#stultified

[rastronomicals]

5:48 PM EDT June 24, 2024:

Andy Summers & Robert Fripp - "Stultified" From the album I Advance Masked (1982)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

This album is forever associated with a golden day in my mind. Teenagers, Mark and I, again in his shitshaker Vega, smoking a doobie, then driving through Tropical Park with the windows down, my cassette copy of I Advance cranked loud. Beautiful sunny day, and the guitars preternaturally bright and sunny too, echoplex dripping and Fripp's solos sharp and incisive like the sunbeams you felt viscerally on your forearms. Mark was not a prog dude--he was more Skynyrd, and if he was feeling crazy he'd listen to some REM--but the flak I expected never came, and he listened to the eccentric guitar music like I did, too chill or too stoned to care about genre, letting the gleaming guitar wash over him as it washed over me, bright, stoned and photonic at 15 mph in his orange rustbucket Chevy.

[astranauticus]

(vibrating in my seat) i need to go watch an ambience synaesthesia live at least once in my life come on

[llycaons]

the class commentary is neat and it's cool to see a protagonist of a lower social class but my GOD do I not give a shit about these conversations at ALL

[cicadaknight]

being bored is a gift. spent 2 hours at work just pulling french out of my ass in my mind because i had nothing else to do. remembered a shocking amount despite not using it in 5 years.

[afterthefeast]

gonna say something controversial. i think the ideal eleven & amy dynamic is fag and his hag who is a bit in love with him

[comfortcomes]

why would you ever subject someone with actual interesting life experience and possibly an individual way of expressing themselves to an MFA program

[zot3-flopped]

Love how that anon just thinks Harry is arrogant for staying home, like there’s no other explanation. So mean. That man does *not* like being the centre of attention if it’s photographers and red carpets - look how stressed he appears at the film things he did last year, the awards shows he went to this year. Every muscle of his face is tight, his eyes darting about as if he’s watching for a threat, in most of the photos and clips. Not that he doesn’t look good, but he’s obviously not enjoying it. Other stars have talked about how awful and weird that sort of thing is, but for Harry it has to be arrogance, that’s it, judgement made. He’s not the kid he was in 1D any more, fgs he’s been telling us that for years. He had therapy, he’s working on finding peace constantly. Massive intrusive fame is a huge mindfuck, he deals with it well, but why the hell should he be going to things he probably doesn’t enjoy: just to be seen? He doesn’t need to be seen, he’s in some people’s heads 24/7 anyway, so make it make sense!

👏👏👏 People want him to be at Liam Payne's level of desperation and go to the opening of an envelope just so that they get HQs.

[gl1tched-g0th]

When I say Scorpio by Autoheart was made for me I'm not even being hyperbolic that song is too close to a situation I went through down to the tiniest details

[tenth-sentence]

It, too, can smell sweet, like the scent of pleasant woodlands, not of stultifying decay.

"Soil: The incredible story of what keeps the earth, and us, healthy" - Matthew Evans

[illycanary]

Katara's Story Is A Tragedy and It's Not An Accident

I was a teenaged girl when Avatar: The Last Airbender aired on Nickelodeon—the group that the show’s creators unintentionally hit while they were aiming for the younger, maler demographic. Nevermind that we’re the reason the show’s popularity caught fire and has endured for two decades; we weren’t the audience Mike and Bryan wanted. And by golly, were they going to make sure we knew it. They’ve been making sure we know it with every snide comment and addendum they’ve made to the story for the last twenty years.

For many of us girls who were raised in the nineties and aughts, Katara was a breath of fresh air—a rare opportunity in a media market saturated with boys having grand adventures to see a young woman having her own adventure and expressing the same fears and frustrations we were often made to feel. 

We were told that we could be anything we wanted to be. That we were strong and smart and brimming with potential. That we were just as capable as the boys. That we were our brothers’ equals. But we were also told to wash dishes and fold laundry and tidy around the house while our brothers played outside. We were ignored when our male classmates picked teams for kickball and told to go play with the girls on the swings—the same girls we were taught to deride if we wanted to be taken seriously. We were lectured for the same immaturity that was expected of boys our age and older, and we were told to do better while also being told, “Boys will be boys.” Despite all the platitudes about equality and power, we saw our mothers straining under the weight of carrying both full-time careers and unequally divided family responsibilities. We sensed that we were being groomed for the same future. 

And we saw ourselves in Katara. 

Katara begins as a parentified teenaged girl: forced to take on responsibility for the daily care of people around her—including male figures who are capable of looking after themselves but are allowed to be immature enough to foist such labor onto her. She does thankless work for people who take her contributions for granted. She’s belittled by people who love her, but don’t understand her. She’s isolated from the world and denied opportunities to improve her talents. She's told what emotions she's allowed to feel and when to feel them. In essence, she was living our real-world fear: being trapped in someone else’s narrow, stultifying definition of femininity and motherhood. 

