#systematiser

[communistkenobi]

fanon is such a good writer. I keep becoming more compelled to read theory that isn’t highly structured and laden with citations

[teddybasmanov]

Hey, so literally nobody cares, but I organised my writing (AO3 and Tumblr titbits) and song takes masterlists by fandom, in case someone (who's not me) actually wants to find something on this blog.

[thisisgraeme]

Te Ara TuhiTuhi: Master the Journey from Initial Idea to Polished Composition

Te Ara TuhiTuhi: A System for Learning How to Write Better Welcome to “Te Ara TuhiTuhi,” a comprehensive yet easy-to-understand writing system designed to transform your initial ideas into polished prose.  This system takes you through a cyclical journey, mirroring the natural progression from the birth of an idea to its full realisation in writing. Here’s how you can navigate each…

[procrastiposting]

Systematising brain

Today we are mad that systemitisation- the cognitive tendency to uncover the underlying rules and expalinations governing observable data- is literally only discussed in juxtaposition with "empathising"

This is fucking Simon Baron-Cohen bullshit, and more specifically, here is why I am mad:

I have a systematising brian. Systematising is a super legit thing that some people (Per SBC himself, Autistic people,which I about 3/4 agree with**) naturally do quite a lot. Anecdotally, I also know an abundance of people who absolutely could not give less of a shit about why things work or how they work- they simply care that they work, or more common still, they only notice when they stop working.

Anyways- I am fully willing to give my personal cognitive support (*for now*) (Essay pending) to the idea that some people systematise more easily or more intutively than others.

What I Will Not be lending any fucking support to, however, is the neurotrash nonsense idea that systeitisation is the opposite of empathy, and that this dissociation characterises differences in the "male brain" and "female brain". I hate this. You were doing so well and then you had to make it blue and pink and for what

Anyways Do I systematise because I am autistic or is it because both my parents were engineers? Or is it because both my parents were autistic engineers? [diagnoses pending /hj]

something something systemetysation and empathy are both very much destributed processes requiring overlapping areas of cortex

yaddah yaddah just because you think autistic brain are highly systematic and lower empathisisng doesn't mean that these things have anything to do with one another beyond drawing on a shared and limited pool of cognitive resources

boo hoo literally the prevalence of emotional hypervigilance and "hypersensitivity" within certain groups of autistic people* is literally testament to the fact that empathy and systemetysation can not only cooccur, but can covarry across populations.

(*incidentally mostly girls, but this doesn't prove anyone right)

I think this all has to do with more global frameworks in which cognitive resources are selectively hyper-concentrated on specific concepts- this is the special interest thing, this is the systemetisation of whatever is being attended, this is hypervigilance, this is social anxiety, this is high empathy, it's literally just amplified cognitive and cortical processing (hello oversaturation of white matter tracts) and what and however its focused, - both in terms of item selectivity and prefered handling method (systematising, reitterating, attenuating)

Basically, systematisation is the natural consequence of focused cognitive attention to specific information, for those whose brains got used to systematising.

brains think more or feel more depending on which processes they are focused on. This preference is modulated by Learning! Which is subject to social conditioning!

It's possible a preference for systemetising processes is due to excess cortical connectivity, and weakened limbic circuitry (ASD)

However! This doesn't really universally reflect a dichotomy between systematising and empathising?

unless we are looking to redefine the term based on neuro-reductivism (which I do love to do, but will refrain from here don't @ me) Empathy multiple components distributed across neocortical, paleocortical, and subcortical areas! Reduction in one does not deplete the others,- especially if they compensate with hyperconnectivity!

systemetisation can act on literally any representations/objects- including people, body language, feelings, relationships... probably most objects involved in "empathy" (albeit I would wonder how much of this may be modulated by social attention wich is observably depleted in autism relative to NT controls)

SO in conclusion can we please just talk more about systemetisation without making it a boy thing? We can make it an autistic thing* but we gotta stop using it to make autism a boy thing.

*I do find the discretisation here a bit tiring as well (future essay)

A systematising brain is not a Male Brain.

The autistic brain is not an Extreme Male Brain.

*dies imminently*

****Disclaimer time!: Lots of big takes in this rant that I have not cited because i am LAZY- I reserve the right to revisit, revise, redact, or retroactively source any of the above claims if I read something that makes me realise I'm a moron or I develop a spontaneous desire to elaborate on anything in a more formal or structured tone. Feel free to point out my mistakes or send me articles

[mortalityplays]

I have now been diagnosed autistic by tumblr strangers who don't believe allistic people can enjoy learning information AND diagnosed allistic by a tumblr stranger who doesn't believe autistic people can enjoy small talk. if only there where some systematised way of actually determining whether a person meets specific criteria, like say maybe by a designated expert of some kind. ah well. the crowd has spoken. guess I'm the avatar.

