im getting really fucking sick of all this “it gets better!” bullshit. im going to have depression for the rest of my life. it’s not going to “””get better””” fuck you
to everyone reblogging this and saying that you’re the exception, or this will never apply to you, you are not alone. back when I made that first text post I felt the same way. but something I realized in between the first half and second half of this post is that it starts with you. it starts with wanting to be done with the misery. it is so much easier to give in to whatever mental health issues you’re dealing with, especially in a world that is built against us. however it is so worth it to not give in. it is so worth it to do things that make you feel good even though it can feel impossible to start. it’s so worth it to fail at something because at least it means you tried.
getting yourself out of the hole is hard, and can feel damn near impossible at your lowest. but it isn’t impossible. i am living proof of this. nobody is responsible for your emotions but you, and if you want to be happy, you have to create your happiness. do whatever you can to surround yourself with joy. not hedonism, but actual joy. accomplishments, good relationships, engagement in healthy hobbies and habits. it can be hard, there’s no denying it, i still struggle myself sometimes. the reward is so worth it. feeling like you’re the best version of yourself is so worth it.
to quote the queen kali uchis: i know it’s hard, but did you even really try?
relational trauma has to be healed relationally. the best way to practice having relatively "safe" interactions with ppl is joining a hobby group/club/whatever. I've recently joined like ten Fancy Leather Bag groups on fb out of deep curiosity and interest and the communities ppl will build around literally everything I swear to god. I've seen multiple ladies in these purse groups being like "thank you everyone in this hobby for getting me through my chemotherapy" like ... sometimes we dismiss the middle aged purse lady demographic but you know what they have got is a functional community where they support each other that just happens to be centered around purses. having now read many posts from these groups for several weeks I can see that the object being collected IS important, and is certainly the superifival draw into the space as well as something that provides an immediate shared interest, the actual benefit of localish hobby/collecting spaces is largely community and social support.
those of us who are Very Online Only could stand to learn from this sort of thing I think. it doesn't have to be purses it could be anything. but like. (gestures at the purse ladies who are getting each other through chemotherapy) Shared Interest Facebook Group And/Or Subreddit has it for you. i think.
this is actually my first step of learning emotional regulation. yes yes, restful sleep and physiologically appropriate exercise and getting outside and eating nutritious meals. these are all good. but also MEET. YOUR. SOCIAL. NEEDS. you need the relational foundation to cushion you while you work on these skills! i know it's really scary because we all have relational trauma but that doesn't mean we don't have a need for social connection and support!!!
I used bag collecting as a rando example, but collecting objects is of course only one of many, many ways to participate in this sort of community -- a bunch of people have great suggestions in the reblogs and replies here, so I'm compiling some of the most common ones: fiber crafts (which have communities at every level of creation from shearing the sheep to spinning the yarn to knitting or weaving to sewing a garment, etc,) community sports/rec groups (often have classes available before you participate in any competitions depending on the sport,) religious study or activity groups (if you are a member of a religious community, which not everyone is. for example, I'm Jewish, and a ton of Jewish community centers will have a ton of programming to participate in,) book/reading groups (doesn't even have to be a Discussion Group thing, local libraries often have stuff where you can go and read to kids or something, which involves a little less putting your own opinions out there,) gardening (and subhobbies; many people will focus on a very specific thing within gardening like 'breeding orchid' or 'maintaining a community vegetable garden' and there are sub-communities for all of them,) aquarium design/fish keeping/other related stuff such as maintaining bioactive terrariums, buy nothing groups on FB, local gaming store activities (mine have all kinds of participation opportunities like TTRPG nights or classes on painting miniatures,) trading card stuff, local music groups such as drum circle/community choir/etc, local theater groups (you can ease into communities like this by attending a lot of the events before trying to audition or volunteer your time directly,) bookbinding/zinemaking, cooking classes, ceramics/pottery/other art classes, jewelrymaking/beading, language learning (often has the knock-on benefit of putting you in the orbit of immigrant communities in your area!) dance classes, martial arts, kink/leather/queer clubs/communities, addiction/mental health support/grief groups, writing groups, general community-tending (literally you can probably find a group of older folks who do things like get together and pick up trash in green spaces! people will get together and do anything! it doesn't have to be Your Passion!) volunteering with youth groups (such as scouting, big brother/sister programs etc,) camping/hiking/outdoors groups, okay I'm out of ideas atm but there are so many more, this is not at all comprehensive!!!
