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[heartsl0b]

road trip

[user7038634357]

[wearegoingfuckinganywhereman]

[astriiformes]

College friendship is sending one of your friends who's graduating soon a giant list of monster theory and gothic horror academic reading recs so they can download as many PDFs as possible before they lose their university database access

[astriiformes]

Got a request for some of the recs here, so here's a short-ish list of some of the reading recs -- I've made an effort to link open source and/or at least slightly more accessible databases like JSTOR wherever possible, but some of these are, admittedly behind various paywalls that I wish everyone luck with circumventing in whatever manner you deem fit

Monster Theory - Really great anthology to start with, especially the first reading, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's famous "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" which is a personal favorite

The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts - A general SF/F journal, but there are definitely a lot of great monster theory and gothic horror readings sprinkled throughout. Consider taking a look at Veronica Hollinger's "The Vampire and/as Alien," the special issue on Dracula, and Faye J. Ringel's "Genetic Experimentation: Mad Scientists and the Beast," among others

Werewolf Histories edited by Willem Blécourt - Phenomenal anthology on werewolf scholarship, especially if you're interested in the connections between werewolves and witchcraft and/or witch trials in Early Modern Europe

Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters by Jack Halberstam - Of interest to those who are interested in the connection between the gothic and gender (among other topics). Halberstam has written extensively on both

The Journal of Dracula Studies - Exactly what it sounds like.

Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural - Another journal, which focuses on the connections between witchcraft and occultism, monsters, demonology, and the like.

Susan Stryker's "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix" - An absolutely landmark piece of writing on Frankenstein and the transgender (and in particular the transfeminine) experience; one of my favorite pieces of academic writing of all time.

Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology - Another solid monster theory anthology

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene - A really, really good anthology about the ecological gothic that I cannot recommend enough. As a known werewolf guy I especially like the piece "Wolf, or Homo homini lupus" by Carla Freccero

The Vampire Lectures by Lawrence Rickels - So many vampires

Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader - Another anthology, I in particular recommend Rosalind Sibielski's "Gendering the Monster Within: Biological Essentialism, Sexual Difference, and Changing Symbolic Functions of the Monster in Popular Werewolf Texts" in this one.

"The Trans Legacy of Frankenstein" by Jolene Zigarovich - Definitely a good read if you enjoyed the Stryker piece earlier; it's a more general survey of the idea but might give you some ideas for further reading

TransGothic in Literature and Culture - A whole anthology of works on transgender identity and the gothic!

Twenty-First Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion - Not to be confused with the other similarly named anthology earlier, this one is on various modern perspectives on the gothic.

"Christians and Jews in the Twelfth Century Werewolf Renaissance" by David A. Shyovitz - Stand-alone article but really really interesting

Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750 by Lorraine Daston & Katherine Park - Incredible volume that gets into several different subjects surrounding the fantastical in the medieval and early modern eras, monsters among them. The same authors have written some other fantastic work, such as "Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England" and I honestly would recommend any of their work.

Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds Through Monsters - A more anthropology focused volume, I particularly like Rozanna Lilley's "Drawing in the Margins: My Son's Arsenal of Monsters—(Autistic) Imagination and the Cultural Capital of Childhood"

Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations - Another anthology, this time with a historical perspective

This isn't even everything I've dug into on the subject, but I hope it's enough to get folks started on some reading!

[leonsrightarm]

LMAO so years ago as a christmas gift for my dad i got a book of old puritan plays, hollowed it out, and put a flask inside. i just learned that he has in fact been using it to hide good whiskey this whole time. 👍👍👍

[unteriors]

2nd Street, Pence Springs, West Virginia.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

one of the funniest conversations I ever had with my ex was when they were still getting used to Celsius and asked me "what's 20 degrees?" and instead of converting it, I said "it's the highest your dad will ever let you set the thermostat and when you say you're cold he tells you to put on another sweater, we're not made of money" and they went "oh, 68"

the fact that this reference was that fucking precise was something they went on to tell people about for years.

[fraiseziska]

fly high papa von karma 🕊️ EDIT SOMEBODY SAID FLY LOW 😭😭😭😭😭😭

[letterful]

?

