2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
official daine visual archive
Claire Keane
occasionally subtle
Cosimo Galluzzi
Show & Tell
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
@theartofmadeline
#extradirty
taylor price
The Bowery Presents
Andulka
No title available
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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Keni
Fai_Ryy
blake kathryn
YOU ARE THE REASON
d e v o n
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@cameronlsummers
Alternate timeline in which all Greek and Latin roots are swapped:
catastrophe -> contraverse cephalopod -> capitoped chlorophyll -> viridofolia democracy -> populimpery homicide -> anthropoctony homosexual -> equigamic kilometer -> millimensure interregnum -> mesarchy magnanimous -> megapsychic manuscript -> chirography motorcycle -> ergatorote microscope -> parvovisor oxygen -> acidofex polyamory -> multierasty television -> remotoscope universe -> monostrophe
does anyone else feel like we need to raise the standard for writing quality across all mediums like right now
a BRILLIANT read, and even more incentive for me to make my own wizards trope-defying and excellent.
God it’s fascinating to look at the timestamp on this one and then realize that Pratchett went on to write his Witches Series and Granny Weatherwax, who’s strong and fierce and brilliant and austere and so achingly, bitterly, intensely good. I think Granny Weatherwax would give Gandalf a hard look and Gandalf would remember he had a very urgent appointment three shires away and stroll off really fast.
Holy fuck, everybody go read this right now.
Pratchett is one of the people whose work is not only hilarious, but legitimately brilliant. I learned so much from reading his books. Even this talk is peppered with the kind of thing that makes you snort out loud and get stared at by coworkers:
No wonder witches were always portrayed as toothless — it was living in a 90,000 calorie house that did it. You’d hear a noise in the night and it’d be the local kids, eating the doorknob.
And he fucking nails the witch/wizard dichotomy. Wizards = wise, powerful, organized, educated; witches = crones who give you warts. The Tiffany Aching series addresses this directly, as do the regular Discworld books focusing on the Lancre witches. Like Roach says, Granny Weatherwax is achingly, bitterly, intensely good, and that’s partly because she’s constantly aware of how easy it would be to be bad. How someone has to do the mucky jobs and help the obnoxious and stupid and never, ever take credit for anything you didn’t do; how the hardest thing is to stay balanced just on the edge between extremes, maintain that equilibrium, do what needs to be done no matter how awful or difficult it may be. Wizards never have to think about this. They just forge straight ahead, eating big dinners and squabbling amongst themselves and taking their power for granted.
Come to think of it, that’s one of the most significant divisions of power in Discworld: the men all gang up into this big elitist mob and loll around indolently, specifically not doing magic. Their magic is so powerful and dangerous that it’s a better use of their time to all keep each other down, all the wizard books basically revolve around ‘Oh no, someone’s doing magic, we’d better stomp them flat and then go home for second breakfast’. They keep the world from turning inside out but not much more than that, and they’re kind of a bunch of assholes about it too. Meanwhile the witches are just grimly slogging along, delivering babies and rousting out vampires and changing compresses, like, they stake out territories and then take care of everyone in it… while everyone still thinks that wizards are respectable and witches are shady.
The line about equal rites killed me, though. The insightful commentary (on the internet no less) here helped buffer that.
Discworld Heritage Post
It’s the difference between status and value. Who does the necessary work, and who takes the credit. Who the world would actually fall apart without, and who reaps the rewards of being considered important.
There’s gender in it, but shades of poor-and-rich as well.
What’s marvellous I think here is that Pratchett’s criticism of Le Guin, on Earthsea, was made in 1985 - and in 1990, she wrote Tehanu, which is a fantastic indictment of the sexism and misogyny of the earlier Earthsea books. Doesn’t meant she saw this, she probably didn’t - her own unease with the earlier Earthsea books was evident in other places - but it’s what Pratchett himself is saying, reality creates fantasy creates reality.
Terry being brilliant, and read the comments.
Past-midnight-thoughts as I’m thinking forward to the next semester of teaching and to what the purposes of a university education and my course are. For a while I’ve been saying that the purpose of a college education is to “teach critical thinking” in resistance to the businessification of academia and because, for technical skills that can be learned on the job or through self-learning/other experience, “critical thinking” seems like an offering unique to academia. At the same time, I have also been thinking about how that framework of critical thinking as academia’s main offering can be limiting to specific epistemologies (and can still allow me as an instructor to fall into the banking model of education!). I have started thinking more about Lauren Berlant’s notion that we are scholars not to find the answer but to learn to ask a better question. Maybe that’s also what I think academia can offer—tools and practice to learn how to ask a better question, regardless of the epistemological framework.
James Baldwin photographed by Carl Van Vechten on September 13, 1955.
