ozzy, whatever pronouns just change it up, '96 edition. tme white butch, autistic! ao3
[icon is savathun from destiny 2. mobile header is raven from rwby holding a mug that says "Don't talk to me til I've fucked your wife"]
header is by @seeyouguyslater.
every single conversation abt ip on here devolves into a bunch of people being really anxious that someone is going to take away their hypothetical income from them for their creativity and like, that is already happening. that is literally happening. how do you think publishers like penguin, harper collins, macmillan et al got big and stay big? how do you think publishers like elsevier et al maintain such a stranglehold and charge such amounts? do you even know how individual IP rights operate these days, especially when you're licensing them to a company? have you read a contract ever in your life? have you had to work on preparing a contract ever in your life? do you think your much vaunted, precious authors have the rights to reprint their books whenever if they realise their publishers are fucking them over? don't make me fucking laugh. at the very least please pull your heads out of your asses and read helen dewitt's extensive chronicling of her run-ins with the publishing industry as is. god knows you can pick up the biography or collected/published letters of almost any author* across time and encounter a section with their run-ins and struggles with their publishers, either because they're not being given enough royalties, or because they're writing to contract and need to give their publishers a book by a specific deadline, or a specific kind of book, even when circumstances & health issues are conspiring against them. do you think copyright gives them any control over their lives, or any sort of creative control? don't be so naive - and nevermind the fact that it is basically impossible to have a career in writing these days and that the rare few who do are writing extremely formulaic genre fiction written to, again, insane deadlines that are punishing for any sort of creative work. stop being naive!!!! take an actual look and reckon at what the actual circumstances and conditions are for producing art! it is not good! copyright is not going to save you! it is panacea at best! you will literally do better campaigning for universal basic income over championing the cause of copyright!
*off the top of my head just based on the biographies & other primary sources i've read: agatha christie, aldous huxley, jrr tolkien, georgette heyer
mind you, this is only in publishing/writing. the conditions are not that much better in other domains. music? most artists are being fucked over by their record companies cutting deals with spotify that leave them getting very little revenue while not actually owning their own masters. visual arts? a handful of artists will break through each year and it depends heavily on your ability to network and attend extremely expensive art events, from what i know of. but maybe you can get lucky working in highly exploitative conditions in a well-known artist's studio where you produce works that are sold under their name :) can't say i know much about television or film, but my impression is that its not that much better (perhaps the greatest evidence in favour of this is the way the number of working working class actors in the uk has nearly dropped completely off and nearly all of them are privately educated in one way or the other). so genuinely who do you think the so called ip law is protecting right now? bc right now from where i'm sitting, it is protecting literally those with the greatest amount of money and purchasing power, on both sides of the cultural production and cultural distribution divides. which as you might imagine is anathema to any kind of genuine creative culture.
plaintext: *off the top of my head just based on the biographies & other primary sources i've read: agatha christie, aldous huxley, jrr tolkien, georgette heyer. end plaintext.
Interviewer: There is something stereotypically masculine about the kind of chest-pumping, overly stylish translations of your predecessors.
Wilson: I’m really skeptical about any gender essentialism on that. Other women have published translations of Homer into Italian and into other languages I can’t read. I’ve read some of the French translation by Anne Dacier from the 17th century, and it’s fairly loquacious. Could you pick the translations of The Odyssey by a woman out of a lineup? Absolutely not. But journalists wanted it to be about that. I get that you’re trying to create a story, but I just don’t believe it.
Interviewer: Have you followed the online discourse about the film so far?
Wilson: It’s made-up controversy. Nobody’s seen this movie. It’s just the usual triggers about race and gender, and I just find it very tedious.
Interviewer: curious about what it would look like to make a feminist version of The Odyssey. It seems that could be a helpful framework to have ahead of Nolan’s movie.
Wilson: I’ve been watching a lot of Nolan movies in preparation for all of this, and it seems to me that we don’t know what the script’s going to be like. If it’s the usual Nolan plot of “A guy is on a quest far from home and struggling to get back to an objectified female character,” then I’m not sure I see that plot as inherently particularly feminist.
Interviewer: Looking at those two changes, it seems to me that your translation has a feminist function, whether it’s intentional or not.
Wilson: I think the bar should be higher for feminist translation. There are people whose project that is.
if ur a trans girl and ur partner is not an ardent transfeminist frankly you need to dump their bitch ass. you can and will find better partners. i promise. i love you
some people read an awful lot, but don't read very well. deep reading is itself a skill. being able to untangle the threads of theme, subtext, characterization, narrative style, and more are all things that it takes time and intentional engagement to learn.
if you've ever watched a movie with your film buff friend and chatted about it afterwards, that friend might have pulled hours more of conversation out of the same 90 minutes of screentime, and wondered how the fuck they did that - it's not raw intelligence, it's a skill that's been honed. And I learned a lot about film from talking to friends who knew about film, and reading critique by film scholars
literature works exactly the same. so if you want to get more out of your reading, there are things you can do to train that.