Then we watched Katara go through an incredible journey of self-determination and empowerment. Katara goes from being a powerless, fearful victim to being a protector, healer, advocate, and liberator to others who can’t do those things for themselves (a much truer and more fulfilling definition of nurturing and motherhood). It’s necessary in Katara’s growth cycle that she does this for others first because that is the realm she knows. She is given increasingly significant opportunities to speak up and fight on behalf of others, and that allows her to build those advocacy muscles gradually. But she still holds back her own emotional pain because everyone that she attempts to express such things to proves they either don't want to deal with it or they only want to manipulate her feelings for their own purposes. 

Katara continues to do much of the work we think of as traditionally maternal on behalf of her friends and family over the course of the story, but we do see that scale gradually shift. Sokka takes on more responsibility for managing the group’s supplies, and everyone helps around camp, but Katara continues to be the manager of everyone else’s emotions while simultaneously punching down her own. The scales finally seem to tip when Zuko joins the group. With Zuko, we see someone working alongside Katara doing the same tasks she is doing around camp for the first time. Zuko is also the only person who never expects anything of her and whose emotions she never has to manage because he’s actually more emotionally stable and mature than she is by that point. And then, Katara’s arc culminates in her finally getting the chance to fully seize her power, rewrite the story of the traumatic event that cast her into the role of parentified child, be her own protector, and freely express everything she’s kept locked away for the sake of letting everyone else feel comfortable around her. Then she fights alongside an equal partner she knows she can trust and depend on through the story's climax. And for the first time since her mother’s death, the girl who gives and gives and gives while getting nothing back watches someone sacrifice everything for her. But this time, she’s able to change the ending because her power is fully realized. The cycle was officially broken.

Katara’s character arc was catharsis at every step. If Katara could break the mold and recreate the ideas of womanhood and motherhood in her own image, so could we. We could be powerful. We could care for ourselves AND others when they need us—instead of caring for everyone all the time at our own expense. We could have balanced partnerships with give and take going both ways (“Tui and La, push and pull”), rather than the, “I give, they take,” model we were conditioned to expect. We could fight for and determine our own destiny—after all, wasn’t destiny a core theme of the story?

Yes. Destiny was the theme. But the lesson was that Katara didn’t get to determine hers. 

After Katara achieves her victory and completes her arc, the narrative steps in and smacks her back down to where she started. For reasons that are never explained or justified, Katara rewards the hero by giving into his romantic advances even though he has invalidated her emotions, violated her boundaries, lashed out at her for slights against him she never committed, idealized a false idol of her then browbeat her when she deviated from his narrative, and forced her to carry his emotions and put herself in danger when he willingly fails to control himself—even though he never apologizes, never learns his lesson, and never shows any inclination to do better. 

And do better he does not.

The more we dared to voice our own opinions on a character that was clearly meant to represent us, the more Mike and Bryan punished Katara for it.

Throughout the comics, Katara makes herself smaller and smaller and forfeits all rights to personal actualization and satisfaction in her relationship. She punches her feelings down when her partner neglects her and cries alone as he shows more affection and concern for literally every other girl’s feelings than hers. She becomes cowed by his outbursts and threats of violence. Instead of rising with the moon or resting in the warmth of the sun, she learns to stay in his shadow. She gives up her silly childish dreams of rebuilding her own dying culture’s traditions and advocating for other oppressed groups so that she can fulfill his wishes to rebuild his culture instead—by being his babymaker. Katara gave up everything she cared about and everything she fought to become for the whims of a man-child who never saw her as a person, only a possession.

Then, in her old age, we get to watch the fallout of his neglect—both toward her and her children who did not meet his expectations. By that point, the girl who would never turn her back on anyone who needed her was too far gone to even advocate for her own children in her own home. And even after he’s gone, Katara never dares to define herself again. She remains, for the next twenty-plus years of her life, nothing more than her husband's grieving widow. She was never recognized for her accomplishments, the battles she won, or the people she liberated. Even her own children and grandchildren have all but forgotten her. She ends her story exactly where it began: trapped in someone else’s narrow, stultifying definition of femininity and motherhood.

The story’s theme was destiny, remember? But this story’s target audience was little boys. Zuko gets to determine his own destiny as long as he works hard and earns it. Aang gets his destiny no matter what he does or doesn’t do to earn it. And Katara cannot change the destiny she was assigned by gender at birth, no matter how hard she fights for it or how many times over she earns it. 

