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Ay-O A Study for "A New World" 1963 undated, titled and signed on verso: A STUDY FOR "A NEW WORLD" AY-O oil on canvas

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@massachusetts-official

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Agates carved into orange slices by wutong_crystal_carvings.

Source: x

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first you have to remember that the first disco ball was painstakingly put together by hand from nothing but an idea and lots of intricately cut glass and bandaids and then you have to think about the experience of being under a disco ball for the very first time, bathed in reflections of an era that has not yet come to past, and finally you end up wondering what else there is around you that has yet to be unearthed by something with so much as a silly name

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grizzled mercenaries are always being like "I'm sick and tired of being a pawn in someone elses game" like their job isn't literally rent-a-pawn

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Mama cat gargoyle

Cat with a kitten statue on the roof of the castle of Château de Pierrefonds, France. It was built between 1393-1407.

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Rock crystal lizard uncovered near Cortil-Noirmont, Belgium, 2nd century AD

from The Art and History Museum, Brussels

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"'Five years ago it was noncitizen. In the future, who knows? Perhaps not-citizen-enough?' She waved a hand, a gesture of surrender. 'It won't matter. Such boundaries are too easy to create.'"

A very loose rendition of lieutenant Awn's conversation with the head priest in Ors.

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what if lotr took place in interstellar space

Technically, it does. Anyway here’s my ancillary radch crossover: Frodo Baggins agrees to host a dissenting fragment of Annaatar Miaron’s consciousness as part of a mission to reintegrate said fragment with the Lord of the Radch… but on the resistance’s terms, not Sauron’s, at a time and place when reintegration will result in civil war within Miaron’s own mind. Frodo’s allies: Presger interpreter Gandalf, last ancillary “Strider” of ship Sword of Isildur, idk I started running out of steam after Annaatar but you get the idea

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Having read all 5 Imperial Radch books, I am intrigued by how often they come back to the legal establishment and confirmation of identity. A lot of SF, especially when it brings AI into the mix, is about identity and personhood, and typically it lands on how you get to decide for yourself, that identity is a very personal thing that other people can't impose on you. Whereas in Imperial Radch... obviously we have the Radchaai concept of civilization where they divide between Radch and non-Radch, human and inhuman, civilized and uncivilized. At the end of the first book Anaander changes Breq from ancillary to human simply by saying so with the legal and political powers that she has. At the end of the main trilogy, Breq outmaneuvers Anaander and asserts her own identity not by asserting the moral high ground of any personal epiphanies (not that she doesn't have them) but by appealing to a treaty. She takes the issue to committee. In Provenance, another character escapes eir legal troubles by appealing to that same treaty and getting eirself legally defined as an alien. Then in Translation State, a Presger translator does the opposite and calls a committee to define e as human.

So much SF takes this very internal, emotional view of selfhood and identity and 'only you get to say who you really are!!' and Imperial Radch is like woe. committee meeting be upon ye. Sometimes characters are having personal epiphanies about their identity and sometimes they are doing this for convenience, but either way the win state involves appealing to bureaucracy.

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As much as I adore conlangs, I really like how the Imperial Radch books handle language. The book is entirely in English but you're constantly aware that you're reading a "translation," both of the Radchaai language Breq speaks as default, and also the various other languages she encounters. We don't hear the words but we hear her fretting about terms of address (the beloathed gendering on Nilt) and concepts that do or don't translate (Awn switching out of Radchaai when she needs a language where "citizen," "civilized," and "Radchaai person" aren't all the same word) and noting people's registers and accents. The snatches of lyrics we hear don't scan or rhyme--even, and this is what sells it to me, the real-world songs with English lyrics, which get the same "literal translation" style as everything else--because we aren't hearing the actual words, we're hearing Breq's understanding of what they mean. I think it's a cool way to acknowledge linguistic complexity and some of the difficulties of multilingual/multicultural communication, which of course becomes a larger theme when we get to the plot with the Presgar Translators.

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My dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😝 this strain is called "the destruction of Garsedd" 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd 💯

Me: yeah whatever. I don't feel shit.

Five minutes later: dude I swear I just saw some Presger in the forest

My fellow Anaander Mianaai pacing: Anaander Mianaai is plotting against us

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Britt Lower, Adam Scott, & Dichen Lachman © Jason Armond, Los Angeles Times (2025)

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Gyokuyou🌸

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Kitten square!

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Much has been said on the modern healthy masculinity of tolkiens men but what I think what we’re really seeing here is medieval masculinity

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In the backstory chapters of Nona, there's a strong thread of racism running through what goes down and why, but it's all under the surface. Unacknowledged. John frames the injustice done to him in squarely economic terms, or about being fair, or he doesn't explain himself at all, and so there's always something in his story that rings false. A disconnect between the events and John's reaction to them. John clearly knows what it is, but he's still unwilling to overtly name the accomplice even after everyone else involved is dead. Why is that?

Well. Probably racism. One if its little tricks is how no one likes to hear about it, especially if it implicates their own communities. Talk about an instant way to lose a crowd. Or a scholarship. John was an indigenous student without a safety net. He spent his whole life making himself palatable to first Pākehā and then British institutions, in the hopes that by chasing success in education, he could lift himself out of poverty and make a difference in the world. That's what everyone tells you, right? Get yourself an education, and that's your ticket out. Survive the abuse, and you can make something of yourself.

John played that game perfectly. He worked his way up, he endured, he got his degrees, and in doing so he learned to frame things in the way people wanted to hear them. And how to avoid mentioning things that might be used against him.

None of it protected him, of course, that's the true bitch of it all. He was still put in his place as soon as he tried to use his investor's money to help people like him, and there was nothing he could do about it. The harder he fought to blow the whistle on them the worse things got, until he was stood in front of the government with all his evidence, and instead of considering a word he said, they threatened him with racialised violence. We were going to put you fellas in jail, weren’t we?

Ten thousand years later, he's still not ready to confront any of that. I got mad, he tells Harrow, as if that could possibly adequately explain what had happened. As if he'd even know where to begin explaining why.