xidaer

[xidaer]

I’m writing a book.

This is nothing new but I’ve hit 110 pages and I need to get an ending in so @xidaer can edit it and it can go to publish. I have learned something about myself.

I am profoundly silly. The huge socioeconomic lore projects where I’ve built out all the Big World Building with economic, disease, and ? I get stalled.

This dumb fae fem domme reverse harem where the line that got me to start writing it was “Bippity Bippity your dicks are my property” with a drunken drug using party girl fairy godmother slutting it up and trying to do a detective while sloshed out of her mind and getting epic oral sex from lust demons while the fae princes cry in chastity?

Two fucking weeks to write it. And I only get stalled when I address the serious shit.

*sigh* I want to write like Ursula LeGuin but I am, at heart, Terry Pratchet but stupider and more pornographic.

[xidaer]

I CAN’T TELL WHAT’S FUNNIER I regret middle school

[xidaer]

[xidaer]

Would Mexican Style Luchador wrestling have been popular in Bronze Age Egypt?

Hear me out.

Yesterday, while my wife of 17 (almost 18) years and I were running errands and vibing in silence, I turned to her and asked a question I thought was perfectly reasonable given she had been working on her PhD in Antropology.

"Do you think Mexican Luchador wrestlers would have done crazy numbers in per-unification bronze age Upper Egypt?"

Keep in mind before then we'd been quiet for a few minutes in the car and were heading to Home Depot to pick up moving boxes so the last thing we'd said was about bubble wrap.

She was silent for a moment, I thought she was going over the interesting question and implications that brings up. Instead she just said "Where in the FUCK did that come from?"

So I explained the ADHD thought train. I had been thinking of 16th Century Italian Comedia dell Arte (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commedia_dell%27arte) like one does, and how it's completely forward compatible- it just works and a lot of our comedy is still based on those tropes. It was absolutely backwards compatible too- the character tropes that we had even in Greek and Roman comedy (the greedy, scheming gossiping slave became the shifty servant, the young lovers more into being loved than paying any attention to what the other one is actually like and fumbling while other people tried to help them get together/keep those idiots apart, etc) so you could have absolutely made Comedia Dell Arte work in any time frame. Also it traveled as far as Moscow in it's time, transcending cultural differences even in the 16th-18th centuries. Comedia dell Arte transcends cultures- just like Mr. Bean (not a huge fan but respect for the work) is the most popular in terms of $$$ comedian worldwide because you don't need words to get the jokes from his fascinating facial expressions. It goes beyond language and touches the heart of the human experience.

I mean... who hasn't felt that exact way at some point?

So, what other forms of entertainment are universal or near universal? That transcends cultures, language and time?

US style Pro wrestling would have been a huge hit in certain eras but I don't think it's truly universal. It's part Comedia dell Arte (you have the heel, the face, lots of drama, grown men in skimpy clothing, etc) and in a lot of ways I think of it as "aggressively heterosexual drag without lip syncing while also being deeply, unintentionally homoerotic" . It would, indeed, slap in, say, the coliseums in Rome, but what about Mexican Luchador wrestling? It's got a lot more emphasis on social justice than WWF wrestling. A lot more commentary about the world and what's wrong with it, and gives a lot more voice to the oppressed who are angry about the way the world is and would sure like to punch a physical representation of that nonsense.

So I'm not sure it would slap as hard in super stable long term societies like the stable periods during, say, Egyptian Unification or Indian Maurya Empire or Gupta Empires, because a big part of why those cultures were so stable long term was the whole philosophy that your role in life was mostly cast by fate/karma. That leads to very stable but stagnant cultures in terms of social mobility, would that make Bronze Age Luchadors more or less culturally relevant? I mean there WERE tomb paintings of wrestling, they had it as a sport but not as a sport/theatrical performance/comedy/social commentary.

My wife laughed her ass off and said that's why she loves, me she never gets bored of how my brain works.