[bookofmac]

I actually really love the anticlimax of the 60's hyped up meeting being a zoom meeting that only 16 of them attend. so much of the show is about how fickle and personal Evil acts are, yes they are gross and disgusting, but also systematised and impersonal. and what better way to represent that than showing Leland trying to tell a demon what the mute button looks like.

[burningvelvet]

Lord Byron writing about book-burning, queer representation, and the value of poetry . . . in 1821:

“Let us hear no more of this trash about ‘licentiousness.’ Is not ‘Anacreon’ taught in our schools? translated, praised, and edited? Are not his Odes the amatory praises of a boy? Is not Sappho's Ode on a girl? Is not this sublime and (according to Longinus) fierce love for one of her own sex? And is not Phillips's translation of it in the mouths of all your women? And are the English schools or the English women the more corrupt for all this? When you have thrown the ancients into the fire it will be time to denounce the moderns. ‘Licentiousness!’ — there is more real mischief and sapping licentiousness in a single French prose novel, in a Moravian hymn, or a German comedy, than in all the actual poetry that ever was penned, or poured forth, since the rhapsodies of Orpheus. The sentimental anatomy of Rousseau and Madame de Staël are far more formidable than any quantity of verse. They are so, because they sap the principles, by reasoning upon the passions; whereas poetry is in itself passion, and does not systematise. It assails, but does not argue; it may be wrong, but it does not assume pretensions to Optimism.”

Context: this letter was written during the Bowles-Pope Controversy, a seven-year long public debate in the English literary scene primarily between the priest, poet, and critic William Lisle Bowles and the poet, peer, and politician Lord Byron. The debate began in 1807 when Bowles published an edition of the famous writer Alexander Pope’s work which included an essay he wrote criticizing the writer’s character, morals, and how he should be remembered. Today, we would say that Bowles tried to “cancel” Alexander Pope, who had affairs without marrying, and whose works had sexual themes. Lord Byron defended Pope, who was one of his all-time favorite writers. Pope had been dead since 1744, so he was not personally involved. This debate shows that while moral standards have changed throughout the centuries, the ways people have debated about morality have remained similar.

Source of the excerpt: — Moore’s Life of Byron in one volume, 1873, p. 708 - https://books.google.com/books?id=Q3zPkPC8ECEC&pg=PA708&lpg=PA708&dq=%22Are+not+his+Odes+the+amatory+praises

Sources on the Bowles-Pope Controversy: — Chandler, James. “The Pope Controversy: Romantic Poetics and the English Canon.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 3, 1984, pp. 481–509. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343304. — https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pope-Bowles-controversy — Bowles, Byron and the Pope-controversy by Jacob Johan van Rennes, Ardent Media, 1927.

[coldalbion]

[IMAGE ID: Tweet from Twitter user CAFFSTRINK on !st August 2024 Ppl gotta stop seeing testosterone and estrogen as male and female hormones bc every single human produces them just in different amounts /END ID]

And I'll actually go further: the systems of measurement are not unbiased - they have their roots in assumptions that are kin to, if not directly identical to those made by eugenicists and scientific racists.

Because they are artefacts of a classification ethos that is, at best, merely 300 years old. Before that, guess what, the so called West didn't automatically categorise in binaries, or fit things in boxes. A text on snakes would include things that were associated with snakes as well. Remedies for bites would sit next to folklore on snakes, info about their habitat, ways to care or avoid them etc, as but one example. What we have now is a product of colonial attempts to systematise and codify the world as a result of shock at the sheer diversity of existences and varieties of life. That is, to capture and create an over-arching episteme and claim its universality. To dominate knowledge construction and say that this is the only way. It is not. There are other knowledge systems and epistemologies. Note: this isn't saying SCIENCE=Bad. But is saying that claims of universality and the assumptions of universality which undergird the so-called Western episteme have biases that need noticing and interrogating.

[0x28]

like i just see all the rhetoric around violence towards trans women prisoners being around the male prisoners and tbh it does feel a little bit like demonisation of male prisoners. i was in a men's prison (three, actually) and while absolutely they are environments that breed violence among prisoners both sexual and non-sexual, due to the fact that ur locking people in cages like animals, and also due to the fact that they're supposedly "male" environments creating a culture of masculinity and gendered violence, many male prisoners are like. genuinely just kind people who do not want to assault people including trans women. i tried to be closeted in prison but was outed by the guards (lol👍) and most of the male prisoners were intrusive but ultimately nonthreatening about it, and I don't think they were intrusive out of malice rather than the generalised cis curiosity you see outside of prison environments. yeah they asked questions that are not appropriate to ask a trans person but you have to understand that many prisoners are coming from places of very low education & exposure to the world. i had one prisoner ask me what genocide meant when i talked about palestine. like male prisoners are human beings and men just like men outside of prison. there was genuinely a sense of solidarity between male prisoners and any heightened threat male prisoners pose to women kept in the male estate comes from the male prison environment, not from some ontological fact about the men inside themselves.