[oneterabyteofkilobyteage]

original url http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Campus/5466/

archived on 2009-04-27 18:39:17

[dovvvvv]

this is how charli xcx sounds to straight men

[itsbilby]

I looked the book up. the main character's name is Tookie De La Crème

[memories-of-ancients]

Anthropeum

A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artif

An interesting game where you are presented with 10 artifacts from the MET. You have to place where the artifact is from and what time period it is from. Each artifact scores up to 10,000 points, and you lose points the further away your guess is and how far off in time you are. You can only play once a day. Thanks to @baebeylik for showing this to me.

Today I scored really well. Yesterday ... not so much.

Anthropeum.com · Jun 8 2026 🟩🟦🟦🟩🟩🟩🟥🟦🟦🟩 79,001 · top 3% of players today!

[sufjansjoy]

well i'll just go ahead and get it out of the way : good morning. i know that's what you sick tuesday freaks want to hear..........

[wizardarchetypes]

the place where so many haunted house genre stories fall apart is where the writers try to explain why the house is haunted and it completely defangs the story because the explanation is never as scary as the haunting itself. "this house is haunted and bad things happen here" can be so artful and outrageously scary. "this house is haunted because Specified Bad Thing Happened Here" falls flat again and again. i'm not saying it can't be done but i'm almost never satisfied by it and often it ruins the whole story for me.

[wizardarchetypes]

the thing is, a Haunted House story is not the same as a Ghost story. In a Haunted House story, the Haunted House is a character. Usually a main character. In a Ghost story, the ghost is a character. A Ghost's story may be explained by showing us the Ghost's origin. But a Haunted House story cannot be explained by showing us the origin of one of the House's ghosts. That's just one ghost. We're talking about the House.

[leonsrightarm]

oh yeah i am officially recommending Non-Human Player(s).

i've still only read 80 chapters but the characters and plot are really good. probably an all timer danmei for me, up with global examination and maybe inching toward kaleidoscope of death. the summary is a little vague but essentially it's about test-tube humans who are created to be used like androids (as companions and tools) with no rights of their own. the protagonist is owned by an entertainment company that streams horror games to humans. failure in the game means having your memory and identity erased in real life. breaking the company's rules means the same thing. the protagonist has already been reset once under unclear circumstances.

i guess the best description would be... never let me go meets the hunger games ha ha ha. it's one of those stories where the plot initially appears simple, but each additional piece of information the protagonist collects complicates things further and reshapes your perspective of characters and events. i thought i was pretty sure what the big plot twist was going to be but now i think it's something else which is even more terrible. (this is praise.)

the only problem with it is the translation (HUGE BUMMER). it's mtl which has all the usual problems - names are intermittently transliterated (for example, the protagonist, xi yu, randomly becomes 'western feather' sometimes) and pronouns switch around for no good reason, which can make it confusing to tell who's speaking/acting and also does impact the plot from time to time. a lot of the jokes and references don't make any sense and sometimes the translation is just. wrong. and you have to piece together what it actually said based on logic and how characters react.

all of this is normal mtl stuff but the biggest issue is that there are a few major sections of the novel that are missing. chapter 36 is replaced with a chapter from another novel and the first half of chapter 61 is missing entirely (it also happens to contain important information for understanding what's happening in the subsequent chapters). i went and mtl'd the original myself to fill these parts in but i don't blame others for not wanting to. there's also a kiss scene that's missing but it's hard to tell if this was a translation error or a victim of censorship (i didn't go look for it).

i really hope this gets a better translation someday (don't look at me T_T my plate is so full rn) but i still think it's worth reading

@miyamiwu (i had too much to say so i had to write a whole new post; sorry i'm a blabbermouth you can just skip it and read just the first line if you want ha ha ha)

[intactics]

the most occidentalist cnovel I ever binged via MTL was about a chinese guy reincarnating into europe right before the black plague & teaching the savage europeans how to cook food and do agriculture and industry properly and inventing an innoculation for the plague and he wound up gay marrying the sexy young pope & collecting a really unreasonable number of magical animal companions along the way, including a tiger. the tiger's introduction led to my favorite author's note in the following chapter, which was basically "I've been informed Europe doesn't have tigers but I don't really give a fuck" ... that was kind of charming.

[haaarpb]

a bar comic