CynicalClassicist

British Nerd of Medieval Literature and Politics

[cynicalclassicist]

For Silk, Steel, and Kisses worked around, including on Aces and Carys talking privately.

[cynicalclassicist]

I saw that it was Clint Eastwood's 96th birthday on the 31st! He's had an incredible acting career, from the Dollars Trilogy to Dirty Harry, and directing from Unforgiven to Invictus. Not surprising that he's now retired!

[cynicalclassicist]

For Silk, Steel, and Kisses, worked a bit on the feast Aces has for his leaving.

[beggars-opera]

Right.

Because the military, an establishment that has historically been run for men, by men, while miles away from women for sometimes years at a time, has never allowed drag.

What the fuck

Do you think our forefathers

Would think of us

If they could see us now

Emasculating ourselves with makeup

Dressing like pansies

Making fools of ourselves

Absolutely mocking the very concept of masculinity

While they were giving their lives fighting the Nazis.

Yes, I know the last three photos are British, and you can kindly fuck off.

[cynicalclassicist]

Ronald Reagan was even in a film This is the Army in 1943, in which he wears drag. Ironic that.

[flowerytale]

Louisa May Alcott, from Little Women

[cynicalclassicist]

'Tis June now!

[cynicalclassicist]

For Silk, Steel, and Kisses dabbled around, including Lisanor returning to Karadigan.

[cynicalclassicist]

June is here again, so wishing my fellow queers a very happy Pride Month! With attempts to drag away the rights that we've fought so hard for over generations, it is all the more important to celebrate who we are!

[larasramblings]

Sorry if this sounds inappropriate to ask but you know you to be more fair-minded on RTD than a lot of people. What are your thoughts on the controversy I'm seeing from people in the fandom regarding RTD and his gender-critical friends?

It's... I mean, I can't lie, it's disappointing. Full disclosure, I knew nothing about any of this before receiving this Ask, so I'm kind of stabbing blindly in the dark here.

I wish I could say it's surprising, or that I was able to work up much of a fuss about it, but in truth, I suppose it isn't, and I'm not. Perhaps part of me is just... I'm so weary of expecting celebrities or artists to have the Right Take on everything. That's not to say that I think that people shouldn't hold them to account, but increasingly I find that when an artist I respect has a lukewarm or wince-inducing take on an important social issue my feeling is more along the lines of a resigned "Well of course." The fact of the matter is that I think it should have become increasingly clear over the past ten years or so that expecting publicly visible celebrities to be our unproblematic saviours is not a fruitful line of thought.

And perhaps some might say that that's me giving into apathy, but like... I'm going to be real, I think it's mostly me giving into entropy. I physically do not have the fire and fury of youth in me a lot of days, and at a certain point you do have to pick your battles.

I love the work of Nick Cave even if I think his takes on issues like cancel culture and the Israel-Palestine conflict are severely lacking in a proper appraisal of the contextual factors at play. I'm sure if I really wanted to I could get up in arms about PJ Harvey speaking in support of fox hunting. But in both cases I still like their stuff, while still recognising that, ultimately, they're human, with all the blindspots and foibles that that implies.

Frankly, I don't think that I've ever heard a great reason that makes me think that we *should* be turning to 68-year-old white Australian men for their takes on cancel culture or the horrifically aggressive and genocidal state of Israeli foreign policy, nor a then-29-year-old white British woman raised on a farm in Dorset interviewed for a piece in NME nearly thirty years ago. And if Harvey turned around and clubbed a baby seal on the press tour for every new album after that point or something, then yeah, I don't think This Is Love being a banger would really be sufficient for me to feel comfortable giving her money, just like I'd feel a lot more irked (to put it mildly) by Cave if he were posting selfies with Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir.

And look, the fact of the matter is that Davies is a sixty-three year old white British gay man. The chances that you're going to have friends who are a bit on the TERFy side under those circumstances are, frankly, not zero. I do think that sometimes there can be a tendency in leftist spaces to reduce the totality of an artist's being to a tally of "good person"/"bad person" points, and Lord knows I'm not above letting that kind of thinking influence my perception of authors like Gareth Roberts or Trevor Baxendale, but again we're inadvertently bridging the gulf from "people with TERFy friends" to "people who are actively espousing transphobic rhetoric on their public platforms," which, say whatever you like about Davies, he *isn't* doing.