Lrb and speaking specifically about classical translation and more generally about translation of works by authors who are actually dead, the translator becomes a meaningful coauthor; the author's sole capacity for input is the text itself, which may be/become corrupt. The relationship is different with contemporary translation (i.e. the author is still actually alive), when it's increasingly common for authors to have a preexisting relationship with translation/a given target language or even act as their own translators--this isn't a litcrit thing, this is a practical consideration. In the case of actually-dead authors, though, and especially very ancient texts, the translator has to make so many autonomous decisions that radically impact how the source text will be read in the translator's own temporosocial milieu that they become to a meaningful degree a coauthor, creating the work anew from the source, while often--not always any more but for a VERY long time in the anglophone world--functionally invisible. Fitzgerald's Homer is not Lattimore's Homer and both are distinct from the "original" insofar as there is meaningfully an "original" in this context. This is a critical consideration in many ways, I think.
Possible considerations include
- degree of localization: how much is/should the text be "updated" to make it legible in various ways to contemporary readers
- style: verse vs prose and if verse what kind--how to convey verse forms that don't exist/are impossible in the target language
-semantic drift: cf Emily Wilson thread on what the sirens sing from--what preconceptions linger from prior versions or intervening cultural constructions and are they present to the text and if so to what degree
There's more but these occur to me off the top of my head, and these are truly important considerations when analyzing works in translation. I may be biased but I do think that it behooves authors to consider translation--not while doing the writing but as the writing. The considerations of translation are also the considerations of good writing, and it is beneficial to keep them in mind, and that's even without the Steiner thing about types of translation.
i like when people say that the universality of campbell's hero's journey only applies to western mythology/folklore. brother, i am going to hold your hand when i say this... it doesn't apply there too
loml, the libby app
honestly christianity really hit the jackpot with "jesus christ" rolling off the tongue as an expletive so well. the number one problem with fantasy settings is that whatever names you come up with to take in vain will never hit as well as "jesus christ"
this guy gets it!!!!! this is the kind of rock solid phonetic structural integrity you have to compete with!!!! and no amount of marika's tits or thal's balls or odin's beards will ever get close because with ol jeezy boy his name alone has all the features you need
official linguistics post
[Image ID: Tumblr tags from spr0utsies reading: #its the like. 2 fricatives in a row in jesus getting snapped w the hard /k/ sound in christ #then the stop of the /t/ doesn't let it hang #its easy to say fast and short enough to roll of the tongue #its a good expletive!! /End ID]
Happy tax day, I’m way down a grading hole and not sure when I can come back up for air, but Edgar did our taxes this year right after doing
Some rather wild book reviews -- for which I took too much time, and so I have far too many.
Hieronymus Bosch
He looks a bit different than I imagined.
There's a whole book or even multiple sagas to be written around the question of "why do adventurers exist in this world at all". I hate the term "murderhobo" with a passion but there is a lot, a lot to talk about what kind of society hires wandering questing warriors to solve problems and where do those "adventurers" come from and what role do they have in society.
Lots of people have talked about this but I would like to point out this essay on ACOUP that starts with seemingly a semi-related matter (why gold coins in fantasy don't make sense in historical societies) and ends with a very revealing insight... gold isn't the reward that "fantasy adventurers" should seek. It should be power and influence, noble titles, a comission in the local army, land.
This week on the blog I want to take a brief detour into discussing historical coinage, particularly in the context of modern fantasy and ro
As usual and expected from a blog titled A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, it does take a long (but very interesting and worth reading) read to get to that point, but I'll point out the interesting thing in this context:
Here, "Big Man" is a stand in for the nobles and rulers and landowners of agricultural societies. While more urbanized and industrial societies may have a use for coinage, what do these societies based in interpersonal relationships can give you as a reward for a quest, as a reward for solving a problem? Social power; a title, a relationship, a promise of support. And not only that, but this isn't often a reward but a necessity in the first place. To have a horse, to have armor and weapons and the means to wage war (go adventuring) in the first place, you don't go to the medieval store and buy them with 20gp, you often have people supporting you and even , you are a man-at-arms, part of a noble retinue a noble yourself, maybe part of a holy order, or in more early-modern scenario, part of a mercenary group.
However, this doesn't happen often in fantasy because of these reasons reasons:
The idea of the selfless hero who doesn't choose glory or fame but instead continues questing endlessly to do good or defeat an ultimate evil. Making a hero have a patron feels like selling out (but I will address that)
Even with those characters who aren't selfless and would probably take the power and titles, it seems to tie them down to a place or obligation and this makes adventures boring (but I will address that!)
