Imagine a human turning into a vampire in their bedroom. After the transformation is complete, they look at a mirror and can see their reflection dead in bed.
AITA for not telling my new party why I broke things off with my cursed greatsword?
I know how it sounds, but like, bear with me.
I (28/F/former paladin), had been travelling with a cursed greatsword (Immeasurable/F/Sword) and was really into her for a long time. When we first met she told me she was the disembodied spirit of an ancient warlord and beamed images of a beautiful raven haired warrior in gorgeous blackened Gothic armor into my mind, she told me it was her true form and I was super into it so I forsook my paladin oath and we started hooking up
Early on in our relationship she was really supportive when I started to transition, telling me she was "nearing her apotheosis" as well. I didn't think much of it at the time, and dutifully listened to her when she told me to travel the kingdom and assemble the ritual objects for her ascension. There was a team of adventurers that tried to stop us and she told me to kill them but one of them was my former best friend Sir Roderick The Bold (25/M/Paladin) so I refused and only incapacitated them. She didn't like that and we had a huge fight about it after we'd left
Long story short after I'd done the ritual and assembled the artifacts she revealed her true form was a ruse and she was actually just a mass of tentacles and eyes (which I don't mean to yuck anybody's yum mentioning, it's just that tentacles don't really appeal to me lol)
She said she was going to consume the world, "starting with you" and that I had "outlived my usefulness". I felt really shocked and betrayed and helped the adventuring party that was following us around to defeat her and seal her back in the sword (which I left there), but I feel really bad about it
I sorta got adopted by them since then and they keep telling me things like "Good job resisting the influence of the cursed sword!" And "How did you break free of her mind control?" Or "I am happy to see you've chosen the path of righteousness." And I haven't told them I wasn't ever under a spell or anything, I was just really mad at her at the time and lashed out. AITA?
i will never be over the fact that during first contact a human offered their hand to a vulcan and the vulcan was just like “wow humans are fucking wild” and took it
#iiiiiiiiiiiiii mean vulcans had been watching humans for a long time#they knew the significance of a handshake but still#they had to find some fast and loose ambassador#willing to fuckin make out with a human for the sake of not offending them on first contact#lmao#star trek
give me the story of this fast and loose vulcan
“sir…these…these humans…they greet each other by…” *glances around before furtively whispering* “by clasping hands…”
*prolonged silence* “oh my…”
“sir…sir how will we make first contact with them? surely we…we cannot refuse this handclasping ritual, they will take it as an insult, but what vulcan would agree to such a distasteful and uncomfortable ritual??”
*several pensive moments later* “contact the vulcan high command and tell them to send us kuvak. i once saw that crazy son of a bitch arm wrestle a klingon, he’ll put his hands on anything”
I swear Vulcans only come in two types and they are “distant xenophobes” or “horny on main for humanity”. Also apparently this guy is Spock’s great-grandfather and frankly that explains everything.
Hey so I looked into this at one point and that handshake literally created a lifelong telepathic bond between the two of them, and basically all of Solkar’s descendants were later obsessed with humans, including freaking SPOCK, so I’m not saying that handshake was so gay and good that it created an intergenerational telepathic bond between Solkar’s descendants and humans, but I’m also not….not….saying that.
The slow deliberation with which Solkar takes Cockrane’s–I’m sorry, Cochrane’s–hand… The sheer sensuality witch which Solkar infuses an otherwise borderline impersonal social ritual… It clearly shows a very conscious knowledge, on Solkar’s part, of what the significance of the handshake is in Vulcan terms and of how affected he is by it.
That’s why he’s so slow in doing it, and so sensual. A part of Solkar can’t believe this is happening, despite it being a perfectly logical thing to expect from a human, and the rest of him can’t believe how good it is.
I bet that if the camera zoomed in any further we would see the dilation of Solkar’s pupils and a quickly-repressed shiver of delight. Cochrane’s firm, businesslike clasp is probably (in sexual terms) being perceived as a deliciously carnal display of dominance.
No wonder Solkar is all like, “TAKE ME, YOU WILD-MANNERED BARBARIAN WITH ENTICINGLY ROUGH CALLUSES.”
