male author: lithe, spirited, outgoing, and not afraid to speak her mind. she was a raw sexual force and she knew it. she was dandelion fluff on a summer day, gone in an instant, leaving you with nothing but the memory of her touch and the faint taste of strawberries on your lips
Supporting marginalized authors is real good and own voices is also very good in the contexts it needs to be relevant but genuinely sometimes it freaks me out how much ppl know about authors’ real lives and identities. Like most of the time i don’t know anything about these people except if their book I read is good or not and I hope to keep it that way
People visiting when I'm doing demonstrations with the guild: Oh it's so good that you're Carrying On The Tradition. I bet it's really nice to Reconnect With Your Ancestors by using Traditional Crafts that No-one Alive Has To Use For Real Any More, How Very Interesting and Noble Of You
#There's a longer rant here about the broader alienation from production the global north has and how there's this kind of. #Fetishisation of The past and how it was So Hard Then but of course no-one has to make their own clothes now! #No-one has to rely on wood fires any more! Oh wouldn't that be such a hard life how noble these people were. How humble and poor #When like. These things are still very much integral parts of life in many places #just not the ones considered important by people in the imperial core
#And these are the same people who shy away when I offer them a spindle and say try it; it's not hard I promise #Humanity has been doing this for millenia across cultures and distance. And I think some of it is fear of failure but there's also I think #probably some fear of losing the mystery of it #The artificial distance between you & the person who had to spin to make everything they wore and for their family too #I think maybe that scares people a little. Idk. Or maybe they're just scared of embarrassment
#All this to say no I'm not spinning to Commune With My Ancestors. I'm spinning cause it's fun. You should try it too #And maybe you'll gain an appreciation for how our relationship to labour has changed from the people you see as so distant to you #Or maybe you'll just have some nice yarn
the other day a friend of a friend referred to "busting out of your abdomen like the alien from the Predator films" and I was completely caught off guard. like I guess that's - that's not wrong. the alien was. okay she was in the Predator films. well some of them. but like. she had her own. she's the alien from the Alien films. like. they have her name on them. he's not "King Kong from the Godzilla films"
I do really love it when women write graphic and fucked up things. I feel like so often people react to fucked up fiction with “of course a disgusting man would write this 🙄” and it often carries an unspoken (honestly sometimes spoken) message of “a woman’s PURE and DELICATE and FEMININE mind could NEVER think of something this VILE”. Thank you women in fucked up fiction 🫡
Had sort of a breakthrough moment while thinking about redundancies, just now, in the shower. I'm always a little bit thinking about redundancies because I'm into archiving (family occupation+autism, which is also a family occupation), and frequently I remind myself that they are good things actually (it's good to have a little more groceries than you need, it's good to save more than one copy of your project, it's good to pack enough underwear for more days than you'll be traveling, it's good to have more than one escape route, etc.)-- BUT TODAY I thought: hey this is true of intellectual/creative redundancies as well!
Oft I find mineself falling into the trap of thinking 'if I can't make something novel and completely original then it's not worth making', or some version of 'other people have told this story before better than I could', and this is an excellent way to ensure I never finish anything. EXCEPT, I remind myself once more, slapping my forehead, REDUNDANCIES ARE GOOD ACTUALLY, REMEMBER?
No one is going to read all the books, watch all the movies, hear all the stories. Not everyone has access to the same stuff, not all the stuff is made in the same place at the same time by the same people in the same language in the same context. You can say the same thing more than once and that just means there are two different places where people can encounter that idea. Ideas are iterative anyway! If nothing else (says the archivist), a long time down the road, having multiple examples of a thing occurring at a similar time is evidence of a trend in that specific period, and that's valuable in its own right.
Tell the same story twice! Put it on VHS and DVD and torrents! It's fine! it's good actually! don't keep stalling yourself (myself) out on a project because you (I) think it's been done before!! That's the sign I'm going to tap whenever I'm next bewailing that my story isn't original and other people have done it better already.
i think as a writer, the older you get and the more you read, the more you realize there are very few actual truly bad ideas. which is a relief. but! the other thing you learn is that stories live and die on the execution and ha ha. lemme tell you. unfortunately. there are lots and lots of bad ways to execute an otherwise fine idea
"Whether someone understands it or not, these are the consequences of the political views they're espousing" is a pretty important analysis tool for online movements because quite honestly, over half of everyone engaging in politics online have no foundations for the stuff they're saying and are just saying whatever makes them feel like a member of an in-group.
If your in-group is "the left" you're very much not immune to this. In fact, trying to do left-wing politics without even trying to build a foundational political understanding is a great way to end up as a neo-nazi with a tumblr accent rather than an effective left-wing advocate.