Dungeons & Dragons
People say that every generic fantasy world is inspired by Tolkien but I will argue that he's the grandfather of modern fantasy, the father is Gary Gyax. The ideas baked in D&D have been present in ALL over popular fantasy for decades now, even more prominently than Tolkien (and of course D&D 'borrowed' a lot from Tolkien). Now what this means in this particular case is the idea of wandering "adventurers" solving problems for "gold" in "dungeons", often with the undertone of a frontier or decaying civilization full of monsters and bandits to be killed and tamed into civilization (some other people have written about this better than me)
Nevertheless, even beyond the setting implications, there are deep gameplay implications that have filtered down popular fantasy. Dungeons and Dragons is a survival/combat game. It's a survival game because you have to rely in your abilities and limited equipment (which you buy with gold) to survive in a dungeon, through combat. Of course you can do a lot more than that, but this is the core of the game, what it was designed for: buy equipment, go into a dungeon, survive, get treasure, use it to buy equipment, go into another dungeon. Here "dungeon" can mean many things... combat, travel, puzzles, but the loop is clear.
There is no "gain a patron and get social capital" loop in the game, though it might be simulated, it isn't fun. So there is a lack of interest on exploring this, or really, anything beyond the "quest". And since again, it's D&D, not Tolkien, that shapes most popular fantasy, we see popular fantasy repeating this deeply baked in idea of fantasy once and again and again and again. Sometimes even making them into actual, literal points inside the world: making literal worlds with Adventurer Guilds and Dungeons and Quests and sometimes even Levels and XP as part of society (they're only lacking the dice... and that's because D&D is also the main influence behind videogames).
Is EVERY SINGLE FANTASY WORLD like this? No, not at all. But I want to talk about where does this idea of "gold" and "adventures" comes from, and it's NOT medieval or historical inspiration, and it's NOT even Tolkien. It's D&D.
I told you I would address the idea that having a patron or a story based on one's social standing could be boring or at least incompatible with "adventure", and there are many cases that I could point out, but I want to point to a very interesting one: Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, el Cid Campeador.
El Cid is both a real person who lived a very interesting life and a folklore figure, and both are very interesting as inspirations for fantasy "adventurers". El Cid was considered (by the social standards of the time) as an ideal knight and a tragic figure. But his whole life is defined by the society he lived in and, as any knight (or noble warrior in general), how he walked the interrelationships of his society; his back and forth of loyalty and betrayal with King Alfonso, his loss and recovery of honor, his service to the Muslims rulers of Zaragoza which indeed gave him his title (these constant intercultural interactions were very common in medieval Iberia, which makes it a very unique and underused setting inspiration), his rulership over Valencia. Over time, El Cid changes and seeks patrons and his changes in his social status (and his dependence on them) are a major part of the story both in real life and fictionalizations.
But this doesn't mean that the life of El Cid is boring or lacking in combat and travels. He gets "adventures" all over the place, he travels and fights over the whole breadth of Iberia, he has countless legends to his name. He wasn't a "murderhobo" that got gold from each adventure and then went to the store to buy a new sword, he took command of armies and he even took power and governed his own realm, but his life wasn't lacking from excitement, he didn't just sit and became a paper-pusher. I need to be very clear I'm not saying El Cid was a hero, I'm saying he led an exciting, interesting life, worthy of most fictional adventurers, but he wasn't just going from place to place asking for gold... well, technically yes, but this involved his status, his honor and his place in society. Which makes for a rich story.
And he's not the only one, Medieval Iberia is full of stories of these characters that navigated the social networks of their time, a place where cultures interacted with each other in multiple complex ways and kingdoms and taifas often employed these wandering "adventurers". Maybe if you want to get inspired to write about adventurers, don't look to D&D for inspiration. Read about Al Andalus sometime.
While I understand the desire to make Big Art entirely and viscerally I think it's worth considering that small art often leaves an outsized impact on its audience. Short stories, teensy indie games, short films, sketches on scrap paper, carved or sculpted figures that would fit in the palm of your hand, etc. etc. are all things that, when they hit your psyche at just the right angle, can stay lodged in there forever specifically because they are small. It is not necessary for a thing to be sprawling for it to have impact.
How important is rewriting to the writing process? Should you edit as you go or should you wait until you’re done with the story?
NO BACKSPACE UNTIL THE DRAFT IS DONE
Youre barely even writing until the first draft is done. Writing --as in the actual craft of writing-- begins and ends in the edit.
do you have the courage to write a terrible first draft?
Shout out to the (many) times I got called an elitist gatekeeper for saying that the only real way to fully understand a work of fiction is to experience it firsthand and that summaries and reviews are not a replacement for that
Me, reading the first 80% of the post: What do you mean, "experience it firsthand"? How am I supposed to join the Hunger Games or go on the Odyssey?
Me, reading the final clause of the post: Oh, you literally meant that people have to read the book/listen to the audiobook in order to fully understand it. And people got mad. Oh dear.
