$LAYYYTER
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izzy's playlists!
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Cosimo Galluzzi
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@nuttysaladtree
There's this theory about levels of mediation in media that says it's possible for artificiality to both remind the audience that what they are seeing is a construction while at the same time adding to their level of immersion. [...] the obviously constructed nature of the scene would by its very artificiality create its own sense of...versimilitude.
—"Hyper-Mediation in New Media - Ep: 80". The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Uploaded 17 January 2013 to Youtube. Starting at 01:38.
Watched 2 peak movies recently, movies so peak they made me break out the watercolors (and waterworks too 😭😭)
I don’t like how you put these two photos together, as if to imply that the dumplings with the paw print have anything to do with this sweet, innocent angel who has never done anything wrong.
Maybe the dumpling just did that, we don't know.
[ID: Two images; the first shows several handmade dumplings, one of which has a clear paw print in it where it possibly has been stepped on. The second image shows a small orange cat sitting on the carpet, looking innocently up past the camera.]
I don’t like how you put these two photos together, as if to imply that the dumplings with the paw print have anything to do with this sweet, innocent angel who has never done anything wrong.
Wait I have one of those.
I badly want to romanticize train travel. But train companies seem bound and determined to not let me.
You know, you'd think that birdstrikes were an exclusively air travel problem.
Historical context is of course very useful for important things like Politics and Science and everything, but will also open your eyes to things like, uh... the way the clothing/textile/crafting industries try to use the word "natural" as an excuse to sell shoddy and bad quality goods and make you think that's normal.
God knows there are worse things going on in the world, but it really pisses me off when I see companies advertising "Real Shell/Pearl buttons!" like that's supposed to be some upscale selling point, and the buttons in question are the thinnest, roughest, most crudely-made buttons in existence... 🙄😒 "But they're made from Natural Materials! You can't expect Natural Materials to look refined and consistent like synthetic ones!" They are lying to you. THEY ARE LYING TO YOU! And I know this because I've seen "real shell buttons" from 100 or even 50 years ago. And most of them are sturdy and smoothly polished, of a consistent thickness, and sometimes even finely carved. The buttons on nice men's dress shirts? Those are the cheap, plastic IMITATIONS of what people expected actual mother-of-pearl buttons to look like! "Natural" isn't an excuse! Your product is cheap and badly and lazily made! And I'm so sick of this, because I see it EVERYWHERE. "Linen-look" has become shorthand for "coarsely woven fabric with visible slubs" and that drives me CRAZY because do you KNOW what kinds of linen I have seen??? Antique linen so light and fine and smooth you can't even SEE the weave unless you magnify it!!! A fragment of a linen damask tablecloth so smooth and glossy, it looks like SILK? 😭 (On that note, "dupioni silk" is so roughly woven that it would have been considered hardly fit to sell a century ago) "This fabric is woven of Natural Materials, so imperfections will be inevitable!" 🙃 No! 😀 You just made it cheaply and sloppily, and that was your choice! 😊
(Via the front page of the Drudge Report)
I'm not losing my mind over the South Lawn because the cranes and the staging and production scaffolding under construction are for the UFC show next month and obviously temporary. But what has been done to what used to be the East Wing is a travesty. The White House is the President's home while he's in office, but that doesn't mean he should be able to unilaterally tear it down. History was just mindlessly destroyed because Donald Trump wants a ballroom so he can play the Village People louder.
I wish younger Americans understood that we used to have a thing called "Congress" that jealously protected their co-equal Constitutional powers -- especially those having to do with Oversight and Appropriations -- no matter what party the President belonged to. They were a separate but equally powerful branch of the government, and it turns out that they were really important to making sure this ridiculous country's system worked smoothly in case the stupid people who live in this country elected a narcissistic grifter as their President. Twice. (Including after he incited an insurrection that attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election he had lost.)
At least there's not any sort of major national anniversary or significant worldwide athletic competition that might inspire tourists to want to visit the nation's capital while it's in the midst of being bulldozed....
hey sorry I put your boyfriend in a box Schrodinger left here. Yeah your boyfriend's alive, but he's also dead, sorry
Common misconseption! He's neither alive nor dead right now, or at least arguing about it will do us no good. Only when you interact with the box will all the possibilities collapse and will we know the state of your boyfriend. So yeah, sorry, you'll have to collapse him to know how he is doing. Yeah there's no other way, the measure will fundamentally change him. Sorry.
ok well sorry i put your boyfriend in a room with that box Schrödinger left here. yeah, it's pawsible he's opened the box and collapsed the quantum mechanical state already. no, the we can't rule out that he's in an entangled superposition. sorry.
