My life as a lived experiment in queer theory
Studying creation (Femininity as a culture phenomenon) to better understand the creator (Divine Feminine)
Given how often solar eclipse are used to date historical events, I think an international calendar should begin on the day of the first recorded total solar eclipse.
If scientist are right about some Irish petroglyphs, it is currently the year 5365. Christ was born in 3340. The Egyptian middle kingdom period lasted from 1300 to 1558. The Ottoman empire took Constantinople in 4793. Star Wars episode IV was released in 5312.
Proto-writing systems emerged sometime between -40 and 240. The Olmecs emerged in roughly 2140. The Aztec Empire was founded in 4768. The Zhang dynasty began in roughly 1574.
StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.
The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."
The Useless Web
Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)
Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."
Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."
Can we talk about how fucking insane Nona the Ninth must've been from Gideon's perspective?
Like, she spent all of the previous book trapped in a walled off portion of Harrow's subconscious and thinking that Harrow hated her bc she refused to properly eat her soul. Then in the last like thirty minutes of the book harrow's soul goes on holiday and Gideon's now in her body fighting fucked up bug things and she still thinks Harrow hates her but also she's going to do her best to keep Harrow's body safe but definitely not because she cares about Harrow, just because she's her cavalier and that's what she's meant to do.
Then offscreen she got resurrected by god—kinda sorta we'll find out I guess, pyrrah seems to know what's up but is not sharing with the class—who she learned five minutes ago is her dad and was going around doing her tower prince thing with ianthe tridentarius who I'm sure she had a very normal and not at all weird relationship with. Idk maybe they bonded over wanting to fuck Harrow (not that Gideon would ever admit that of course).
Then while Gideon's being all corpse-y in her off time, who does she see but Harrowhark fucking Nonagesimus. Who immediately kisses her. Gideon then learns that said body that she definitely has only very platonic feelings about, antagonistic feelings even, is being piloted by an autistic six month old. Whose one really good skill is reading people and who kissed her because the second Nona walked into the room she read her like a fucking book and saw that Gideon really wanted to kiss Harrow('s body).
Gideon proceeds to be very normal about desperately needing to know where Harrow actually is. Not because she's in love with Harrow obviously, that would be crazy, she needs to know so that she can, uh, point and laugh at whatever predicament Harrow's in, yeah that's it. Only to learn that Nona doesn't fucking know.
Then, at the end of the book, Gideon learns that Nona is actually the corpse that Harrow's had a crush on since she was a kid. And also said corpse wakes up and kisses/bites Harrow right in front of her.
I’m kinda surprised that nalbinding isn’t as popular as crochet and knitting tbh because it has an even lower barrier of entry tools wise and unlike crochet and knitting it makes fabric that you can cut.
I feel like part of it might be casual people are generally aware of the existence of crochet and knitting, even if they don’t know very much about either, but have never heard of nalbinding
Yeah I hadn’t heard of it until recently and I ordered a big bone needle for myself to try it out and that should be arriving soon.
I was surprised that I’d never heard of it though. It’s older than knitting and crocheting and even though it’s been done all over the world it’s super relevant to Nordic culture and my grandmother and I are both into keeping in touch with our roots a bit so I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it.
It seems like the sort of thing that would be popular even if not as popular as crocheting and knitting, considering the low barrier of entry.
You also don’t need a bunch of different sized needles for nalbinding or whatever. The size of the stitch is controlled either completely freehand or by pulling it against one of your fingers. Most people who have a lot of nalbinding needles seem to either have tried out wood, bone, and metal ones to see which kind they liked or they enjoy carving wood or bone and like making their own needles as an extra hobby.
It’s also a lot easier to freehand and adjust as you go than crochet or knitting and you mostly go by inches instead of rows and number of stitches so a large number of accessories like stitch markers or whatever isn’t really necessary.
Maybe the lack of accessories also makes it unpopular idk. People do like collecting things in their nests.
I've been wanting to do so, I cannot find anyone who can teach me, and any books I can find on it are Ass in the Visual Learning department. Otherwise I'd be making the hell outta some nalbinded fabric
I thought this would be kind of a niche post to make but I was quickly reminded that I’m on tumblr, the website full of gay people with one billion hobbies.
So my bone needle actually came this evening (yay!) and I’ve started trying this for real. It clicks in my brain way easier than crochet does. I’ve gotta work up the muscle memory but I think I can do this.
The downside as a beginner is that undoing mistakes is more time consuming than with knitting or crochet. You’ve gotta like sew your mistakes out backwards. Disadvantages of making a really sturdy fabric I guess.