#somehow the idea of vulcans being Horny On Main always gives me the giggles#like literally all they had to do#was be like actually#hand contact is very intimate for our species#and im p sure humanity as a whole would not find that insurmountably weird#there are human cultures that dont shake hands#vulcans are logical enough to think that through on their own#so clearly that vulcan was just down to fuck#down to fuck in a public#professional diplomatic situation no less#and he did not fucking care who knew it (via kittykatthetacodemon)
This is my favourite Star Trek post, complete with headcanons, corrections, the truth coming out of her well to shame Spock even. Seriously perfect fandom work.
They could have explained none of it and responded to the offered hand with a polite bow. First contact was gonna be with the guy who proved they were technologically ready for it but any human aware of Japan and China would recognise that
Desulforudis audaxviator??? My favorite microbe??? Found 2.7 km down a South African gold mine in a puddle of radioactive groundwater?
Also fun in microbiology when we talk about wether individuals even exist. If they don’t, this guy could be the only one. BUT even he has evidence of horizontal gene transfer with archaea! Even if you can be alone doesn’t mean you have to be.
The name comes from a quotation from Jules Verne's novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, where the hero, Professor Lidenbrock, finds a secret inscription in Latin: Descende, audax viator, et terrestre centrum attinges (Descend, bold traveller, and you will attain the center of the Earth).
Because it's baseball season and I've been recently thinking on the phenomena of sports and games in human culture, I want to reflect on the particular choice of baseball as an aspect of Benjamin Sisko's character. Any game would have worked as the initial example to explain linearity to non-linear beings in the first episode of Deep Space Nine and there are two other sports that are associated with American culture more than any other (American football and basketball), so the choice of baseball cannot be wholly explained by the metaphorical requirements for explaining causality and or to establish a particularity of place of origin for Sisko. Also, no American sport is especially associated with New Orleans in the way that Cajun and Creole food and language and music (Jazz) are or the way that baseball is associated with cities in the northeast of the U.S., like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. So it's the game itself and its close mythic abstractions that are characterizing Sisko.
It is significant that in the show baseball is a forgotten and lost game. In the narrative reality, the game hasn't been retained in the culture like, for example, tennis, which is shown to resemble the game as we know it now but still evolved in a futuristic speculative form. This gives Sisko's care and attention to baseball an even greater temporal frame. Sisko's hobby--through which he explains his reality, the key objects of which he holds as psychological anchors in his daily work (working the baseball in his hands while he works through the various problems presented to him the series), and by which he invites others to connect to him personally (his son, Jake, who extends this pattern of friend-making with Nog; Kira; the rest of the DS9 crew)--is a thing representing how Sisko is a character constantly struggling with and accepting and swallowing the matter of time.
Baseball isn't the most popular sport in the U.S., not now or in the 90s when DS9 aired, though it was the most popular in country's history at some point and that popularity has embedded itself in the American vernacular and given the sport itself such a sheen of nostalgia that most Americans have convinced themselves that it's a sport of the midwest, of the country and cornfields, of an idyllic past. The most americana-elegiac film ever made, Field of Dreams, features not just the spirits of old baseball stars from past ages, but the spirits of baseball's greatest villains, the 1919 Chicago White Sox who threw games in a gambling scandal that disgraced the franchise: in the film, in the fields of Iowa, they were cleansed of their sins against the game and allowed to play again. It's a powerfully sentimental mythic treatment of the sport, when the MLB was declining in popularity especially in comparison to the NFL or NBA. But the pastoral elegy is a false history--baseball's origins are in the urban, in the working class neighborhoods of industrial cities of the northeast, and it was spread to other parts of the country mostly during the Civil War among Union camps. But the prime image that people conjure regarding the game is one of pastorality, history, and nostalgia, all of which is also helped along by the fact that baseball is a summer sport and a slow-moving one at that. The play of baseball, composed of long stretches of tension followed by quick bursts of action, not timed, will go as long as needed, ends up being figuratively linked with the cultural-feel of the game, as a past-time now passed into an idyllic mythic past.