Ways to get involved in any of these can involve networking with a group online or signing up for a class or auditioning or whatever! Some of them you just gotta talk to your neighbors! Which I know is also easier said than done for a lot of us with relational trauma! Some tips I have for integrating into new communal spaces in a way that feels safer (to me) than the ways that have not served me well in the past:
* Signing up for something officially is often super scary for me. I'm not really ready for that yet in my life, bc it feels like a lot of pressure, and at this stage I REALLY need to be able to case the joint and sniff everything out to make sure it feels safe before participating myself. You can often check things out by attending events, like craft fairs or performances, but there's also tiers of participation with many things. Lots of stuff doesn't involve official membership or signing up for classes if you're not ready for that. Some things just have informal zoom meetings, which is less scary than in person ones, bc you remain in your own space + can leave at any time. Physically putting myself in a space that I do not have control over is VERY hard for me, and I am also pretty sick such that I am housebound most of the time, so I end up lurking a lot on local community pages on FB (other places such as reddit also offer this opportunity depending on the community) and getting used to who participates and in what ways, veeeery slowly working up to interacting directly by liking comments or leaving friendly but trivial replies to other people's posts. It will behoove you to learn how to engage in what people call "small talk" in a way that does not feel painful to you. I phrase it that way because I know this is not always intuitive for many autistic people, but I personally have found that viewing things like "how to have a pleasant and surface level interaction with a friendly stranger" as a puzzle to solve has helped me a lot. Because the thing is, surface level is safer! Surface level chat is a "free" action that nevertheless can earn you goodwill points and builds up your interaction history with someone. Which brings me to my next point:
* Biggest mistake I have made as someone with REAL bad relational trauma when trying to make new friends or join new groups in the past is feeling compelled to immediately sus out who is "safe" and who is not. Problem with this is that it often takes the form of putting a LOT of pressure onto people who are essentially strangers to understand and accept your Entire Deal Right Away! This makes people really uncomfortable!!! It often results in people feeling like you're trying to force them to Prove they aren't 'a bad guy,' which is a TERRIBLE feeling. My solution is not to throw away the whole idea of wanting to determine if someone is 'safe,' but to very consciously think about specifics: safe how? What can I trust them with, given the amount of information I have of them and the interaction history we have built up? What am I expecting from this person? If I don't know them well enough to know if I can trust them with my Whole Deal, DON'T PUT MY WHOLE DEAL ONTO THEM. Not being able to fully trust a person is not an indictment of them nor does it render them "unsafe." Not being able to fully trust people you do not yet know well is NORMAL. Its hard because many of us with relational trauma are not getting our social needs met, which can result in a level of desperation in social interactions that can be off-putting to people who do not know us. And someone being off-put by you is value neutral; not everyone immediately likes everyone else. Time is key. Going slow is key. Remembering not to treat people like Potential Enemies (even if your trauma is making you feel like they might be!) is key. Thinking about what YOU can provide to THEM, as well as the other way around, is key. Not expecting total and perfect one-to-one reciprocity is key -- communities of many people are a really ideal way to practice lower stakes relational interactions because the amount and type of participation each person brings can be in flux and slack can get picked up by various people at various times depending on their capacity and circumstances. Be curious and interested in the other people. Think of them as full and complex people who have their own stories and experiences and view getting to learn about those experiences as something exciting. Don't necessarily approach each new relationship as though you EXPECT these people to eventually get you through chemotherapy, so to speak -- that is the knock-on benefit of the relationships you build up after a history of mutually enjoyable interactions over a span of time. Even if you do not build a "getting each other through chemo" level relationship with any given person or community, it is good practice to have and a good way to get non-scary social interactions under your belt, which will help you heal your relational trauma, which will etc etc. Eventually this snowballs in a way that is noticeable and interactions start to become less aversive, they start to become exciting and rewarding, you start to have an easier time dismissing difficult or unpleasant interactions as not the end of the world, etc.
Practically speaking, it's absolutely true that some hobby and community spaces have drama or unpleasantness. It can be hard to tell which ones have more or less of that (or who is participating in a hierarchical authority-seeking way and who is there to make genuine connections) from the outside, which is why I think going slow is important. You can get a sense of who is engaging with people in a way you don't care for and simply choose to spend more time with the people who are. Or, you can decide the group doesn't seem to have the vibes you need and excuse yourself from the space BEFORE you get involved in any potential blow-ups. I cannot say enough for going slow and being *cautious* but not *suspicious*. I often feel suspicious; I now endeavor to never make that suspicion the problem of any of the other people in a space, because it is an impediment to making genuine connections.