as for the real threat it ofc comes from the officers themselves. the only times I was actually assaulted in prison was by the guards. the verbal transphobia from the guards was many orders of magnitude greater than that from the prisoners. and the difference is, while prisoner-on-prisoner assault on trans prisoners usually leads to the trans prisoner being segregated, officer-on-prisoner assaults on trans prisoners leads to absolutely nothing fuck all happening and they won't even acknowledge it happened. as dismissive as the prison was about the fact that they'd outed me to the other prisoners they at least didn't pretend me being assaulted by another prisoner was impossible. officers are the ones who can and do assault you with impunity and regularly, and unfortunately they are in women's prisons too. it's a p widely acknowledged fact that women prisoners are regularly sexually assaulted by the guards in womens prisons too.

not to mention the systematised sexual assault thats enshrined into prison policy—fun fact, in the uk at least, strip searches only exist in "men's" prisons. people in the women's estate don't get strip searched.

[communistkenobi]

I believe it was the work of legal scholar Florence Ashley where I first encountered this term (it might have also been Serano), but I’m becoming more and more committed to saying “degender” as opposed to “misgender.” like I think the term ‘misgender’ fails to properly identify the mechanism behind the process it describes: misgendering is not an act of attributing the wrong gender characteristics to a trans person, it is an act of dehumanisation. I think the term ‘misgender’ especially gives people much easier rhetorical cover to argue that trans women are hurt by misandry by being ‘mislabeled as men,’ or that they are in fact ‘actually men’ and benefit from male privilege, because the (incorrect) assumption underlying this is that when trans women are ‘misgendered’ they are being treated like men - to follow this line of thinking to its natural conclusion, this denies the existence of transmisogyny altogether, because any ‘misgendering’ of trans women is done only with the intent, conscious or otherwise, to inscribe the social position (and the privileges this position affords) of men onto them, as opposed to stripping them of their womanhood (and thus, their humanity).

The term degendering, however, I think more accurately describes this dehumanising process. Pulling from the work of both Judith Butler and Maria Lugones, gender mediates access to personhood - Lugones says in the Coloniality of Gender that in the colonial imaginary, animals have no gender, they only have (a) sex, and so who gets ‘sexed’ and who gets ‘gendered’ is a matter of who counts as human. She describes this gendering process as fundamentally colonial and emerging as a colonial technology of power - who is gendered is who gets to be considered human, and so the construction of binary sex is a way of ‘speciating’ or rendering non-human the Indigenous and African people of colonized America, justifying and systematising the brutal use of their land and/or their labour until their death by equating them to animals. Sylvia Wynter likewise describes in 1492: A New World View that a popular term used by Spanish colonizers to describe the indigenous people was “heads of Indian men and women,” as in heads of cattle. By the same token, white men are granted the high status of human, worthy of governance, wealth, and knowledge production, and white women are afforded the subordinate though still very high responsibility of reproducing these men by raising and educating children. Appeals to a person’s sex as something more real, more obvious, or ‘poorly concealed’ by their gender is to deny them their gender outright, and therefore is a mechanism to render them non-human. Likewise, for Butler, gender produces the human subject - to be outside gender is to be considered “unthinkable” as a human being, a being in “unliveable” space.

Therefore the process of trans women going from women -> “male” is not “being gendered as a man,” it is being positioned as non-human. when people deny the gender of trans women, most especially trans women of colour, they invariably do this through reference to their genitals, to their ‘sex,’ as something inescapable, incapable of being concealed - again, this is not a process of rendering them as men, it is the exact opposite: it is a process of rendering them as non-human. there is not a misidentification process happening, they are not being “misgendered as men,” there is a de-identification of them as human beings. Hence, they are not misgendered, they are degendered, stripped of gender, stripped of their humanity

[canmom]

what's the book for? part 2

[here's an intro where I talk about the three hour video essay that inspired me to do this]

[here's the first part where I argue that there's a big difference between the actual thing you do in an RPG and the book that tells you how you're allegedly supposed to be doing it]

So if the actual TTRPG games are mostly learned by observation and practice, what is the something that RPG books claim to give you in order to enable that?

Here's three things I can think of.

This isn't intended as a Forge-like categorisation of games, most RPG books offer (or claim to offer) all of these to some degree, ideally in complementary ways...

