censorship is ✨bad✨

for literature, writing, reading, and languages

[fangorn-forest]

*tom bombadil fighting off the barrow-wights to save the hobbits* 🎶oh the weather outside is wightful🎶

[theonequeeneverygrouphas]

Oh Eva Stratt how I adore you in every version of you. Slapping Grace in the book and walking him like a dog in both book and movie. I deeply love the eminent kindness Sandra Hüller plays you with. The slight awkwardness she interacts woth Grace with, singing to him when he's conflicted and disheartened, forcing rooms full of people to clap for him (multiple times). Showing such favoritism and trust towards him the Petrova Taskfoce think they're fucking. The way she commandeered a Chinese aircraft carrier and it was dubbed "Stratt's Vat".

The world's whipping boy is my angel bro.

[l-mouse-l]

I noticed that Grace likes to be bossed around. Not in like a kinky way (I mean, maybe who knows), but like if he isn't, he doesn't really know what to do with himself. Obviously, he can be independent. That's not what I mean. I mean that when he's in certain situations that he doesn't have strong feelings on, he gets conflicted and panics. Stratt would boss him around, and sure he'd pout, but it's mainly for show. He doesn't actually mind being bossed around. Same with Rocky, Rocky bosses him around and he puts up a small fight occasionally but most of the time he's completely content with being bossed around and I feel like a lot of people forget that it isn't a bad thing that Grace gets bossed around.

[writingdose]

the fic you write doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, it just has to be the story you want to explore for yourself and your own enjoyment

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’m kinda surprised that nalbinding isn’t as popular as crochet and knitting tbh because it has an even lower barrier of entry tools wise and unlike crochet and knitting it makes fabric that you can cut.

I guess it’s because it’s slower or something.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Nalbinding aka needle binding is when you use yarn and a big sewing needle to make fabric btw

It also has a lot of different kinds of stitches you can do that make different densities of fabric.

Some people even make rugs.

[thewolfwaitsbelow]

I feel like part of it might be casual people are generally aware of the existence of crochet and knitting, even if they don’t know very much about either, but have never heard of nalbinding

[what-even-is-thiss]

Yeah I hadn’t heard of it until recently and I ordered a big bone needle for myself to try it out and that should be arriving soon.

I was surprised that I’d never heard of it though. It’s older than knitting and crocheting and even though it’s been done all over the world it’s super relevant to Nordic culture and my grandmother and I are both into keeping in touch with our roots a bit so I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it.

It seems like the sort of thing that would be popular even if not as popular as crocheting and knitting, considering the low barrier of entry.

[what-even-is-thiss]

You also don’t need a bunch of different sized needles for nalbinding or whatever. The size of the stitch is controlled either completely freehand or by pulling it against one of your fingers. Most people who have a lot of nalbinding needles seem to either have tried out wood, bone, and metal ones to see which kind they liked or they enjoy carving wood or bone and like making their own needles as an extra hobby.

It’s also a lot easier to freehand and adjust as you go than crochet or knitting and you mostly go by inches instead of rows and number of stitches so a large number of accessories like stitch markers or whatever isn’t really necessary.

Maybe the lack of accessories also makes it unpopular idk. People do like collecting things in their nests.

[the-color-of-sound-is-space]

I've been wanting to do so, I cannot find anyone who can teach me, and any books I can find on it are Ass in the Visual Learning department. Otherwise I'd be making the hell outta some nalbinded fabric

[what-even-is-thiss]

I found this channel by a nice man who makes up close tutorials

Happy Needlebinding

I create videos on YouTube to learn people how to needlebind using two fingers and your thumb. Needlebinding helps people to relax, relieve

[what-even-is-thiss]

I thought this would be kind of a niche post to make but I was quickly reminded that I’m on tumblr, the website full of gay people with one billion hobbies.

[projectorthus]

Grace sends this off as a "fuck you" to Stratt and unintentionally eases 40+ years of horrific guilt.