Go in with a plan on how to care for and honor yourself if you are mistreated: Many people have noted that it's possible to incur further relational trauma in hobby/community spaces and that's absolutely true. Unfortunately that's a risk that comes free with being a social animal. Be aware of this and don't deny it or squash down any feelings of discomfort, but have a set of boundaries at the outset about what you'll tolerate and what will make you bounce. Once you're more deeply embedded, think about what kind of thing you're comfortable addressing with other people. In determining if a community is relationally safe, its really important to pay attention to how harm is addressed -- if the answer is "not at all," that's very important information, because harm happens in every relationship and community and it is important to be able to express and work through that without huge blowups happening. I look for people who are really casual about this, which sounds weird, but like... people who do not see "there is an issue" as a Scary Indictment of themselves or their space are the kind of people I wanna be around. I wanna be around people who remain levelheaded and chill about repairing ruptures and who see it as Normal and an expected part of participating in social spaces. This part isn't ALWAYS true, but: a lot of times I find that a certain kind of older woman is really good at this. It can be hard to pick up on when you are just getting started but over time you'll learn the little clues in people's interactions that let you know they're not going to be reactive or explode if someone tells them something they don't love to hear. Older people often have more *practice* maintaining long-term positive relationships, simply because of the amount of time they've had to do so, which I think can be really helpful if you're a young person.
I also look at the structure of the group and leadership. Is it really rigidly hierarchical? is leadership really authoritarian? These will not be spaces that help heal relational trauma. I look for spaces that don't make newcomers run any sort of gauntlet or prove themselves. This doesnt mean they all immediately have to accept every single new person or deny the knowledge or expertise experience has lent them, just that no one is trying to Dominate you simply because you're new. Look for spaces where people are excited for newcomers and excited to help people participate and learn.
Ummm.
I can't think of anything else now but feel free to add stuff if you have other tips you have found helpful for safely participating in new communities as someone with relational trauma! :)
If this were occurring abroad, to an ethnic minority, we would call it ethnic cleansing.
To put this in perspective, the last time an American subgroup migrated at these rates was the Great Migration, in which roughly 6 million Southern Black people fled Jim Crow violence and repression. This occurred over a period of decades, in the face of political repression, systematic violence, and legal apartheid.
In its fastest decade, the 1940s, 1.5 million left the South—against a Southern Black population of roughly 10 million. Black America fled Jim Crow at about 1.5% a year, at a time when baseline inter-state mobility was higher than it was today.
Trans America is fleeing red-state persecution at ten to twenty times that. In short, trans people are being internally displaced within America's shores.
Did you hear the scientists have found a way to grow colored cotton? Thoughts?
It’s not a ‘scientists have found’ and much more ‘people have been already doing that for thousands of years and it’s just gaining more attention recently’
There’s actually been a load of vitriol leveled against folks who try to raise traditional colored cottons, because a lot of cotton growers don’t want the colored cottons cross-pollinating with their standard white cotton.
But anyway cotton can be grown in lovely natural shades of greens, reddish-brown ochres, and browns, all of which deepen with a good boil in water with a bit of washing soda thrown in.
The color obviously doesn’t fade or run, because it’s not dye. It’s the intrinsic color of the fiber itself.
I’m biased because I love the natural earth tones of many fibers, of course...browns, blacks, creams, copper-reds, ect...but I think they’re just gorgeous.
Scientists did not "just find out", and this is more of the same anti intellectual bs as the post that goes around claiming archaeologists were too stupid to know that hair could be sewn for elaborate styles.
Anyway, scientists DID figure out how to grow colored cotton. They genetically engineered it to be bright fuckin pink, and they didn't "just find out" about it, they already knew which is literally what inspired them to attempt the thing they just accomplished. Begging y'all to stop pretending that scientists don't know things, don't have interests, don't grow up in farming communities or have family who taught them this. Scientists are people. Do you seriously think people who use genetic engineering to make eco-friendly pink cotton don't know anything about textiles?
Anyway. Bright pink cotton without dyes, because science is awesome
Yes. CSIRO scientist Doctor Colleen MacMillan led the team that figured this out. They used tobacco plants for testing because of the genetic similarity. Basically if the tobacco leaves produced colors when injected with a bit of the experimental genetic material, the scientists on the team already understood that the color change would affect cotton bolls as well.
They grew bright red and bright yellow in a petri dish.
