GimbleStank

Participating in the Goblin Market

[gimblestank-the-goblin]

Across the Spider-Verse and Canon Events

Warning: Spoilers for the entirety of the new spider-verse film.

Into the Spider-verse’s plot is a brilliant commentary on the nature of superhero AU’s and the comic industry’s tendency towards retelling the same stories ad nauseum, and to explain why we need to look at both the plot of the movie and the words they use to describe that plot.

The plot of Across the Spider-verse (ATSV) is actually pretty standard. Its one we’ve seen a million times. Certain events have to happen or else something terrible will happen. Its just that in most of these types of movies the reason these events have to happen is fate, or destiny or time travel shenanigans. The hero changed the past and now they have to go back and undo that mistake to stop a “bad timeline” or whatever.

But in ATSV its not fate, its canon. And the events that the Spider-organization is seeking to ensure are the major plotbeats and storylines that define the character of Spiderman. Uncle Ben dies. Gwen Stacy dies. Spider-man lifts the rubble. These are the classic, iconic events of Spiderman’s story. The ones told and retold across a hundred different reboots, continuities and alternate universes.

And if these don’t happen, ATSV posits, the universe will be destroyed. In Spider-Gwen’s universe, Captain Stacy and Peter Parker have to die. She has to lift the rubble. Or else the world ends.

Except, that’s not true (if it was, Gwen’s father wouldn’t have quite the police and Miles wouldn’t be the main character of the movie).

Because those events don’t have to happen for the world to exist.

And that is really interesting in the context of reboots, AU’s, etc. Because in the real world, these events always happen. These are the events the reader’s want. When a reader opens up a Spiderman reboot they aren’t looking for a completely original story. They’re looking for these events. The greatest hits of a story that’s been running since 1962 edited down to perfection. Everything iconic, everything that works kept, and the rest jettisoned or retooled.

And it doesn’t matter what form of reboot the story is. If you’re watching a Spiderman cartoon, this is what you are going to get. Reading a comic where Spider-man is a robot? Same beats, just with a twist.

Because if these things don’t happen… well there’s a risk the fans might not like that. The story might not be good (and we know the original story is good, we’ve been telling it since 1962). And if its not good? Well then its stops getting made. The story ends. The universe ends.

And so every AU plays it safe and tells the same stories.  

Except for Miles Morales. His story was never a reboot, or a retcon or an AU. It was a continuation. Ultimate Spiderman had already done the “greatest hits of Spiderman” before Miles Morales stepped onto the page. And that meant it was free to tell its own story.

And that story was great. So great that it survived the destruction of its own universe and Miles Morales got added to the “main” 616 continuity.

Miles Morales, in his comics, in real life, and in the movie is living proof that reboots can take risks and tell their own stories. The world won’t end. The readers will still read. The audience will still watch.

The world will go on.

So take risks. Tell your own story.

You don’t need to be caught in a web made up of 61 years of canon.

[rederiswrites]

There used to be a lot of activities that took place around a populated area like a village or town, which you would encounter before you reached the town itself. Most of those crafts have either been eliminated in the developed world or now take place out of view on private land, and so modern authors don't think of them when creating fantasy worlds or writing historical fiction. I think that sprinkling those in could both enrich the worlds you're writing in and, potentially, add useful plot devices.

For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.

Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.

They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.

Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.

If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.

If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).

There are so many things that preindustrial people did and would find familiar that we just don't know about now. So much of life was lived out in the open for anyone to see. Make your world busy and loud and colorful!

[ahedderick]

This is a big reason that I have always loved the Brother Cadfael novels, set in the mid 1100s. Written by Ellis Peters, each book has such a vivid sense of the place and the time period. Many different settings around Shrewsbury are described, along with the people and their various jobs.

[toooldfortumbling]

I love that kind of world building and would add that many resources were tightly regulated that we don't consider nowadays. Examples are the right to herd your pigs in an oak forest belonging to a specific monastery (saw an example where an altar piece had a carved pig to make sure the claim was known and advertised) or down to which farmers had the right to tree leaves in the fall (shortage of other animal bedding in certain Swiss valleys). The idea of a wilderness in a medieval setting is not what we think.

[rederiswrites]

Great points! Thank you.

