Do they suffer from BIID? Body dysmorphia?

Body integrity identity disorder (BIID), or body integrity dysphoria, is a mental health condition where you feel that a limb or healthy body part shouldn't be part of your body. You're aware that this body part is healthy; you can still feel, use and move this body part, but you don't believe it should be yours.

And that's on top of my head, about a relatively "simple" fix.

(not to less the actual struggles of amputees. But to give a wider look.)

What about someone with CP? Down Syndrome? EDS?

What about intellectual disability?

Ethical issues:

can a caretaker decide for their charges to ongo this procedure?

Can you sue a (former) caretaker for making you take this? You're now considered your own guardian. But you never agreed to that in first place.

What about depression and anxiety and OCD?

What about PTSD?

This can have many, many implications.

And even if there was none, you'd still have people with disabilities - those who didn't match the current magic, or didn't want to go through, or any other reasons.

Remember y'all, *magic* doesn't negate the existence of disabled people. Eugenics does that. And Lainoff's book, All for One, is incredible and worth a read. It's on my bookshelf!

[gatheringbones]

[“So why have anti-democratic authoritarians seized on our tiny population as the latest red meat with which to whip up their followers against democracy and something they call “gender ideology?”

We are meaning making animals. And of all the meanings we make about the body, perhaps none is more basic than sex.

But accepting me as a woman means radically changing how you think about sex and gender

In addition, recognizing me as a transgender woman means accepting that what I say I am trumps your visual knowledge of how I may look like to you.

I’ll see it when I believe it. Seeing is believing. What you see is what you get. Our language is replete with references to how compelling visual knowledge is. It is very challenging to ask people to accept that what they see is not really what is really there.

Think about the simple shift from “pregnant women” to “pregnant people.” The very idea of “pregnant men” — virtually unheard of a few years ago — fries some people’s brain circuits.

Finally, transgender challenges feelings about sexuality. The fact is, many people are attracted to taller, stronger masculine-type bodies and/or smaller, rounder, feminine-type bodies. It’s deeply grounded in their sense of their sexuality and feelings of desire And when you swap these aesthetics around or mix them up — as happens with bodies like mine — it undermines something fundamental about their sense of sexual attraction.

This is why attack materials created by transphobes so often features bearded, hairy-chested men: a) invading the Women’s Room; b) invading girls’ sports; c) wearing dresses and high heels; or, d) invading the Women’s Room at a girls sports event while wearing dresses and high heels. Many people find such images disturbing or actually disgusting, because they the jacks the wires of their sexual aesthetics.

So as transgender people, we are not just demanding our rights: we are asking people to literally rewrite their much of their reality. And people can be noticeably, ummm…reluctant to do that. Just talk to your parents (or mine).

And of course nonbinary and genderfluid people just put all this (pun very intended) on steroids.

Most people can probably integrate the idea of women’s rights or gay rights without upsetting their world-view too much. But not so transgender. We are literally indigestible with how many people currently understand bodies and sex.

After all, violent and anti-democratic strongmen didn’t start attacking so-called “gender ideology” world-wide until transgender rights became a thing. They have learned they can capitalize and monetize the discomfort some people feel.

Which is another way of saying that transpeople — this small, underfunded, outmanned, and outgunned minority barely on society’s radar only a couple decades ago — are slowly remaking the world.

From pronouns, gender-neutral languages, and government-issued IDs to parental rights, sports, and of course bathrooms — states, corporations, and entire societies are just beginning to wrestle with what it means to disassemble the ubiquitous structures of binary gender.

They shall know us by our enemies.

Well, we are being attacked by some of the strongest, most vile strongmen on the planet. It’s not a sign of our failure. On the contrary, it’s a sign of our success.

We’ve under-estimated just how radical and world-changing our message and vision is.

They know it. It’s time we knew it, too.

Trans rights is going to change the world.”]

[elbiotipo]

Barebones (I am not a cunning linguist) situation of language in my space opera story:

NO UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR: that's a cheap cinematic trick to make things easy, if you want to communicate between different species or cultures you either learn their language or convene into a trade language. You could also hire a diplomat (a very in-demand profession) who is not only a translator, but also a cultural advisor. For every world and species, there are multiple languages, dialects, customs…

There's also no universal trade language; there is something like it, among Human spacers: Tandar (from "Standard") which is both spoken and visualized and is widely used, but olfactory species, species that communicate in different sound and radio frequencies, and others need their own translators and agreed trade languages.