And yes, Doctor MacMillan knows lots of things. Here's a list of some of her publications.
@csirogram on Instagram
Additionally folks are researching how to create flame resistant cotton and black cotton. If a variety of black cotton becomes viable, it can stop a LOT of environmental damage caused by chemical manufacturing of black dye.
THIS. Every damn botanist I know, including myself, is at the least tangentially interested in fiber arts and indigenous methods behind things like that. Scientists have hobbies and we're all goddamn nerds so a lot of those hobbies are more niche. The anti-intellectualism is insane. I swear half of y'all think scientists are all evil cackling old men devoted to holding up colonial power systems. The work done by Dr. MacMillan is crazy cool and should be celebrated
“Why I Wasn’t Contracted to Write Beauty and the Beast” by I have no idea who, and desperately want to know. If anyone does, please tell me!
Edit: Through knmajorblogs I have discovered the genius behind this piece of art. The genius in question is LordJazor ! Thank you!
“she warned him not to be such an apocalyptic fuck hat to strangers”
“for who could ever learn to love such a cock waffle”
BLESS
THIS IS THE GREATEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN
[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'JK Rowling posted upskirt photos of a woman on Twitter' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]
No one doing this should be allowed to call themselves a feminist.
The wealthy author escalated a social media spat that resulted in posting a photo from a 2023 event at the Institute of Economic Affairs in
Let's not beat around the bush: Children's author JK Rowling sexually harassed someone. In some jurisdictions, this would count as sexual abuse. JK Rowling has committed a sex crime against a woman and fell back on the old rape apologist standby of "she was asking for it".
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the landmark settlement in the class action copyright lawsuit on Monday. Authors and publishers are e
Anthropic illegally downloaded some 500,000 titles, and 92% of those eligible for an award—both authors and publishers are entitled to payment—had opted into the class action. Martínez-Olguín denied all but two requests to opt out of the agreement.
“We applaud the court’s final approval of this settlement, which represents an important victory in the larger battle to hold big tech accountable for its unscrupulous appropriation of intellectual and creative properties that clearly belong to authors and publishers,” said Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, in a statement.
Pallante praised the court for recognizing that downloading from pirate sites “is not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it’s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.” She also argued that fair use should not be extended to allow tech companies to copy copyrighted materials, and that tech giants should look to licensing agreements to train their AI models.
Now we'll see how long the payouts take to come through. I had between a half and two-thirds of my lifetime output stolen by these schmucks, but payouts from many of those thefts will be split 50/50 with the publishers. (Which strikes me as fair enough.)
So the waiting continues. Meanwhile, so does work...
I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what you’re saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesn’t, that is to give the author grace instead of immediately deciding that the racial politics of his work is intentional. I accept Tolkien was a conservetive, but I find it hard to believe that he was exposed to anti racist thought like we are today. I think it’s important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because he’s a linguist based in a very white part of England, whose background is in European history who did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm. Of course that doesn’t make the text less racist but it’s an important thing to consider. That’s all, I agree with your other points.
Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so I’m snowed under atm ☠️
So there’s a lot of talk about Tolkien being ‘of his time and class’ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. ‘Of his time’ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isn’t applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ‘norms of his time’ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to ‘what Tolkien said’ rather than ‘what was actually happening then’.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the “the fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his time” line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.
I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.
Beyond the Oxford ventures, you have things like Moody’s League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 and organising against colour bar practices in Britain itself. The West African Students' Union had been running since 1925, building a public anticolonial intellectual culture that fed directly into multiple independence movements of the following decades. CLR James was in England from 1932! And so on and so forth! And many in these organisations were white British activists or public intellectuals or writers! This was a live political and literary scene running in parallel with Tolkien's and explicitly arguing against the racial categories his fiction sought to preserve. Which is to say, I think what’s more likely than ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didn’t know any such antiracist thought existed’ is that ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existed’.
can i say i am so glad the guy was not a lazy writer and also that he disliked direct allegory because if one of sharky’s minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking people’s cats
Anyway, I’m so tired of how “of his time" just keeps getting used to mean "the time as understood by conservative Oxford dons," when the actual record shows Black British and colony diasporas and white progressives were producing sustained public counter-discourse in the same space the whole time, in his own country, in his own language, in his literal university. So when people say he was "just a product of his environment," I just always want to know which environment they mean exactly, because the one he was actually in very much did sustain quite a lot of anticolonial thought.