Inserting this particular game into a story about a man consistently reckoning with his relationship to a place of beyond-causality, who is ultimately consumed by this place and forced to abandon the material of time as he was built to understand it, characterizes Sisko with an underlying structure of elegiac reflection. As a character, he, frequently enough, engages with traditional knowledges and practices, sometimes with a sheen of nostalgic yearning, mostly with an ethic of celebration and respect. He cooks and passes down his particular subculture's food, he builds a starship based on ancient Bajoran epistemes in a rhetorically decolonizing effort, his favorite game is one that has technically died out. He also is sometimes angled in his personal relationships towards the past: reaching emotionally for his dead wife; his closest friend being a re-version of an old friend from his youth (Dax); being wrenched away from a love-interest by the nature of an established system trying to maintain. He's centered as the voice of a primary speculative ethic in an episode surrounding a nostalgic-futurism, a mid-twentieth century speculative fictive frame of imagining grand explorations for any and all people in a time where half the U.S. was living in an apartheid state: the character is in many small character-detail ways and large narrative-theme ways a character of historical reflection and temporal consideration.
The narrative conclusion for the character is to, in a way, leave behind this depth of signifying through temporal matter. At the end of his story, the wormhole-people he had so reached out to and explained himself to through baseball, a nostalgia, who had confronted him with the lived-reality of grief, another form of yearning for the past, fully claimed him and he entered entirely into the space where time was such that everything that characterized him up until that point had to be redefined on a fundamental-matter level. The story-end for Sisko was a full subsumption of the self. Narratively, it can be argued, because it's Sisko and because he is characterized the way he is throughout the series, because from the very first episode his character is set up in a friction through which he is frequently prompted to handle and/or solve time itself, the story claims that Sisko was uniquely positioned to be the figure so subsumed and changed. He both had to have the rich-causality (a growing temporal and creative son, a new love with progressive thought and movement, a new child still in the process of becoming, a traditional and nostalgic bend to him, a lifelong interest in a forgotten game) and he had to leave exactly all of this in order to materially change the outcome of an existential fight for his pluralistic civilization. It's a competing tension resolved by the fact of leaving causal understanding.
One can read that by the end of season 6, start of season 7, Sisko's character is fully committed to rewriting the depth of his temporal significance. He lost the first re-version of his friend Dax, a character whose specific relationship with time both reifies Sisko's and challenges it, and meets the second re-version of the "old man", and, in a sense, this change represents the tension at the center of Sisko both losing everything and gaining everything, reformed at a fundamental matter level, by the end of the series. Sisko's religious posture in-narrative for the Bajoran people becomes more and more substantive to his lived-reality and the expression of his person. He becomes the messenger, the "emissary", the wing-footed carrier of temporal significance, handing over the character-specific and narratively-thematic composition of himself over to the people beyond the threshold of causality. It's not so much that he leaves anything behind but that he takes with him every rich temporal aspect in order to satisfy the story-tension of a place with swapped-time-and-space existing without enough narrative weight: to the imagination of the audience, the wormhole nexus, where conscious beings live and affect the cosmos beyond them, is an impossible/improbable place. To solve it, the character who has been its agent and, in equal depth, the agent of the changing, historical reality outside its bounds, must enter it and claim its episteme and affect for the whole story.
Sisko leaves behind but also, through his substance, carries: his son whose in-narrative power is storytelling, a wife who is associated with building and futuristic progressive hope, an old friend of constant death and rebirth and memory, another friend of equal pluralistic leadership to whom he also leaves his baseball.
As episode one demonstrates, baseball has no place outside of causality so of course the object Sisko can't take with him is the ball itself. But due to how Sisko's presence has manifested in the story, many times referenced through that object, Kira picking up the baseball at the end of the series is the still-presence of Sisko and thus a portrayal of how Sisko has remade himself to be both atemporal and omni-manifest. Baseball, the forgotten sport of the past, can only be played now by the characters because Sisko sank himself into it and swallowed its temporal reality and put that substance into a position where future-and-past are right-and-left. He reformed the mythic nostalgic yearning of the sport into the memory of his self and into the metaphor of his self and life as he entered into a differently-woven plane of reality. No longer occupying one point in time, Sisko has presenced baseball and himself and made a game of temporality and looking-back and myth-making simultaneously a way of speculation and futurism and progressive-movement by forcing the game's cause-and-consequence across the threshold of linearity through the matter and narrative-nature of his being.
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”
Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.
#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)
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