A ruling reference - RPG book as legal system

In the intro to a typical mainstream RPG book, this is typically the explanation that is given.

Over the course of a telling a story together, all sorts of weird edge cases come up where you might not want to simply make a call on how it should resolve. Moreover, consistency is valued, for both challenge and narrative reasons.

In this case, the RPG book is a big collection of rulings for specific situations. 'What happens when a character falls off a cliff?' You can look it up. It's like legal precedents. This is how a lot of the stuff in the early D&D books started - stuff that someone had done, and a referee had made a ruling, and it got written down. Then it would get systematised, unified, and streamlined so that it's easier to remember and extend to new situations.

A lighter game avoids special cases and just suggests a general procedure for resolving situations of uncertainty, conflicts etc.

This angle doesn't tend to cover procedures for how the game is physically run - how to go about setting up the scenario, who should get priority when speaking, etc. etc. - beyond perhaps offering prebuilt modules to inspire you. In older games, most of that is stuff you pick up by watching. In newer games... well, hold on.

A grab bag of interesting prompts - RPG book as inspiration in the moment

Most RPG books have flavour text; many also have tables of weird shit you can roll on or select when building a character, character sheets full of interesting abilities, descriptions of NPCs and so on. A select few RPGs like Unknown Armies and Chuubo's Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine have really distinctive prose too.

The aim of all these tools is to give you something to latch onto when you're in the moment and you need to think of the next thing to say. It's also to get people onto some shared understanding of what this game is all about.

This is where the bulk of many RPG books lies. It's explicitly the aim of Apocalypse World's MC moves. Many one-page RPGs are nothing but lists of evocative names and description elements, and a short snatch of prose.

Prompt tables and lists of names are popular in just about every tradition of RPG design - trad, storygames, OSR, all use them. Sometimes they're the most memorable thing about an RPG, like Dark Heresy's crit tables.

Sometimes pages of tables is the RPG - in recent years, card-based games have become popular, using a regular deck of cards which indexes into a big table of events, each of which is like 'here's a short description. how do you respond?'. This type of game has a great deal in common with storylet-based interactive fiction like Fallen London.

Prompts don't have to be short, though. Arguably an adventure module can be pretty much this - something you consult when players arrive in a new place to get an idea of who they should meet for example.

In D&D, the Monster Manual is straight up a book of real freaky guys you can put in your game. It also has stat blocks for them, of course, but the descriptions and pictures do a lot of work here to make them concrete.

This is why I describe the pictures in Lancer as load-bearing. The pictures help - or are supposed to help - grease the wheels of imagination when you're trying to imagine mechs.

This function of RPGs is a large part of the angle you're playing if you tie the game to a particular genre, setting or IP.

A machine to guide you to a specific experience - RPG book as auteur blueprint

So here's the newer flavour.

RPGs can be one of the most feelings-dense forms of art that humans create - it's your story, with your characters. This is something that tends to arise organically after you spend a long time with a character and 'get into their head'.

However, there is often a desire on the designer's side to structure the game to bring about a particular kind of emotional experience more directly. From horror games to games self-consciously 'about' colonialism, abuse, romance, etc., these games try to give you a particular experience, similar to what a film or book gives you - or indeed, a computer game.

Here are some examples:

My Life With Master is an older Forge game. It's about the 'Igor' servant characters in a classic horror movie, billing itself as 'a roleplaying game of villainy, self-loathing, and unrequited love'. It presents you with an emotionally charged scenario and mechanics that try to push you towards specific drama - if you want to be critical, a firm instance of the incentives and buttons oriented design that Huntsman was talking about, sometimes quite explicitly saying 'this mechanic was designed to...'

Dog Eat Dog is a game 'a game of imperialism and assimilation on the Pacific islands', with the DM reimagined as a colonial power adding more and more restrictions and the players as native people who will inevitably break its rules, until they are eventually pushed to 'run amok' (fatally), or assimilate. It's a game whose entire argument is more or less spelled out in the book itself.

But games don't have to be this narrowly scoped to have this kind of aspiration. Something like Apocalypse World still wants to bring about certain kinds of interaction, laid out quite explicitly as 'agendas' for the MC and players. It is strongly 'opinionated', in programmer terms.

Even a very flexible game can take on this model. Fiasco is a very abstract structure, designed to set up a chaotic situation like in a Coen Brothers movie. Microscope is designed to give you a fractal zoom in and out of a fictional history. These games are almost all procedure; Fiasco has some fantastic prompt tables, and a clear way to cook up your own, but the bulk of it is the stuff it tells you to do with scenes and dice.

These could be seen as games on an auteur model, with many of the emotional beats of the scenario already rigged up in advance. You get this type of book to experience a good/meaningful story - with a certain amount of flexibility in the details that gets you more attached. If there is a GM/MC/etc. they have instructions to facilitate the expression of that story.