Also just to get into the basics again, bro was famously a philologist, ie not exactly a profession where you could plausibly bumble through life without ever encountering race-as-a-formal-category. Philology in this period, and especially in Oxbridge, was literally a primary engine of race science. The Indo-European/Aryan linguistic apparatus that mapped language families onto racial stock was built by people doing Tolkien's exact job, so I really don’t think he passively inherited racial categories without noticing, he inherited them deliberately through years of formal study, with copious footnotes and his own academic judgement. Like I always find it so funny when people, even on that post, refer to the racial dynamics of the legendarium as ‘unconscious bias’ because I just know Tolkien is spinning like a power drill in his grave every single time, because they just implied he was shit at his job 😭
Anyway, the entire feudal value system of the legendarium runs on inherited blood as a determinant of worth (even within the Shire, ie the most ‘normal people not kings of men’ place, where Sam is placed as a Good Man Friday), and this is a very well known fact within fandom. Aragorn's legitimacy is genealogical-first and earned-second, the blood of Númenor "running true" in some lines and "thinning" in others is outright presented as a real, quasi-biological fact about a person's capacity for greatness, and not to forget Faramir’s entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the ‘childless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gates’ bit.
Or if you prefer a Silm example, (note: the context of the exile and whether or not you think they deserved what they got is irrelevant to this point) but the Doom of Mandos and the Noldorin re-entry ban, when viewed as a mechanism detached from context, is fundamentally just the ontological excision of a ‘birthright citizenship’ as a consequence of a person’s actions. Idk how big this was outside the UK but remember when Shamima Begum was extensively groomed as a child and fucked off to join ISIS and the UK decided to strip her of citizenship and leave her stateless? This is basically just that, ie the legitimisation of an ontologically confirmed birthright citizenship that can be granted to exceptional cases at the behest of the ruling body (see: Hobbits, Peredhels) due to their extraordinary actions, but also can just as easily be taken away by the same ruling body in response to a transgression. Like this is literally just present-day ‘migrant criminality’ discourse, how can you say he didn’t anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration 😭
(once again to the reader, please let me reiterate i am simply comparing the mechanism of the exile alone, i am not saying that the Fëanorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls don’t jump up my ass 😭)
Tolkien wasn't writing this in a vacuum where phrenology was a fringe pseudoscience nobody respectable touched, it was institutionally embedded and state sanctioned British science well into the interwar period, with its own society and journals, and an enormous presence in Oxbridge. Moral and mental character of Great Men™️ being first fixed by descent and the subsequent positive/negative shaping of character by choices and environment being seen as a somewhat effective yet undeniably secondary mechanism, is literally the loadbearing premise of race science. It’s not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean ‘he did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm’??? 😭The legendarium isn’t a product of 1937 alone, bro was notoriously still tinkering with its genealogies and societal architecture well into the 1960s and early 70s and pretty much until the day he died, like a fucking dweeb (for once, complimentary), hence why it takes the fragmented form it does. That's a working lifespan that runs through major global decolonisation, Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, through literally the entire long and convoluted and drawn out process by which Britain had to publicly and unavoidably reckon with the idea that the empire's subjects were now their neighbours. At some point we need to truly engage with what "of his time" means, ie we have to reckon with the fact that “his time” kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didn’t.
And to bring up the same example from my original post but in a different light, Tolkien was completely capable of precise and deliberate racial argument the second it was framed as being about himself rather than his fiction. In said well known example, in 1938, some German publisher wants confirmation of his "Aryan" descent for translation rights, and Tolkien's (drafted) response is sharp and furiously specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of him by the Nazis and exactly why it's grotesque. Compare that to the total absence of literally any comparable interrogation applied to the Haradrim or orcs, or the entire chronology and geography of Middle-earth where evil consistently arrives from the same two compass directions wearing the same coded features. Man like. Tolkien was honestly a pretty clever guy, and ngl I feel it does him a (very funny) disservice to assume he didn’t have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does ☠️
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on “unconscious bias of the era" does not actually originate in a true desire to absolve Tolkien (fair enough, because this is a man who has never once asked to be absolved of the opinions he holds strongly enough to work into his narrative at such depth) the individual, and but rather in the interests of keeping the emotional crutch of loving a beloved childhood text without having to acknowledge that the person who made it was making choices in the same way Rudyard Kipling or Rider Haggard was making choices, and yet very few people offer Haggard this kind of protective custody in present day.