Should the bar probably be higher than "isn't actively funding the genocide of people like me"? I mean, shit man, yeah, undoubtedly. But like, that's the bar we're working with, because the other big international children's/family fiction success story of the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s is busy chomping on cigars and spreading libelous bullshit about female athletes. TERF Island fucking sucks, and I don't even have to live there; and at the end of the day, Davies was willing to turn the huge media event of reuniting David Tennant and Catherine Tate into an excuse to give the latter's character a trans daughter. However clunky it may have been, it is fundamentally well-intentioned, and to me, the basic good of that *still* isn't undone by the man's unwillingness to drop friendships that have likely lasted for decades.

Humans are complex, multi-faceted creatures. And yes, even Doctor Who showrunners count as humans.

[cynicalclassicist]

Sorry to be the one who brought this up to you. I suppose that you would have seen it soon enough anyway.

But I think that you gave a very fair-minded answer to it. I like RTD overall, I think that he has done a lot for queer representation, and I think that he means well... yet didn't get what this sounds like. And yes, he's human, he's fallible, he is quite capable of getting things wrong, and not being in touch with certain issues. He's not as bad as Gareth Roberts certainly. Or Trevor Baxendale. There's plenty of stuff in both his eras that you might think that he mishandled! I'm not going to ramble on about that as I think that my point is clear.

It's sad when you see celebrities that you like fail to reach your standards. But it's something that we have to deal with in life.

Anyway, thanks for giving such a comprehensive answer so quickly!

[blondebrainpowered]

A Life on Our Planet, 2020

David Attenborough

[cynicalclassicist]

We love David Attenborough!

[kleptomaniac-trans-girl]

There's a Doctor Who title generator now :D

Here are some great new episodes that have leaked

[cynicalclassicist]

I can see that with much of Doctor Who.

[kiri-instinct]

today i am reminded of, and moved by, the best tweet of all time

[isaacsapphire]

Were they actually any good at cannabis breeding in the USSR?

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

What muddies the waters here is a certain excerpt attributed (wrongly) to Larry "Ratso" Sloman's Reefer Madness: A History of Marijuana, which unfortunately is written in precisely the way that an honest stoner is likely to propagate without much thought:

They say that the weed grown in the USSR under Stalin was some of the most potent ever known to man. Under the guidance of Trofim Lysenko, Stalin assembled a crack team of growers whose marijuana was known for its intense body high and clarifying mental effects. In his personal diaries, Nikolai Bukharin writes, "Joseph [Stalin] came to me one night as I was struggling to finish the final edit of an issue of Pravda. He handed me an ounce of marijuana that reeked of skunk, The smell alone was enough to make me tremble. 'This is a gift from Lysenko and I' he said, and left almost immediately. I smoked that weed and I was never the same."

But by some miracle, it seems that Lysenko's hilarious theories managed not to cripple Soviet hemp production, and to this day Ukraine's Institute of Bast Crops is considered a world leader in general hemp research. Though it must be said their website does also look like something someone would make up as a joke while severely chonged:

[cynicalclassicist]

Cannabis breeding you say?

[larasramblings]

"Let the show be cancelled so we can have a second Wilderness Years!" You mfs couldn't even handle the Gatwa Era...

[larasramblings]

Joking bitchiness aside, and a year on from The Reality War, I really do believe that, while sometimes imperfect, the Gatwa Era was consistently doing interesting things with Doctor Who that made for television that I actually looked forward to watching every week, which was a feeling that Doctor Who hadn't reliably given me since 2017.

And all of that's without even touching upon the unlikeliness that, in the current ecosystem of modern franchise/fandom media, the BBC would realistically allow something as weird and singular as the New/Eighth Doctor Adventures (or, heaven forfend, Faction Paradox, though I guess that's a point that's rather undermined by the continued persistence of that series at Obverse). Speaking as someone who's written a properly mentally ill number of words on the Wilderness Years, they were, as a textual object, the product of a very specific set of circumstances that the past thirty odd years have seen companies become increasingly disincentivised to let happen. And I think a lot of people lose sight of that in the calls to bring back the Wilderness Years. If we do bring it back, it'll probably be tripe on the level of the absolute worst and blandest of the EDAs; you'll be getting so many Janus Conjunctions you won't even know what to do with them.

[cynicalclassicist]

Yeh, that's a pretty short-sighted statement from these people. The Wilderness Years was possible because of circumstances in the 1990s which are very different to the 2020s. We can't just replicate things, especially as books aren't being read as much now.

I'm annoyed at all this uncertainty over the show, but a cancellation and a few years off isn't the answer. People don't seem to get what cancellation actually means!

Yeh, mixed thoughts on the Gatwa era, plenty to say about things I didn't like... and plenty to say about things that I did like. The show certainly seemed better than it had been in a long time.