...well, I refer to it as an auteur model. Thankfully not everyone is Ron Edwards! Apocalypse World has a whole chapter about how to modify the game to your taste, or build new games on its framework, and that - plus its conceptual simplicity - probably played a role in its hundreds of derivatives. 'Hacking' games was well established as a practice in the storygames milieu right from the early days. Probably the vast majority of games put out on itch.io are simply hacks of an established framework, very few offer real innovation.

Despite this, the offer of these products is still that they'll tell you how create a kind of verbal machine to realise some very specific thing.

Secret fourth thing...?

I can't think of others right now, but I hate presenting a list as exhaustive unless I can prove it's exhaustive. It's very likely there's some other function a book can claim to perform.

However, to summarise, you look at an RPG book to get:

a consistent set of rulings to handle situations of uncertainty

a set of prompts to help inspire your imagination when you need inspiration

a carefully designed procedure to lead you to a specific experience

The third thing is kind of a different beast to the other two, huh? You might be thinking that the first two are trad games and the third one is post-Forge 'story games', but it's really much older than that. Paranoia is a great early example; there are shades of it in many games published in the 80s and 90s. Not all these games are affiliated with the Forge and its diaspora either - take for example Jenna Moran's games and Bliss Stage.

Story games are not books either

The Forge and its diaspora led to a lot of games being printed, and launched the careers of many an 'indie TTRPG designer', which was not really a thing you could be in the same way before. It would be easy therefore to think this was the main contribution: we should assess it on the basis of the printed games that resulted.

However, nothing says you have to use a book to pilfer from their idea pool.

The really interesting contribution of the whole movement, to my eye, is that it calls our attention to a facet of TTRPGs that had often been left implicit. Who speaks, when? Who gets the 'narrative authority' to make the final call on what becomes 'true'? How do you organise time - do you frame scenes, use flashbacks, cut between different characters? What makes a dice roll exciting? How do you work out what would engage the other players, and communicate your own interests? Are you trying to help your character win, or are you more like a writer who might choose to make them suffer? How do you make a compelling character arc? What can be changed around behind the scenes to make a better story?

These are all aspects of 'play', the thing that you do at the table. Any given TTRPG group will settle on its own implicit or explicit approach to this kind of thing.

Different RPG books will tell you to do this or that. Some games will tell you to set stakes, or make failure interesting, or make choices that act as 'flags' to show what you're looking for.

But these tools are not tied to any specific game. You don't need the 'permission' of a book, nor can a book stop you doing it. A book may lay out a procedure that makes it easier, may introduce you to an idea that you haven't heard before, but once you have the idea, you can play with it however you like.

The way I approach a trad game like D&D, from either side of the DM screen, has become very different after my sojourn into the world of story games. A lot of what I liked there, I kept doing. Other inspiration comes from outside of the 'hobby' entirely, in related milieu like improv comedy.

This is something the OSR milieu seems to understand quite well. Everything is expected to be mixed, matched, and interpreted by the needs of your group. Posts will be framed as mere advice, which can be picked up and applied regardless of context.

But that all depends on a certain amount of common ground as to 'what the game is'. There is an authoritative DM who runs the scenario. The emphasis of the game is probably on exploring some kind of ruin and surviving in a dark, decaying fantasy world populated by various factions at odds with each other. Players control flimsy characters whose survival is not guaranteed, but if they live long enough, they can become major powers. There is a heavy strategic aspect: you are trying to use your resources to survive and get something. This is the general shape of a 'prototypical OSR game'.

the shared context of storygames

Story games form their own subsubculture, but they do not have this level of shared context. Instead, a different kind of shared context is kind of implicit in the milieu.

Here's how things go at the London Indie RPG Meetup Group, which I've attended a couple of times: a group of nerds gather in a pub. People will pitch games with a couple of sentences; then people will form groups and play that game as a one-shot session. Someone will have a book, or printouts. Most players will not have heard of the game before.

In this kind of context, a lot of the quirks of story games make sense. 'Read this out' paragraphs, rapid character creation based on selecting prompts, simple mechanics designed to push you into drama as quickly as possible: all of this stuff is perfect for a one-shot game you play once or a few times. This type of game is not really trying to 'take on' trad games.

But then there's the 'middle ground' kind of game, which are closer to a 'trad' game - a game master, persistent characters each controlled by one player, multiple sessions, progression - but also instruct you to do something more experimental by trad-game standards. This includes Apocalypse World and its derivatives, Blades in the Dark and its derivatives, the Burning Wheel/Mouse Guard lineage, Jenna Moran's games... and so on.