I like the feel of this bone needle though and don’t think I’ll be trying the wooden or metal ones.
Also I think I’m gonna have to get good at doing Russian joining if I decide to get good at nalbinding because I don’t have wool yarn and the ends won’t felt together if it’s not at least 50% wool. A small price to pay for using big bone needle though.
Here are another set of initials used by Theodore Low De Vinne's (1828-1914) De Vinne Press in New York in the early 20th century. The last two images are of chromatic initials to be printed in two or three colors.
These examples come from Types of the De Vinne Press, published in New York by the De Vinne Press in 1907. Theodore De Vinne founded his press in 1883. He was also a co-founder of the prestigious Grolier Club and one of the leading commercial printers of his day, whose enterprise had a profound influence on American printing and typography. This book was intended as a promotional specimen book “for the use of compositors, proofreaders, and publishers,” to demonstrate the wide variety of typographic possibilities that could be available to their clients.
"In fact, when I finished it, I handed it to my wife, and I said, 'I think I just wrote something incomprehensible about four women wandering aimlessly on a hiking trail in North Florida. Could you please check for me?' She read it and thankfully gave it the stamp of approval and said it was actually a novel and actually made sense."
Jeff Vandermeer about Annihilation, Clarkesworld magazine, July 2014.
can I just say that we all owe Kojima an apology for Metal Gear Solid 2? He looked right into the camera and said “the future of information control will not be censorship, it will be drowning people in trivial noise and misinformation until people partition themselves into their own separate realities” in TWO THOUSAND AND ONE. Three years before Facebook existed. Kojima gave us the biggest Babe-Ruth-pointing-at-the-sky called shot of all time and we weren’t ready for it.
Raiden is a diegetic video game character who is an anxious millennial being told to replicate the past while living in different circumstances who is a parallel between the player obediently accepting the limitations of the game and a soldier taking orders. And he gets sexually harassed by the president of the United States of America.
recent alecto news might bring some new people who are interested in finally getting into the locked tomb series - so if you’re a little lost on where to start, here’s what i recommend as the reading order!
1. gideon the ninth
2. two week break. must wait the full two weeks to allow for proper marination. DO NOT wait longer than two weeks
3. first two chapters of harrow the ninth
4. quick skim of gideon the ninth to provide reassurance that you didn’t accidentally forget the whole plot
5. the rest of harrow the ninth
6. as yet unsent
7. two week break
8. gideon the ninth
9. the extras at the end of the gideon the ninth paperback, which you technically skimmed the first time but deemed unimportant and extraneous
10. as yet unsent
11. harrow the ninth
12. the mysterious study of doctor sex, which you just learned exists
13. two week break
14. nona the ninth
15. the unwanted guest
16. the chapter of nona the ninth relevant to the unwanted guest
Ghosts are not real. If you want to believe in ghosts, you should contemplate why. It is important to understand how history moves through you, because history is very real.
Belief in ghosts has always been particularly interesting to me, because its often very weak. There have been multiple instances where I've questioned someone about their belief in ghosts, only for it to be packed up and put away like a box of legos. This is interesting.
Belief in ghosts is a low risk, low investment belief. It takes up almost no money or time, and generally doesn't come up all that often. So, like a night light forgotten in some out-of-the-way wall socket, it can sit unmolested in an adult worldview for a surprising amount of time.
If someone voices a belief and then goes back on it when you start questioning them, it might say more about the context of the conversation than that specific belief. Most people who believe in ghost know that to do so is considered irrational within mainstream society, so they only voice it when they suspect they will find agreement, when the potential reward of finding someone who agrees outweighs the risk of being ostracized. If they are interrogated on that belief and don't want to expend the effort defending it, they retract their statement to cut their losses.
What’s important about this public information is what we do with it. When we act in social contexts, we treat the information in the common ground as if it were true: that is, we treat it as a premise for public action. Use of this common bank of assumptions is ubiquitous in social life: its because we share so many assumptions about meals and socializing that my partner telling me that friends are coming over tonight suffices to get me to cook more food and set extra places at the dinner table. Similarly, the townsfolk in the fable treat a naked emperor, presumed clothed, as the premise of their shared activity of cheering. And this makes sense of their choice to cheer, at one level. But, as the fable’s setting dramatizes, there are all kinds of reasons to act as if something is true. Genuine belief is just one potential reason among many.