I'm worried that we'll get 'safe' lit. and even worse, AI lit.

[communist-ant-hill]

Ya'll remember how online games made specifically for children were programmed in a way that made it practically impossible to share your personal info?

When age, gender, location was censured like profanity in the name of protecting kids?

But suddenly the Only Way to keep children safe online is to make sure that they have 0 privacy?

Yeah ok. Sure. For the children.

[cynicalclassicist]

We've really gone backwards with online safety over the last 20 years.

[cynicalclassicist]

For Silk, Steel, and Kisses, worked around, including on Carys going to see her father before seeing the ghost.

[cynicalclassicist]

I was sad to hear of the passing of Jill Curzon at 87. She was known for playing Louise in Doctor Who film Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., though also had roles in pieces like The Saint. My thoughts are with her loved ones.

[larasramblings]

Working on a longer-form expansion of these feelings for the blog proper to serve as an Interlude before I go on hiatus (although actually on reflection, this may have winded up long enough), but for now I just want to say... thank you all so much for everything.

Writing this blog, I mean... people say certain artistic projects changed their lives, and before I started Lara's Ramblings I think part of me always felt that was at least a bit overexaggerated. But for a long time now I've known that it isn't, not one little bit.

I am fundamentally not the same person I was when I started half-heartedly jotting down some babbling, inane, gratuitously profanity-laden thoughts on the X-Files episodes that I was watching while recovering from a suicidal bout of depression.

This blog changed me, and has gotten me through some of the darkest times of my life. Realising that I had been sexually abused for years, coming to grips with being trans and the lingering feeling of not being "trans enough," or in the right ways, and of course, the knowledge that at just twenty years old I have effectively lost any chance of living an able-bodied life. While still having to clear stupid bureaucratic hurdles that want to insist that long COVID is not a disability.

And if I want to say that I'm grateful, I also want to package that with an acknowledgment that I'm sorry. Because underneath it all, I think no small part of my burnout has been rooted in the feeling that nobody cares about anything I do, and as base and grubby as it feels to acknowledge it that feeling really does all come down to a monetary question. And it shouldn't, because it is, at its heart, an inherently silly framing. I know, logically, that people *do* care a great deal about the things I've written, and that money shouldn't be a part of the equation.

Of course, it ultimately is. The only reason I've cared at all about money, despite it never really even being a consideration for most of the blog's existence, is that I *am* sick.

I'm lucky enough to be in a position of relative financial security, but I have never had a job, and in all likelihood, I never will. This world already makes it hellish enough to try and be remotely creative and also fit that creativity into a framework where you are judged deserving to live. Try adding disability to that equation, and usually the cold amoral calculus will come out with some flowery variation on "Well actually you don't deserve it. To live, that is."

None of that is my followers' fault, unless Jeff Bezos is actively lurking on an alt account and just keeping it on the down low, in which case, ew. But I can't lie, the relentless fucking exhaustion of being disabled has occasionally made me feel way more angry and resentful than I really should. I always knew it to be wrong and not grounded in actual material reality, buuuuut that only makes the scrupulosity OCD of "Well I'm actually a piece of shit for even *thinking* this" all the worse. Either way, I'm sorry.

I'm also sorry that I haven't been as active in responding to all the wonderful things that people have said about my blog as I would like to be. Please know that I see it all, and again, I am eternally grateful. Sometimes you just really don't have the spoons to write one more word, and you put it off until tomorrow, and then all of a sudden it's ten months later and you can hardly reply to that comment *now*.

For now, I'm focusing on getting my disability pay. I really should have done that sooner rather than wait a full three years from my initial illness, but hey, I don't always make the smartest decisions. I'm hoping that once I actually have a reliable flow of income, I should feel less pressure to... well no, let's just leave it at "I should feel less pressure." I think that about covers it.

And in turn, I'm hoping that once that happens I will feel better able to take joy in what I'm writing again, rather than the ugly, unclean feelings that are way more prevalent than they should be for me at the moment.

[cynicalclassicist]

There is a lot that I could say on this, like liking the Jeff Bezos dig.

But know that I am sorry that you've had such a hard time but am glad that you have been open about it to us. I hope that things work out for you.

Keep up your good work. It's really impressive what you do!

[austenacious]

I don’t want to send the TOBS fandom into a spin but…

Who know who will even be involved in it or if it will even air this year, but it’s promising! (Link)

TOBS TOBS TOBS

[cynicalclassicist]

Well... it's something to hope for.