It's this point of overlap where things get sticky and it all becomes a bit tense. Since, well, story game fans can be quite evangelistic - and part of that evangelism depends on a dismissively book-determinist view of trad TTRPGs. But conversely, trad players can be quite reluctant to imagine there is any other way of approaching this whole activity, and dismissive of any other approach. I do not like it, Sam-I-am.

So you end up with a situation of camps, with both groups bristling at the sense that they should be compelled to give up the thing they like to do it the way they consider inferior.

And if you want to criticise the other camp, what do you do? Pick up their book and criticise it as a product, according to your sense of what a TTRPG book is for. Which seems hopelessly besides the point when a book is such a small part of the story.

I've played trad games, story games, OSR games, 'freeform' forum games, LARP, MMO roleplaying, improv comedy... Not as much as I'd like of anything, but enough to get a sense of the many ways we can do this 'roleplaying' thing, whether by explicit rule or implicit convention.

So the puzzle I now have is, if there is to be a book involved, what is that book there to do? What really makes for a good RPG book? Are there other ways to get that thing? How do you game design honestly?

We'll try to address that in part 3 of this series, coming... sometime soon, hopefully!

[familyabolisher]

can you explain the tlt/sexual violence connection at like, a 7th grade reading level? (or - you’re British right? idk what year that would be but it’s the grade where you’re 12-13) i struggle with reading comprehension and im trying to get better at reading long/intricate text but a lot of your posts just end up confusing me when I try to read them 😅 thank you

sure, i'll do my best. i’ve bolded the ‘key’ parts and i’ve tried to keep this to just a few paragraphs, so hopefully that makes it a little clearer?

At the heart of how Tamsyn Muir writes about interpersonal relationships is the suggestion that the necromancer-cavalier relation emerges from the discourse of Nabokov's Lolita. I wrote in-depth about this reading here, but the gloss of it is: John uses Annabel Lee to explicate and rhetorically bolster the relationship between himself and Alecto, which is similarly used by Humbert Humbert in Lolita explaining his relationship to Dolores Haze (and the 'nymphet' in general). Muir has written in the past about Lolita, such that I find it impossible to believe that she would reference Annabel Lee without intending to usher in Nabokov's novel as a possible interpretation. From the John-Alecto blueprint emerges every other necromancer-cavalier relationship we see; though each is of course individuated, the current of power and subjectivity running through each retains the same base shape, and that power/subjectivity current emerges from Humbert and Dolores in Lolita. This sets the stage for relationships that are pretty explicitly abusive and predatory (Cytherea and Gideon; Harrow and Gideon; Ianthe and Coronabeth) to be understood not as aleatory happenstances, but as epiphenomena relative to, and consistent within, a social order that sanctions and facilitates and even demands such a practice.

What this does is suggest that a relationship can be drawn between the conditions of sexual abuse and the conditions of (imperialist) hegemony; if what Humbert did to Dolores Haze (pedophilic rape, in short, on particular aesthetic terms) can be expanded upon, systematised, and used as the base for a society-wide set of relations that ultimately exist with intent to sustain an imperial order, what questions can we start asking about those relations? What lies at the heart of this is the idea that sexual violence, sexual abuse, is a currency of the hegemonic order, and that this abuse is made possible not only through particular normative social relations but through the backing of the dominant culture affirming and normalising (and thus invisibilising) the process by which this abuse takes place. This is an idea that also occurs in Nabokov, who crafts Humbert's abuse of Dolores around a fictive, composite "Lolita" emerging from the legacy of a number of women from the literary canon: Annabel Lee, Lenore, Beatrice, Botticelli's Venus, Virginia Clemm Poe, Petrach's Laura, to name a few. In short: what is the relationship between the aesthetics of imperialism, the enactment of imperialist conquest, and the social facilitation of sexual abuse?

The key development Muir makes in relating the subjectivity of Alecto (as Dolores Haze) back to the other subjectivities in which she deals comes from the parallels she draws between Alecto and other characters. A strong example of this is Kiriona, paralleled with Alecto at a number of points that I list off in the linked essay. In rendering John's 'creation' of Alecto as functionally equivalent to Humbert's 'creation' of Lolita, which we understand to be a process of rape, and then making the 'creation' of Alecto equivalent to the 'creation' of Kiriona, Muir suggests at a number of things. Firstly, that rape and the deliberate destruction of the Earth are the same, which I've always read as a play on the double meaning of 'rape' as 'sexual assault' and 'pillage'; secondly, that this twinned process 'creates' the valorised subject position that we see Alecto occupy, one similar to 'Lolita''s and one denoting (in short) normative white femininity and its currency under capitalism; thirdly, that to this enactment of rape-plunder-killing-creation of the subject can be added the creation of the imperial weapon, which is the position that Kiriona takes up, and arguably the crux of cavalierhood as a state of subjectivity as a whole. 

