#this is a good example of our wing structures

[haggishlyhagging]

Another way to solve the paradox of depressed wives reporting their marriages as happy is to view the socialization process as one which "deforms" them in order to fit them for marriage as now structured. We cut the motivational wings of young women or bind their intellectual feet, all the time reassuring them that it is all for their own good. Otherwise, no one would love them or marry them or take care of them. Or, if anyone did, they would be unhappy and feel caged if they had wings and could not fly, or unbound feet and could not run.

There may have been a time when this made sense. It might well be asked if it still does. But whether it makes sense or not, we are quite remarkably successful. We do not clip wings or bind feet, but we do make girls sick. For to be happy in a relationship which imposes so many impediments on her, as traditional marriage does, a woman must be slightly ill mentally. Women accustomed to expressing themselves freely could not be happy in such a relationship; it would be too confining and too punitive. We therefore "deform" the minds of girls, as traditional Chinese used to deform their feet, in order to shape them for happiness in marriage. It may therefore be that married women say they are happy because they are sick rather than sick because they are married.

There are some researchers who believe that this is indeed the case. They note that our standards of mental health for men are quite different from those for women, that if we judged women by the standards which we apply to men they would show up as far from well. A generation ago, Terman could judge women who were conformist, conservative, docile, unaggressive, lacking in decisiveness, cautious, nontolerant to be emotionally stable and well balanced. They were the women who had achieved an adjustment standard of mental health. They fitted the situation they were trained from infancy to fit. They enjoyed conformity to it. They were his "happily" married women.

But modern clinicians see them in a different light. Inge K. Broverman and her associates, for example, ask whether a constellation of traits which includes "being more submissive, less independent, less adventurous, more easily influenced, less aggressive, less competitive, more excitable in minor crises, having their feelings more easily hurt, being more emotional, more conceited about their appearance, less objective"—a constellation of traits which a set of clinicians attributed to mature adult women—isn't a strange way of "describing any mature, healthy individual." These researchers conclude that we have a double standard of mental health, one for men and one for women. We incorporate into our standards of mental health for women the defects necessary for successful adjustment in marriage.

We do our socializing of girls so well, in fact, that many wives, perhaps most, not only feel that they are fulfilled by marriage but even hotly resent anyone who raises questions about their marital happiness. They have been so completely shaped for their dependency and passivity that the very threat of changes that would force them to greater independence frightens them. They have successfully come to terms with the conditions of their lives. The do not know any other They do not know that other patterns of living might yield greater satisfactions, or want to know. Their cage can be open. They will stay put.

-Jessie Bernard, The Future of Marriage

[zenkindoflove]

Surprise self-rec time! Pick 3 of your favorite things you’ve written and share them here, then put this in the inbox (anonymously or not) of your fellow writers to spread the positivity and help celebrate already written fics

(Added side quest from @achaotichuman, tell me what inspired your fics, why you love them so much etc etc, tell me EVERYTHING)

I can only choose three?!? *cries* Okay, I'll try lol.

...And Again Into the Light (Elucien)- This is a fic I cowrote with @crazy-ache. After our joint writing adventure where we wrote Dear Lucien, Dear Elain, we wanted to write together again. I suggested we write a horror romance story because I thought it would be a fun co-writing genre because we could leave each other with both spooky and sexy cliffhangers for the other to pick up. And that is exactly what we did. When we write together, we start with a basic idea and structure and we really "yes, and..." the rest of the process. I really like writing horror. It's one of my favorite genres and this was an opportunity for both me and Ariana to play around in that sandbox. And I think we did a DAMN good job at it. I think it's a pretty unique piece too, which is kind of a theme we've had in the projects that we've co-written. We both were really inspired by the idea of Elain and Lucien being trapped in a haunted house together, and what we ended up creating was a interesting exploration of the mating bond (because duh, it's them) on top of all the haunts and scares that were going on.

Kneel Before Me (Elucien) - I wanted to include this one because it was the first fic that came to mind when I read this question. I love this fic because both the inspo and the premise is kind of unhinged for me. This fic was entirely driven by fandom ship war wank. At the time, the new ship war topic of discourse was whether or not Azriel really could defeat Lucien in a blood duel, and the takes were driving me nuts. So, Kneel Before Me was me channeling my rage into art. The premise is Azriel and Lucien spar on the HoW's roof top and Azriel eggs him on into a real fight that tests the theory of who would actually win in blood duel like circumstances, followed by some hot Elucien smut where I might have went a little crazy writing an excessive paragraph long description of Lucien's dick because all of the bat boy obsessions, wing span jokes, and just generally people forgetting Lucien's existence and that he's HOT. And hey, look. I know when I'm cooking and I fucking COOKED with this fic. Even though I did tag it anti-Azriel because I wanted to be upfront that the fic doesn't depict him in a positive light, I've had a lot of Azriel fans read it and confirm for me that they don't actually think it's anti-Azriel at all and they like the twist I incorporated that made it all make sense and feel in character. Because even if I'm being a little cracky, I can't help but want things to make sense for the characters as they are.

Summer Heat (Elucien + Erixius) - This fic is my big multichapter fic that is now turning into a series with the sequel I'll write once I'm done with Pull Me in Deeper. The inspiration was really simple. One of my falling asleep day dreams included Elucien having some fun and awkward flirty moments in awkward and making out on the beach and I was like, "okay I keep thinking about this so I should write it." It definitely is an example of my first outline way underestimated the story it became. I didn't even initially have a plan to have a significant Eric x OC side story but once I created Alexius it really just became an animal of its own. This story I think is some of my best work in that it really spans the spectrum of my skills - comedy, romance, smut, angst, and generally a decent plot. It's the first time I made an OC. I did some new world building. And from experimenting with those the story blew up into something way bigger. I anticipate Golden Visions, the sequel, to be an even longer story which sort of gives you a perspective on how much I was inspired by both of those processes. At its core, I really wanted Summer Heat to be a romantic comedy. And I think it still has that essence but I'm not sure it can really be called that anymore with some of the angst and fantasy world building I built into it changed things. I also tried to write a slow burn for Elucien (and very much not a slow burn for Erixius) which I think I was successful at by my definition of a slow burn lol.

Thank you so much for this ask!!! This was so fun! I could write little paragraphs like this about all of my fics 🤣.

[limbuscompanysituations]

Thank you for answering my ask! If you don’t mind fun facts, I will just type random stuff and the readers can do with that what they will^^

While most cockroaches can glide, American cockroaches can fly. From what I’ve seen in the fandom, most people seem to suspect that the bug traits come from a German cockroach, I think the American one could be likely

However! That doesn’t go along with the way that little cockroach that accompanies him is drawn. See, looking as the back of it (no visible wings) and the coloring, it doesn’t match with my first point. It’s darker than the American cockroach. The thing is, it’s dark enough that I could even speculate that it is a female, which would be supported by the wing thing as well. Furthermore, this extends to Gregor’s right arm too. The colour thing. So, if someone is willing to trust a random bug lover on tumblr and really wants to validate their trans headcanon, you can run with this point I suppose

NSFW: there’s actually a lot of conflicting information about this, and after reading some articles and books (not solely on that matter, just bugs in general!) I can share some info. While the common consensus seems to be that cockroaches do not have a penis in our strict understanding (so that’s one headcanons for you) there are structures that we can call a penis and it will be perfectly fine to do so. However, if we are looking at penis-like structures, quite a few sources claim that in that sense, cockroaches have two. I prefer the version in which there’s none, but like you said, people can headcanons whatever. And uh. If you ponder what that could mean for the G corp ID. Yeah

