tempestttgames

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the angel staying over at my house asked for a nightlight in their room and i told them buddy, don't you produce your own light? what're you gonna do with more? and they said they wanted to see why people like it so much. and also that the nightlight i own is blue and they're been trying to understand color. anyways i think they've stared at it for an hour now

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In New Zealand, there is a man legally known as ‘The Wizard’ who is an educator, comedian, magician and politician. Some of his political ideas include:

Abolishing old-fashioned gender roles

Travelling to find the “center of the universe”

Replacing God and the Church with Wizardry and the World Wide Web

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The second choice would never occur to me until a few years ago, and The Autism would have said it was Highly Illogical to let other people's emotions dictate my behaviour. But the grown 40-something in me is just beginning to wonder if this is actually Being Kind???

Anyway, I voted for 'fucking funny' because that's how I'd feel about it when I eventually fell. Because I am an actual idiot. Why? Couldn't tell you. But I didn't turn the light on, and I did fall. Funny that.

There's a dark, curving flight of stairs at my boyfriend's family's cabin. They keep telling me to turn the damn light on when I go up and down because I'll fall and eat shit, but I've never fallen so I think I'm good.

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Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.

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This is a great story about how food (and also culture) travels!

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When it comes to demigods as they were in like ancient Greek and Norse mythologies - half-human and half-mortal, almost always having some god for a father, and the human mother can count herself lucky if she even has a name, and perhaps some brief sad story of how she died. Always a story of what happened to her, not one about what she did. No agency.

Now, consider: A story with a pantheon of gods of some sort, and a tale of a demigod of ambiguous origin. And "ambiguous" here meaning that they know exactly who the demigod's mother is, she's a human woman who walked up to the realm of the gods, very obviously and heavily pregnant, beating pots and pans together going "WHAT'S UP YOU DIVINE FUCKS, ONE OF Y'ALL OWES ME CHILD SUPPORT", and refused to leave. They cannot make her leave before verifying that her child is, indeed, a demigod. And her claim turns out to be true. The mystery is the father.

This human woman is rude, abrasive, insolent and does not seem to have any sort of fear or respect for anyone or anything. None of the gods are willing to admit to having fucked her. Goddesses who would otherwise go for jealous revenge do not dare to go near her - partially out of a reluctance to embarrass their husbands by implying that they would have screwed this woman, and partially out of their fear of being severely insulted and ridiculed by her. Her child, who now wanders around the realms of the gods largely unsupervised, is unquestionably divine in origin, but doesn't seem to show any distinct features that'd be easy to connect to any of the gods.

While having the standard demigod's slightly-better-than-mortal strength, speed, healing and other such qualities, this half-human child simply does not seem to have any particular divine gifts. Their most distinct, unnaturally potent and overpowering feature is their sheer unflinching bold audacity, clearly inherited from the mother.

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Sorry, I could never be a capitalist, I suffer from “wanting humans to have their basic needs met” disorder, where I care about people who aren’t me.

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The Poo Theory of Creative Expression

Okay, so I fully understand why people feel like their creative output is an extension of themselves. But what I see as a result of that idea is just a lot of hurt feelings around what should be constructive criticism. If your work is an extension of who you are, then logically a bad review is a bad review of YOU.

But, what if creative expression was more like having a poo? When your poos are runny or gritty, do you ever have the thought that it makes you a bad person? No, of course you don't. But it came from you none the less.

What do poos and creativity have in common, I'm sure you're asking? Well, let me tell you...

They're natural.

You do them by instinct.

They come from you.

They feel good to do.

You don't want anyone watching while you're doing it.

You curate specific inputs (diet/experience), in order to directly develop these outputs.

I could go on, really.

What's so good about poo then (as a metaphor)? It's a thing outside of yourself that you can do something about and hear criticism regarding without internalising that information in a negative way.

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The Poo Theory of Creative Expression

Okay, so I fully understand why people feel like their creative output is an extension of themselves. But what I see as a result of that idea is just a lot of hurt feelings around what should be constructive criticism. If your work is an extension of who you are, then logically a bad review is a bad review of YOU.

But, what if creative expression was more like having a poo? When your poos are runny or gritty, do you ever have the thought that it makes you a bad person? No, of course you don't. But it came from you none the less.

What do poos and creativity have in common, I'm sure you're asking? Well, let me tell you...

They're natural.

You do them by instinct.

They come from you.

They feel good to do.

You don't want anyone watching while you're doing it.

You curate specific inputs (diet/experience), in order to directly develop these outputs.

I could go on, really.

What's so good about poo then (as a metaphor)? It's a thing outside of yourself that you can do something about and hear criticism regarding without internalising that information in a negative way.

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do you ever think about how in the 90s and 00s, collecting luxury shoes was seen as not only a Woman Thing but like, the height of Feminine Foolishness? at least in mainstream white american culture, it was a focus of misogyny that women buy a lot of nice shoes and men don't, and men are smarter and more practical for it. anyway now luxury sneakers are a major part of popular masculinity, Fake Jordans is a meme, shoes are for men now. that happened in my lifetime. like it's one thing to read about how the makers of gender are fluid and cultural, it's another to experience it myself.

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Communal living has always fascinated me, whether that's indigenous American or Iron age European cultures. I was delighted to find out today that this was also found in China (no surprise, it just makes so much sense) and there are people there still living this way today.

I wasn't thinking of any specific real-world group when I decided the humans of Miminey City live communally, I think it just scratched an itch I've always had and maybe now that I've already "written" Kinde, it might be a good time to search the world for practical examples?

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male gaze is not 'when person look sexy' or 'when misogynist make film'

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn't mean 'finding a lady sexy' or 'looking with a sexual lens', it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it's important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can't get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery', you're really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.

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remember on buffy when evil willow from another dimension tied angel up and burned him with cigarettes just because it was would be hot if that happened? do you remember when Kira from ds9 had an evil bisexual dominatrix counterpart, also from another dimension? the sexy evil universe where everyone wears fetish gear and is a depraved bisexual used to be a genre staple. we need to bring it back.

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