[batbetbitbotbut]

Forever recommending A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry as an introductory resource for this! The author is a historian of the ancient mediterranean and he has a lengthy two-part blog post on "lonely cities": how fictional cities tend to look in pseudomedieval fantasy versus how real cities actually worked, specifically how they reshaped the land use for many miles around. Part I, part II, or available read aloud on YouTube here.

[erodingsinner]

BLACK SAILS ( 2014 - 2017 )

4.03 "XXXI" // 3.09 "XXVII" // 3.05 "XXIII" // 3.08 "XXVI"

[excusethequality]

While watching a DVD from the library my TV popped up a message saying to press a button if I wanted to watch this from additional providers.

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?

Why must the future suck SO much?

[excusethequality]

How to Turn Off Smart TV Snooping Features - Consumer Reports

TVs collect a huge amount of data. Here's how to use privacy settings to limit the surveillance on TVs from LG, Samsung, TCL, and every othe

A good rundown on what each brand of TV is up to and which settings you should turn off.

[anarchistmemedistro]

[lytefoot]

PSA - Do not buy an LG smart TV. They just added a line to their terms of use that it's the user's responsibility to inform any guests in their house that by entering they consent to be recorded, in order to comply with wiretapping laws. That thing is literally recording you.

You can find tutorials online telling you how to open that thing up and physically remove the mic and wifi module. Frankly I don't trust anything less.

[mookimooks]

Please watch the Gamers Nexus video on LG Smart TV's and monitors! It's basically malware at this point.

[silvermoon424]

Sailor Moon says to seize the means of production in the name of the Moon!!! 🌙✊🌹

[historicity-was-already-taken]

some meandering context required for this question, for which i apologise. I’m also sorry if this is just an inappropriate question. ss/anon if u can. I (Asian) grew up upper class in Hong Kong, an incredibly international city, which meant that much emphasis was placed in my education on English and global affairs. I consume(d) more English than Cantonese content, most of which was American. Despite that, my social circle was still overwhelmingly asian. Which meant that i gained a passing theoretical knowledge of anti-black, anti-indigenous raciam in america. I also internalised some anti black racism in the American form presumably from the American movies/tv shows i was consuming, which i had to work on All that to ask: what is anti semitism like today/can you explain anti semitism? From my perspective, it makes no sense. It doesn’t come across strongly in media, or I would’ve picked it up. Jews are also mostly White? ethnically indistinguishable? Look the same is what im trying to say. Religious stereotypes cant be it given how secular america/the world is, and the factually true ones (lawyers etc) are positive. jews also seem fairly assimliated.

Hm. Ok. So let's start on the basics. Jews are a global ethnoreligious minority. There about about 15 million of us left on the planet, at .2% of the global population. About half of us live in Israel, which means that diasporic Jews kind of have to care about what's going on over there. but don't tell any DSA babies; this type of information makes them projectile vomit while spewing excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the original Russian and shotgunning beer with Rama Duwaji.

Archaeological, textual, and genetic studies indicate that this ethno-religious group originated in the Central Judean hill country, near present day Jerusalem. Over centuries those early Israelite tribes merged with surrounding Canaanite groups, and slowly developed hegemony over the Southern Levant, as well as--by the 6th century BCE--a form of monotheism.

Now the Levant is a very valuable piece of land as it connects Western Asia to Europe and Northern Africa via the Med, so empires have always wanted it; the Egyptian and Hittite Empires were fighting over it before the Israelites rose as a distinctive group, and the cosmological documents of the Jewish people demonstrate successive empires attempting to capture that piece of land. But when empires do that, they're not like, super enthusiastic about letting the indigenous populations stay, so boom diaspora. this would happen multiple times before Joshua of Nazareth rolled up to yell at the temple Boomers.

So, diaspora. We diasporad out to surrounding empires. Now, ancient governments are a lot like modern governments, in that conformity of ideology and belief are important to maintain official control of the populace. Jews got this memo pretty earlier and many of us preferred not to die, so we assimilated as a means of survival, while maintaining our ethno-religious identity. but, that's never enough. because while maintaining our religion, its laws, its Textual Stuff, we're still believing differently than the majority. Not only that, but we're believing differently in concert with one another over political lines.