A less intense fact (and one that makes me look less deranged) is the way Outis and Gregor’s hair is drawn. Let me explain. This is more of a neat fact than a ground for developing ideas though. So, as I come from an organisation (can’t really mention them, but uh, think about an intense and more serious version of scouts I suppose? Sorry can’t name it, but yeah) there’s a lot of talk surrounding hair. Traditionally older people go with the idea that hair should not touch the uniform. If you are serving your hair should be short or braided in a crown. However, with time it became more acceptable to only have it tied. It can never be loose, obviously, but most younger lads opt for tying it while serving. This isn’t probably about that, most likely they are drawn with their respective hairstyles because it fits them, but I think it’s nice that it can be explained away in a more reality-based way^^

This one is book based actually. Kafka detailed the way in which his man character’s tastes had changed. He specifically said that after being transformed, he did not enjoy fresh food. It didn’t taste right, so the protagonist resorted to eating stale, moldy food that appealed to him. In reality, that kind of food isn’t great grona real life cockroach, but older food does interest them more. Just don’t feed our six legged friends mold! I believe that while Gregor would not share that with the rest, he could also now enjoy somewhat less fresh food. And that trait was definitely something that, if given the chance, they would have given him. Looking at the history of the military (another interest of mine) from the rations perspective, soldiers don’t get the most fresh stuff anyways, at least it was like that in the past. So it would be deneficial to alter them in a way in which that aspect is not a problem to the leaders (I say this not as an example of a good idea, but more so because I think it goes along with the dehumanisation aspect. Like, people tried to have human-ape soldiers irl and one of the pros that was recited among them was that it would be cheaper to feed them whatever and avoid complaints)

Gregor canonically likes to sleep on his side, though in the book he cannot do that anymore after his looks change. So maybe that’s the case with his Limbus-ified version as well? If I remember correctly he did said it was the right side he liked sleeping on, if so, then it could very well apply

All in all, those are cockroach facts. He is a person and I’m not trying to dehumanise him further by claiming everything I say must apply to him because of his looks. Definitely not. Though even if it did, it’s all chill, he’s great and different habits nor changed anatomy take away from that^^ I just happen to like cockroaches and I remember that line about the bug-related features growing more prominent at times, so I decided to share things, it’s up to the readers what they pick (if anything) from the list. Quite frankly I have stayed up for way too long trying to convert my bug knowledge into coherent English. This is not checked for mistakes. I’m very sleepy. So, I’m sorry if the contents are not up to your standards or if people find it boring. I hope at least one person can use that info to make up something was cooler and more thought out than my list here

Also, hi to my friend who also reads your blog! It’s not very hard to guess this ask is from me, the cockroach facts give it right away hah

Bug facts! Bug facts! I love bug facts! And so comprehensively explained too! I didn't think about the likely difference between cockroach species, even though it should be pretty obvious that insects as common as cockroaches would have wild variations lol Thank you so much for the bug facts! As for my two cents, I keep brainstorming with a friend about the possibility that the bug Gregor becomes in the book is something closer to being a dung beetle than a cockroach, but at the same time it's sort of interesting because a cockroach is sort of a vermin? And the imagery in C1 is very... full of vermin, dirty animals, etc.

The information about haircut/hairstyles and Outis vs Gregor makes sense and fits their personality so well too, amazing.

I was actually discussing with a friend not so long ago about Kafka's Gregor eating softer foods, and they were tying it to the fact cockroaches can't really bite into harder things. I don't know, just something that I think about sometimes.

These are so comprehensive, thank you so much (once again) for the meal. I will bite into it and use this new information to be more insane about these fictional characters!

[atopvisenyashill]

Hello! I have a question and I hoped that you might help me. I’ve seen a lot of posts in the asoiaf tag where people claimed that GRRM is criticising feudalism. My problem is that I don’t understand why would he? Feudalism isn’t a system that actively exists anymore. It’s not like criticising capitalism or totalitarianism which still exist. And it’s a fantasy series and most fantasy series have a somewhat medieval setting. It doesn’t make sense to me.

oo fun question anon.

well, first off, i would say he’s not just critiquing fuedalism. he’s also critiquing monarchies, which unfortunately still exist, and power structures in general, which definitely still exist. for example, that famous broken man section, sorry for length but the whole thing is good:

“Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. “Is a broken man an outlaw?” “More or less,” Brienne answered. Septon Meribald disagreed. “More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. "Then they get a taste of battle. For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe. “They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. “If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world… "And the man break. “He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them…but he should pity them as well.”

When Meribald was finished a profound silence fell upon their little band. Brienne could hear the wind rustling through a clump of pussywillows, and farther off the faint cry of a loon. She could hear Dog panting softly as he loped along beside the septon and his donkey, tongue lolling from his mouth. The quiet stretched and stretched, until finally she said, “How old were you when they marched you off to war?” “Why, no older than your boy,” Meribald replied. “Too young for such, in truth, but my brothers were all going, and I would not be left behind. Willam said I could be his squire, though Will was no knight, only a potboy armed with a kitchen knife he’d stolen from the inn. He died upon the Stepstones, and never struck a blow. It was fever did for him, and for my brother Robin. Owen died from a mace that split his head apart, and his friend Jon Pox was hanged for rape.” “The War of the Ninepenny Kings?” asked Hyle Hunt. “So they called it, though I never saw a king, nor earned a penny. It was a war, though. That it was.”

Bolded parts mine! All of it, but especially the bolded parts can apply just as easily to soldiers in the war of the five kings, the war of the roses, world war 2, vietnam, and every war in between. Think about the way military recruiters show up to high schools with cool gadgets and the promise of free college, and the way Meribald talks about the lords showing up pressing young boys into service. Think about the fact that the British military executed three hundred and six soldiers suffering from PTSD after WWI for "cowardice" and the starving soldiers Meribald talks about abandoning their armies just for an extra mouthful of food. when meribald talks about the soldiers looting from peasants, think about the fact that the innocent people in gaza are starving to death while a handful of miles away, there are restaurants booming and food enough to throw away. War is war, regardless of whether it's being waged a thousand years ago or a thousand years from now.

it's important when discussing asoiaf to remember that george is often holding a mirror up against our own society - he is saying that this, the violent patriarchy of westeros, is our natural endpoint if we continue to treat each other the way we do. it's about taking these typical tropes and roles and archetypes and asking what they are really like, how hard they really are, how awful they really are, and if this is the life we want to befall our own children. it is about asking if we, as in the reader, are capable of breaking the cycle of violence as surely as it is about asking if the characters can break that cycle too. There's a reason, for example, Ramsay's story is so tied up in domestic violence, or why Robert's character focuses much more on the way he has failed his family than anything else. There's a reason there's so many sibling groups (Martells, Daynes, Starks, Lannisters, Tullys, Baratheons) that get wrecked by the Rebellion and that the series tracks the way this wreckage seeps out into the realm. Yes, asoiaf is about feudalism but it is about us as well.

second, while feudalism doesn’t technically exist any more, the relics of feudalism still haunt the world; from hereditary noble titles to literal monarchs with absolute power to extreme barriers to social mobility and even serfs. you'll see a lot of academics, especially since the pandemic started, talking about "neo-feudalism" and the idea that just like the middle ages was shaped by pandemics that ravaged populations and made it easier for upper classes to get richer and stop social mobility, the pandemic has enriched the richest people in the world and made everyone else exceedingly poor. while george obviously wasn't writing about the neo feudalism people are talking about today, this is a concept that's been kicking around since the 1980s so I think it is likely that George had done some research into the relics of feudalism and the criticism of modern governments working like corporations. Because this history may seem a long time ago - the war of the roses ended over a thousand years ago, after all - but feudalism and it's relics are still very much within living memory. Russia still had serfs until the 1860s, Bosnia and Herzegovina up until 1918, and Bhutan until the 1950s! There are also still countries all over the world that still have what is basically legalized slavery, whether it's workers stolen from one country and trafficked to another, a minority group that is used as slave labor, or prison labor. I think George is also knocking at the remnants of it as well. I mean, the UK monarchs aren't even that powerful in the grand scheme of things and yet every time they have one of their lil events, they destroy tent cities and mass displace the unhoused populations of London because like, homeless people are gross instead of actually doing anything to help those people. Diana was a teenager when she married Charles. Yeah, that's a far cry from like, poor Rhaella but that doesn't mean it's not still a fucked up institution that is worth taking aim at!