[ID: a screenshot of a comic speech bubble. The black text in it reads "No matter how open-minded, socially conscious, anti-racist I think I am, I still have old learned hidden biases that I need to examine. It is my responsibility to check myself daily for my stereotypes, prejudices and, ultimately, discrimination." /ID end]
antiracism is a constant process. i was raised in a racist village and it's not easy to get rid of it. i moved away over 10 years ago but those ideas are still haunting me.
also keep in mind that shame + guilt are not conducive to growing as a person. when it comes to "checking yourself" it should be a non-judgemental process. it's not about flagellating yourself for every bad thought or trying to purify your mind of all corruption. it's only when acknowledging your own racist thoughts doesn't fill you with dread that you can really progress past the white guilt of it all.
radical self-acceptance & genuine self-critique are not opposites. they need each other. do not let obsessive-compulsive behaviors colonize your desire to grow as a person.
The thing is, most people who use "antiracism" and champion it as a concept are really into flagellating. Just look at White Fragility, a book that is frequently recommended and heavily worshiped among the antiracism community: she actually says outright at one point that when people come up to her at the antiracism workshops she's running and ask her for practical ways they can help, that's an excuse to avoid sitting with their guilt and doing internal work and she tells them as much. (And she describes precisely one of her own mistakes in order to discuss the extremely self-flagellating way she responds to realizing she's been rude to the Black IT person at work.)
Shame and guilt are not conducive to growing as a person and not conducive to accomplishing anything. Unfortunately there's a very large chunk of the movement that is running around telling people they need to purify their minds of corruption; I would even say it's the majority of the mainstream antiracism movement.
(If anyone's looking for a book that deals with working on your biases without falling into "You should feel guilty about everything!", check out Debby Irving's Waking Up White, which details her journey to racial consciousness. Including unflinchingly describing a lot of her cringe-inducing early mistakes and how she's learned from them without any kind of flagellating over it, despite the fact that some of them are really cringe-inducing, with "you will make mistakes and you will also improve" being a big part of the messaging.)
I get in theory why people complain about het ships or whatever, I get wanting to watch queer media I really do, but I guess where y’all lose me is like. I saw some asshole on a post about Sinners complaining it was “hetslop”—this person was specifically doing so while also claiming Remmick was a queer character and thus they were justified in caring more about him than the Black protagonists. which is a whole other disgusting can of worms that has been well addressed by others at this point. but even in the absence of that part of the argument, like, no, i actually don’t think that a hunger for queer stories is an especially good excuse to deride and dismiss a piece of landmark Black filmmaking, especially as a non-Black person. I have a post that’s been going around encouraging folks to engage with more Native stories and characters, and I had someone come onto that post saying in the tags that they’d need these stories to be queer in order to care. and I just think that, you know, sucks! like obviously as a queer Native I also want to see more of those stories too. but idk how else to put it other than to say that Black people and people of color shouldn’t have to be like you in order for you to care about our narratives and experiences. and I think some of y’all are using this disdain for heterosexuality as a cover for your unexamined racial biases. it’s not okay to be racist to people just because those people happen to be straight, and you continue to be white before you are queer.
on an even more basic level than that, also, I simply just think some of y’all NEED to learn how to interact with media and storytelling without ships and fandom in mind. like if not being able to write fic about two men kissing is genuinely going to be a dealbreaker for you I think that’s actually something you need to work on within yourself because at that point I think you’re no longer really interacting with art and themes and narrative so much as just kind of playing with toys. which is, like, fine I guess. have fun. but it wouldn’t kill you to disengage from that from time to time. especially if would allow you to actually appreciate rich and deeply moving cultural stories from communities of color that you desperately need to learn how to see as human
Three details I unironically enjoy about TOS Starfleet and adhere to with all my heart (all the more as I'm fascinated by the TOS-era conception of Starfleet that I think was pretty aggressively disregarded in many ways by later ST):
1— Members of Starfleet assigned to "ground" service rather than space wear a stylized flower as their breast insignia. It's apparently based on the starflower plant, IIRC, which grows down in northern California as well as the rest of the West Coast. We often see the flower insignia on very high-ranking administrative officers as they're been promoted beyond single starships, but it's also worn by those posted to starbases (like Areel Shaw) and cadets at the Academy (you know the really important ground personnel because they get bigger flowers vs the cadets only getting little blossoms as their insignias).