Katara is Winston Smith, and the year is 1984. It doesn’t matter how hard you fight or what you accomplish, little girl. Big Brother is too big, too strong, and too powerful. You will never escape. You will never be free. Your victories are meaningless. So stay in your place, do what you’re told, and cry quietly so your tears don’t bother people who matter.

I will never get over it. Because I am Katara. And so are my friends, sisters, daughters, and nieces. But I am not content to live in Bryke's world.

I will never turn my back on people who need me. Including me.

[rastronomicals]

7:51 AM EDT May 4, 2024:

Andy Summers & Robert Fripp - "Stultified" From the album I Advance Masked (1982)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

This album is forever associated with a golden day in my mind. Teenagers, Mark and I, again in his shitshaker Vega, smoking a doobie, then driving through Tropical Park with the windows down, my cassette copy of I Advance cranked loud. Beautiful sunny day, and the guitars preternaturally bright and sunny too, echoplex dripping and Fripp's solos sharp and incisive like the sunbeams you felt viscerally on your forearms. Mark was not a prog dude--he was more Skynyrd, and if he was feeling crazy he'd listen to some REM--but the flak I expected never came, and he listened to the eccentric guitar music like I did, too chill or too stoned to care about genre, letting the gleaming guitar wash over him as it washed over me, bright, stoned and photonic at 15 mph in his orange rustbucket Chevy.

[musical-chick-13]

There are some banger lines in this song, with the chorus melody doing some cool things, but then they ruin it by saying “I know you’re a scorpio” 3 million times.

[sunlighthroughthe-ashes]

langston hughes once wrote, in the poem 'harlem'— "what happens to a dream deferred? / does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? or fester like a sore, and then run? /"

this episode is all about dreams — seok-ryu's dreams, unrealized and unthought of. seung-hyo's dreams — given up on, and formed anew. how, from past to present — from dreams broken and built again: they're still at each other's side.

love next door captures with such beautiful fragility the reticent hope tinting our adult lives — crushed by the corporate grind, the endless race from job to job to stultifying job: can we truly rise above the numbness, the wasteland of our everyday, walking home on wistful feet — and blow the dust off of our dreams? touch the stained gold of our longings, still buried beneath the bone-deep weariness? do we not owe it to our younger selves, still glistening with the dew of possibility — to at least try?

what does freedom mean to you? what does the ability to dream mean to you? this is what love next door asks of its characters, and of us — with so much empathy. so much warmth.

i can't stop thinking about how seung-hyo put his hand in the pool water with such infinite gentleness — as if the current could carry him back to the past where anything was possible. the water a conduit to wonder — to youth.

water in any form is rebirth, redemption — and the fact that seok-ryu jumped into it for seung-hyo, that he held her in his arms, suspended in the pool: indicating that they will reaffirm their dreams together. rebuild them side by side.

this is what i love about k-dramas: they make the mundane sacred. they infuse so much intimacy into the most ordinary of things — and love next door is such a fine example of it. the parallels to lovely runner were so precious to me — swimmers headed to the olympics, thwarted by unforeseen circumstance — hopelessly in love with their neighbors.

while lovely runner was for the hopeless romantics, the purest of souls for whom love is as concrete as their own heartbeat — love next door is for the burnt-out gifted children, the disillusioned daughters: bitter but still carrying a burgeoning hope that something might change. that love might be lingering where it's least expected.

[lizbethborden]

Even if 100% of the women in porn loved working in porn, loved taking two dicks in their asshole until their rectum prolapsed, loved getting chlamydia and gonorrhea in their eyes from the cumshots, loved being beaten, spat on, choked, slapped, throatfucked until they vomited, I would still argue for the eradication of porn on the basis of what it is doing to the rest of our fucking society. This evil, disgusting world will do anything to justify the continued degradation and violation of women; will do ANYTHING to conform the abuse of women to the tone of the times so that profound human suffering is now considered vital and empowering, just as it was once moralized as a "necessary evil" for containing the sexual violence of men. I do not forgive those that blindly swallow this lying, soporific, stultifying gruel.

[hussyknee]

I'm really not a villain enjoyer. I love anti-heroes and anti-villains. But I can't see fictional evil separate from real evil. As in not that enjoying dark fiction means you condone it, but that all fiction holds up some kind of mirror to the world as it is. Killing innocent people doesn't make you an iconic lesbian girlboss it just makes you part of the mundane and stultifying black rot of the universe.

"But characters struggling with honour and goodness and the egoism of being good are so boring." Cool well some of us actually struggle with that stuff on the daily because being a good person is complicated and harder than being an edgelord.