You could totally move Luchador wrestling into post-revolution France. If you could have gotten a drag queen style, huge foam powdered wig and a fancy glittered cape on a luchador he'd be a phenomenal heel. Robespierre and friends sitting in a private box so that people wouldn't see they was enjoying such uncouth entertainment as someone with the drag/wrestler name of Nobless Obli Cheese gets the People's Elbow to the gut would totally work.

We agreed that Shakespeare would have LOVED THAT SHIT. He'd have two Luchadors run off stage being pursued by a polar bear, no question in my mind at all. My Dad was a Shakespearean scholar and I wish I could have talked to him about that because he was a big believer in the universality of Shakespeare's work- you can turn them into westerns, samurai movies, all kinds of things.

I was glad she was amused but... I also really want to know what other people think. Would this be a universal art form, giving voice to the powerless about their frustrations with their societies while enjoying a spectacle with drama, elaborate costumes, and oiled up half naked hot men? Or is this an art grounded in it's space, time, and culture?

[xidaer]

“To me, the core of that attraction is that she is a better reporter than he is. Think about being Superman for a second. The Olympic record for weightlifting is 1,038 lbs., but you could lift more than that as a child. The record for the 100 meter dash is 9.58 seconds, but you can travel over 51 miles in that time. Going to Vegas? You don’t need your X-Ray vision to win at Blackjack, because you can just count the cards while holding down a conversation about nuclear physics. Without really trying, you are better at just about everything than anyone else in the world. However, (as Mark Waid once pointed out in a podcast with Marv Wolfman) none of that really translates to your chosen profession. Typing really fast does not help your prose. Being able to lift a tank does not help you convince a source to go on record. It is as near to competing straight up with normal people as Superman would ever be capable of. Even then, it comes easily enough to him that you get a pretty lofty perch at a great paper very early in your career. It is just in this one context, there is someone better than you are: Lois Lane. As mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, you reach up for the first time in your life and she rejects you. To me, it is an inversion of the Luthor story. Luthor sees someone above him and feels hate. Superman sees someone above him and feels love.”

—

Dean Hacker, comment on “Giving Lois Lane A Second Look, For The First Time” by Kelly Thompson (CBR: She Has No Head!)

#GoLois

(via wickedjunkie)

[xidaer]

sometimes i need to remind myself that i'm writing fanfiction for free and i'm allowed to have a shitty sentence or two

[xidaer]

Deeply fascinated by the people who heard rightful criticism of generative AI (i.e. chatgpt etc) and decided all machine learning is evil or something. You sound like a scifi villain. You sound like the character who's wrong on an episode of star trek. That's not how this works

[xidaer]

One struggle 🫡

[xidaer]

subway??? no man this is domway. we tell you how you want your sandwich and u shut up and eat it.

[xidaer]

I have a go fund me so if any of y’all want to help my trans Jewish family escape the US, we’d sure appreciate it. We emptied all our retirement accounts to fund the hop over the pond but between the 35% penalties, the 12% decline of the dollar vs the euro, and the nonsense of the stock market we no longer have ANY wiggle room.

They did an ICE raid at our county courthouse today.

[xidaer]

it is weird that celiac stuff has become part of the 'culture war'. because it's literally just a medical thing.... I get super anemic unless I cut a certain protein out of my diet, because it bulldozes the villi in my intestines. but if I post about it, right-wingers send me gore images. I guess you can't expect shitty people to be logical, but I've even heard lefty people make fun of gluten stuff, and it's like why are you mad about this??? why are you pissed off that I'm eating bread that doesn't taste as good so that I can have blood in my body? it's so morally neutral.

[xidaer]

Life-changing OCD hack is learning that you can literally call poison control to check if you fucked up and took medications wrong in a way that could kill you instead of having a panic attack while reading reddit and quora threads for an hour. They won't even be mad at you. Like obviously don't do it every day or something but genuinely you can do this if you need to

[xidaer]

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

[xidaer]

Seeing mutuals Like and reblog my posts? Chef’s kiss!

[xidaer]

Reblog if you’d love for people to ask you about your current WIPs

[xidaer]

For no reason, here is Art Spiegelman's 1991 graphic novel Maus, for free on the Internet Archive.

[xidaer]

Guy freezes his hair and it stands tall part 2

Part one here