Olúfḿi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Haymarket Books. 2022
hello locked tomblr! i was at the tamsyn muir event in oxford - here are my notes
i've tried to group them thematically rather than chronologically, and to point out spoilers when i can. there are some parts that i missed/didn't hear correctly - i would appreciate it if others at the event correct me :D
Key takeaways
Alecto is still being written! Muir was reluctant to say a year, so it will probably be more than that
Alecto won’t be written in a Biblical style, and there will be multiple POVs. It will mostly be told from Harrow’s POV (I hope I heard that right)
Muir loves the idea of a TLT videogame
Muir’s not yet done with Floralinda
Q&A: Alecto when?
(putting this first because I know you want to know!)
Alecto is not yet finished
Reason why:
Muir was already slated to write another book before Alecto (Floralinda, I think)
Floralinda took longer than expected
Muir also suffered from health issues
Muir was about to say Alecto would come out in a year, but was reluctant. It will be soon. It will be before she dies.
Once Alecto gets to the editor, it will be fast-tracked. There will be few advance reader copies
And Alecto will not be 2 books, do not fret!
Publishing journey for the Locked Tomb Series
TL;DR – Muir got published because she had good contacts
George R. R. Martin was Tamsyn Muir’s mentor at Clarion
Muir took what she described as the ‘traditional route’ into publishing
She spent around 3 years publishing short stories
Then she got contacted by an agent for a novel
Muir acknowledges that routes into publishing are not like that now
Sometimes, fanfiction writers are approached – Muir doesn’t approve as that ruins the hobby, it adds a financial incentive and makes people do it for a career rather than for fun.
Muir wouldn’t do anything differently
We joked a bit about an agent who remarked on the ‘sisterly relationship’ between characters in Muir’s manuscript
Advice for aspiring authors
Send stuff to an agent regardless of where you are
Work in the industry
There was a bit of discussion on self-publishing – it doesn’t suit Muir personally, but it’s a good route for someone with the energy to be their own editor, advertiser, etc.
Q&A: something about being a successful writer (sorry I forgot)
Basically, getting successful requires having good connections
Videogame Influence on Locked Tomb Series
Muir is a big fan of the emergent narrative that videogames afford
Muir worked for Disney and wrote videogame scripts before GtN. There’s an insane House of Mouse script archived somewhere, which Muir wrote.
Novel writing is very different from videogame writing.
In a videogame, you have to fully flesh out the in-game universe and provide enough choices and points of interest for players
This taught Muir to be in-depth when writing her novel universes…
…which particularly influenced her to write tonnes of AUs for the Locked Tomb series
There are two versions of Nona, for example: one which is what’s really happening, and one which is Nona’s POV
Q&A: did the videogame influence help Muir to write so confusingly in the Locked Tomb series?
Muir strongly cites Umineko as a key influence
This is a perfect example of a slow reveal, like in the Locked Tomb books
Muir doesn’t strictly plan her reveals (e.g., on the second reread, the reader finds this out), but she does love a slow reveal and works hard to make close reading rewarding for the reader
Tamsyn Muir would love for the Locked Tomb series to be adapted into a videogame!!
A funny story was told where Muir got approached by a gacha game company… which didn’t come to anything
POV voice shifts in the Locked Tomb series
A key reason for the books being so different is that Muir didn’t want to write the same thing again – she gets ‘easily bored’
She focussed on the sentence links of each character – Gideon’s sentence links are very different from Harrow’s
Vocabulary also played a key role (again, compare Gideon and Harrow)
The second person narrative in HtN was planned for a while, the tricky thing was convincing publishers to accept it
Muir has an HtN draft somewhere, 50% written, that’s in third person
POV in Alecto the Ninth: It will not be written in a biblical style
There will be different POVs
Q&A: Book inspiration for writing in the second person?
Muir notes that she didn’t write in perfect second person – it was actually first person
She will always turn to On a Winter’s Night a Traveller
And this is another videogame inspiration
She mentioned Homestuck then said don’t mention Homestuck so…
The theme of memory in the Locked Tomb series
Memory as a result of love, and memories which are a source of pain
This is a key theme in HtN – note how memory affected Harrow throughout the book
It’s also going to be a key theme in Alecto
Muir is using memory as horror
The horror of not being able to trust yourself and to know what is real
She’s drawing on her own experiences of being schizophrenic
Magic systems in the Locked Tomb series
Muir wasn’t actually a big fan of necromancy before writing TLT
She found it too passive in Dungeons & Dragons
She wanted an active magic system, something unintuitive that required hard work and study to learn
She also wanted a magic system to be gross!
TLT magic system was described as “telekinesis with meat”
Worldbuilding in the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: what was Muir’s worldbuilding starting point/seed?