but thirdly!! feudalism exists in fiction constantly still - as you said, a lot of high fantasy has a medieval-ish bent (even books pulling from non western cultures or authors from non western cultures still tend to pull more from history that falls pre-1500s; this is mostly just my opinion as a librarian and fantasy reader, but it's really only been the last decade or so that fantasy has branched out into non medieval time periods like with stuff like babel, six of crows, some of katherine arden's stuff, etc). the divine right of kings is still alive and thriving in fiction and (again, this is my amatuer opinion here) I do think at least part of this is because a lot of american fantasy writers have never lived under a monarchy, so the bad affects of it are far off and easier to romanticize. as well, you get a lot of "times were simpler" PoVs from non americans who have lived under some sort of monarch as well. and that’s why i believe he’s criticizing it - he’s critiquing the genre itself for its romanticization of feudalism, monarchies, kings and queens, and the idea of the divine right of kings. he's saying "look realistically this shit sucked for everyone" and then rubbing your face in how bleak the feudal system actually was. It's the aragorn's tax policies aspect - there is more to being a leader than a watery tart throwing a sword at you!! it's jaime's entire riverlands arc - house lannister won the war on a technicality, and yet the horror, the desolation, the despair are still fresh in the minds of the common people, in the minds of the people who lost their loved ones.

[mihrsuri]

💖🧑‍🏫🥘🟥🐎?

💖 Which of your fics is your pride and joy? Jewish Anne Boleyn my beloved.

👩‍🏫Pick a character and I'll tell you their favorite season and why. I really really love S2/3 Abigail Bartlet. Stockard is so good always but like MY FEELS.

🥘What wip are you most excited about? All of them *g* Right now I’m really excited I had a breakthrough with my big WIP (rewrite the stars 2.0) - I got into the head of a character that I’d been struggling with and it’s So Cool because we haven’t heard from him before.

🟥How long do you spend in edits? Both a long time and like, not a long time at all because of the way my brain works! I spend a long time thinking things out in my head/trying out things that work (also in my head)/sometimes on pinterest and listening to music and talking about it to friends (I love talking about our WIPs with friends LOVE IT) and then I’ll write something/write it down and then I’ll go over for spelling/grammar/structure (I’ve found with long fic I’ll sometimes reorder parts of a chapter these days) and then post because if I look at it too much I’ll get in my head.

🐎 Would you ever do a medieval or pirate au? WOULD I EVER (I think I’d pretty much try out most AU’s because I love going ‘…how could I make this work’ (excluding omega verse for Trauma Bullshit Reasons). I have actually extensively plotted out a West Wing medieval AU in my head (I just want Charlie to so comprehensively outrank Jean Paul it’s Terrifying To That Guy but I’m not sure what his title would be) for example. Although now I’m considering Pirate Captain Abigail Romance Novel Style except she’s obviously the Dashing Swashbuckling Hero.

[paladin-of-nerd-fandom65]

Pretty cool answers got some more if that’s ok?

1: what is something the duo believes in? Like Bigfoot, mothman, etc…

2: what’s their opinion on cops in general?

3: you mention in a earlier post that Chris accidentally brushed his teeth with Jake’s toothbrush, was there any other gross moments the duo received?

4: you might’ve answer this before I think but what’s something that makes the duo really angry like super-saiyan angry?

5: what bets does the duo regular make? Like sees who’s faster for example?

6: what does the duo like to do with those respective girlfriends? Like hand holding, kisses on the cheek, etc

1) Well given that well….its the DCU where Greek pantheon gods, biblical demons, descendents of the Norse pantheon (New Genesis and Apokolips) and many others are all legit characters, it’s likely those cryptids indeed do exist anyways. Mainly the Duo though would give some attention in saying the Loch Ness Monster and the Congo’s Mokele Mbembe are real. Unlike in our reality, they have some actual evidence

2) Whilr they certainly have very good allies in Dan Turpin, Maggie Sawyer and especially Amy Rohrbach (in addition it of course Jim Gordon, Renee Montoya and even Harvey Bullock), Chris and Jake are overall more cautious around police officers in general and prefer not to overly rely on them as they both are aware of the systemic issues and structural problems many police departments have, the ones that we in the real world would acknowledge. This is especially true for Bludhaven as their police department is stated in being more corrupt than even Gotham’s.

3) Well, there only two incidents they are willing to talk about including the time Jake was dared by one of his classmates to not shower for a few days, hoping to break a record from an urban legend at their school. While he was able to beat said record by one messily minute, by the end of it he’d smelled and I quote from Chris “like if a foot and Brussels sprouts had a baby….who went Number 2 on their diaper.” Once Jake finally beat said record, Mar’i and Chris immediately gathered up some clean clothes, dragged Jake immediately straight to the bathroom and shut the door behind them so he can finally shower.

The other time would be when Chris and Jake love did some volunteer work at the local zoo, especially when it came time for cleaning some of the animal enclosures. Most difficult of all being the chimpanzees given their usual methods of warding off intruders. One of their ‘items’ they threw literally hit a fan (thankfully an air conditioner fan not a person) from across their habitat.

4) Easily hurting their loved ones and best friends like each others real badly and especially right in front of their eyes while gloating/laughing about it. During the brutal duel and beat down against Victor Zsasz on Jake, had he not been restrained by a power dampening anklet with traces of kryptonite in it, Chris for sure would’ve gone absolutely ballistic on the deranged criminal and rightfully so.

Also hurting innocents just to spite them or being careless is another way to get the two real ticked off. Even Chris and Jake have shown amazement on their ability to hold back during the few times Mongul nearly annihilated large swathes of Bludhaven and Metropolis, merely pounding him down rather than outright incinerating him.

5) Along with who can fly and/or run the fastest, they also made bets on Who can Eat Raw Onions without Crying (Chris won that one), Who’s the better poem writer (Jake), Who Can Curl Their Tongue (Jake again), Who can Annoy Hawkman first (Chris) and Who Can handle Spicy Hot Wings (like we’re taking spices including Habenero and Ghost Chili Peppers) with their Powers Shut Off and Without Milk (a Tie since they both made it two Twenty Wings before rushing for the Gallons)

6) Hand Holding, Quick Cheek Kisses, Sitting Close to each other when taking a seat, Paying for Lunches (Chris and Thara often make reservations at a local Big Belly Burger in Metropolis while conversely Jake and Meredith are regulars at a Bomp N Stomp in Bludhaven), Going to the Movies together (Especially Kaiju movies for Meredith of course), and helping each other out with their homework at their nearby libraries; all these are common place for the Duo regarding Thara and Meredith respectively

Thanks for the asks and your compliments @pin-crusher2000 . It’s very appreciated :-D

[dein0nychus]

siggy give me as much wyvern info as possible

ENABLER!!!!

-Wyverns is invertebrates. They have a lobster-like shell-skeleton-thing beneath their skin that keeps their shape and protects their organs. Their beaks and resonating chambers are coated in keratin to reinforce them. Its much more "Wyvern-shaped" than Earth vertebrate skeletons.

-Wyverns don't have feathers, but rather coarse "hairs" like insects. The hairs are very thick (some individuals acclimated to colder climates can have up to 10 hairs per follicle, but its usually 1 or 2) and stiff. Touching a Wyvern feels like running your hand over a soft-bristle hairbrush. They usually range from 1-4 inches in length and stand straight up and away from the body, but sometimes can be longer and/or "shaggier."