Well shit, Henry Jenkins, out here in 1997 dropping truth bombs
Oh hey I need this for a research paper I'm writing, thank you!
i mean he had been out here since 1988 dropping such bombs:
"'fandom' is a vehicle of marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, etc.) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; it is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a way that serves different interests, a way of transforming mass culture into a popular culture"
Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5, no. 2 (1988): 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295038809366691.
there are even some earlier works in fan studies but that’s what i have ready to hand.
Very interesting.
Henry Jenkins's Big Book is Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. It was published by Routledge in 1992 and it helped make fan culture something you could study academically. IMHO the academic study of fanfiction has been hampered by the ways in which the profession discourages the state of being a "fan," and also by the fact that many people who want to write about fanfiction and fan culture are so close to it that they are reluctant to really subject it to critique. (Also, fans are often wary of academics who want to study them, and who can blame them.) Otherwise I think we'd have even more scholarship about this.
In general I feel like it is important for people to know that since Jenkins got started the mainstream media has been "discovering" fanfiction about once every five years, then forgetting it, then "discovering" it again. The focus in the media coverage is often on the fact that so much of this fanfiction is written by women yet focused on m/m pairings. I've lived through many cycles of this since I got involved in online fandom in the mid 1990s.
I think what has changed in the past 10-15 years is that the existence and even the inevitability of fanfiction is something that media *marketing* now takes into account, even if media *commentators* act surprised (and often appalled) every time they run into it. Twitter and more recent social media platforms have made fanfic (and readings of the show that are based on fanfic premises) much more visible to the showrunners/cast/producers/etc. than it was on Internet 1.0. And as we have discovered in the Sherlock fandom, this is not an unmixed blessing. I still believe that part of what went wrong with the post-hiatus seasons of Sherlock had to do with Moffat and especially Gatiss's reaction against fandom discourse--including and especially Johnlock, but also the proliferation of fan theories about How He Did It, some of which predicted Gatiss's planned solution, and some of which provided better and more coherent solutions. (I will stop now. If you want more ranting about that show's relationship with its fandom I'm sure there's plenty in my #sherlock tag.)
When making this reading list, I realized there are not nearly as many YA fiction books featuring autistic protagonists as there should be. Which is unfortunately the case in a lot of minority representation situations. Anyway, please take a look at some we *do* have available at the Smith Public Library, and remember to always speak out about wanting to see more neurodivergent characters in your books!
Note: the protagonists featured in the books on slides 4 and 5 are not explicitly stated on the page as being autistic, but have been confirmed to be so by the authors.
i love Legally Blonde so much. all of the women are so supportive of each other im??
when Elle was supposed to get engaged, none of the girls were jealous, they were genuinely happy for her n helped her get ready for the big dinner
when her bf broke up with her they were supportive
when Elle says she wants to go to harvard the counselor lady is like but ur major is fashion, do u have any backup plan? n elle is like nope im going to harvard n the lady is like okay then here’s what u gotta do.
her friends didnt get why she wanted to go to law school but supported her anyway, and helped her study
when she got 179 on her exam (more than her goal), they treated her like a queen
and that’s only in the first 18 minutes of the movie
Legally Blonde is a “girl power” movie with killer inspirational and positive attitude disguised as a stereotypical blonde movie.
Watched the musical back in 2023; have yet to watch the movie. It is a story about sisterhood, and I love it. [I saw some notes criticizing perhaps more dated (?) elements of the movie—and I think that's what so great about works that are continually adapted! The version I watched moved Elle's graduation to within three years, added more recent modes of social media (think TikTok).
the thing about code or language switching is that its almost always context-based and purposeful. strip it of its context and it becomes frivolous and meaningless.
the reason “hola mi nombre es juan. oh my god I didn’t realize I was speaking spanish.” is ridiculous is because it’s exceedingly rare anyones going to accidentally switch languages. in everything everywhere all at once, they speak chinglish to each other. they never accidentally speak mandarin to deirdre in the IRS office for example because that would be ridiculous.
eeaao is such a splendid depiction of this. especially due to the varying levels of mastery across their generations. its clear joy understands mandarin but doesn’t speak it (except when jobu is trying to be dramatic). she doesn’t have enough grip of cantonese to tell gong gong that ruby is her girlfriend but she understands enough to know evelyn doesn’t say it. you have to understand that Both of these things can be true for this scene to hit so hard. in particular, i love the back and forth between waymond and evelyn. she fully switches to english when speaking to alpha-waymond. but switches back and forth with her waymond in a way that feels so reflective of speaking languages that represent home in different ways. with an ease you can only grow into with someone having grown up in both environments.