So now we're challenging to authority, and untrustworthy. those dynamics showed up VERY early in the game. you know the Purim holiday? That holiday is about a piece of historical fiction written Before Christ about how our insistence in maintaining our culture and beliefs in diaspora WHILE assimilating threatens those in power. and then those in power decide to do a genocide, and sometimes don't if we're hot enough. the enduring ties between far flung diasporic communities, and our insistence upon maintaining our ethnoreligious beliefs, practices, and culture is a threat to any government which relies on ideological homogeneity. which, most governments still do. but, when a ruler says that they are descended from gods, or are a god, or were appointed by god/the grace thereof, or are protected by god, or whatever, our desire to keep doing our own thing is dangerous and unholy. and we keep existing beyond and across political borders while doing it.

this makes some people jumpy. including yourself. but we keep doing it: assimilating, while maintaining our shit and transnational cultural ties. that makes people jumpier. because after all the millennia of expulsions and ethnic cleansings and genocides and lynch mobs shouldn't we have stopped by now? but we haven't, so that must mean we cant be trusted? or maybe we made a pact with satan? there's your anthropological response. i haven't had my breakfast or caffeine yet and my period just rolled up two weeks fucking early and i have a million things on my to do list and my insurance has decided that my chronic migraines aren't bad enough to keep supplying me with goddamn nurtec, so it's a bit less polished and edited multiple times than my usual responses of this nature.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

In my haste to post the greatest paragraph ever written + my anthropological assessment of this question, I neglected to discuss race.

Understanding race as pure colorism can’t be applied to Jews. With Jews, it’s old-world style. It’s about blood. In the fifteenth century some Spanish priests spoke about Conversos, implying that they can never be trusted because the betrayal and murder of Christ lives on in our blood. And that’s a really spot-on assessment of anti-Semitism: it’s about a set of inherent characteristics which override and transcend skin color.

If you’ve watched short form vids where a non-Jewish creator of any skin color is discussing Holocaust history or issues regarding contemporary anti-Semitism, you will always see comments along the lines of “how much are they paying you bro?” Because that base sentiment that Jews cannot be trusted transcends time and place. It transcends modernity. It transcends contemporary understandings of monotheism.

To be a Jew is to reveal oneself as an Other, who belongs nowhere, and leaves financial carnage wherever they go; who are loyal to one but each other, and who can never be understood as full citizens of any polity. Except their own. But they will never be allowed to have their own (not a commentary on I/P specifically). The Nazis knew that this was about blood and ancestry. The scary inquisition Catholics did too.

And at the edges of this question, I can see the thought forming: “what is so enduringly wrong with you people that everyone hates you?” And the answer is that we keep refusing to fully assimilate while forming our own state-within-a-state structures for transnational survival because we know the state will eventually abandon us. And that’s unacceptable to the non-Jews we live beside. It’s scary. It marks us as enduringly unworthy of trust. And the cycle goes on.

[yourcommissar]

Croakomorne

[leebrontide]

A week or two ago I was in the car with my 7 year old and she saw one of the few surviving Red Lobsters and asked if we could get cheddar biscuits. Because Red Lobster cheddar biscuits are amazing.

But the problem is that I can't walk into a Red Lobster because if I do that I will stop breathing. It's not a fun spot for the shellfish allergic (Yes, Jamie from my books gets that from me).

So I told her we could, if she would take some cash into the restaurant, wait her turn to talk to the hostess, ask politely, pay, and bring them out to me. She considered this, but she already orders for herself in restaurants, goes up to ask for shop restroom keys herself, etc. She's polite and calm and it's fine. So she decided that this was a manageable stretch, and agreed.

And lo, we had cheddar biscuits and they were awesome.

And I keep thinking about how we did this all the time in the 80s and 90s and then everybody went nuts for stranger danger and true crime podcasts and we just...stopped.

You know what's great about teaching young kids how to do shit like this? No sense of cringe, and if they fuck up they come right back to their parents, and also people give young kids grace if they stumble a bit.

Instead, I'm seeing people to wait till their kids are teenagers to expect them to be able to do things independently. Teenagers! Who are famously terrified of social fuckups, who get no grace from anybody, and who rarely want to go to an adult if things go wrong!

That's utterly backwards!

Not only do we need to trust teens to do more independently, but that starts with letting young kids do things more independently. So they learn early on that trying and failing is ok and they can just try again. So they can learn skills when they're young and shameless.

standard disclaimer not all kids not all families you know the drill please do not be obnoxious pretending I said you piss on the poor.