-They come in lots of colors, from purples and blues to reds and oranges! Their color runs down to their skin, so a hairless Wyvern would still retain their color and pattern. Colors are genetic and related clanmates usually share similar colors, inherited from their parents. Brighter colors are considered more attractive, with the exception of pink. Pink wyverns are a form of hypopigmentation where the skin and hairs don't fully develop normal color, so they appear varying shades of pink depending on the levels of pigment in their skin. Rikki is a good example of a hypopigmented Wyvern- he retains some red pigment but is mostly pinkish in color. Pink is often used as an alarm or threat color, as their blood is magenta.

-Wyverns have a bisex system, but it doesn't quite work the same way ours does. One sex can only reproduce sexually with another Wyvern, while the other can reproduce parthenogenically (asexually) as well as sexually. There is no sexual dimorphism between the two. Exclusively sexual reproducers can mate either with the opposite sex or with each other (hence why I hesitate to call the sexes "male" and "female." The closest analogue here on Earth that I can find is gynodioecy, where females and hermaphrodites coexist, with the asexual reproducers being the "females" in this scenario. Confusing, I know. This is also totally prone to retcons as I'm not sold on it yet.)

In line with reproductive stuff while keeping it as SFW as possible, Wyverns are sort of marsupial-like in young development. They form a marsupium (a sort of weird external sack to hold developing offspring in. Isopods do it, its totally cool and weird) on their abdomen, where the offspring develop for a few months before they break out as little scraggly cotton balls called whelps. The whelps can't walk on their own, and are totally dependent on their parents for the first few years of their lives. They can eat solid food from birth but depend on their parents (and other adults in the clan) to carry them around, feed them, and protect them until they're old enough to start flying and their wings get strong enough to walk on. As soon as they're fully flighted, they're considered adults in the way of becoming a full-fledged clan member, but don't become fully physically mature until they're about 20, when their resonating chamber starts to grow out into its full display structure (which takes another year or so to finish.)

That's all I got off the top of my head without further prompting atm!

[crippleprophet]

i hope this is okay to ask, really sorry if it's not!! i was wondering if u or ur followers have any tips for getting a doctor to actually do tests (i can't get a different doctor), or if anyone has better understanding than me of the wording and tests used for fnd

i have a neuro appointment at the end of the month and from our one previous appointment he's already decided i have fnd even tho my symptoms don't particularly fit (and like.. he said i had positive hoovers when he also said i have near normal strength? all the things i have read about hoovers sign talk about it with people who have one very weak limb and other limb with normal strength. he also said i have "give way" weakness but it wasn't that i could hold my limbs up and then collapsed under gentle touch; i could push back for a few seconds but then would be weaker and buckle because my weakness gets worse with exertion. i dunno if he's using these things correctly because from what i can read it doesn't sound like the typical ways it's used but i also can't read a lot before getting triggered). i want to get a EMG with repetitive nerve stimulation because my GP thinks i have seronegative myasthenia gravis, and would like to get a muscle biopsy to look at other neuromuscular causes like MD or mito, but i have no idea how to get him to order these. in the time since my first appointment with him i realised i have scapular winging and that that's probably the causes of my neck and shoulder nerve pain and i know from an old CT that i have loss of cervical lordosis so am hoping that maybe?? bringing up these structural changes in the areas i get a lot of my muscular symptoms Might help convince him it's not functional but i don't have a ton of hope. i'm bringing support people with me but other than that and saying things like "to rule out" rather than "because i think i have" when asking for tests do u have any advice?? or knowledge on the fnd things? i am So Scared for the appointment shshdhdjdj

oh god i’m so fucking sorry you’re dealing with this, that’s such bullshit. i think emphasizing that your GP wanted the EMG is the aspect that’s most likely to be effective, if possible you could also try to get your GP to send the neuro a letter listing the tests they want ordered (which could include ones you propose). i think the fact that your gp is considering seronegative MG is a really good sign so i hope they’ll advocate for you!

idk if you’re in a system / situation where you can go to a different neuro but if that’s a possibility i strongly recommend you consider it. i’ll get into this more in a second but the fact that he’s framing your symptoms through the lens of these signs & that he invoked fnd without conducting any tests is a strong indication that he’s going to push an fnd diagnosis no matter what your test results actually say.

the strength signs aren’t “my area” so to speak so i’ve called in a consult with my gf who is a med student planning on going into neuro :)

so both of these signs are bullshit because they exist as a metric of whether or not to invalidate someone’s symptoms, which it seems like is exactly what your neurologist is trying to do to you. so for me the issue is less how he’s using these signs than the fact that he’s using them, if that makes sense

hoover’s sign is technically defined based on how you’re moving your body rather than muscle strength but some doctors may use it in that form. it’s generally like “your right leg moved when i had you move your left leg so i’ve decided you’re lying about your right leg being paralyzed,” so it’s weird that he’s using it in a context where you’re not telling him you’re paralyzed but it doesn’t mean he’s necessarily acting outside the bounds of the test as it has been constructed, if that makes sense

what you describe you doing – pushing back for a second & then not being able to – is how “give way” weakness is defined; the example you described of holding a limb up & then collapsing without pushing back would be written as a separate exam finding. so as my gf said, “i don’t think he’s using these terms incorrectly per se, i just dispute the value of them.”

you may have already done this for your first appointment but for what it’s worth a lot of people with myasthenia gravis discuss having strategically worn themselves out immediately before going to the doctor (by talking on the phone, darting their eyes around, etc). obviously this takes a certain level of familiarity with your energy capacity on any given day because you can’t then be too tired to get through the appointment… there are definitely certain risks involved as with any intentional act of making ourselves sicker so it’s up to you whether that’s worth it!

there are also some other get sicker MG tips in another post in my myasthenia gravis tag if you want to check that out!

i’m really sorry again that you’re dealing with this, you deserve compassionate & comprehensive care which imo functional diagnoses are fundamentally at odds with. wishing you the best of luck getting the testing you want asap <333

[crossdreamers]

Report from a young Ugandan lesbian refugee in Kenya.

Nakafeero Swabulah is an activist leader of lesbians advocating for support for vulnerable lesbians and children. Nakafeero is currently living in the Kenya Kakuma refugee camp. We present her story and some of the political and cultural context.

The Kenya Kakuma refugee camp

The camp, which is located in the north-west corner of Kenya,  consists of four parts (Kakuma I-IV), and is managed by the Kenyan government and the Kenyan Department of Refugee Affairs in collaboration with the UNHCR.   

New arrivals normally receive one piece of reinforced plastic 4 by 5 meters with which to construct their shelter. As Nakafeero will explain below, this is not a safe environment.

Escaping from the homophobia in Uganda

Nakafeero has escaped from Uganda, a country where the government is doing everything in its power to scapegoat and persecute LGBTQ people.

 Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda, even if a 2016 court ruling found the 2014 Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act invalid on procedural grounds.  

Ugandan Members of Parliament have recently reintroduced an anti-LGBTQ bill. Homosexuality is described a “cancer”.  

The parliament is currently investigating what it calls “the festering of homosexual activities” in schools. This is a classic example of homophobic and transphobic hysteria, where the culture stigmatizes queer people, leading people to try to “protect” kids from gay people, leading to more oppression. 

The idea is that kids are lured into becoming queer, arguments similar to the ones presented by right wing extremists and TERFs in Europe and North America. This vicious circle is particularly strong in a country like Uganda, partly because the family structure plays such an important role in peoples’ lives.

Ironically, the anti-LGBTQ activists in Uganda claim that the acceptance of gay and trans people is a “foreign” Western idea. The fact is that it is the homophobia and transphobia that has been imported from the colonial powers of the past. Homosexual relations were accepted and commonplace in pre-colonial Ugandan society.

Nakafeero Swabulah has sent us the following report from the Kenya Kakuma refugee camp:

Living as a lesbian refugee in a camp in Kenya

By Nakafeero Swabulah

Kenya Kakuma refugee camp it's located in Kenya North Western Tulucana county. It has over 2000 LGBTQ refugees passing through, due to the homophobic situation and the many challenges found here and in nearby countries. 