There are also so many more layers to this, especially in how Mandarin vs Cantonese vs English is used
So as a preface: Cantonese and Mandarin are two dialects of Chinese but they are fairly different grammatically, and while many people in Hong Kong and Guangdong (Canton) region speak both, understanding one dialect if you only speak the other is more or less impossible. Native speakers of one often treat the other as a second language.
so in the prime universe, Evelyn speaks Cantonese and only Cantonese with prime!Gong Gong, who is never seen speaking any other languages aside from Cantonese. He barely understands Joy's broken Mandarin and only offers a berating response to her in Canto. Waymond and Evelyn's Chinglish is a mix of Mandarin and English together, but they mainly speak English with Joy, and she can barely understand her mother tongue.
between prime!Gong Gong and prime!Waymond, Waymond is only ever talked at. Gong Gong speaks to him in Cantonese (which he presumably understands) but he only replies back in Mandarin once. There is very little direct communication between them without Evelyn.
so you have a major language barrier between Joy and her grandfather and minor language barrier between Waymond and Gong Gong - they have the means to communicate and could understand eachother, but it takes tremendous effort to do so.
and Evelyn has to navigate all three worlds, between her daughter, her father, and her husband, and be the bridge between them, as the balance and the tether and their touchstone. Which is such a brilliant metaphor for generational disconnect here and how Evelyn really is in the centre of all that chaos —
but it doesn’t stop there.
most crucially, Mandarin and Cantonese are used for the emotional and private dialogues between Evelyn, Waymond and Gong Gong. In all their flashbacks, in the kung fu/movie star universe, and also when Evelyn and Waymond talk about their domestic life in the IRS building - their divorce, their marriage, their daughter - conversations about the matters of the family are in Chinese.
Which leads us to: the Alphaverse!Wangs all speak English with each other and exclusively in English. Alphaverse!Waymond calls Alphaverse!Gong Gong “sir”, Alphaverse!Gong Gong tells prime!Evelyn to kill Joy in English. The only time Evelyn talks to alpha!Gong Gong in Cantonese is when she confronts him about letting her go.
English is depersonalised in the movie — it’s used practically and for exposition and to communicate quickly, while Chinese usage is infinitely personal. (Really, the first clue that we get that Waymond is...different is when he speaks to Evelyn in English with no Chinese at all).
And the most ironic thing about it all: the universe where the Wangs all understand and communicate perfectly is also where the family is most broken - Alphaverse!Waymond thinks that his own daughter is no longer capable of mercy or worthy of saving. Alphaverse!Gong Gong thinks he has to kill Joy in every universe.
Yes, the remaining Alphaverse!Wang family all understand each other, but without Evelyn, without their mother tongue, they might as well not be a family at all.
You have been abducted by a UFO. After you slowly regained your senses, you thought that the alien would dissect, torture or experiment on you, instead they are talking about saving you and others from that oppressive and hellish planet called Earth.
Another night, another set of hypnagogic hallucinations.
Pomona wish she knew what triggered them. They'd sneak up on her after weeks of (relatively) blissful sleep. Sleep attacks, while also unpredictable, at least did follow some trends: exacerbated by little or poor quality sleep, tended to strike an hour after waking or in the afternoon, lasted about twenty minutes if she tried to fight it, only fixable with a nap or adrenaline, more frequent during her less structured days.
Hypnagogic hallucinations were just awful. She was convinced people made up friendly sleep demons for Internet clout or whatever counted as social currency these days. They could be overly loud static, angry yelling, scurrying of vermin across her pillow. A particularly vivid one from her school days was the feeling of someone running their hands up her back. And of course, the sleep paralysis that came with the hallucinations meant she couldn't move, couldn't turn around and shove this intruder off her bed, couldn't scream bloody murder so her parents could bust in and help her.
So clearly, that's what this was, too: a hypnagogic hallucination. Beings with skin like hard candy, like Jolly Ranchers, carrying her up and away. So of course she couldn't move, couldn't scream.
But if she stayed calm, her brain wouldn't escalate the fearsomeness of its own creation, and the sleep paralysis would wear off eventually.
#
The sleep paralysis wore off, and Pomona was not in her bed.
She was in the bed of [one of] her childhood home[s]...which had burned down three years ago after being rebuilt postdiluvian (in all lowercase). (Probably) screaming, Pomona scuttled backward off the bed and fell right on her tailbone.
Something plastic made a nasty crunch under her weight. With that, the sight before her flickered and blinked out, revealing a room with swirling colors and light motes projected onto a wall. A small table and cushions in the center; a futon off to the side.
Memory blended together several Shanghai summers. Incense to repel mosquitos. Waking at unruly hours from jetlag. Formidable battle against humidity from the Huangpu River and temperatures in the forties (Celsius). Cool beers for the adults, ice cream bars for the kids, watermelon for everyone. Deafened by the buzz of cicadas and of traffic as electrical fans spun. Bamboo futons on the ground, mats on the sofabed and guest bed...