Muir struggled to find this out. There’s no magic formula
Creative writing can’t be taught, only practiced
For GtN, she wanted a story about duty, and duty vs freedom
She wanted the story to be about two young women
Gideon was originally a cop/fireman
For Muir, worldbuilding is there to serve the plot. She does not worldbuild for worldbuilding’s sake
Everything in Muir’s books is there to serve the plot
Would the TLT protagonists make a good DnD party?
Absolutely not!
Although Camilla and Palamedes would be fine
There was some joking around about how Muir and her friends tried to play as Gideon and Harrow in DnD and it didn’t work out
Genre merging in the Locked Tomb series
Muir identified her blend of comedy and horror as unique to Kiwi fiction
She used Peter Jackson’s early films before the Lord of the Rings as an example
For Muir, science fiction and fantasy are merged – it only really feels like science if you do hard sci-fi
Muir grew up with Star Wars, so it felt natural to set her fantasy world in space
The genre merging created publishing problems
Publishers want an easy comparison to other books to make it sell, but there was nothing like Gideon the Ninth
We joked a bit about TLT being compared with Dune
Q&A: now that TLT books are out, has Muir noticed any very similar books that GtN etc. are being compared to?
Not really.
Muir sees the most similarities with people who know her and have had similar influences
An example is A. K. Markwood
Another book that seemed very similar is ‘Dawn Hound by Necksy Strownack’ another New Zealand author (I did a quick google and I think this is the Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach?)
Comedy and Humour in the Locked Tomb series
Muir’s advice for aspiring writers is not to write humour to appeal to everyone, as you’ll please no one. Stay true to yourself.
Muir writes plenty of humour into her manuscripts, which are often cut away during editing
Q&A: memes that didn’t make it: (note: I struggled to catch what was being said under all the laughter and I am also woefully uncultured – many of these are me transcribing as best as I can. Do correct me if I’m wrong!)
Mr Bones’ Wild Ride
Emperish meme
Horse Plinko (this got referred to a lot!)
Harrow calling Ianthe the ‘God of Thot’ in HtN
And many more
Muir mused about whether she will dial back the humour in later work, or whether she will go full throttle as she doesn’t care anymore
Writing process for short stories vs books
Muir sees her short story days as mostly behind her, although she is getting one published soon (as we are aware!)
With short stories, you only have time for one thing, whilst with a novella, you have time for plot and subplot
Short stories are great to practise your technical writing skills
Muir personally would not turn her short stories into novels – she wants to do something new
Q&A: The planning process for the Locked Tomb series
Muir had already planned the whole story before writing GtN
GtN and HtN are the question arcs
NtN and AtN are the answering arcs
Muir really enjoyed writing a New Zealand story
Lesbians as epic heroes in the Locked Tomb series
Muir doesn’t see this as jarring – why can’t epics have lesbians in them?
All epics want you do to is die gloriously
You can do anything after that
Q&A: Epic influences on the Locked Tomb series
The Iliad. It all comes back to Homer, and the Iliad.
There was some insightful discussion on how the Locked Tomb world codifies its past. In a sense, it’s stuck in time. There’s no golden period to hark back to.
The discussion then turned to the idea of the hero, and what a hero should be.
This is heavily explored in Gideon the Ninth, which centres around Harrow failing to prevent Gideon from being the hero
Add lesbian to anything
Muir would love to see a lesbian Hunger Games
Floralinda vs Gideon and Harrow
“Floralinda blows” – Tamsyn Muir
Floralinda is a supervillain story about a ‘bad girl who gets worse’
Muir has written/is planning to write more on Floralinda
Q&A: Advice for writing characters who suck?
Just let them be shit, go hard first and don’t hold back
Take a sin, take a virtue
All of Muir’s characters, in some way, are a ‘fuck up’
Catholic imagery in the Locked Tomb series and Catholicism in general
Q&A: was it difficult to link lesbians with Catholicism in the Locked Tomb series?
It felt good for Muir, a lesbian Catholic
And also very fun!
Q&A: who’s the hottest saint?
In the TLT universe: Valancy!
In the real world: Saint Barbara
This sparked some light-hearted banter
Q&A: Meaningful names in the Locked Tomb series
Muir loves writing meaningful names that hide things in plain sight
Muir does not browse ‘Behind the Name’ lol
She has a ‘laundry list’ of names she likes which she’s accumulated throughout her life
Homer and ancient Greek influences played a key role
Also Biblical names
Changing names are highly important in the books, e.g., Gideon to Kiriona
Muir doesn’t mind if people sus out a character’s plot after immediately reading their names
Umineko inspiration
Lolita and the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: the audience member read Lolita at the same time as NtN. They were wondering if the similarities between the two were deliberate.