I would like to tell you about my situation and experience.

As a young lesbian I moved from my mother country Uganda because I was facing a lot of invalidation. Some even wanted to slaughter me like a goat because am a lesbian.

I am not willing to change what and who I am, even if that had been possible (which it is not).

The Ugandan president does not accept lesbians, gays or transgender people. My mother and my sister were both killed in our home by local people because they thought that was inside the house.  In Uganda lesbians are seen as devils right now. I have no one who can help me, so I decided to come to Kenya. 

People from Uganda are still looking for me and others like me. I thought that I would be safe in Kenya, but the situation right now is not good. This is why I want to seek asylum elsewhere.

This photo shows you where we sleep in the camp. The authorities have not provided shelters where we can at least sleep safely.  

At night we have been attacked by homophobic people. There are dangerous insects such as snakes and scorpions.

In the camp we are given one kilogram of millet, one of sorghum, one kilogram of maize and one cup of cookies oil per month. This isn’t enough for a week.

Kakuma is not a safe place for LGBTQ people.  We need help.

Nakafeero Swabulah and Giulia Sarro (photo above) are organising a fundraiser campaign to pay for food and sanitary pads for the lesbian refugees in the camp. 

You can support them here!

You can follow Nakafeero on twitter.

Photos provided by Nakafeero.

[mistype360]

mbti/enneagram typing for @eheu-vae-mihi

enneagram: 3w4 so/sp 8w9 7w6 387

straight off the bat, the fear of not living up to standards suggests you're somewhere in the competency triad (1-3-5). this is also why you seem to detach a lot from your emotions. struggling with introspection and trying to work through things logically is very similar to what someone in that triad would experience. you seem much more like a 3/5, as a 1 would focus more on being morally perfect. so3>5, as 5's don't seem to care about the guidelines for success set by society as you mention ("getting a good job", "earning money"...).

your wing for the 3 wasn't too strong, and was pretty balanced between 4 and 2. usually when this happens, it means that the wing is a countertype (meaning, the specific subtypes defies the stereotype/general description). between sp2 and sp4, the way you almost internalize/repress emotions was more fitting towards a sp4. this, on top of your answer to dealing with shame, which was very much internalized.

the part about wanting to make a strong impact on the world gives feeling in mbti mixed with e3, with a little hint of 8. the 8 is especially seen in your descriptions of anger (many ppl think 8's are feral angry rats but most of them relate to your exact answer). being fiercely protective of those around you is epitome of so8, plus the fact that you hate being controlled by others .

for your 8, 9 fits perfectly especially with how you don't find yourself being good at self-reflection. also with how you aren't too sure of where you want to go, suggesting you struggle with identity like a 9 would.

something that really solidified the strength of this fix was how when your at your lows, you find yourself worried about things, feeling worthless, and feeling life has lost it's meaning, which is how a 3 and 9 would disintegrate.

your 9 and 8 seem pretty balanced. i don't think that you're either a 9w8 or 8w9 tbh, because you seem to use them in a way that is complementary to each other- not really that one is stronger than the other. but since your mbti is an entp it made most sense to type you as 8w9.

lastly, for the final fix of your tritype, i notice you mention you want to do things w/o worrying about repercussions, which is pretty similar to how an e7 would function. most of the reasons for giving you this fix were slightly sprinkled throughout your questionnaire, there wasn't an exact answer that led me to it. some sentences gave me the impressions that you do value gaining experiences, while also slightly 'security" focused, like a 7w6 would be. an example would be your curiosity answer about preventing a big situation in the real world from happening, which was small, but still pretty e6.

mbti: entp

imo, the way you structure your answers suggests a lot of ne. you consider a lot of possibilities in the way you respond to certain questions, which is something a high ne user would usually do. in my experience people who say "it depends" a lot are usually a mix of ne and ti.

maybe it's my washy speculation, or maybe the intent was to add more info?? either way, this wasn't the only reason i gave you this typing.

i'm honestly too lazy to format so i'm just going to list reasons why you seem high in ne and ti that i noticed:

you're curious about "why and how" things work

you think "the past is gone, no use clinging to it" and think the future is "what we want it to be"

🚪🚶is the se/ni in the room with us?

values logical consistency

the future "is moulded by our visions"

challenging authority by own ideas

there are moments where you do value efficiency and seem to like having a sense of concreteness in certain things, but imo that's more attributed to your 8 fix rather than simply just te.

you also do seem to show slight se, especially through learning things with application. but i don't think that this se necessarily trumps your ne. i think your enneagram explains why you display some stronger sensory traits (having all 3, 6, and 9 in your tritype def proves it), but again, looking back to your cores fixes, it points much more to entp.

[continuations]

Thinking About AI

I am writing this post to organize and share my thoughts about the extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence over the last years and especially the last few months (link to a lot of my prior writing). First, I want to come right out and say that anyone still dismissing what we are now seeing as a "parlor trick" or a "statistical parrot" is engaging in the most epic goal post moving ever. We are not talking a few extra yards here, the goal posts are not in the stadium anymore, they are in a far away city.

Growing up I was extremely fortunate that my parents supported my interest in computers by buying an Apple II for me and that a local computer science student took me under his wing. Through him I found two early AI books: one in German by Stoyan and Goerz (I don't recall the title) and Winston and Horn's "Artifical Intelligence." I still have both of these although locating them among the thousand or more books in our home will require a lot of time or hopefully soon a highly intelligent robot (ideally running the VIAM operating system -- shameless plug for a USV portfolio company). I am bringing this up here as a way of saying that I have spent a lot of time not just thinking about AI but also coding on early versions and have been following closely ever since.

I also pretty early on developed a conviction that computers would be better than humans at a great many things. For example, I told my Dad right after I first learned about programming around age 13 that I didn't really want to spend a lot of time learning how to play chess because computers would certainly beat us at this hands down. This was long before a chess program was actually good enough to beat the best human players. As an aside, I have changed my mind on this as follows: Chess is an incredible board game and if you want to learn it to play other humans (or machines) by all means do so as it can be a lot of fun (although I still suck at it). Much of my writing both here on Continuations and in my book is also based on the insight that much of what humans do is a type of computation and hence computers will eventually do it better than humans. Despite that there will still be many situations where we want a human instead exactly because they are a human. Sort of the way we still go to concerts instead of just listening to recorded music.

As I studied computer science both as an undergraduate and graduate student, one of the things that fascinated me was the history of trying to use brain like structures to compute. I don't want to rehash all of it here, but to understand where we are today, it is useful to understand where we have come from. The idea of modeling neurons in a computer as a way to build intelligence is quite old. Early electromechanical and electrical computers started getting built in the 1940s (e.g. ENIAC was completed in 1946) and the early papers on modeling neurons can be found from the same time in work by McCulloch and Pitts.

But almost as soon as people started working on neural networks more seriously, the naysayers emerged also. Famously Marvin Minsky and Seymour Paper wrote a book titled "Perceptrons" that showed that certain types of relatively simple neural networks had severe limitations, e.g. in expressing the XOR function. This was taken by many at the time as evidence that neural networks would never amount to much, when it came to building computer intelligence, helping to usher in the first artificial intelligence winter.

And so it went for several cycles. People would build bigger networks and make progress and others would point out the limitations of these networks. At one time people were so disenchanted that very few researchers were left in the field altogether. The most notable of these was Geoffrey Hinton who kept plugging away at finding new training algorithms and building bigger networks.

But then a funny thing happened. Computation kept getting cheaper and faster and memory became unfathomably large (my Apple II for reference had 48KB of storage on the motherboard and an extra 16KB in an extension card). That made it possible to build and train much larger networks. And all of a sudden some tasks that had seemed out of reach, such as deciphering handwriting or recognizing faces started to work pretty well. Of course immediately the goal post moving set in with people arguing that those are not examples of intelligence. I am not trying to repeat any of the arguments here because they were basically silly. We had taken a task that previously only humans could do and built machines that could do them. To me that's, well, artificial intelligence.