2—Speaking of cadet uniforms, we do see a cadet uniform in TOS! It's kind of awful and I love it. It's distinctly silver and glittery (not grey) striped velour with a black collar and white long-sleeved undershirt that I wish later ST and fanart did more with. This is not because it looks badass, it absolutely does not. Look at this silver velour situation:
I'm nevertheless charmed at the idea of an Academy-era Spock and Kirk who actually look like young Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner—
—in those uniforms. Sorry JJ Abrams and whomever else, you will never take our heroes as baby-faced Starfleet teens in sparkles from me.
3— There is no officer/enlisted distinction in TOS outside of the Terran Empire of "Mirror, Mirror." Everyone on the Enterprise is an officer.
There's a pretty good discussion of it here, apart from minimizing the glaring differences from the real US Navy and, relatedly, the rather franchise-poisoned contortions around continuity/lore at the end. Its own evidence indicates that this is a very deliberate world building/thematic choice driven by the writers' and creators' grievances with their own experience of the US military and not just the Enterprise being special; they were pretty obviously trying to envision a half-familiar but better world, as far as their audience as they thought of it and themselves were concerned, one where the closest thing to a standing military is something like NOAA (then very recently consolidated into ESSA) rather than a full navy.
That definitely doesn't exclude WWII, the Cold War, and US policy in general militarizing the marine research agencies, and then expecting them to go back to normal but also be ready for combat at any time, but it's a different idea of the Starfleet "normal" than something purely naval—and, incidentally, NOAA's corps does not have an officer/enlisted distinction either (for context, NOAA has ~300 officers in the corps and ~12,000 civilians). The fact that we don't see the officer/enlisted distinction in any other Starfleet context in TOS except very specifically the Mirror Universe is, uh, a pretty standard TOS level of subtlety.
All of that said, the linked article very thoroughly covers pretty much all the arguments and counter-arguments around enlisted in TOS, esp on the Enterprise.
(There is also no distinction between cadets and midshipmen, btw; the terms are used completely interchangeably depending on, as far as I can tell, vibes.)
#I feel like the cadet uniform could actually be very pretty if it didn't suffer from bad materials like a lot of TOS costuming does.#I do really love the silver look and the stripes. It's so unfortunate a lot of their designs I adore but the fabric choices look awful.#Not everything of course there's a few costumes I remarked on the fabric of but.. a lot of it does.
In all honesty, I adore many of the TOS fabrics (even if the velour's shrinking was unfortunate over time) and the IMO magnificent lead costume designer's approaches to style and design were specifically inspired by the fabrics themselves, rather than the fabrics as mediocre vehicles for the design, with an eye to the contemporary and futuristic (by contrast to the film costumes, which after the dire TMP costumes played it safe by looking to the past for their primary inspirations and leaning on much more overtly militaristic nostalgia and much more conservative choices around both style and materials).
Sometimes the TOS costuming was working on a shoestring budget (esp in S3), and the crews, actors, etc were always being worked at an unjustifiable pace to turn out the sheer quantities they did, but Theiss and his team also just re-purposed all kinds of things regardless of budget in ways that I think make them look all the more imaginative and fantastically zany (like the shower curtains used for the space Hazmat suits!). The TOS fabrics also seem to have been much more comfortable for the actors than a lot of later uniforms tbh—but either way, the styles are inextricable from the fabrics.
I think the cadet uniform in particular is one of the less exceptional looks without the silver glitter velour and the undershirt, for sure—those make it fun! I genuinely love the idea of teen Spock and Kirk in it, no tongue in cheek, as much as I think they'd look very young and very silly. A Starfleet cadet should look sparkly and silly in a world with glitter bandages.
I asked for a pastry at the coffee shop. When I raised my card up to pay, he simply said "you're good." and waved it away. I wondered why. I wondered what made him think I deserved to have my order be free. Sparing me those two dollars.
Sitting down at the table, I remembered the scars on my arm. The universal signifier of "This Kid Needs Help." Maybe his kindness was only out of pity. He saw those and assumed there was some great misery and wanted to offer me some relief. It's generally good to be kind to people who are hurting. But I wasn't hurting that bad.
The thing is, there is some great misery. People generally aren't doing that great. There is a great misery within me and within him and within everyone, and some people notice the pain, some people express it, others don't. But we all suffer from something.
It doesn't matter if someone seems to deserve some relief. Everyone needs it. Everyone is suffering constantly. Some more than others, but still. This Kid Needs Help applies to everyone.
Thirty minutes later, I went to get a second pastry, intending to pay and leave a tip this time. It was the same cashier. As he reached to grab it for me, I saw scars on his arm.
But it doesn't really matter. He'd deserve a tip anyway. Because it's never just us hurting.
origamiaround
snowghoul
germansingergirl
