[id: photo of a door with scratches around the doorknob, and a text message that reads "i know from context that your sister's dog did this, but it's a bad look for a guest room." end id]
I needed to take a minute and say something about pop culture in general and MST3K and Stardew Valley specifically.
Culture matters. Whatever you want to call it: entertainment, pop culture, escapism, storytelling, literature, music, doesn't matter. The art we create and share does matter. Like, save-a-life MATTERS. Let me tell you a story.
When I was seventeen, a few months into my freshmen year in college, two thousand miles away from my home and family, my father died unexpectedly of heart failure in the middle of the night. I left school, and went home, because my family needed me, my mother needed me. I do not regret it.
I didn't cope well with my father's death, as to be expected, but my mother almost didn't survive the grief. We held together, as best we could, and both of us made it through the pain to the other side. Grief is heavy, something you drag with you, always pulling you down toward oblivion. After awhile oblivion begins to look inviting. Mom felt the pull more than I did. She leaned on me, which added to her grief, as she felt like a burden, and I did the best I could to carry all of us, her and I and our dragging grief. This manifested in intractable insomnia. I couldn't sleep, couldn't get my mind to stop eating itself long enough to rest. Unless.
I would put on old VHS tapes of episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and fall asleep to the sound of bad movies and good jokes. The sound of Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, Kevin Murphy, Joel Robinson and Trace Beaulieu lulled me to sleep for years. Their voices were soothing, I'd seen the episodes so many times that I knew them by heart, and this was an escape, a place I could go that wasn't my own mind, where all the weight was gone. On the Satellite of Love, I could forget that I was barely an adult and yet having to deal with a myriad of adult things, like getting work to help pay the mortgage, or get my mother to a doctor before she did anything drastic.
When she got better, stronger, Mom carried me more times than I can count, so please do not think that I bear any resentment for the suddenness of my transition into adulthood. I understand what happened to her and have long since made my peace. My father was the love of her life; it was no wonder that his loss took the legs out from under her. She never remarried, never even dated again, despite my encouragement, would only say that it would be unfair to ask someone else to live up to my father's memory.
When she died, I buried her with him, as she asked.
When she died, MST3K didn't work the same way. The escape I found this time was in Stardew Valley, a lovely place where I could fall in love with the sweet redhead with a love for books and children. I built a life on Winedrunk Farm, with Penny, and our children Calliope and Julius. It was a lovely place, where I didn't have to think about probate attorneys and an apartment full of the things a person collects in their life and leaves to their loved ones to sort through when they die. The things that carry the barbs of a thousand memories ready to stab the unwary.
Sometimes we need someplace to be that is not ourselves, and our shared stories give us that. Someone else's world doesn't carry those barbs, cannot stab us in the same way. Without someone else's world there would be no escape from ourselves. I would not have survived the grief of losing either of my parents if I had not found these worlds. I NEEDED to escape my grief, and a silly satellite with a mad scientist and bad movies, or a rural town where I have made EVERYONE love me, is exactly what I needed.
I started this as an essay on the importance of even "pop" art, but I ended up just wanting to put my gratitude out into the world. To all the people who've made the things I love, but especially the creators and writers of MST3K and ConcerncedApe, the developer of Stardew Valley, whoever they are, for saving my life. It sounds dramatic, but it's true. I'm here because of a cowtown puppet show and a farming sim video game. Maybe that doesn't matter, really, in the big scheme, but it matters to me, so thank you.
Thank you to all the artists, who save lives, and never even know it.
Sometimes, in fandom, we just want to write id-tastic fic that rolls around in tropes that might be viewed as problematic. But we donât want to address the problematic side of things in this particular fanwork; we just want to roll around and wallow.
It is considered courteous to give readers a heads-up via use of AO3 tags. I propose a tag that signals that a given fanwork is for rolling around, not giving a measured evaluation of anything. The MCU has carved out a space for this sort of fic with the âHYDRA Trash Partyâ tag, for which I commend them. Trash Party is a bit too specific to cover all of the ground Iâm thinking of here, though; I propose âDead Dove: Do Not Eat.â
For those of you not familiar with Arrested Development, Michael Bluth finds a paper bag in the freezer labeled âDead Dove: Do Not Eat.â He opens the bag, finds a dead dove, and reacts as follows:
[gif of a white man saying âI donât know what I expectedâ in a deadpan manner]
The âDead Dove: Do Not Eatâ tag would essentially be a âwhat it says on the tinâ metatag, indicating âyou see the tropes and concepts tagged here? they are going to appear in this fic. exactly as said. there will not necessarily be any subversion, authorial commentary condemning problematic aspects, or meditation on potential harm. this fic contains dead dove. if you proceed, you should expect to encounter it.â
(more at KnowYourMeme: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-dont-know-what-i-expected)
today I was wearing my âyes homoâ shirt and some lady told me âyouâre going to hellâ and I said âwith you around itâs like weâre already thereâ and I swear she made this exact fkn face
I cannot believe this post I made in 2015 is still going aroundâŠ. anyway plot twist this same lady got famous on my townâs facebook gossip group for divorcing her husband for a woman đ đ»âš I like to believe my yes homo shirt pointed her in the right direction
this is going to be a silly reblog but i have kind of a fixation on animal qualia and the idea of an animal's umwelt, so i ended up wondering whether pudding was actually "enjoying" this.
which meant i went and read about snail brains.
here's the bad news, at least by human standards:
snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.
pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.
snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."
so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.
and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.
snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."
if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.
pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.
i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.
snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?
so maybe the point isn't "this is sad because he can't enjoy it," but "this is a reminder that minds come in radically different shapes, and value doesn't have to be rich to be real."
hey, I went to Mad At You Island and it wasn't empty. there was a stranger you were a bit curt with on a bad day, an old friend who you got into a falling out with, a labmate who's experiment you messed up by mistake, someone who's birthday you forgot, an internet stranger who is hellbent on deciding you're not morally good enough for not reblogging a post or not following a one day boycott. and it is kind of mortifying to realise that Mad At You Island will never be uninhabited, but it's just a fact of life. and if you try to reduce the population to zero, you'll end up whittling yourself down to nothing
this is completely true, and you know what else? i've actually visited Mad at You Island a few times, and while it's never empty, the turnover rate is pretty high. most people only pop in for a minute or two at a time, a couple of hours at most. in most cases, they have better things to do with their days then sit and stew on Mad at You Island. and while there are certainly exceptions, in general, if you are someone who does your best to communicate openly and listen well and be decent to other people, then most of the time, folks you find lingering for ages on Mad At You island probably got lost on their way to Mad At Myself Island. that's a bummer for them, because it sucks in both those places, but that's neither your fault nor your problem.
though i once would not have believed this, it's okay to let people go to Mad At You Island. it is, in fact, one of the great joys of life to reach the day where you see someone set off for that desolate hellscape and, with delighted relief, realize, "my god! i don't have to follow them."
I love that the dog is just like âthe people are being very weird but Iâm getting a whole jar of peanut butter out of this, so itâs fine by meâ
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