The next thing that we discovered is that while humans have big brains with lots of neurons in them, we can use only a tiny subset of our brain on highly specific tasks, such as playing the game of Go. With another turn of size and some further algorithmic breakthroughs all of a sudden we were able to build networks large enough to beat the best human player at Go. And not just beat the player but do so by making moves that were entirely novel. Or as we would have said if a human had made those moves "creative." Let me stay with this point of brain and network size for moment as it will turn out to be crucial shortly. A human Go player not only can only use a small part of their brain to play the game but the rest of their brain is actually a hindrance. It comes up with pesky thoughts at just the wrong time "Did I leave the stove on at home?" or "What is wrong with me that I didn't see this move coming, I am really bad at this" and all sorts of other interference that a neural network just trained to play Go does not have to contend with. The same is true for many other tasks such as reading radiology images to detect signs of cancer.

The other thing that should have probably occurred to us by then is that there is a lot of structure in the world. This is of course a good thing. Without structure, such as DNA, life wouldn't exist and you wouldn't be reading this text right now. Structure is an emergent property of systems and that's true for all systems, so structure is everywhere we look including in language. A string of random letters means nothing. The strings that mean something are a tiny subset of all the possible letter strings and so unsurprisingly that tiny subset contains a lot of structure. As we make neural networks bigger and train them better they uncover that structure. And of course that's exactly what that big brain of ours does too.

So I was not all that surprised when large language models were able to produce text that sounded highly credible (even when it was hallucinated). Conversely I found the criticism from some people that making language models larger would simply be a waste of time confounding. After all, it seems pretty obvious that more intelligent species have, larger brains than less intelligent ones (this is obviously not perfectly correlated). I am using the word intelligence here loosely in a way that I think is accessible but also hides the fact that we don't actually have a good definition of what intelligence is, which is what has made the goal post moving possible.

Now we find ourselves confronted with the clear reality that our big brains are using only a fraction of their neurons for most language interactions. The word "most" is doing a lot of work here but bear with me. The biggest language models today are still a lot smaller than our brain but damn are they good at language. So the latest refuge of the goal post movers is the "but they don't understand what the language means." But is that really true?

As is often the case with complex material, Sabine Hossenfelder, has a great video that helps us think about what it means to "understand" something. Disclosure: I have been supporting Sabine for some time via Patreon. Further disclosure: Brilliant, which is a major advertiser on Sabine's channel, is a USV portfolio company. With this out of the way I encourage you to watch the following video.

So where do I think we are? At a place where for fields where language and/or two dimensional images let you build a good model, AI is rapidly performing at a level that exceeds that of many humans. That's because the structure it uncovers from the language is the model. We can see this simply by looking at tests in those domains. I really liked Bryan Caplan's post where he was first skeptical based on an earlier version performing poorly on his exams but the latest version did better than many of his students. But when building the model requires input that goes beyond language and two dimensional images, such as understanding three dimensional shapes from three dimensional images (instead of inferring them from two dimensional ones) then the currently inferred models are still weak or incomplete. It seems pretty clear though that progress in filling in those will happen at a breathtaking pace from here.

Since this is getting rather long, I will separate out my thoughts on where we are going next into more posts. As a preview, I believe we are now at the threshold to artificial general intelligence, or what I call "neohumans" in my book The World After Capital. And even if that takes a bit longer, artificial domain specific intelligence will be outperforming humans in a great many fields, especially ones that do not require manipulating the world with that other magic piece of equipment we have: hands with opposable thumbs. No matter what the stakes are now extremely high and we have to get our act together quickly on the implications of artificial intelligence.

[samsimisauser]

Sorry to go back to this, but now that I have a free moment I am going to bore you some more. I’m sending you this here because there’s a character limit in replies.

It seems like a lot of blue colours in nature (not plants which contain a anthocyanins which is I think what they say the Na’vi from Avatar have, but they’re plant like aliens.)

Looking at natural living creatures with blue colours, it appears that they are not blue pigments but are considered to be structural colours. So the question of blue is actually less of a biology question but physics https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16449568/

A good example of this is the Blue Morpho Butterfly which is has a brown pigment. Blue morpho butterflies had a distinct structure that are called “diffraction grates” that causes the light to scatter, and appears iridescent blue to our eyes.

You can actually see these under a microscope https://www.uvm.edu/~dahammon/Structural_Colors/Structural_Colors/The_Blue_Morpho_Butterfly.html

Similarly the blue feathers of a bird are also structural colours, and blue because of the way light scatters on the keratin. When the light hits the feathers the red and yellow wavelengths cancel each other out, leaving the human eye to perceive it as blue.

However, beta-keratin is only found in reptiles and birds. Alpha-keratin on the other hand is found in all vertebrates and is what human hair is made up of. These two forms of keratin are structurally different. Alpha-keratin are helical and beta-keratin are parallel sheets. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Secondary-structures-of-keratin-protein-beta-pleated-sheets-and-alpha-helix_fig1_329169109

This doesn’t really explain anything, but some context behind the colour blue in nature is rare because it is not actually a naturally found pigment (except for rare cases) but is a product of light scattering due to structural properties of the animal.

So as a scientist, my natural instinct is to consider your hypothesis and then propose additional observations to confuse everybody.

So from the structure of beta-keratin and butterfly wings, and now that my free time is running to an end so I can’t really examine other examples, I wonder if this has anything to do with ridges and planar structures.

So what if instead of collagen, which is usually found on the scalp-end of hair follicles on hair, the blue of Marinette’s hair and other people blue-hair ancestry have some mutation that causes a structural change in their keratin structure that forms small planar ridges that scatters light in such a way that the hair appears blue?

Just spitballing. Thanks for listening!

Probably Correct!

The reason i went with Collagen instead of Keratin is that i forgor found "evidence" (hairdresser manual from 1890) of Blue hair growth after long term exposure to Cobalt/Indigo (thus pigments). Structural Color is the most likely reason why hair would be blue, all the things that can be naturally blue on a human appear blue because of structure.

I then looked for Blue in other animals, preferably Mammals, preferably Primates. I did not find evidence for Blue Keratin in Mammals. So we have evidence for Blue Collagen in a close relative of Humans, and none for Blue Keratin in any Mammal.

Realistically it probably would be caused by a difference in Keratin, arrangement instead of a protein where its not supposed to be.

[communistkenobi]

I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts about the growth of American fascism as a movement made up of small scale cells like how Louis Beam advocated for, considering the authoritarian personality’s perspectives? We had an extremely interesting seminar on the KKK that branched into talking about their theorists in the 70s onwards and then into the current recession of the KKK in favour of smaller movements like the boogaloo bois or generally the Unite the Right groups. Cause the KKK was last successful nationally in the 20s, then WW2 and publishing of the authoritarian personality, then 60s and 70s civil rights KKK then alt right theorising

I’ve been thinking about this a lot!!! My answer is going to be kinda scatterbrained because it requires a lot of preamble, but tl;dr I think the decentralised cell structure of the current right wing reactionary movement(s) is not at all in conflict with the idea that fascism requires (and desires) a strong authoritarian state leader. To the extent that fascism is an ideological output of capitalism, we can liken fascist movements today to crypto-currency.

I think central to this discussion is the process of neoliberalism. Which is a word that people seem to struggle with (I also did for a while), but it’s essentially the idea that social problems can be solved via the market. Ideologically, this means an intense focus on the individual as a consumer (self-care products are usually a prime example of the neoliberalisation of healthcare, which more broadly is the concept of spending money to feel good and therefore making it easier for you to be economically productive again) and decentralisation of the government. The “downloading” of responsibility to manage problems like social services, healthcare, welfare, housing, etc from federal to provincial/state governments, and then eventually to municipal governments, means that smaller and smaller governments are now responsible for managing larger and larger slices of civic life. Which they can’t handle, so they turn to non-profits, charities, and corporations to help with the costs. This then directly inserts capital interests into these spheres of public life, and also de-democratises them, as they are now being managed (ie, paid for) by non-government organisations.