(40+ factoring in the Hail Mary mission, then the time it would take to get back to Erid and the time it would take for the message to get to Earth. Probably closer to 50+ actually).

(I do think Stratt felt bad. She did a lot of terrible things to save the planet, and obviously felt guilt for sending Grace off. I imagine the time waiting to hear back from the Hail Mary was torture for everyone, but she essentially sent three people off to their deaths, one unwillingly. Hearing that Grace made it out alive would be a huge weight off her shoulders.)

[glumshoe]

obviously we know in our hearts that Jabba the Hutt is not a dragon. that’s ridiculous.

But Is Jabba A Dragon Though?

he has the body plan of a lindworm. I suppose you could argue that he is too thick to be considered “serpentine”, but he is longer than he is wide, and not entirely unlike an especially chunky gaboon viper. his upright posture distracts from the fact that he’s built like an abbreviated mole lizard, which are lindworms.

and then of course he acts like a dragon. I don’t know if Star Wars uses gold or something else but whatever it is I’m sure he hordes it. eats people sometimes. disturbing taste for princesses. knights come to kick his ass.

Is Jabba A Dragon?

[the-creep-in-the-hawaiian-shirt]

Jabba the Hut isn’t a dragon. He doesn’t fly. He’s more like a slug.

[glumshoe]

Ah, but he uses a hoversled, which is much like flying:

And not all creatures under the broad category of “dragon” fly. Lindworms don’t fly, neither do wyrms, drakes, sea serpents, or hydras. Lungs/Chinese dragons can fly but they don’t use wings to do it. Jabba should not be disqualified as a dragon simply because he uses repulsor technology to achieve airborne locomotion.

Jabba is unlike a slug in so many ways. He has jointed limbs, a hard internal skeleton, a skull with fixed spherical eyeballs, and no sensory tentacles or pneumostome. He is capable of facultative parthenogenesis--like komodo dragons and other squamates--continuously growing larger and living for hundreds of years hoarding wealth and power and preying on princesses. His resemblance to a slug is superficial, though we may describe him as such in an insulting fashion... like how a dragon may be called a “worm”.

Also he can and does eat people.

Jabba the Hutt is a dragon and I have convinced myself of this.

[goomymegpoid]

No he aint bro hes a fuckin alien. dragons have to originate from the planet earth hes from a galaxy far far away.

[glumshoe]

The dragons from both The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey and The Pit Dragon Trilogy by Jane Yolen are aliens from extraterrestrial planets called Pern and Austar IV, respectively. 

Jabba the Hutt is a dragon.

[wardenaristraith]

I think you will find that Hutts lack a backbone, commonly known as a spine, which, for the most part, dragons have either litterially or figuratively.

[glumshoe]

Jabba’s motions, limbs, and posture are clearly dependent upon the use of a hard interior support system. Lacking an exoskeleton and being unable to simply squelch out of Leia’s chokehold suggests he is not simply moving around via the hydrolics of a muscular hydrostat. Besides, there’s this art from the making of The Phantom Menace:

[direhuman]

ship this is getting dangerously close to morphological taxonomy

do you want a plucked chicken swung at you? because this is how you get a plucked chicken swung at you.

[glumshoe]

“Dragon” is like “worm”, in my opinion. It’s not a taxonomy because the variety of creatures referred to as “worms” don’t even belong to related phylums. A horsehair worm and a nightcrawler are not related but they share an innate “worminess”. A velvet worm has many legs and is still counted as a worm-thing. Like I’ve said before, “worm” isn’t a taxonomy; it’s a lifestyle.

Dragons are the same way. It’s an umbrella term, and while some irritating pedants insist that only a four-legged creature with words god can be considered a dragon, they only say that to make sure everyone in the room knows that they know what a wyvern is. Wyverns and lindworms and amphitheres are obviously all under the dragon umbrella.

If these things are dragons, then “dragon” is as fluid a category as “worm”:

Jabba has more stereotypical “dragon traits” than some dragons do. He doesn’t hit every point, but a dragon is a worm is a dragon is a worm.

