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@blame-my-muses
the main trick to dancing at a goth club is:
1. Imagine you’re a powerful wizard
2. Imagine you’re channeling mana for one of your strongest spells
3. you can also pretend you’re a deep sea predator pretending to be aquatic plant life drifting in the currents to attract prey
Kids today need to learn how to pull the evil taffy.
4. Brush away the spiderwebs in the vast and mysterious crypt you're exploring
Much has been made of Ryland Grace's name being Grace, and that's extremely valid, but I think y'all might be sleeping on the Ryland part.
Because rye wasn't domesticated like other cereals. It was a weed with enough of a passing resemblance to wheat and barley that there was accidental gradual selection for similarity to crops, which meant larger seeds. At which point rye still mostly stayed as a weed, but a arable (useful/edible) one. And then (after thousands of years of arable weediness) it was intentionally cultivated, likely due to its frost resistance and ability to grow in poorer soil than it its ostensibly higher nutrition domesticated competition, becoming a regionally vital crop. The cultivated strain continued to hybridize with its weedier/"earlier" rye relatives in the wild in a way that was hard to control, leading to a high level of genetic diversity (until relatively recently) compared with other grains.
I'm just saying that at some point, maybe a couple years into the road trip, maybe not until linguists dig in post-nutrient crisis, Rocky, who on day two (2) of their collaboration/friendship, was informed the bipedal leaky space blob's name was "Elegant movement" and duly provided the eridian tranlation with the same sense of amusement that new Merry Men got upon meeting Little John, who called him that name in literally every possible emotional register from sarcastic glee (watching sleep-deprived 'elegant motion' trip on its own feet for the 4th time that day) to great and terrible fear (rocky was not actually thinking about dramatic irony while watching Elegant-Motion be thrown to the wall and lay there unmoving while its body weight crushed its lungs, but he did maybe think about it with dark humor later) to unfathomable love, gratitude, shock, relief, thankfulness (at a certain point a funny nickname ceases to mean anything but that person. Grace is here, Grace came back, Grace is here!), Rocky is going to find out that was not in fact the only translation for his name.
Apparently Grace's name could ALSO have been translated as first name: "Expanse of living things which survive terrible cold and lack of nutrients and are good in hidden ways and unintentionally shaped themselves to be chosen for consumption by humanity", last name: "Help/ Mercy/ Kindness from a higher power". At which point Rocky will clarify that 1)Grace didn't make all that up just now to fuck with him 2) that's been his name since birth. And then Rocky will speedrun all 7 Eridian stages of Grief and chase Grace around with a wrench.
I learned in my political science class that all major famines in the 20th century and onward have been caused by oppressive groups or political situations restricting access to food, NOT natural causes like crop failure
This is literally the point that Indian economist Amartya Sen made that won him the Nobel prize in economics. As a child, he survived one of the several Bengal famines that were organised by the British colonisers in India. He developed his theory on famines, which is that they were more about distribution of food rather than production or availability of it
*weeps uncontrollably at 9 o'clock in the morning*
God, I love randos on the internet who just want to be kind.
So a wizard and an ancient construct walk into a tavern.
Oat milk was discovered much more recently than you may have known. Like many now-familiar technologies, it was found by accident during the Apollo program when NASA learned what a zero-g environment does to goat milk.
I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:
A forty hour work week is considered full time.
It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)
A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.
Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.
Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
Our goal as a society should be to protect each other, especially those that most need protection, not to subsidize failing businesses whose owners could quite well subsidize them on their own.
Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
The Australian Ballet is doing Alice in Wonderland again and on one hand I’ve seen it before, and on the other, their Queen of Hearts has my favourite costume in anything every
It’s just this and her court pushes her around the stage on wheels and every act it gets taller until she towers over everyone
Also in act 3 (I think) it swings open at the front and her husband is sitting inside reading a newspaper
I saw this again on Tuesday so here are some things I’d forgotten about:
This is the only Alice adaptation I’ve ever seen that doesn’t cut the caucus race
The mad hatter wears taps throughout and it’s so jarring and surprising it’s perfect
The executioner shadows almost everyone who dances with the Queen
Lewis Carroll is a character in the ballet and becomes the white rabbit who leads Alice into wonderland which is bad and wrong because Carroll is the dodo but does work very well
They started dropping rose petals from the ceiling onto the audience when Alice looked through the door to the garden and it was utterly magic
The Cheshire Cat is made of about 10 different puppets that dance around the stage
Which reminds me Alice is styled after Alice Liddell rather than the John Tenniel illustrations
I don’t think the king of hearts actually dances he just wanders around looking confused
here’s a video
more. (btw this is a parody/reference to the very famous “rose adagio” from sleeping beauty)
the Caterpillar is pretty neat too
(all of these videos are from the Royal Ballet’s productions in 2014 and 2017)
Finally an adaptation that makes feel like I’m going to have stroke, it’s perfect
This looks fucking bonkers, I love it.