But this was not accompanied by some massive shift in power. The basic functions of society were still being administered, and while peoples lives got materially worse because of this decentralising process, there was no fundamental restructuring of the way society operated. However, when you couple this with the dismantling of unions, the selling off of public lands to private businesses, and the de-democratising of social services, you have absolutely destroyed peoples’ ability to foster community. You can’t organise at work, you can’t go anywhere or do anything unless you pay for something, and joining community councils now means navigating an insane bureaucratic web of NGOs, charities, public-private partnerships, etc just to get a five hundred dollar grant to throw a neighbourhood barbecue at the local community centre (if that centre is even open anymore). This is also coupled with people’s wages stagnating, work hours becoming longer, housing prices skyrocketing, and overall just cost of living going up while your wages go down, depressing your ability to do anything other than work.

So the fabric of civil life has been torn to shreds, but people are not individually more free than they used to be, their lives just suck more now. And this I think is where things like qanon and other decentralised, online networks rise to prominence. The internet facilitates the building of communities across space, and while it’s not a replacement for a robust social and civic life, it’s the best you’re going to get.

So, again to compare it to crypto-currency - the base power that money has in our society is not threatened by crypto. It’s a decentralised network of assets, sure, but those are still evaluated in relation to global state currency (almost always USD), and they are literally fucking useless unless you cash out with real actual currency. You are only obscuring the functioning of central power by doing this, you aren’t actually challenging banks or the state. In the same way, I think fascists can operate in these individual little groups, inventing insane conspiracies as a form of entertainment, but the central authoritarian logic of fascism is not being questioned by idiots claiming on image boards that giving your child bleach will cure covid or whatever, even when those groups clash about the details of their newest conspiracy theory. They still want to install their leader as the president of the United States - they still want to use the power and authority of the state that currently exists to their advantage, they don’t want to demolish it (although they do want to change a lot about current public life, certainly). Fascism has undergone the same neoliberalisation process - power is simply being obscured by the functioning of capital, it’s not actually being divided up.

Now what you were mentioning with the KKK is an intentional strategy. I don’t think shit like qanon is intentional in the same way. I think these people are simply responding to the moment they live in. And in the same way neoliberalism has been extraordinarily beneficial to capital interests, I think this neoliberal form of fascism can be beneficial in many of the same ways to right wing aspirations for state power. The Authoritarian Personality describes fascism as an irrational totality, a desire to be completely ruled by another person, and that fascism is a product of capitalism. Again, I don’t know how true that is (as in, I don’t think abolishing capitalism will rid us of violent and horrible people, but that’s another conversation), but fascism has adapted extremely well alongside capitalism, and you seem to be able to measure the state of the reactionary right with whatever the fuck is going on in the economy, so describing fascism as a function of capitalism seems to hold a lot of explanatory value.

[iphigeniacomplex]

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this:

Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.

Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.

Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.

Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.

Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.

Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.

Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.

Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy—especially its males and absolutely its children.

Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions, a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence, a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.

Maintain, at all costs, silence.

In 1995 racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight.

The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any single political party. Democrats have no unsullied history of egalitarianism. Nor are liberals free of domination agendas. Republicans may have housed abolitionists and white supremacists. Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist — we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can become a suitable home. Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing — marketing for power.

It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurships; all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones — so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers — so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers — so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking — so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their healthcare, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product — a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car — or kill generations for control of products — oil, drugs, fruit, gold.

When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas "marketplaced," our rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.

Toni Morrison's address at Howard University, 1995.

[wordsandrobots]

I think After War: Gundam X is my third favourite Gundam show.

This is way behind Iron-Blooded Oprhans and Turn A Gundam, but compared to the others I’ve watched, it’s definitely more to my tastes. I think it could have benefited from the extra episodes it didn’t get, especially to expand on some of the initial space-based adventures, and it has a lot of the usual issues I have with the franchise (erratically written female characters, a half-arsed approach to condemning structural oppression, and throwing out the ‘horrors of war’ maundering whenever it’s more plot expedient to mow down mooks like there’s no tomorrow). Overall, however, it packs in a much more coherent plot than predecessor Gundam Wing, some charming characters, and a few very deft thematic flourishes.

For example, there’s an episode early on where our heroes have to help save a psychic dolphin and her pod from being turned into an advanced sonar system. Now you might think that’s a very silly sentence and you’d be correct. But the point is, this is something the Federation (emphatically the bad guys here) developed during the war this series takes place after, in order to have more effective underwater combat suits. They took dolphin brains and turned them into spare parts. And a couple episodes later, we discover this is their attitude to psychic humans too, which seems to be the pay-off until we reach the end of the series and, well, let’s just say the approach goes all the way to the top.

In fact, Gundam X is very concerned with the exploitation of psychics both by those who treat them as tools to be used and those who venerate them as humanity’s next evolutionary step. And oh gods, this means I have to write about Newtypes.

[I shall put the rest of this under a cut because I genuinely think this is one series it’d be worth going in blind on and also because this will ramble a bit.]

All right, let’s get this out of the way: Newtypes as depicted throughout both the original 1979 Gundam and this show (which essentially starts as a bad AU to Gundam ‘79/the Universal Century) are humans with extraordinary abilities, who are theorised to be an evolutionary adaptation to living in space. Newtypes have greater levels of awareness, cognition and empathy. That is to say, they can variously gain a deeper understanding of the people around them or be really, really good at driving giant robots. They are in-universe hypothetical until war breaks out and suddenly a lot of people are very interested in the military applications of psychic powers. Also occasionally people get their brains blasted to mush by the weight of too many people dying near them at once and/or are able to unify humanity’s brainwaves in order to atomise asteroids dropped by manipulative blondes with eco-fascistic tendencies. It’s a whole thing.

I am being a little glib here and I also don’t want to delve into the out-of-fiction meaning of Newtypes because I feel woefully unqualified to write about that. But for myself, considering the fiction as presented, I’ve always found Newtypes to suffer from the Jedi Problem: it’s fine and dandy to have quasi-mystical power that increases human connection but if you’re only going to show its applications in war, you’re smothering a lot of interesting potential in the concept.

This is primarily a problem of genre. Gundam is a series of war stories. It is deeply invested in fighting and conflict, and not merely because it’s financed in order to sell brightly coloured war machine kits to children and adults alike. There is nothing wrong with that per se but it limits what can be shown with respect to the doings of the magic people we’re repeatedly told are the heralds of a new age of understanding. Yes, we get to see lots of Newtypes get traumatised by their powers, or artificially created by nefarious powers-that-be, or occasionally bugger off to the end of time with their boy- and girlfriend after causing an untold amount of harm to everyone around them. But we never really get to see much in the way of non-military applications of this supposed ability to connect with others on a fundamental level. Even setting aside creative disillusionment, the very type of stories being told back the idea into a corner.

This is not to say the Gundam ‘79 derived fiction hasn’t made much hay of the in-universe tension between the status quo and the possibility of radical change. It’s kind of its one trick. But to me, it feels like diminishing returns and I end up longing for a story of Newtypes just . . . being. What does that kind of power look like when it’s not plugged into the latest giant robot suit and being sent off to punch whichever red-suited dork is trying it on this week.

Gundam X is not a story of Newtypes just being. It’s a setting where Newtypes are conscripted, manufactured or mutilated to be used as weapons. It’s a setting where one faction has proclaimed everyone in space to be a Newtype, in order to justify the wide-scale slaughter of anyone left living on Earth. And it’s a story in which, as it turns out, Newtypes do not actually exist.

Oh, there are people with unusual abilities. A girl who has prophetic visions. A pair of brothers with a psychic link. Ace pilots who glimpsed the future. But the ultimate revelation is that these are one-offs and the grand theory of advancing human evolution via living in space is so much hot air, dreamt up to further various agendas. And that makes a hell of a lot of sense in hindsight.