[valkylander]

My general position is that the use of the word "dragon" to encompass all these disparate creatures is a bad thing and a relic of eurocentric colonialism. A Chinese Long is not the same thing as an English Dragon, nor is a wyvern or an amphithere, and calling them "dragons" belies the cultural differences in which these disparate creatures arose.

In terms of narrative purpose and lifestyle, Janba fills the role that a Dragon does in many stories, however. I would argue Jabba is a dragon in the same sense that a Tsuchigumo is.

[glumshoe]

I think enforcing a strict cultural differentiation would eliminate most dragons from fiction. Fiction, which supplies most modern dragons, does not stick to a strict historical consistency in dragon-depiction, either visually or behaviorally.

Take, for example, the dragons from The Last Airbender. They’re clearly dragons, as they breathe fire and have wings, but they’re also more like elemental spirits that visually and behaviorally resemble lungs more than they resemble, say, Smaug. Do their similarities to lungs disqualify them from dragonhood?

Also, it’s not like the medieval Welsh concept of a “dragon” evolved in a vacuum. There are mythical creatures from around the world that bear strong resemblances to That Specific Creature Which We Are Apparently Now Inisisting Is The Only True Dragon. Welsh and British folklore was surely being influenced by mythology from disparate cultures. 

I am firmly against declaring wyverns “not dragons” because even in British cultural history, the distinction only arose out of the technicalities of heraldry, not folklore or even art. 

[maulusque]

The only thing that Jabba lacks in terms of dragon qualifications: the innately obvious “dragony-ness” that makes most people take one look and go “oh yeah that’s a dragon”. But i don’t think that that’s a REQUIREMENT of dragon-hood. Like, what the fuck is that thing down there?

That thing does not have innate dragony-ness to me. It looks like a turtle with tentacles. 

But, while I think the answer to “can we consider Jabba the Hutt to be a dragon” is yes, no one has asked whether or not Jabba would consider himself to be a dragon.

there’s a whole list on wookiepedia of dragons in star wars and it turns out there’s a bunch of creatures that have “dragon” in their name and they all have quite a lot of dragony-ness but also none of them seem to reach anything beyond semi-sentience. So maybe Jabba has enough dragon-y qualities to be considered a dragon, but he himself would be insulted if you called him one.

[maulusque]

@glumshoe

i’m reading Maul: Lockdown by Joe Schreiber and

he’s a fucking dragon 

[dragons-locator]

@glumshoe

you make some good points and also I ABSOLUTELY HATE YOU FOR THIS

fine.

DRAGON LOCATED

i hate this i hate this i hate this

[officialdragonposts]

official dragon post

unfortunately

[alldragonsaregood]

Not unfortunately. This is great and awesome

This is exactly what I mean when I say "All Dragons Are Good"

You give multiple full reasons in calling him a dragon, and they all check out. Jabba's a wingless worm-like dragon, and there is nothing unfortunate about that.

[dragonheritageposts]

Dragon Heritage Post

[annabelle--cane]

yknow I'm feeling a bit brave so I will venture to say what this blighted essay's pitch actually is: reading project hail mary (novel and film) as a ravishment fantasy. in both main threads of the narrative grace is brought wildly out of his element and pulled into the orbit of a mysterious foreign stranger who is significantly stronger / richer / more powerful than him, forced to accept unsolicited lavish gifts and personal praise despite protests and discomfort, and made to live in isolated locations in extremely close proximity to these people with no say in the matter, all of which are common motifs in ravishment fantasies. on her own, stratt also brings in other common motifs of restraints, drugging, being above the law, multiple kidnappings (I'm doing crazy things with the classical definition of "rape" as in "abduction" and its shared etymology with "rapture" as in "being taken to the heavens"), and the very specific yet still common motif of "otherwise trustworthy partner goes too far and doesn't take 'no' for an answer." rocky on his own brings in the overprotective flavor common to a lot of dark romance novel heroes, i.e. "I make sure you sleep and I like to watch you while you do it, I make sure you eat enough even if you've got baggage about it, I make inhuman displays of strength when you're injured, and as long as I'm around I'll make sure nothing bad ever happens to you ever again."