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”
Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.
#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)
people sometimes flatten Dean’s protectiveness into possessiveness because from the outside they can look similar:
hypervigilance
difficulty letting go
stepping into caretaker mode
panic when loved ones are endangered
trying to “fix” situations
but emotionally, the root is different.
possessiveness is usually about ownership and entitlement. Dean’s behavior is much more rooted in responsibility and terror of failure.
John essentially conditioned Dean into believing:
if something bad happens to this family, it’s your fault.
which is an absolutely catastrophic burden to put on a child. especially this child, because Dean was already naturally empathetic and nurturing before the parentification fully set in.
and the phone call with Mary and John is so important because it reveals something crucial: Dean’s instinct toward comfort predates the trauma configuration we usually associate with him.
little Dean doesn’t respond to distress by withdrawing. he moves toward it. Mary gets upset and he immediately tries to soothe her:
“i’ll never leave you”
“dad loves you”
reassurance
emotional caretaking
that is not John programming him from scratch. that’s John exploiting something already there.
which honestly makes it sadder.
because John takes a naturally affectionate, emotionally sensitive kid and turns those instincts into survival labor.
Dean learns that being nurturing and noble and dependable is not optional. it is duty. it is vigilance. it is crisis management. it is:
keep everyone together keep everyone alive absorb everyone’s fear do not break do not need anything
and because Dean succeeds at this so often, everyone around him unconsciously starts relying on it too.
that’s why he gets trapped in impossible expectations throughout the series:
be emotionally available
be strong
be forgiving
be ruthless when needed
be soft
be hard
be a brother
be a parent
be a soldier
be stable
never fall apart
he’s expected to endlessly regulate both himself and everyone else emotionally.
and when he can’t? people often react with discomfort because Dean’s caretaking became structural. he’s the emotional hearth of the narrative, and when the hearth starts to get cold, everyone notices.
I think the tragedy of Dean is that he often genuinely doesn’t know where responsibility ends and personhood begins.
because John blurred that boundary repeatedly.
protect Sam. watch over Sam. raise Sam. save people. hunt things. keep moving. don’t complain.
Dean’s nurturing traits become militarized.
so when he spirals into overprotectiveness later, it’s usually not:
“you belong to me.”
it’s:
“if i fail to protect you, i have failed fundamentally as a human being.”
that’s a completely different psychological framework.
and honestly? Dean’s terror is less about people leaving him voluntarily and more about people dying on his watch. abandonment hurts him deeply, obviously, but guilt is the thing that truly devours him. because guilt reinforces the conditioning:
you should’ve done better. you should’ve saved them. you should’ve carried more.
which is why he keeps overextending himself emotionally and physically until he breaks.
there’s also something deeply important about the fact that Dean never fully loses his tenderness despite everything. that’s kind of miraculous, actually. because a lot of people subjected to that kind of emotional exploitation either harden completely or stop nurturing altogether because nurturing became associated with pain.
Dean doesn’t.
he still cooks for people. still comforts people. still wraps blankets around sick shoulders. still worries. still notices tiny emotional shifts. still tries to make people laugh when they’re hurting. still loves deeply.
even after Hell. even after betrayal. even after losing basically everyone seventeen thousand times because television writers feed Winchester suffering like it’s a renewable energy source.
that softness survives.
damaged, exhausted, defensive sometimes, absolutely. but alive.
and i think that’s the core of who Dean is: not a man driven by ownership. a man whose capacity to care was weaponized against him, and who kept caring anyway.
this post makes me feel patriotic
this post makes me feel a complex mixture of love for the people around me and consternation about what "patriotism" entails politically and ethically
too lazy to retype this but . insane interaction w coworker last night
tell me you have never worked in customer service without telling me you've never worked in customer service
customer facing worker faces customers politely more at ten
Taking a break from my occasionally intense WIP to meme
Canadian literature:
All this stuff is probably true, but it makes it sound like the workers are contaminating lettuce.