You see, throughout Gundam X we see a wide variety of supernatural abilities, but only some of these are classed as ‘proper’ Newtypes (resentment over this fuels the primary antagonists, the Frost brothers, who decide to burn down the world over being dismissed). As a viewer, you get pulled along by this without thinking too closely about it. But there are hints from the start (including a couple of ex-soldiers selling themselves as Newtypes while clearly not being anything special) that the term might be less than it seems. Amuro Ray-alike Jamil Neate’s stated goal is to protect Newtypes from oppression but he finds a grand total of one to safeguard in the entire series. Our hero, Garrod Ran, is an unusually gifted, empathic pilot who never gets the term applied to him. The working definition the world-dominating Federation are using is simply ‘can operate our patented robot control system’. Meanwhile the leader of the Space Rebellion has, as I said, declared everyone born in space a Newtype, making the existence of supposed Newtypes born on Earth very inconvenient. The term is at once over-specific and overly-wide, depending on who’s using it.

And in the end? Turns out the ‘first’ Newtype was some poor sod who could use that robot control system and got turned into a computer on the moon for their trouble. That was the source of the working definition and everything afterwards was just various people building castles in the sky. The powers are anomalous. Inexplicable, but not any kind of evolutionary leap. They just . . . happen. Every Newtype is their own distinct thing and not really an indication of anything very much other than fluke.

Which is actually pretty clever. It means the whole conflict is driven by people building taxonomies and raising certain things on to pedestals not because of something that definitely exists but because it suits their agendas to do so. It’s also a neat solution to the Jedi Problem, turning it around and saying, yes, these people only display their powers in combat because those looking for them only said those that were useful in war were actually Newtypes.

(I know the Gundam ‘79 and its sequels do stuff like this as well, but Gundam X has the advantage of making it the entire point, rather than wanting to have it both ways because it has the ending of Char’s Counterattack to deal with.)

Bit of a shame this all gets rushed out in the last couple of episodes due to the series running short. But perhaps that’s for the best, given there’s nowhere really to go once you’ve pulled the rug out from under everyone and demonstrated the antagonists’ motivation is fundamentally a hugely inappropriate reaction to a categorisation error.

Other observations:

Garrod Ran is fairly generic as protagonists go but I do find it amusing how he basically gloms on to every angsty teenager he encounters like they’re a precious baby in need of protecting. Including the one who was definitely trying to kill him when they met.

Tiffa’s arc would have worked much better if her attempts to define herself beyond her status as a Newtype had been emphasised more. Like, it’s sort of there, but it only comes to the fore at the very end.

Toniya and Ennil absolutely deserve to end up together and leave Witz and Roybea moping around a cornfield somewhere.

I really like the design of the Dauntless mobile suit. It’s an almost unsettling take on the GM model from the Unviersal Century. In fact, I generally appreciate seeing a Wing-esque aesthetic mapped backwards on to the original style, with greater emphasis on making the non-Gundam machines look that little bit off.

For all that I enjoyed this show, I really dearly wish Jamil hadn’t gone back to the Federation at the end. They make themselves utterly irredeemable across the course of the series and there isn’t any functional need to maintain them beyond the end. It’s a sour note, honestly, especially without any indication the rampant empire building across Earth is going to be reversed. But that’s the kind of pat assimilation ending Gundam seems to trade in more often than not, so it’s not a unique flaw.

Depths Of Minds Elevating. Huh. That’s a very long walk for what is itself a totally undescriptive acronym.

I am somewhat tempted to write Jamil/Lanslow fic. Not even necessarily Like That, but just to explore an older, more relaxed Amuro/Char dynamic in which both sides have learned how to chill the hell out.

[massharp1971]

Hey! I saw your post on censorship in ao3 and the reality of grooming culture, this one: https://at.tumblr.com/massharp1971/hate-censorship-but-troubled-by-the-discourse-on/t4wxft92tqcb I wanted to comment. Ao3 was created as a reaction to people who claimed to be "protecting the children" and then turned around and targeted minority/lgbt spaces overwhelmingly. I think that relates very closely back into why many people on ao3 are unwilling to talk rationally about it now. Ao3 is a hotbed full of people who are sick of censorship and being told that they are horrible people, so they are pretty unwilling to go through that again. One thing I've heard a lot is "all lgbt people are predators" it's also that kind of thinking that lands the entire group back at square one. Once again, people in ao3 are unwilling to compromise/change because now their entire existence is being vilified. I would like a solution that makes things safer, but often times the problem has been that people have made situations worse by hiding bigotry behind protectiveness. For a lot of people on ao3, they ignore and somewhat judge the unhealthy fics, but usually elect to ignore it since in the past nothing good ever came of approaching the problem. What would you present as a solution? The main problem here is that people on ao3 are pretty unwilling to approach the topic because every attempt to solve it thus far has been a massive failure. Also, just generally demonizing one another. In my experience, regardless of what they've done when you demonize another person they become unwilling to consider what you're actually saying. Your example of Jenny reminded me of that. Jenny would probably become unwilling to face the problem because she believes it makes her an evil person, so then she avoids it like the plague and makes the existing problem worse.

CW CSA mentions This is really important and I'm glad you asked. Given my identity and my career, not exactly issues I'm unaware of.

My solution is we need to have hard conversations and talk about stuff out in the open. My solution is discourse that doesn't get shut down. If we want a site that contains adult material, the bare minimum is to be able to have grown-up conversations about it. We need to wrestle with ethics in our writing and we need to think a lot about consent and perpetuating harmful structures because we're part of a community and communities should take care of each other even when we disagree - especially taking care of the most marginalised among us, who are more vulnerable to all kinds of abuse.

One thing I want the free speech to say is that it is absolutely despicable when people throw pedophilia or bestiality, both of which cannot be consensual, alongside consensual LGBTQIA+ or kinky identities, or sex work. Especially when the very structures that enable child abuse stifle queer and other marginalised folx.

Whichever side people are on, that has to stop.

I'm not in favour of censorship, but I do not accept that my freedom as a queer person has anything whatsoever to do with people's right to read stories about adults fucking children "as long as they're well tagged". These are separate discussions and it's harmful to LGBTQIA+ people when they get dragged into this by both sides. "Protect the children from the kinksters and queers" is a vile right-wing authoritarian narrative, but equally "words can never harm anyone and people should be free to do and say whatever they like" is a vile right-wing libertarian narrative. I have no time for either of these positions.

LGBTQIA people and kinksters and sex workers should be safe and protected because we're not doing anything harmful just by being any of those things. This is, or should be, an entirely separate discussion to the pros and cons of censorship of morally reprehensible content.

My rights are not going to be won by some wildly generalised ideals that somehow mean we can't even talk about the fact we have child abusers in our spaces, because child abusers are everywhere and we really, really need to talk about this more. Abuse thrives on silence.

I think the following article could be helpful in thinking about an alternative to either a) kneejerk prohibition moves that never work and often cause harm or b) pretending like there isn't harmful af stuff on ao3, as there is everywhere (including places where prohibition is attempted). I cannot tell you the sick, abusive harrassment I've received for writing what I wrote, from people who are apparently pro free speech but not when someone says something they disagree with because they've wilfully misinterpreted it. Apparently, writing about fucking children is a-ok but writing about challenging grooming culture and having adult discussions about it makes me a terrible person who must be silenced at all costs. Interesting, isn't it? I don't want it censored but I don't have to like it. At the heart of anti-censorship arguments there has to be an understanding that we will be defending the right of material to exist that we personally find deeply troubling.

Nor is disapproving of something or wanting to discourage it necessarily demonising. To me, it's about having good boundaries and an ethic of care. Let's talk to people more about consent, self-consent, and how we uphold or dismantle harmful power structures within our spaces.