Other examples of this parallel process include John's relationship to Harrow, which in my opinion threads in the relationship between Catholic imperialism via proselytisation and the language of 'fatherhood'/paternity being used to describe the language between the Christian God and his subjects. A crucial throughline here is the question of if we are to understand the position of 'father'/'fatherhood' not as one of safety but as one of violence, how does that change our relationship to the language of fatherhood as used to describe God? God as 'the father' when the father carries out an imperialist crusade of sorts hearkens back to Humbert Humbert as the incestuous pedophilic rapist able to enact his violence via the social relation of fatherhood.

(I focused on Lolita here because I find it the easiest framework to explain my thoughts, but I think you can make sense of this reading even without using Nabokov as a guide? I think it's very textually substantiated that John's relationship to various others – Alecto, Harrow, Kiriona – is one of abuse, so it's about using that as a starting-point to unpick the rest of the discourse.) There are some other key questions going into this – I think, for example, John himself being indigenous has some v crucial significance and I wouldn't claim a 1:1 analogy to Nabokov's Humbert, rather a development with significant caveats – but hopefully this is a clearer summary?

[thedreadvampy]

I think the thing that worries me about many approaches to mutual aid (and this isn't a criticism OF mutual aid, nor is it a new or unique concern) is yeah, that need for systematisation and, honestly, an amount of alienation that a lot of small communities are currently not super able to create.

like as somebody who grew up in a family shouldering the burden of failure of care. there's stuff you as a family member or friend or community member can and should do to support loved ones, and it's hard and unpleasant work at times but it needs doing.

but then on the other hand there's stuff that can only really effectively be done by someone whose relationship to that person is more distant and care-specific. because the burden of carrying on that close relationship can really get in the way, for both people, of the care work that needs to happen Right Now. and vice versa.

the need for more depersonalised/professionalised care can look like a lot of things. from being someone with a serious injury who doesn't want people they're close to to see them naked and vulnerable, to someone finding their resentment towards a parent make it hard for them to care for them in old age, to people who burn friendships out by being there through someone's violent manic episodes. it looks like adequate personal/professional boundaries with a therapist, so that you know that the session is just about you and not about them. it looks like being able to care for someone who's consistently vile and aggressive towards you because you know that at the end of the day you'll finish your shift and walk away into a space where you can take care of yourself.

like that's what a system where people don't fall through the cracks has to look like - a balance between what we owe each other through loving relationships, and what is best done by someone who isn't personally connected to the person needing care.

professionalised care isn't enough on its own. we all need community and personal relationships - and all of us will sometimes need to grit our teeth and weather some storms and go out of our way to keep that going.

but equally community care isn't enough on its own either. often we end up having to choose between being someone's friend/lover/family and being their carer, because they can be mutually exclusive. often we don't get a choice, because there's nowhere else they're getting that care. but your relationship doesn't come through unharmed and equal if you're regularly having to put your own wellbeing aside to provide in-depth care for someone. it can't. that affects both of you a lot. it affects power dynamics. it builds mutual resentments. it puts you in a position of either burning yourself out or abandoning them, and it puts them in a position of constantly mitigating their needs to keep you.

Like, when we talk about how in a fully functional community, shitty, unpleasant and miserable-to-be-around people can't be left without support, this is part of that. but also it's part of managing the tendency to burn ourselves and each other out and lose love by trying to be all things to all people.

there have to be some sort of distancing structures in place for some kinds of care - both physical and mental. idk what that looks like necessarily - shift rotas, committees, nominated carers without close existing ties, idk - but it can't just sit solely within existing friendships and relationships.

I do think a lot of communities understand this need, but communities working on mutual support and mutual aid often just straight up lack the resource and capacity to NOT be doing this in a close knit group. I don't know how to resolve this. but I've seen enough examples of people throwing themselves into the fire over and over again to the detriment of both the carer and the caree to know that it needs resolving.

[metamatar]

/r/ is usually flapped or trilled.[30] In intervocalic position, it may have a single contact and be described as a flap [ɾ],[31] but it may also be a clear trill, especially in word-initial and syllable-final positions, and geminate /rː/ is always a trill in Arabic and Persian loanwords, e.g. zarā [zəɾaː] (ज़रा – ذرا 'little') versus well-trilled zarrā [zəraː] (ज़र्रा – ذرّہ 'particle'). [...]

Loanwords from Persian (including some words which Persian itself borrowed from Arabic or Turkish) introduced six consonants, /f, z, ʒ, q, x, ɣ/. Being Persian in origin, these are seen as a defining feature of Urdu, although these sounds officially exist in Hindi and modified Devanagari characters are available to represent them.[35][36] Among these, /f, z/, also found in English and Portuguese loanwords, are now considered well-established in Hindi; indeed, /f/ appears to be encroaching upon and replacing /pʰ/ even in native (non-Persian, non-English, non-Portuguese) Hindi words as well as many other Indian languages such as Bengali, Gujarati and Marathi, as happened in Greek with phi.[21] This /pʰ/ to /f/ shift also occasionally occurs in Urdu.[37] While [z] is a foreign sound, it is also natively found as an allophone of /s/ beside voiced consonants.

The other three Persian loans, /q, x, ɣ/, are still considered to fall under the domain of Urdu, and are also used by some Hindi speakers; however, other Hindi speakers may assimilate these sounds to /k, kʰ, g/ respectively.[25][35][38] The sibilant /ʃ/ is found in loanwords from all sources (Arabic, English, Portuguese, Persian, Sanskrit) and is well-established.[10] Some Hindi speakers (especially those from rural areas) pronounce the /f, z, ʃ/ sounds as /pʰ, dʒ, s/), though these same speakers, having a Sanskritic education, may hyperformally uphold /ɳ/ and [ʂ].[39][24] In contrast, for native speakers of Urdu, the maintenance of /f, z, ʃ/ is not commensurate with education and sophistication, but is characteristic of all social levels.[38] The sibilant /ʒ/ is very rare and is found in loanwords from Persian, Portuguese, and English and is considered to fall under the domain of Urdu and although it is officially present in Hindi, many speakers of Hindi assimilate it to /z/ or /dʒ/.[27][24]

Being the main sources from which Hindustani draws its higher, learned terms– English, Sanskrit, Arabic, and to a lesser extent Persian provide loanwords with a rich array of consonant clusters. The introduction of these clusters into the language contravenes a historical tendency within its native core vocabulary to eliminate clusters through processes such as cluster reduction and epenthesis.

what fascinates me about linguistics is that i have known all of this, intuitively, i know which sounds are urdu sounds, which are the upper and lower registers in hindi, i have also heard the complaints of elders about the loss of the proper /ph/ and i have never ever systematised this knowledge but continue retain it through sheer practice.

[horsesource]

"For Guattari, signification has an immediately political character. Against standard understandings of the signifier-signified relation as 'arbitrary' or 'conventional' Guattari argues that this relation is 'at root merely the expression of authority by means of signs'. Guattari contends that meaning does not come from language itself, but rather from 'very real social power formations', and he speaks of a 'linguistic machine' that serves to systematise and structure these power formations. To remain at the level of language is to avoid questioning the operations of power that underlie it. At issue for Guattari, then, is that approaches that make signification, language, or the symbolic primary do not and cannot adequately account for the real diversity of semiotic systems, and he suggests that '[o]ne type of meaning is produced by the semiotics of the body, another by the semiotics of power (of which there are many), yet another by machine semiotics'. In short, Guattari is challenging methods that suppose the adequacy of a single semiotic – specifically that of signification – and raising the question of by what means a single semiotic can be seen to unify diverse semiotic systems, 'where all other poly-centred semiotic substances can become dependent on a single special stratum of the signifier'.

The new role of analysis then becomes a matter of mapping 'the non-signifying semiotic dimensions underling, illuminating, and deconstructing every discourse'. But the question remains of what it could mean for a semiotics to be non-signifying or a-signifying. [..]

[Charles Sanders] Peirce distinguishes between three kinds of signs: first, likenesses, or icons; second, indications, or indices; and third, symbols, or general signs. Icons ‘serve to convey ideas of the things they represent simply by imitating them’, indices ‘show something about things, on account of their being physically connected with them’, and symbols 'have become associated with their meanings by ['conventional'] usage'. It is perhaps not quite right to say that these are classes of signs so much as they are aspects or functions of the sign: for Peirce semiosis involves accounting for how each of these functions is a part of any given sign we encounter. What Guattari’s positions suggests, on these definitions, is that the semiotic of signification operates solely at the level of the symbol, and what Guattari is doing is trying to accommodate the icon and the index. Among many semioticians, linguists, and philosophers, signs that are 'only' icons, indices, or mixes of the two are often not considered to be signs and are rather named as signals, and, as Guattari scholar Gary Genosko puts it, Guattari is aiming to 'rethink and regain the lowly status of signals'.

"Deleuze and Guattari’s Semiorhythmology: A Sketch for a Rhythmic Theory of Signs", Iain Campbell

[jordicasamitjanaethicalvegan]

Do you know the difference between Animal Rights, Animal Welfare, and Animal Protection? Do you belong to any of the movements associated with these concepts? In this article, I explain the difference between these concepts, and how they compare with Veganism.