Find a book or short story you think you've got a pretty good grasp on, preferably from a widely read & respected author like Ursula K Le Guin or Ray Bradbury (if you're new at this don't swing for the Toni Morrison or the Samuel Beckett yet unless you feel very comfortable with the complexity of the text - the point is to develop a complicated new skill on good foundations). Then go to JSTOR, create a free account, and look up criticism on the story you've chosen. Find something that looks readable to you and at least somewhat interesting. Read that article, and look at what that writer got out of the same story you've read that you didn't get. Do you see the critic's points? Did they teach you something about the text? Go reread that story and see if the criticism has changed how you read it. Are you seeing more? Are you thinking about the implications of a line that you hadn't noticed before? Does the story feel richer now?
there are other more involved ways of finding criticism. Learning to use academic databases, going to your local library to do interlibrary loans, finding critical voices you appreciate; these are all useful subskills. Literacy isn't just being able to read words, it's being able to read words in context and think about what they tell you about the text, the author, or the time and culture in which the text was produced. Literacy is the skill of being able to look at the world with open eyes and think clearly about how its parts are connected. It'll change your life
this keeps getting shared around and ive seen some different tags responding differently so i just want to make some important clarifications and distillations
you don't have to read more deeply if you don't want to (but i'd recommend it, i genuinely think it makes you a better person)
if you want to learn to read more deeply, the resources are out there. try to find critical literature (that is, academic writing that analyzes the text) on works your familiar with so you can get a sense for how to do that analysis too
learning to deep read literature can help you deep read many areas of your life
writers tend to put a lot of work into their stories. if you learn to read that work you'll (probably) appreciate the stories you love even more. And if not, then you'll have developed your taste. This too is worth doing
Abstract. Evolution has produced an astonishing array of organisms, but does it have limits and, if so, how are these overcome and how have
An interesting paper (Vermeij, 2015) on the "empty phenotypic space", i.e. the forms and adaptations that we do not see in the living world, possibly relevant to the convergence vs. contingency debate.
Some examples:
Wheels: some curled-up arthropods can roll around, and bacterial flagella and some parts of weevil legs rotate on their axis, but macroscopic wheels with a free axle do not exist, probably because smooth surfaces on which they'd be useful are rare and it would be difficult to grow them through embryonal development.
Animal-provided pollination and dispersal do not exist in water, with the possible exception of one species of fish-pollinated seagrass (which is a descendant of terrestrial plants). Presumably water is already good enough at carrying gametes and propagules that buying the services of an animal is a useless expense.
Mineral reef-building does not occur on land nor, more surprisingly, in freshwater. The reason for the latter is not clear, since there are enough mineral ions in freshwater to build shells. Boring of rock, shells, and wood in freshwater is also extremely rare though common in the sea.
Gelatinous plankton like salps or jellyfish (with few exceptions of the latter) is also not found in freshwater, probably because they can't survive dispersal between separate water bodies.
Endothermy ("warm blood") is generally not found in small aquatic animal, probably because water leeches away heat much faster than water, so aquatic endotherms (tunas, sharks, seals, whales) need to be bulky. On land, however, endothermy is found among tiny vertebrates and even insects.
There is no passive air-floating plankton, since air is not dense enough to support living tissue or dissolved organic matter by buoyancy. For that reason filter-feeding is also rare outside of water, while carnivorous plants are not found in the ocean (the water already carries enough nutrient). Aquatic plants do not produce wood as buoyancy is enough to keep them upright.
Large terrestrial animals do not specialize as scavengers (all mammals famous for scavenging also hunt actively); large carcasses are too spread out. All specialist scavengers on land are either very small, or flying.
Herbivory is rare among active fliers, because plant matter has a low energy density and takes a long time to digest. Herbivorous birds and insects are poor fliers or flightless, and the best fliers, like geese, are the ones that can take shelter in water.
Many more examples are only excluded from specific groups (e.g. live-bearing, despite being very common in reptiles, never appeared in birds, probably because the bird egg-shell is too mineralized to be retained in the womb as transition toward full live-bearing).
Even though the author calls them "forbidden phenotypes", only some of them are actually impossible (because they cannot evolve in the first place, or because they cost more energy than they're worth), and others simply never happened to evolve. At the end of the paper there is a list of phenotypes that would have been "forbidden" in the aftermath of the Cambrian Explosion and Ordovician diversification, but which appeared later, and they include
cutins, suberins, lignins, flavonoids, alkaloids, vascular systems, roots, leaves, rigid frameworks of stems and branches, nutrition complemented by animal matter, and basal growth in land plants; nitrogen-fixing symbiosis on land; animal-mediated dispersal/pollination; silk-producing, sound-emitting, flying, eusocial, terrestrial herbivorous, wood-boring, terrestrial shell-bearing and endothermic animals; embryos nourished within the body of an animal or plant parent; mineralized phytoplankton; and rock-excavating marine herbivores. [...] photosymbiotic and chemosymbiotic molluscs, the bivalved condition in gastropods, terrestrial life in gastropods and vertebrates, complex septa within the phragmocone of externally shelled cephalopods, internalization and loss of the shell in cephalopods, cementation to the substratum with a glue of calcium carbonate and organic matrix in several animal groups (gastropods, brachiopods, bivalves and barnacles), spines on shells of several groups (brachiopods, bivalves and brachiopods), mineralized tubes in polychaete annelids, mobility in bryozoans and pelmatozoan echinoderms, jaws and teeth in vertebrates, and vascular systems in brown and red algae. A vast diversity of potent venoms also lay in the future as part of the defensive and aggressive arsenal of many gastropods, cephalopods, aculeate Hymenoptera, vertebrates and land plants.
He also mentions phenotypes that were lost, but every listed adaptation seems to have survived in some group (e.g. complex spiny shells disappeared among cephalopods but survived in gastropods).
there r some characters that u really love that u do not want to see any opinion or discussion about online ever. u agree with like 2 ppl on earth total about. maybe 3. their haters lovers glazers fuckers shitters pissers whatever pissing u off to equal degrees. just a beautiful kind of torture chamber to find urself in
We report: as we were walking, the sky ahead of us was a milky white, certainly nothing like rain. We stopped for a sip of water, and finally noticed the clouds pooling behind us. We almost immediately felt a raindrop on our cheek, the wind pushing our hair into our face.
snowghoul
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theartofmadeline
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