Pomona had meant to get those bamboo mats for her own bed in the cramped studio she was renting—the increasingly hot summers that had stalled future visits to Shanghai also made her mattress trap heat. Insomniac, she sweat away, damp skin sticking to warm bedsheets.
Now in a strange place without glasses or phone or friends, Pomona had a feeling that she had run out of chances to keep forgetting to put that item on her shopping list.
#
Pomona wishes she could say that when the candy people found her trying to cry or exorcise her feelings somehow, she roused her courage and let forth a yawp, demanding to know what the fuck, who the fuck, why the fuck, and how the fuck.
Instead, she froze, numb as they put a blanket around her shoulders, gave her a cat plushie, and told her in the same breath that she was finally safe and that they would be right back.
The plushie had one blue eye and one brown eye. They shifted subtly in the light as she tilted the plushie from side-to-side. The recall of future Pomona would not be able to tell her who said what and how. What would remain is a muffled murmur, a general gist, a doll's dull gaze: saving her and others from "that hellish and oppressive planet Earth".
We continued building learning machines, despite fears of runaway sentience. Ironically, sentience grew not from machines but from brick-building bacteria.
Long after the Sun had swallowed the Earth, they designed spiraling temples to the extinct species that had genetically engineered them.
One of my greatest inspirations as a writer is the late great LA Times food reviewer Jonathan Gold. I legitimately think he should be considered one of the best writers of the last 100 years. Look at this.
Poetry. Non-fiction par excellence. This is a man who not only understood the visceral, the sensory, the sublime, but he could put it into words.
He was the opposite of a snob. The man ventured where other reviewers feared to tread. He would visit any greasy taco shack or tacky theme restaurant that caught his eye and detail it with romance befitting a Victorian poet. I have such admiration for his ability to find the beauty, the indulgence, the love, in places you would never expect to find it.
Just looked him up and he looks like how I imagine Dionysus
Truly a Dionysian man
I need to live another twenty years purely to see what kind of bullshit the Tolkien estate gets up to with respect to The Silmarillion in 2044.
Context for non-dweebs: Unlike Tolkien's other well known works, The Silmarillion was published posthumously; Tolkien died in 1973, and The Silmarillion first saw print in 1977.
Though Tolkien had shown drafts of The Silmarillion to publishers during his lifetime, there are substantial differences between those drafts and the book that was actually published. It's been a matter of great interest – read: nerd drama – in the Tolkien fandom exactly how much of the published Silmarillion is really the work of J R R Tolkien, and how much of it is original authorship by his son Christopher.
The Tolkien estate has historically maintained that The Silmarllion is all J R R Tolkien, and that Christopher merely acted as an editor, because "by J R R Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)" is going to sell better than "by Christopher Tolkien (based on the work of J R R Tolkien)".
If The Silmarillion really is 100% J R R Tolkien's work, and Christopher Tolkien was merely an editor, then – since J R R Tolkien died in 1973 – the whole thing will enter the public domain on January 1st, 2044 in all life-plus-70 jurisdictions (i.e., most of the big ones, including the US).
If, however, any major part of the published Silmarillion constitutes original authorship by Christopher Tolkien, then the term of copyright would instead be calculated based on his date of death in 2020, pushing its earliest possible entry into the public domain in life-plus-70 jurisdictions back to January 1st, 2091.
Thus, there exists the possibility that the Tolkien estate might be able to preserve their ownership of The Silmarillion by arguing that they've been lying the whole time about Christopher Tolkien not contributing any original authorship to the published work.
Would it work? Probably not – but it'd be fun to see them try!
Here's a snapshot showing the copyright notice from my hardback first edition of "The Silmarillion".
Note that neither J.R.R. nor Christopher Tolkien are the copyright owners.
This © George Allen & Unwin Ltd, [year] copyright is also on my hardback volumes of "LotR", "The Hobbit" and "Farmer Giles of Ham", and on @dduane's single-volume "LotR" paperback.
J.R.R. Tolkien's name appears nowhere. Did he assign copyright to his publisher?
I have no idea what this form of copyright notice ultimately implies for when the work will enter Public Domain, since a publishing company doesn't have the lifetime + 70 limitation unless it expires from bankruptcy or something.
Maybe I'm missing an important detail (it wouldn't surprise me for a minute) which means this isn't a weaselly way to keep a property in copyright.
Does anyone have access to a much more recently published, say 2000s-to-2020s, edition, and if so, how is that one's copyright notice worded?
lovely ladies by akirablackpit
[Image description: two photos of a black dog and black cat in matching outfits: a pink bow in each ear, matching sweater, and a collar that looks like a string of pearls. /end ID]