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]

[ohnoitstbskyen]

12 years on and still the best articulation ever made of how one should respond to useless critiques

[pastacrylic]

Don't vent to Pinkie Pie

(EDITED TO BE MORE READABLE)

[nonbinary-bosmer]

Every time I see a Season Greasons post, I can’t help but wonder how many people actually know that image is from Man After Man and is supposed to be future evolved humans killing each other for food

[amingethia]

I’m sorry please elaborate what is Man After Man

And why are the evolved humans so hairy

[nonbinary-bosmer]

Man After Man is a book by Dougal Dixon on the speculative evolution of man after climate change, genetic engineering, and environmental collapse leads to the engineering of new human species to fill those biological niches, which then goes completely wild when society totally collapses and evolution runs wild.

As for why they’re so hairy? To survive in the freezing tundra. Why are they in the tundra? No idea. New human subspecies are created seemingly just to exist. However, be glad that they are hairy cause it’s the non hairy ones that are really horrifying.

Like the aquatics…

Or the space avocados Vacuumorph who were engineered to build spaceships for the elite…

Or these fucked up horsed people…

[amingethia]

I got this far down the rabbit hole. Might as well dive deeper.

[nonbinary-bosmer]

Goddamnit. Why did I even mention those? I don't want to be known as the Man After Man tumblr 🤦

Well you know the guys from the meme?

Well over the course of Two million years, they eventually go from that to this...

Yep, the hunters have now become literal Parasites who feast off the blood and fat of the now massive and hairless tundra walker Hosts

But it doesn't end there. You remember how it was mention that there were spaceships being built? Well those humans eventually return to Earth after several million years. And do you want to guess what they do?

This...

They turn the Hosts into this, massive immobile mountains of flesh harvested for meat as quickly as it grows.

So yeah, that's what the Season Greasons meme is all conected to and I am angry that knowledge of this takes up actual space in my brain

[nonbinary-bosmer]

This time of year, it’s important to remember the story behind a classic holiday image.

[parawyrm]

More from that one post

[parawyrm]

[parawyrm]

[parawyrm]

[ohnoitstbskyen]

i am going to need six seasons and a movie of this

[demilypyro]

People act like I'm just being an asshole but man the whole reason I'm so anal about hating gambling mechanics is because I've been down that road and lost a ton of money on games I just stopped playing eventually anyway and it SUCKS and the more you learn about dark pattern design the more you realize that this entire corner of the game industry is just fully focused on screwing vulnerable people out of their money and it's just evil, plain and simple. What do you want from me?? To promote this shit like every other streamer after knowing all that??? I will NOT be complicit in this shit. I'm gonna talk about how bad it is!!! You think that makes me an asshole?????

[esoteric-merit]

one of my friends is a mobile game designer who's worked for big companies before.

One of the things she's told me she's proud of before, was a time when one of the (older) users of the game she was designing discussed her strategy of drinking extra water to wake up early enough to claim her dailies, and how proud she was that she made a game people liked that much.

Even looking her in the eye and asking "getting 60 year olds to disrupt their sleep schedule by pissing themselves makes you proud?" did not get her to hear herself talk.

I think a lot of people don't comprehend the evil of dark patterns. They handwave it all away by "it's personal decisions people make", even while they see the patterns of behaviour they create on the populace. They read falling into those patterns as focus and grindset, if anything. And for a good number of people, pay-to-win is a *positive* thing.

I think if I were tasked with coming up with a way to make a populace depressed, unhealthy, and insomniac, even without getting them to pay me, I'd be heading towards video games stuffed with dark patterns. And such a video game would also produce profit for me, as it happens.

[demilypyro]

I studied game design and nothing disillusioned me like this one time I did an internship at a mobile game company because it was so obvious that the team only cared about how to screw as many people out of their money as possible. The only feedback I ever got for my system designs was "okay but how can we make it more addictive?" or "how can we get them to spend?" and shit like that. Nobody there cared about the game being fun. In their minds, a "good" game was a profitable and addictive one. I haven't been able to see these games the same way ever since. It was one of the big reasons I quit being a game designer. Dark pattern design doesn't happen by accident. They know what they're doing. They want to fuck you over.

[existennialmemes]

Knowingly hijacking someone's reward pathways to weaponize them for profit is unambiguously bad. They are manipulating people on purpose with the sole intent of triggering maladaptive & addictive behaviors. They want you to financially harm yourself to enrich them instead. Being a Hater™ is the obvious moral position here.