Almost nobody aside from hardcore conservatives sits around saying King Solomon's Mines just "reflected the assumptions of empire" as if Haggard had no hand in shaping said assumptions himself, we read it (correctly) as a deliberately shaped ideological project worth taking seriously as an argument. Tolkien, specifically due to the fandom culture around him both then and now, often gets a pass that even Kipling doesn't, and imo it's not because the textual evidence is thinner but because the fandom loves him more and flinches harder when he’s hit. Which is to say, the insistence on ‘Tolkien was of his time and his time was bad’ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about ‘the time’ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.
On a vaguely related note, I also think ‘this fandom gives grace to the author’ should not be treated as a complimentary statement, especially because one of the elements of the Tolkien fandom which genuinely baffles me is the general air of author-genuflection across the board regardless of what fandom pocket you’re in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and it’s doubly baffling considering that he isn’t exactly a sensitive up and coming artist but a dude who has enormous mainstream cultural impact and, crucially, has been dead as a doornail for decades.
Like it is quite funny but also on a serious note, whilst the sentiment is understandable because yeah the world and its languages are as immense as the work he put into it and it is very important to so many of us, I think a publicly performed culture of ‘grateful to the author for this wonderful world’ is one of the things that preclude a deeper critical understanding of the legendarium itself. Amusingly, this is literally the only thing that makes me miss the bloodsoaked battlefields of anime fandom, because Masashi Kishimoto may have painstakingly drawn 3 billion pages of Naruto, but 95% of the fandom would probably, upon meeting the guy, tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly on the head with a rubber hammer going ‘why the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?’
I have a longer post cooking abt the historical elements of Tolkien as a man of his time re ideological genealogies and contemporaries, but in the meanwhile I just want to say by his own letters (letter 83, written in 1944), Tolkien was an avowed supported of General Franco, which a) most writers of his generation were in active and public opposition to Franco and b) Tolkien spends a not inconsiderate part of his letter bitching about how the notoriously conservative C S Lewis himself is opposed to Franco and infected by "Red propaganda" and c) if it comes to fellow Catholics, Graham Greene himself opposed Franco, even if he was unhappy abt murders of priests. And I also think it is very important to note re the stewarding of these conversations that there are exactly two papers on Tolkien's support for Franco, one by an independent scholar and one by the head of the Tolkien Society in Spain, who managed a private interview with Priscilla Tolkien and who cited her godfather having been a Francoist himself - and THAT author is, guess what??? a fucking Francoist himself. The conversations and scholarship about Tolkien are NOT happening in a neutral and "normal" space.
“Thinking about the maneuvers performed by self-defined“literary” novelists to preserve their purity from genre pollution, I realized that I am in the unusual position of being able to perform the same poses and contortions, only backwards. How am I to protect my unspotted name as a science fiction writer from the scorn of those who might think I have been shamelessly performing acts of realism in public? Thus: How dare you call me a realist? My book “Searoad” has nothing to do with the commercial realism found in all the chain bookstores. I call the book “Social Reality Enhancement.” Realistic novels are for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and conventional subject-matter. Realistic fiction, or re-fi as its fans call it, is an outworn genre, written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they’d be writing memoir, but they’re too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read re-fi, but my children keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it’s an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, incredibly culture-bound, full of wornout clichés and predictable situations: the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive lust, suburban guilt, and so forth. All it’s good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject-matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the com-plexity of contemporary experience. Now, would you believe that tripe? There’s some truth in it. But it’s tripe. All judgment of literature by genre is tripe. All judgment of a category of literature as inherently superior or inferior is tripe.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Genre: A Word only a Frenchman Could Love
Came across this art installation, Liza Lou's Kitchen, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. It's a kitchen made of tiny glass beads, that artist Liza Lou did, taking 5 yrs. to complete, from 1991 - 1996.
also this is part of a disturbing but sadly not uncommon attitude that progress = women (specifically women most of the time) showing more skin. because not showing skin is "following irrational religious modesty mandates" like the man on twitter says
somehow being progressive and secular automatically means putting women's bodies on display (although of course these people would shame women showing that much skin because they chose to). gee, I wonder why...
(to be clear, religious concealing clothing should also be respected as long as it's voluntary!)
Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:
She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.
Yale University, 1969.
Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.
Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"
The faculty answered firmly: No.
Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.
Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.
So she started looking.
She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.
There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.
The professors had been wrong.
But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.
Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.
But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.
It wasn't random. It was systematic.
Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.
Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.
Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.
She needed a name for what she was documenting.
In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.
In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.
The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.
Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.
For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.
Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.
Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.
Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.
Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:
Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.
Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.
Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.
And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.
Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.
The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out.
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