sine lucro friget ludus

I originally made this blog to talk about the media I like, now I just reblog whatever I find interesting or thought-provoking (which doesn't mean I 100% agree with it, just that it makes me think. I think we could all do with a bit less echo chamber and a little more hmm makes me think). I like a mix of highbrow and lowbrow, competence porn, pulpy vintage genre fiction full of sordid personal drama, worldbuilding-heavy SFF and sociological storytelling more generally. Also aggressive music and kinky porn. Big Dorothy Dunnett fangirl. Proud Eurotrash. Passionately against any type of censorship. DNI if you're into psychoanalysis. Previously dehautdesert and unhelpfulfemme.

[symdog]

> "it's unnatural!" > checks nature > mfw

[seren-starlight]

"It's not normal, it's just normalized" -> me when I've rescaled my bimodally distributed data so that all values in the dataset are between 0 and 1

[ponyoisms]

one hyperfixated tumblr mutual has the power of six hundred thousand ad campaigns

[mala-taste]

I know my mother is probably mildly autistic and in any case bad at recognizing social cues but it's always deeply unpleasant for me to keep throwing out my entire repertoire or increasingly blunt distress cues to convey that her insistence on talking about a sensitive topic is hurting and upsetting me, only for her to get hurt about it as soon as my signal becomes loud and clear enough to come through to her (because at that point I'm quite blunt and rude by any objective standard).

I feel like there's a solution to this but I don't know what it is or how to handle this situation.

[microsff]

Every morning, the queen asked her magic mirror to show her the most beautiful person in the world.

The mirror replied "To whom?"

"The miller who made the flour for my bread," the queen would say, or "Whoever spun the thread my shawl was made of".

The mirror would show her, and she'd be amazed.

[nullen-void]

The first time, she says "To me," and the mirror dutifully shows her her reflection. And she is pleased.

The second time, she says "To the King," and she is pleased to see herself once more.

The third time, she says "To the Royal Advisor," and is once more satisfied to see herself.

The fourth time, she says "To the scribe who takes the King's letters." She is shown the man's wife. And she seethes, but quiets herself, for it is only right that a man loves his wife.

The fifth time, she says "To the Court Wizard," and is shown the man's departed mother as he remembers her from his youth, radiant and smiling and warm and larger than life.

The tenth time, she says "To the Stable Master," and is shown the fastest horse in the stable, majestic and free as the wind even in captivity

"To the baker," she is shown the man's daughter, young and adorable and full of joy and laughter.

"To the artist who did my portrait," she is shown a painting of a woman done by the man's teacher, who he still looks up to now that he is well established himself.

"To the Royal Knight," she is surprised but not displeased to see the castle's entire guard force in the middle of doing drills.

The one hundredth time she asks the mirror, and it asks her "to whom?" she once again says, "To me." And she does the same the one hundred and second, and again and again and again.

It is a different person each time, and they are all beautiful.

[romanceyourdemons]

guy currently hurtling toward a migraine at a rate that would impress most astrophysicists: i wonder wgat is happening in my beautiful telephone

[ihavebifun]

[bowelfly]

a traditional monastic post-lunch nap

[meangirlnurse]

Enemy lesbian nuns quit convent and marry each other

Two former novice nuns have shared their story after leaving the convent, falling in love and getting married.

[joanofarcisdead]

meg and dia are a really interesting band, because the titular frampton sisters are multiracial korean-american women who fronted a band that, when it was most famous, was majority asian-american in a scene that was extremely sexist and racist and that, with exceptions for certain white women (see: flyleaf and paramore) and men of color, primarily found fame and success the purview of white men

with all the hagiographies of the warped tour scene twenty years later, with all the claims that the scene has always been "diverse" (despite the ways that we memorialize only a certain kind of diversity -- see the centering of white women and white women only when we try to write “feminist” histories of warped tour), with all the ways that people try to fictionalize a more "diverse" scene via imaginary OCs or bands that were not active during the height of the warped tour era, it would be informative to turn to meg and dia more to inform this critical turn--but we don't. for a few reasons, already outlined above, for structural reasons outlined above. but that's a shame, especially as we ask ourselves how we really want to remember the warped tour scene.

do we actually want to remember the complexities and real diversities of the scene, or will it take us another 20 years to remember the people of color (and women of color especially) who found both joy and marginalization, success and struggle, in what we have now since canonized?

[joanofarcisdead]

so anyway. go here

[nevver]

The moonlight ain’t so great, Ivan Marchuk

[eroscestlavie]

The older I get the more I realize that actually a lot of the time in media the insistence that a relationship between two fictional characters is actually just a deep complicated friendship was NOT bullshit/cope in the face of shipper accusations. Because I keep finding myself in deep and beautiful but complex friendships and I realize now that once you meet your romantic life partner the world of these long term profound friendships sort of presents itself to you & there's way more there than I ever thought possible...Like it IS sort of the number one form of new relationship you face in your adult life. At a poetry reading the other day one of the readers was talking about this and about how much interprojection and like, keeping pace of life and seeing your friends as an extension of yourself happens in later life. And it had me like...wow

[beammeupplease]

Statue in Finland titled: "Read Even Though You're Drowning"

[sugarpsalms]

For the fanfic tropes ask: enemies to lovers, mentor/mentee romance, sex polen and its derivatives

These are all technically A-tier to me, but some caveats:

A lot of the times, EtL is poorly executed imo and not really as punchy as I'd like it to be, so in practice I guess this is closer to an A- or B+. This isn't the fault of the writing necessarily, but everyone has a different tolerance for enemy type behavior, so finding something that fits my wants specifically is, of course, gonna be scavenger hunt.

Mentor/Mentee is almost always gonna hit solidly in the A-tier without exception, especially if someone has written it without express intent for it to be romantic. Gen fic category is where you really want to go most of the time for really bizarre and fucked up and interesting relationship dynamics, because in a lot of cases people get blinded by the pursuit of Romance and end up flattening what could've otherwise been an insane dynamic.

Sex pollen and all its friends (funny little hats for dubcon to wear, when it's feeling fancy) is, like EtL, technically A-tier but due to execution can end up being anywhere from A- to straight F to me. It really, really depends on how the author handles it. Hard to explain, but again, this is all dependent on extremely niche preferences.

[egypt-museum]

Deep Tripod Bowl

Predynastic Period, Naqada I, ca. 3800-3500 BC.

Now in the Brooklyn Museum. 07.447.399

[miamaimania]

“The Greek Garden” ギリシャ庭園 ≋ Peter Skov

[nobrashfestivity]

Bruce Conner, Untitled, 1968

 Felt-tip ink on paper 

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