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

my hopes for writing this are twofold: a) to address the question I sometimes see phm audience members come away with of "if grace likes his life by the end and doesn't seem that mad about all of that, is the message supposed to be 'violation of bodily autonomy is good, actually?'", and b) to lightly resist one of the prevailing notions in the study of forced-sex fantasies, that ravishment fantasies are solely abstracted and fantastical and pleasurable and are completely 100% separate from fearful paranoid imaginings of / flashbacks to realistic sexual violence.

[annabelle--cane]

oh also: the most common interpretation of why people have ravishment fantasies is that it allows the fantasist to disavow a desire they feel ashamed of because, in the fiction of the forcing, they don't *want* it at all, they're being made to do whatever it is and can't be considered at fault. as I allude to in my final paragraph of the original post, I think it's a tad more nuanced, but there's definitely a lot of truth to that. grace can tell stratt that he's not smart or important or capable or brave or selfless enough to do what she wants, but she'll ignore it, make him do it anyway, and kit him out with skilled staff members and expensive lab equipment and coffee just the way he likes it. it's a fantasy of being respected and heroic and good whether he likes it or not.

with rocky, the fantasy is of being forced to be loved and protected. rocky decides to initiate contact, he decides that he's moving into the hail mary, he decides that he's always going to watch grace sleep even if grace says he doesn't need it, he decides to gift grace the fuel to get home even when grace pretends he doesn't want it, and he decides he's not going to let grace die to save him even when grace says he's made his choice. the two scenarios allow grace to experience the rewards of being selfless without needing to be so gauche as to ever say he thinks he's that good of a person AND to experience the rewards of being selfish without saying he thinks he deserves to be cared for.

[manyblinkinglights]

#if it’s an order i’ll take it thank you

[andhumanslovedstories]

I want you to think about the most American (derogatory) piece of art—what it looks like, what its subject is, how you would obtain it. Rotate that image in your mind for a sec. Done that? Okay? Now I will present my nominee for the title

Only $14.99 at Ross. And there were two more of them.

[azaablue]

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be a part of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

[breealtair]

I'm really enjoying Game Changer's take on Dante's Inferno

[fuckthisshit-ugh]

please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

reblog. share. don't scroll past.

[animentality]

[the-immortal-restless]

I think people forget that Stratt amnesticized Grace with the goal that Ilyukina and Yao would be there to help him, y’know NOT DIE, and then THEY DIED before he woke up.

So like she gets the recordings and realizes Yao and Ilyukina are dead before he wakes up so he’s got no pilot, no engineer, and no memories.

And then you also have to remember that the EXISTENCE of these recordings and the fact they were accompanied by the Taumoeba means that an amnesticized Grace somehow managed to save earth without a pilot or engineer and shoddy memory that only vaguely gives him enough to work with as he works.

Like what the fuck man.

[theredponcho]

(Me trying to write my fanfic)

Me: Alright genus brain come up with something! >:D

My brain: … I am hungry.

Me: You have failed me brain.

[weepylucifer]

You know how we call things "pseudoscience"... the media analysis that's being done on twitter and tumblr should be pseudohumanities

[sword-wielding-sapphic]

first rule of fandom is everything goes back to destiel

second rule of fandom is everything goes back to kirk/spock

third rule of fandom is everything goes back to holmes & watson

fourth rule of fandom is everything goes back to achilles & patroclus

[sword-wielding-sapphic]

the funny thing is. I originally typed out "fifth rule of fandom is everything goes back to gilgamesh & enkidu" but then I thought 'no, I can't trust that people will be familiar with the epic of gilgamesh'

I should have known. nerd ass website.