If you want to talk to me about Critical Role/Legend of Vox Machina or Legend of Drizzt or anything I post about, *please* message me, you're always welcome
it's been a bad year for essential workers, mental health, small businesses and probably many of the people reading this, but it's been a great year for hot takes
i spent an absolutely insane amount of time on this and in doing so realised i’m probably more deranged than some of the original people in the tweets. i feel like i’ve been on a journey
As you know, counting sheeps is perfect for sleep. Sheeps take that job very seriously. But some are still learning. It’s fine, I don’t think Wolf Hunter minds. 🐑🐑🐑
my impression of set theory as a field so far is that it primarily consists of doing roughly the same thing as those videos where someone finds out how much you can change the value of pi in the source code of doom before the game crashes
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Naomi Kritzer's Obstetrix is a new, tense thriller in the mode of Atwood's Handmaid's Tale and Alderman's The Power; it's a beautifully turned, claustrophobic horror novel about an obstetrician who's been kidnapped by a Christian cult obsessed with fertility:
Kritzer is a master of building scenarios that require her characters to express and resolve a wide variety of complex and contradictory emotions. Her breakout novel, Catfishing on the CatNet is a charming and deceptively goofy story about an AI trained on the impeccable vibes in a really solid groupchat becoming sentient and demanding…cat pictures. This is the setup for a warm (but intense) novel of internet-mediated friendship and IRL mutual aid:
Then there's her incredibly prescient 2015 story "So Much Cooking," about people in lockdown during a pandemic. For obvious reasons, it enjoyed an revival in 2020, with Kritzer penning an excellent essay reflecting on what it means to have thought through the implications of a disaster that is now upon us:
In 2023, Kritzer published one of the most memorable YA novels I've read, Liberty's Daughter, which is set on a libertarian seastead and told from the point of view of the daughter of the cult's founder:
Liberty's Daughter is basically what you'd get if you rewrote a Heinlein YA novel from the perspective of one of the kids, who had to live with a Heinlein-type dad (Heinlein was childless and had some of the most batshit child-rearing ideas, which he managed to make sound bizarrely plausible). There's a lot of sf that is "in dialogue" with Heinlein (including some of mine), but no one nailed RAH like Kritzer.
Then there's Obstetrix; it's got one of those admirably propulsive setups. Doctor Elizabeth Gwynn is an obstetrician who performed an abortion to save her patient's life, only to be dragged into the culture wars by North Dakota's crusading attorney general, who charged her with felony murder and offered to let her plead out if she would admit that she was wrong to do it, as an example to other OBs who might be tempted. Now, Dr Liz lives in Minneapolis, where her savings are running out and no one wants to hire an obstetrician who's done time.
Then, Dr Liz gets a cold-call from a midwifing service that wants to hire her as an on-call doc. It's a weird offer from out of the blue, but Dr Liz can't afford to pass up a chance at steady work. She finds herself in a residence that the midwives work out of, and the nice woman there offers her a cup of tea. That's when the world fades to black, as the drugs in the tea take hold.
Liz sporadically regains consciousness in a van during a multi-day drive, and already she is thinking about her escape – even as she is becoming increasingly aware of how truly terrible her situation is. When she finally arrives at the cult's remote compound, frozen and isolated, she learns that she has been kidnapped because the fertility-obsessed cult needs an OB, especially since the daughter of the cult's founder, the "pastor," is carrying a high-risk pregnancy.
All that is in the first few pages, which leaves plenty of room for an expertly spun second act in which we get Kritzer's trademark interpersonal work, where carefully chosen and smartly wrought small details flesh out a picture of the complex dynamics of life inside a "high-demand" cult, from the way that members are manipulated into policing each other's compliance to the internal processes that keep members cowed even when they're unobserved by others. It's a brilliant work of sociological speculation and the engine that drives it is a series of maneuvers and gambits whereby Dr Liz hopes to make her way to safety.
I won't spoil the end, except to say that it is exciting, satisfying, and has a sweet denouement that does real justice to the whole book. All told, this is a read-in-one-sitting thriller that does as much to illuminate the workings and dynamics of patriarchy and religion as any gender studies class. It's peak Kritzer (so far), and that's saying something.
The above is a video shared by smrchildsadness on Twitter, showing a person participating in a pride parade exchanging a pride flag with a person standing on his (am using his pronoun based on the TikToks/Tweets of what happened) doorway who had a Portuguese flag. There are sounds of cheers and crying and the two people hug each other as they exchange the flags. The man at the doorway then waved kisses to the crowd within the pride parade.
The Tweet says: "NO YOU DONT UNDERSTAND HE WAS WAVING THE PORTUGUESE FLAG BECAUSE HE DIDN'T HAVE A PRIDE FLAG AND THEY TRADED FLAGS AND HE'S SO EMOTIONAL TO GET HIS OWN PRIDE FLAG I'M EMOTIONALLY RUINED"
For context, apparently they were worried that maybe he's a nationalist because he was waving the Portuguese flag and some nationalists opposing the pride march were waving that flag. But upon interacting with him, it turns out he didn't have have a pride flag and he wanted to wave *a* flag in support of the pride march. So they had an exchange and now he has his own pride flag 😭🥹.
The image above is a Tweet by kunwara_ladkaa that says "I'm crying so much right now (Image taken by Manuel Fernando Araújo/Lusa)". The image shows the same man from the pride parade crying as he hugs his new pride flag.
The above image is a Tweet by dudz_zZzz that says "ainda não parei de pensar nele," which according to Google translate from Portuguese to English is "I still haven't stopped thinking about him." The image is a drawing of the person from the pride parade, crying as he hugs his new pride flag.
His name is António Fernandes, and you can find the original article where he spoke about this event here
This elderly gentleman lives alone in Porto, when he saw the march coming up his street all he knew was he wanted to participate, so he ran home to get the only flag he had to wave as they passed by, when they did he was overcome with emotion and called over one of the activists, they hugged and exchanged flags, he felt so overwhelmed that he could only hold it and cry.
This isn't a story about a closeted elderly man, António lives and has been living alone for many years now and that little moment made him feel included in something for the first time in many years.
Says the article:
"The act was "of support”, guarantees the man, especially because “each one is as they are and we are all the same”. “The joy I felt at this moment. I cried,” he recalled, still emotional when looking at the photograph offered to him during this report.
However, even though it reached thousands of people, the moment screams a feeling of belonging, of joy and also a portrait of loneliness as a consequence of aging.
Behind that door, whose image spread across the country, António is the portrait of a condition that affects many others like him. He lives alone, but the walls of his home are full of memories of a life shared and full of love. “Memories I preserve,” he stresses.
He's not gay, nor does he need to be to support and respect the cause.
“We all have the same color blood. We are all the same.”
Still with an emotional look glued to the photograph that immortalized his gesture at the march, António remembers: “I felt embraced by all of them”. After a sigh, he says: “See this photo? I want to take it to my coffin.”
Every time I mention furniture on this website a bunch of people in the notes for some reason assume that I live within Ikea's delivery radius. I have absolutely no idea why people assume this. Ikea is six hours away. Also their furniture is fragile and I do not like to sit on it, but mostly, they are six fucking hours away.
Congrats to every reply like this for failing to understand the fundamental definition of an accent. Of course you think you sound normal! It's the way you speak!
stormborns
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
gummygunk
titsay
baratheonpilled
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