Tandar was originally a military auxiliary language used in the Last Machine War among Human forces. It is very distantly descended from Mandarin, with a strong English vocabulary, and it also incorporates, besides its numeric system, a "protocol" used with machines, a basic programming language; it is often said that its two languages in one.

Written Tandar is logographic and strictly standarized; stylizing it is very much frowned upon, as it is supposed to be used in emergency signs, instruction manuals, and such. Tandar can also be written in all sorts of other scripts, and over time, puns and metaphors in Tandar have given way to a true Tandaric literature. It is still considered a technical trade language.

Tandar is "everybody's second language" there are, supposedly, no native Tandar speakers, and it's used for trade or technical purposes. You don't talk to your mother or spouse in Tandar.

In practice, there are indeed many communities that have creolized Tandar into local languages. There is also a corpus of jokes, puns, songs (especially spacer shanties) and other vernacular literature in Tandar. So there's a debate about its condition as a pure auxiliary language here.

There is also a mainstream "spacer culture" who speaks Tandar and is connected by similar traditions and of course technologies (it's good to have standarized spaceship parts...), but it varies from one side of the galaxy to another. So smilar, and yet with unique quirks for every trade world and even ship. Sociologists and linguists love studying spacers for this reason.

Human "colonies", now centuries old, were often settled by people from the same nations or ethnic groups. Over the centuries, they have developed their own dialects, so that half a dozen worlds settled by, for example, Thai-speaking astronauts, now have dialects barely comprehensible between each other, or even new languages. A few have developed wholly different cultures, but broadly, the main language families from Mother Earth are still spoken.

There is no faster-than-light communication, so no space radio or TV, the closest thing is a slower-moving (in days-weeks) postal service. So mass communication does not homogenize languages. Many local planetary dialects incorporate some Tandar or other trade language in their speech, but most people speaking it or other trade languages live in trade worlds.

The great generation ships that departed from Mother Earth in times past, virtually flying civilizations encased in asteroids, often have kept old dialects alive in relativist travel. Even if relativist travel has been replaced by faster-than-light aetheric travel, the close-knit nature of generation ships makes them act as cultural time capsules. This is a point of pride to them; speaking Hawaiian, Esperanto or Rioplatense often means "you're part of our family", even if you're born in another world.

Humans who have lived for generations in alien worlds have adopted their languages, customs, culture, religion, even body language... to the point that meeting one for the first time as a "mainstream spacer" human is almost the same as meeting an alien.

The reverse is true for aliens who have lived in human worlds. In fact, this is a very humanocentric perspective. Everything above applies to other species (for everyone, the others are aliens) and with the differences of biology, psychology, culture, economics, and time...

[grokebaby]

Nooo shit okay before I totally forget I'll write this down here. Bc I CANNOT forget this character. I don't want to. Another NPC I loved, except this time, I foresaw the fact that I'd have to make a character I like, the moment it happened. I went "Sigh. Okay if I have to figure out who's doing doctor's work at the Pride district, I'm gonna have to make it a character. And I'm probably gonna get attached to them. Might as well make it funky" SOOOO

(ze/hir or ze/zir)

Yet to be named veggie person who has bananas and other fruit for hair and the body is some vegetable type of thing. The limbs are probably like well adapted roots and stems. The face looks like a breakfast platter who someone arranged to look like a smiley face. Or at least that's how I visualize it lol, I may adjust the details when I actually draw this bih. Naturally mute due to the whole vegetable aspect, but ze has a mechanical speech implant in hir throat (on the outside so it can be pitch or volume adjusted). Ze speaks sign language since before receiving the implant, so ze tends to sign everything ze says out of habit regardless. Born in the Void district where ze worked as a pediatrician/General medic, but moved to the Pride district after giving someone anaphylactic shock. Ze wasn't fired or anything, it was out of shame. Zes fine nowadays but will always wear gloves when interacting with new people (or species). Moved here with hir then-partner, now ex, who's a demon. They're not in bad terms but have drifted apart so they're not in contact anymore. Ze seems like an extremely unflinching, nerves of steel person but that's largely due to everyone else's pov of hir. Things the general public finds disgusting and horrific don't really phase hir. Ze doesn't feel things the same way non plantial species do. Which ze finds very fascinating, among with many other things about species differences. Surprisingly emotionally tactful, despite what one might assume at first.

Personality thus far can be summed up with:

"I'm a healer, but..."

"I'm gonna pretend I didn't see that" / "Let's agree this never happened"

"You've been very brave, here's a lollipop"

"Remember to eat your veggies kids!" <- people tend to find this disturbing, ze does not

Name suggestions welcome ig? I was trying to think of something that could be both serious and silly. Probably a two part name or, like, first name + last name. I was trying to think of some banana pun but maybe I'm not good enough at puns lol

[kate-les-bridge-stewart]

MORE ULTRAKILL BULLSHIT, GO!

This is just gonna be my mad rambling instead of any consistent lore lol

So since v1 is clueless about the universe they have a lot to learn and everything is new to them

One thing they found they liked a lot (and actually the very first thing they found they enjoyed outside of violence) is music

Music in general makes them happy cus it makes them feel emotions theyve never felt before

Once they got out of hell they kinda had a moment where they "woke up"

Like they started feeling all these emotions theyve never even known about

It was like being in hell and constantly starving for fuel put them in a sort of trance where all they could think of was violence

They felt little to no emotion, only ravenousness

They actually were pretty anxious at first, not knowing how to handle these feelings

This anxiety would manifest in strange ways, mostly them seemingly shutting down and behaving very robotic (pun not intended)

Like giving no reaction to anything and not communicating

Eventually the doctor learned what these shut downs actually were and she made it a point to comfort them when they had them

Also as for how theyd communicate I decided theyd develop their own sign language adapted to work with v1's hands

They know a few words that they can put together to make simple sentences

And if they need to communicate something complicated they will project it on one of the tardis computers if they can

V1 started making their own music at one point

They found 12s old studio in the tardis (or maybe the tardis brought it to them 👀) which had all of 12s old drums and guitars and other music equipment

They were particularly interested in the drum set for some reason. Maybe it was the act of hitting the drums that reminded them of violence which was familiar and comforting

They started by exploring the set, playing with hitting them in different ways and listening to the sounds.

The doctor noticed this and decided to show them some books and videos about playing drums

Soon they started trying to play some simple solos

They were rapidly improving and making more complex songs

They soon learned some guitar and made some backtracks to add to their drums

They were primarily putting together very short rough tunes which werent really intended to be full songs

They just thought making music was fun, they didnt have any plan in mind. They just played whatever they felt like

(Quick note, I have no fucking clue what making music is like. My entire experience has been with visual art and so my knowledge about music composition is nonexistent. Forgive me if most of this makes no sense 😭 I was a theater kid, not a band kid)

Eventually as they got more advanced they also started challenging themself to make much faster drum solos

This led to them basically reinventing breakcore lol

One day the doctor was walking by when she heard v1 playing the drums but she hadn't heard them play like this

She quietly entered the studio and was beyond flabbergasted

This lil robot was beating the ever loving shit out of the poor snare drums, their wrists were moving faster than any human could possibly replicate

They also seemed to have attached some extra arms which 13 had never seen before, one red and one green

As for the logic behind where v1 hides their gear, I think they just have some invisible inventory which they can access and materialize their stuff at will.

As always, there will be more to come... >:)

[deafaq]

Kind of an odd question: say there was a story character that uses sign language, and their name is a common noun like Moss or River. When signing their name, could that character use the sign for that word, or does that not make sense from a grammatical standpoint? Or would that possibly be too close to a sign name and should be avoided for that reason?

(Not sure if this changes anything but the character I'm working on with this situation is hearing but semi-verbal and uses sign language when they can't talk)

Hello,

this is actually pretty common situation. While not many people have name like River, lot of people have last names which mean something. (Smith. Brown. Wood. Tailor, etc. if we go by English last names. First names also sometimes, like Hope.)

What happens is that the person, if they dont have a name sign, fingerspell their name. And commonly, the Deaf people do base the name sign on the name. But its not 1:1 and its not always the case - there can be something else in naming which takes precedence or the name can be mix of more signs.

Some actual real world examples:

I know a person called Novak by last name. That means "new person". Their name sign is just sign for "NEW", not "new person".

I know a person whose last name is very similar to word Calendar. Her name sign isn't actually word CALENDAR, but mix of CALENDAR + ALWAYS LATE, in sort of a visual pun. She was the type to always arrive late everywhere and Deaf people found it hilarious.

So, just because someone is called "Moss" doesnt meant their name sign would be literally "MOSS". Its likely it would be similar to the word, because its odd enough that Deaf people would remember it and base name sign upon it. But your character should not introduce themselves by "My name sign is MOSS".

She can introduce herself "My name is spelled m-o-s-s, like sign MOSS", I guess, but not "My name sign is MOSS". Does it make sense?

But in general, if you want to feature sign language a lot in your writing, you should get a Deaf sensitivity reader. ;)

Mod T