Sure you can use fiction to explore the darkness of human nature and learn empathy, but the world doesn't actually suffer from a deficit of empathy for powerful and privileged people who do heinous stuff. You could literally kill a thousand babies in broad daylight and they'll find a way to blame your childhood trauma for it as long as you're white, cisgender, abled and attractive, and you'll be their poor little meow meow by the end of the week. Don't act like you're advocating for Quasimodo when you're just making Elon Musk hot, smart and gay.

[bookish-bogwitch]

Thank you @roomwithanopenfire, @rimeswithpurple, @blackberrysummerblog, @nausikaaa, @larkral,

@hushed-chorus, @alexalexinii, @monbons, @whatevertheweather, @run-for-chamo-miles,

@artsyunderstudy, @mooncello, @brilla-brilla-estrellita, @forabeatofadrum, and @aristocratic-otter for the tags over the past few weeks. I've had a crazy month (90% in crazy a good way) and too frazzled to come up with my own WIP posts, but have enjoyed reading yours and being included.

Here are six ten moody little sentence from Chapter 11 of Basil Pitch's Diary. (In case you missed it, I posted Ch. 10, September, a few weeks ago, then fled the country.) Baz is hanging in in Niall and Dev's room:

The last time I was here with Niall, he’d told me to hold out for more than ear scritches and the occasional carrot. Now we sat on his bed with a chessboard between us. “Baz,” Niall said quietly. “What are you doing?”  “Beating you.” I moved my queen to menace his remaining bishop. “With Snow, I mean.” Niall did that thing where the rook and king hop around, which shouldn’t be allowed, and I realized he’d won. Again. Somewhere, in a parallel universe, there is a me who grew up with someone to play against, demolishing a Niall who never went to math camp.

Below the cut: musing, a posting plan, and more tags.

Musing: I've actually written a ton since the last chapter even though I've been AWOL, but for a while no matter what I wrote, Baz felt out of character. I'd write a scene, like it, and then think "but why is he doing this?" Then I'd rewrite with Baz behaving completely differently, and that also felt OOC.

I worried that I'd somehow doomed myself with inconsistent characterization, but then I figured it out: Baz at this point is deeply inconsistent. He presents himself to the world one way, he tells the reader / himself that he's something else, and deep down he's a secret third thing. And sometimes his masks slip.

To some extent this is every unreliable narrator. But boyo has REALLY tangled himself up at this point. Something's gotta give. Until it does--which it will, soon--I have to be very clear in my mind, even if Baz isn't, about which Baz is driving the Baz at any given moment.

A lot of you can do that sort of thing intuitively. I can't. So I've been building this out (showing you just the headers b/c spoilers):

This might stultify some (most?) of you. For me, though, it's freeing. When my brain isn't trying to keep track of everything, my imagination can unfurl.

"'Everything'?" you ask. "This isn't that plotty a fic." It's not, but it's already 2.5x longer than anything else I've written, which means developing skills I haven't needed before. Anyway, my BPD chart and I are having fun. We're very happy together.

Posting Plan

I pushed myself to get Ch. 10 up before leaving home for three weeks, because Ch. 9 had ended on such a wretched note. While I was happy to have gotten it up, I didn't love the self-imposed time crunch (though betas @cutestkilla, @facewithoutheart, and @thewholelemon were fuckin' heroes). Feeling rushed had me stressing and second-guessing choices that were probably fine.

My plan now is to pause updates until I have at least a very rough first draft of the final chapter, then post it all at regular intervals. I know a longish pause means some folks who'd been reading along will wait until it's complete, if they return at all. To those folks--sorry, and I get it, and thank you for reading in the first place, and I love you.

Tags and shy waves to @brendughh  @beastmonstertitan  @carryonsimoncarryonbaz  @carryonmylovelies  @creepyspice

@comesitintheclover @cows4247 @confused-bi-queer @artsyunderstudy@chen-chen-chen-again-chen

@chronicallyhomoerotic @drowninginships @dragoneggos @excalisbury @emeryhall

@erzbethluna @ebbpettier @fight-surrender @fatalfangirl @gay-at-ikea

@fiend-for-culture @forabeatofadrum @foolofabookwyrm-activated @arthurkko @j-nipper-95

@gekkoinapeartree @goblindad-emoshit @henreyettah @hertragedyconnoisseur @hushed-chorus

@icarus-n-flames @ineffable-grimm-pitch @ic3-que3n @ionlydrinkhotwater @iamamythologicalcreature

 @ileadacharmedlife @ivelovedhimthroughworse @shrekgogurt @im-gettingby @youarenevertooold

@monbons @mooncello @raenestee @you-remind-me-of-the-babe @messofthejess