[iraffiruse]

[furaffinity]

i’m so fucking pissed off at this picture

[stargh0st-deactivated20131025]

wwhat the fuck….

[tubaplaysmatt]

I FUCKING LOVE THIS

[thebaconsandwichofregret]

oh my god thank you for the second perspective, it honestly makes me feel way less stressed about this image, you have no idea

[smimon]

Here’s the second image again since it somehow disappeared in reblogs

[kaijufluffs]

She's being so big and brave.

[kaijufluffs]

The long awaited sequel.

[ultraviolentangel-deactivated20]

Just because you did something wrong in the past doesn’t mean you can’t advocate against it now. It doesn’t make you a hypocrite. You just grew. Don’t let people use your past to invalidate your current mindset.

[ravenobviously]

Bruh. This needs to be a mandatory post on everybody’s blog. Y'all really be pullin out decade old receipts like woah.

[emmaubler]

Either you want people to grow and change or you want people to stay evil villains soyou can feel superior as you shame them.

[iwantmoreoctopusses]

It’s a real mind trap. “If they did something wrong once they are evil. I am not evil so nothing I do can be wrong”

So the only option is to either double down in the bad behaviour, or not doing any good because you are too busy punishing yourself.

[sirobvious]

I don’t really know why you sent me this in response to THAT post of all things but it’s spineless and pathetic and totally reactionary dressed up as being all ‘woke’ and shit.

This “ohhh I’m so sorry for being white” attitude is racist and will prevent you from having a normal healthy relationship with any non-white person (and probably any white person really). The only people who like being around someone acting like this are bullies and predators, because you’re incredibly easy to take advantage of. If you have “friends” who encourage you to have this attitude, cut them off no-contact immediately, yes even if they’re racialized/marginalized. If you draw the distinction of “good person” and “bad person” based on skin, and feel that you were born as a [bad person] with a debt to [good people], a [good person] can tug you around on a leash like a dog. You’ll assess the relationship based on ontological statuses rather than actual behavior, and that’s just holding up a big sign saying “ABUSE ME! ABUSE ME! FREE PUNCHING BAG HERE!”

The truth is, as a North Carolina Southern Baptist you probably were taught some racist shit growing up. It’s basically unavoidable no matter where you grow up because the pseudoscience of race science has been a prominent part of the western zeitgeist for the past 300 or so years and is an important part of the ruling class’s strategy of keeping the peasants divided etc. etc.. When you’ve got a demographic in a society that it is universally taught are “the stupid and immoral ones,” it conveniently becomes very easy to control them. It’s something you must learn to question and criticize, to catch yourself, etc., but you aren’t actually questioning it you’ve just flipped the script and made your own white ass the easy-to-control one as some kind of self-destructive maladaptive coping mechanism for your anxiety. Unfortunately as a Southern-raised Christian myself I can totally see how a “”fundamentalist”” Southern Baptist could come to this conclusion when colliding with progressivism and criticism of race science in America. It’s the Calvinism.

Unlearning racism and unlearning… whatever self-loathing shit you’ve got going on dressed up in racism doesn’t necessarily mean you even have to abandon your Christian worship (I didn’t), but you gotta drop the Calvinism and the idea of there even being such a thing as “ontological evil/good” in the mortal world. Try instead to read the Bible in its historical context. Understand that it’s a compilation of mythologized cultural history, fables meant to teach a moral lesson, and correspondence between church founders that (although divinely inspired depending on who you ask) was written by flawed humans in specific historical cultural contexts and compiled around the fall of the Roman Empire. (And I don’t recall Jesus Christ ever saying “Some people are ontologically evil based just on the way they’re born and raised and this is immutable no matter what they do or say they can only cause harm.”)

(Some form of secular Calvinism also exists in some pseudo-progressive spaces that say that once you’ve been raised conservative your reactionary way of thinking is fixed and you’re a lost cause. Don’t get caught up in that either.)

If you’re a Christian then you should be believing that humans have free will, which is entirely incompatible with your idea that once you’re born and raised in a racist culture you’re tainted can only be that forever until you die or in fact that there is any demographic of people that is “ontologically evil.”

TL:DR: Grow a backbone.

P.S. And since I think I have finally puzzled out why you sent this as a response to a post about how it’s borderline impossible to make a “progressive” old-school dungeon crawler, I think I should also add “media consumption isn’t activism.” The post you linked even basically said as much.