Wide-spread produce contamination happens through dirty irrigation water that sewage has leaked into.
Even if workers were taking shits in the field, it wouldn’t be enough to make these events and someone with intestinal diseases wouldn’t last long out doing manual labor in the hot sun (ask me how I know).
Food borne illnesses are almost always from shortcuts companies do to save a few bucks (don’t test the water, don’t test the produce, etc.)
this needs to be shared far and wide
I advise calling your LOCAL BUSINESSES and asking if they are selling Taylor Farms produce. I advise following that question with expressions of concern, distrust in the face of Taylor Farms bribes, and expressing a worry that the contaminates will spread to other salad greens. Make keeping Taylor Farms produce in stores a PR nightmare.
I want to tell a story to the artists and would-be artists out there.
When I was 19, I made a large oil painting of the nerd I would eventually marry. I poured all my attention and care into this painting. It's the only art I have from back then that still holds up as a work I'm proud of today.
I entered it into a judged show at the local art center. It got an honorable mention. I went to see the show with my beloved model. One of the judges came up to talk to me, and highlighted that all the judges really liked the painting. It would have placed, except, you see, the feet were incorrect. They were too wide and short, and if I just studied a bit more anatomy-
I called over my future wife, and asked her to take off her shoe. Being already very used to humoring me, she did. The judge looked at her very short, very wide little foot. Exactly as I'd lovingly rendered it. I would never edit her appearance in any way.
The judge looked me in the eye, and to his credit, he really looked like he meant it when he said "Oh I'm so sorry."
Anyways the moral of the story is that all of those anatomy books that teach you proportions are either showing you averages, or a very specific idea of an idealized body. Actual bodies are much more varied than that.
So don't forget to draw from observation, and remember that humans aren't mass produced mannequins. Delight in our variation. Because it's supposed to be there.
This is so cute ❤︎
I'm starting to think some of you guys were too easily scared as children cause what do you mean you still as an adult find Dark Crystal nightmarishly scary? Skill issue tbh. The Skeksis might give you nightmares, I just think they're delightfully unpleasant.
'why did they show us films as kids that had DEATH and GRIEF in them???' idk man because children are morbid little creatures that are just discovering these ideas and need a safe way to practise those huge emotions? sorry you couldn't cope with cartoon animals dying but like. these are in fact appropriate things for children to know about and learn how to handle.
It is objectively Good for children to have the chance to practise grief, fear, loss and sadness in safe, low-stakes environments where they don't actually lose anything and aren't in any danger
because otherwise the first time they learn to process those feelings will be when it IS real and it DOES matter.
some good books to start em young are things like Goodbye Mog or The Sad Book or children's horror stories like Goosebumps. and yeah like. Watership Down, Black Beauty, Animals of Farthing Wood, Bambi - stuff that deals with grief and loss in a vivid but age-appropriate way.
as for scary things. this one is weird because quite frankly small children have wild imaginations and will develop fears of some very random things whether or not they're exposed to scary media. like I was scared by watching Jurassic Park as a kid. reasonable. normal. how did this fear manifest? I got scared of the showerhead because it reminded me of the spitting dinosaur. Make that make sense. If you only ever show kids like, Care Bears, they will protect almost as intense a fear onto that as they would onto Dark Crystal or the Black Cauldron - the story is just a cipher for them to process their bigger feelings.
also, and on the other hand. if you're 30+ years old and still scared of Muppets and animated animals you may have an actual problem. I'm not saying that in a perjorative sense but like. are you good?
I recently saw a pretty serious reviewer arguing that books like Old Yeller, The Yearling, The Bridge to Terabithia, and Where the Red Ferns Grow are problematic because they're manipulating children into feeling sad and/or disturbed (iirc, it was specifically along the lines of "they (the books) are teaching children to accept whatever bad things happen to them". )
Yes, these books are sad. That's the whole point! Sometimes terrible things will happen to you, sometimes you'll have to do something that absolutely breaks your heart, sometimes you'll lose people or animals that you loved dearly and you'll just have to learn how to carry on., because that's how life works!
Introducing these ideas at a young age is a good thing. Kids cannot live sheltered from these feelings- they'll come, regardless of how protective you are as a parent
