Elizabeth Sandifer @elsandifer - Tumblr Blog

Are you still worshipping the Blakean pantheon?

I have nothing to add to Ithaca a Saga at this time.

I often find myself using your hug boxing/scab picking framework. Have you written any more on it beyond the initial short essay (perhaps on patreon) and if not do you have any new thoughts on it?

I've not written more about it, no. And no major thoughts other than a sense that the pendulum is swinging away from hugboxing a bit, at least in SFF.

Congratulations on your Hugo nomination! Very well deserved. Sending hearty wishes that you win!

Thank you! I'd quite like that too!

I decided today to (irresponsibly?) use some of my grad student summer stipend to pay the $50 to vote for Cuddled Little Vice in the Hugos! As someone who lowkey grew up on your criticism back in my Doctor Who fandom days, I'm excited to chip in here. Big congrats and best of luck.

Ah, very kind of you. Enjoy the rest of the Hugo Packet.

Congrats on the Hugos nomination !

I’ve been down a Kieron Gillen rabbit hole lately thanks to eruditorum press. I desperately need to get his comics out of my head lest I start gushing about them in hour-long tirades to the normal people in my life. So, before it inevitably turns up in LWIA in a few years’ time, what are your thoughts on the first big arc of The Power Fantasy now that it’s done ?

Also, WicDiv. A bit torn about the very last issue but bloody hell that was good wasn’t it ? Aaaah !

I broadly liked the first arc, while finding a measure of "gosh, we really are just doing all the pent up things he wished he could do with Krakoa aren't we?" to it, especially the culminating reveal. Equally, arc 2 promises to do some stuff I'm super interested in seeing done with superheroes, so I remain quite excited. WicDiv, I largely agree with you on the final issue, but it's hard to dislike on the whole. DIE: Loaded is probably my favorite recent Gillen though. That's absolutely killing it.

what are your thoughts on the animated reconstructions of missing episodes?

My favorite reconstructions, when I was writing about this era, were the ones that paired the narrated audio that the BBC released on CD with photos. (Tragically the group that did the bulk of these, Elaphe, seems all but wiped from the Internet) These days, were I writing about missing episodes again, I'd probably still favor that because it gets more of what was on the screen in the 60s, which is what's important to me in terms of understanding the episodes. But if I'm watching with a normie the animated episodes are far easier to put in front of someone and have them enjoy it.

Don't suppose you've got around to Small Prophets? It's pretty great if not.

Between it and reviving a classic BBC kid's show starring Jon Pertwee with Worzel Gummidge, the tempting thing people are moving towards is pitching Mackenzie Crook as the new DW showrunner. But I suppose it's a struggle to imagine the BBC going for a vision which would surely be quite different from anything the revived has yet attempted? DW as melancholy magic realist comedy? A Pertwee era set in a garden shed rather than a military base?

I'm not watching a ton of TV these days. Sounds neat though.

Get more from Elizabeth Sandifer and Penn on Patreon

If you're a fan of my work I promise you don't want to miss this exploration of a magical work by Alan Moore that's gone entirely undiscussed in the thirty years since he undertook it.

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I don’t think America should be burned to the ground because I think you people need to start caring more about indigenous people and their land first.

this-is-trans-joy

Like, I understand the sentiment but 9 times out of 10 I hear this sort of stuff from people who do not include indigenous rights in their activism, and rather depend on violent slogans to rid themselves of responsibility to their community, as if they’d prefer to have a pissing contest over who can hate America the most instead of, like… work on restoring land rights to Native Americans or engage with their real life communities.

The American government is a genocidal machine built upon the deaths of millions of Black and Brown people, both in America and oversees, but white people on tumblr would rather joke about burning it all to the ground instead of talk to the people whose land it belongs to and actively work on involving them in their activism.

Like, I don’t talk too much about my politics here, but the landback movement is my main point of activism (not just in America, but in every country across the world) and unfortunately, this tankie-led website always gets suspiciously quiet whenever indigenous people in their own country want to talk about restoring their land, because it doesn’t really fit into their (originally white European) idea of destroying everything from the ground up and turning it into some communist utopia.

Like, I also don’t think you care much about people oversees either, you just kinda want an outlet for your violent fantasies.

elsandifer

I love that Tumblr is still a site in which an entirely performative and exaggerated statement like "America should be burnt to the ground" is meticulously flayed as if it is a real policy proposal and rejected on the grounds that it is insufficiently considerate of indigenous rights, complete with dismissing the very site on which this is being said as being controlled by tankies, all of it framed as if this discourse, consisting purely of yelling at the echoes resonating through the hermetically sealed chamber in which it takes place, constitutes a more urgent political issue than the actual war that is killing actual people.

I ain't even mad. It's like seeing a species previously feared extinct rising up to the strains of Yakety Sax.

Ir was the masker by torrey peters, found it like 2 minutes after messaging you. Sorry to bother you

No worries. Hope it's good!

Do you remember the name or the author of that erotic short story/novella(?) that Andrea Long Chu recommended ages and ages ago about trans bodysuit fetishism? It was about an event were rich people invited trans women and some of them were using bodysuits and underneath one was a rich exec of some kind or something like that. I think you were the only other person who reacted to her tweet recommending it but now everthing is so unsearchable...

No recollection of this at all, sorry.

Reading your astonishingly good "From Hell" essay, and it struck me that this line suggests (perhaps unconsciously) an anticipation of Moore's "Providence" in his portrayal of Montague Druitt: "a naive homosexual destroyed by something far bigger than he can possibly understand".

I can see the similarity, yeah. Don't think there's any "perhaps" to the unconscious nature of the link though.

Thoughts on Foucault's Pendulum?

One of the frighteningly long list of books I should really read one of these days.

Zebra Tramples Horse Trainer?

"Everybody loves a surprise" is a great beat, and I suspect the album will be improved by it—one of my pieces of feedback was that I thought it could use a big stompy number. But there are at least six songs on the album that I think are stronger.

Would you end up revising the Mr Robot essay in light of its final season for the Capaldi book? I realise looking now you haven't been selling revised NuWho Doctor books, so guess this is a hypothetical

I've not got one out in a bit, no. Revisions have a bad habit of falling behind "make new stuff" in precedence. I'm halfway through LWIA 2 right now (chapter 7 has dragged as much in revisions as it did the first time around, not helped by the fact that I think it fucking sucks), but after that I'll do Tennant. I'm broadly planning on making the remaining Eruditorum volumes markedly lower on revision than 1-8–I'm not Kickstarting them, I don't need to pack them up with enticements, and honestly I think the Tennant and Smith eras at least are already a bit bloated. I stretched out the end of the original run, and covered a lot of the material that would work as bonus stuff, so I think they're going to be a bit more bare bones "get the fuckers out there." Capaldi and Whittaker are any different—by Whittaker I'd figured out that I should leave myself gaps to fill. Capaldi... well, we'll see. I know one bonus essay I'll do for it ("Could Time Lords Always Change Gender?"), but past that I don't actually have a ton of thoughts on that one. My sense is that, like Whittaker, it's stronger work than the original run, but that it still has some of the "does this essay actually belong here" problems that started creeping in around the Wilderness Years.

Haven't thought about the Mr. Robot essay at all though. Really, haven't thought about Mr. Robot much in a while.

Are you planning to review TWBTLATS? Either on the main site or Patreon

Yeah, on the Patreon barring a shocking surge of pledges that I'm not even campaigning for. (We'd need around $200 a month more, which I just don't see happening for Sexy Sea Devils In Your Area.

The Charlie xcx song House feat. John Cale?

Fuckin' love it.

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Elizabeth Sandifer