Muir loves Lolita and thinks that Nabokov is an expert in writing misery
Muir was open about being a child sexual abuse survivor. The influence of this is pervasive in her work.
There is a strong focus on relationships with authority people
Particularly in NtN, which contains sexual threats. This was hard for Muir to write.
Another example is the relationship between John and Alecto.
They are not a one on one comparison between Humbert and Lolita, but the theme of a man fashioning a girl into the perfect partner is there
Whether there is a sexual element in this will be answered in Alecto the Ninth
Muir explicitly does not want to include overt sexual violence in her work
Misogyny in the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: In the worldbuilding of the Locked Tomb series, how do you balance the misogyny that still exists (which is particularly obvious when John talks to/about Mercymorn) and the outward appearance/initial impression people get of the houses having gender equality (e.g., Abigail as head of the fifth, Jeannemary as a knight)?
This question had Muir wriggling in delight
The answer to this is addressed in Alecto
Why is John fucking up in the creation of his utopia?
Muir encourages readers to question what you, the reader, perceive as misogyny, versus what the characters perceive as misogyny.
Q&A: Cannibalism in the Locked Tomb series
Cannibalism is a metaphor for toxic love
Cannibalism of the soul is much more severe than cannibalism of the flesh
Link to Lolita
It’s eating someone’s life and personhood. A central theme in TLT is exploring love as something taken violently
Can you love someone without taking something from them? This is one of Muir’s favourite ideas
And, it’s not necessarily negative
Example of Camilla and Palamedes (spoiler for NtN!!)
They had to eat each other
Grappling with the question: Is love weightless?
Q&A: How much of their old selves are preserved in the Lyctors?
HtN spoilers!!
John didn’t simply wipe and rewrite them – if not, why are they trying to kill him?
John wanted his friends, so he tried to bring his friends back
Interesting implications for the two people he didn’t know well and only saw as cowrokers
BUT then the Lyctors are changed by their immortality and John
Q&A: What was it like to write immortality?
Muir acknowledges that she doesn’t do a perfect job, and that it’s actually impossible to actually write immortality – it will be too alien for the reader
But this links back to the theme of memory – how much can the Lyctors retain?
The Lyctors are heavily weighed down by time, Mercymorn in particular
Q&A: How long would Muir last in the TLT universe?
0.5 seconds
Muir doesn’t see herself as a necromancer or cavalier
Nor is she particularly aligned with any House
Q&A: Books that Muir is reading right now that she would recommend
(again, my poor listening skills and lack of culture limit me here!)
Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran
‘Payback for Malory Towers’
A.K. Markwood’s new book, the Seventh Banisher
Muir has advance access. AK is her friend.
Q&A: Books and media that influenced Muir as a child
She was a highly prolific reader as a child!
Obviously Animorphs
Weird Kiwi fantasy stories
Margaret Margey
She read a lot of David Eddings as a teenager and got annoyed at the role of women in the books
Gormandust was a key inspiration for TLT (I googled this and ‘Gormandust’ doesn’t exist, hopefully someone more in the know can help to translate my poor transcription!)
Grimmbolts was another influence (again, I probably didn’t hear this correctly)
Q&A: Warhammer inspiration
Muir didn’t get into Warhammer until after HtN. She loves it.
She has been approached to write for the Black Library but she had to decline as she had too much work
Q&A: What’s Muir going to do next?
Muir does not want to keep going back to TLT, she is happy to release it to the fanfiction writers once it’s done!
There are a couple more things in the TLT universe she may add
For example, there’s a big Harrow AU…
Muir wants to go back to videogames
But in her history, the projects she works on tend to fold
Muir is trying to write her own videogames and is slowly learning Python
A very good question about deconstruction was asked, but I missed it because I was too excited
Everyone was really lovely at the event! Cambridge folk, you have a lot to look forward to :))
Gnosticism study lvl 1: there is a secret mystical OG version of Christianity that was suppressed by the church!!!
Gnosticism study lvl 2: Okay there are three main branches the Sethians (the earlier more Platonist ones), Valentenians (the more Christian ones) and Jeuians (the wierd ones with a different Sophia).
Gnosticism study lvl 3: Oh also maybe the mandeans and the bogomills and the cathars.
Gnosticism study lvl 4: actually gnosticism doesn't exist
Gnosticism study lvl 5: Paul met Metatron.
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