Every Angel is Terrifying, Alas! I Sing to You

Page title from Rainer Maria Rilke . Assorted fandoms: ASOIAF, GOT, Les Miserables, Marvel, Star Trek: The Original Series

[canarylemon]

“I promise you nothing. How can I? I’ve told you what lies ahead.”

“I don’t care. I’ll go towards it with you.”

- Queen of the Damned, ch. 4

Things to look for:

Gladioli and wisteria from the illusion of the Villa

The heart framing

Armand’s ring (obligatory. i’m looking at you, amc)

Daniel’s amulet

Prints & more

Original pencil sketch

[serratedpens]

But it just happens, every so often, that something very ordinary seems beautiful to me and I’d like it to be eternal. I’d like this bistro, and that dusty light bulb, and that dog dreaming on the marble, and even this night—to be eternal. And their essential quality is precisely that they aren’t.

Raymond Queneau, Witch Grass

[killxbunnyyy]

sorry i never replied. everyday is blending together and im losing sense of time

[disregardcanon]

Many years ago I had the idea to make an iron throne out of pencils. I finally got that shit done

Ned Stark voice: school is coming

[sparvverius]

can't stop thinking about how "dark and gritty treasure island prequel" sounds like the premise to the worst show ever aired but it's literally good. goes to show that nothing is for certain in this life

[alphacrone]

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.

[trangoldin]

[mrskayathefrog]

Here is the podcast (audio only), here is the text (the top text is Chinese, scroll down for English)

[partywithponies]

My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.

[partywithponies]

Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

the hot chocolate enjoyer when you ask where all the milk is going so fast:

[faraway-ant]

i’ve seen this user post this photo as a sort of reaction image a couple times now and it makes me laugh every time. because this is the incredibly elusive marbled cat and they really do just have a tendency to look so pitiful, guilty, and empty in the head. so here’s some more photos of them looking like there’s just one marble bouncing around their skull:

[mollyjames]

This is just my two cents on what is ultimately a very complicated issue, but I feel like too often we treat representation like it's a quality problem when it would be better approached as a quantity problem. For as many people want to see a serious grounded portrayal of their experiences, there are also those who just want to relax and have a good time. So for instance, if you're writing a trans woman for your story, instead of pouring all of your effort into research - trying to avoid every stereotype while simultaneously making her all things to all trans women - you could instead just add a second trans woman

[mollyjames]

This has the added advantage that you can make them kiss, but I digress

[tarantula-hawk-wasp]

I think that contemporary film adaptations of either the Iliad or the Odyssey will continue to struggle to fully depict the text because I don’t think we’re at a place where blockbuster style movies can satisfactorily handle the inescapable themes of sexual violence and sexual slavery that are integral to the plotlines of both stories.

[youngadultread]

“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions. Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time. In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows: “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.” In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts.”

—

PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)

Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it. 

(via iamayoungfeminist)

[findmeinthealps]

guy on a work call just accidentally said “have a nice freak-end” instead of weekend and now i desperately want that to be the new meme. have a nice freakend everybody

[angstqueenart]

Armand is one of the most devastating characters I've ever seen, what the hell. Reading excerpts from the Vampire Armand after watching the show broke my heart. Assad truly delivered in the scenes when it comes to Armand's backstory and his trauma.

TW// rape, pedophilia, slavery, colonialism, orientalism, grooming, white supremacy

It angers me so much when people don't read into Armand's character by taking into account BOTH the fact that he was a child when he was enslaved and trafficked, AND that so much of his subsequent treatment is related to racism, orientalism and fetishization as a South Asian boy, then man. He was stripped of his agency, his bodily autonomy, his culture, forced to conform to a culture and customs that were not his, all while being subjected to extreme abuse and rape.

This did NOT happen in a vacuum, this is directly related to white supremacy because Marius is a white supremacist, an ancient Roman who idealizes the "white race" and calls any culture that's not western European (even Eastern European, as per Armand's og background as Ukrainian in the books) "barbaric" and "backwards" and beats it into submission and molds it into fitting the "pure European standard".

And yes, Armand idealized Marius for so long, and he served him, and still somewhat idealizes and romanticizes his idea of Marius because he is a victim of him. He is still deeply traumatized and he was groomed by Marius, and as was confirmed by Louis, Marius bought him when he was twelve.

He was taught to serve him, because that was what he knew, Marius was all he had, no more parents, Marius would be his father. Father, lover, maker. Everything, he would be everything all at once.

That is exactly what groomers do. They replace what should be the safest figures in your life, your parents, a partner, a companion, and twist it, just enough, just enough to make it innocuous, to make it look normal. But it's not. Marius beats him, whips him, and Armand still pleads for him to forgive him. "Basked in his mercy," and what mercy was there to be had?

And even still, Armand still somewhat knows deep down that he was abused, but nobody can fault him for romanticizing anything that happened to him in an attempt to protect his psyche from shattering. He tries to wrap it up by saying he was loved by Marius, ("knowing what it would do to his beloved Amadeo") even though we as an audience know he was groomed and that Marius didn't care, as he calls him a "rotten boy" in s3 when Lestat meets him. Disgusting man.

Btw, this is not the discussion to bring your grievances about Armand's actions into, I do not justify nor excuse them, however I feel like Armand deserves to be analyzed as a victim of slavery, colonialism/orientalism and child rape without bringing in what he did after becoming a vampire, so just some nuance to be had here.

Also, while I am not South Asian, I am Algerian, and specifically Amazigh (the indigenous people of North Africa), so my people have an uncomfortable history with different waves of colonialism (not only from Europeans, but also Arabs, Ottomans, etc) and similar fetishization, kidnappings, enslavement, trafficking and rape.

But discussions about Armand's treatment also need to include the fact that he is a brown skinned Indian man and I feel like a lot of people gloss over this as well.

This would ABSOLUTELY affect the way he was treated in the brothel and by Marius. Colorism is a direct result of racism in how it ranks Black and Brown people and too few people talk about it nor do they acknowledge bias in how they might perceive him. Anti-Indian hatred and islamophobia have become alarmingly high in the past decade or so, and I see it in this fandom too even though people try to claim otherwise.

Nevertheless, I truly love Armand as a character, even if I'm disappointed at the flattening of his motives in s3 and turning him into a simple one note villain (besides the mention of his past during the torture scene, but it was such an egregious anti-Black scene I can't engage with it). I don't know if I can trust these writers to write Armand's backstory and do it respectfully.

[utopians]

duuuuuude you have GOT to come out tonight we're enacting cruelty upon those who have transgressed so badly that we can justify any act against them... and you KNOW we're interpreting our delight as moral righteousness... Yeah it's fucking crazyyyyyyy get an Uber

[insomniac-arrest]

I think we should figure out what age we’re living in now so we can say how it’s collapsing to each other

[insomniac-arrest]

Our age of plastics is collapsing

[insomniac-arrest]

Our age of information is collapsing! *remembers generative AI, nods to self* our age of information is collapsing.

[jacobwren]

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI