Hi there! My name is Cee, I'm 26 and I'm starting a digital garden here, or more, a place where I can be a little pretentious but also hopefully helpful compared to my main, which is mostly for shitposting and having a good old time. I think it is helpful to have a place where I can switch into a more focused mind rather than just scrolling aimlessly.
This will be a place where I am intentioned with my relationship to the internet. Everything will have a slightly wizards-flavor, because I'm obsessed with M*hoyaku but I hope it will also be a place where we can ask more of ourselves and other. To focus on improving indefinitely.
Censorship, which is either just plain decency, or nasty-nice prudery, according to your own particular viewpoint, is finally with us - whether or not to stay, no man may foretell.
Censorship, of course, has always been with us to an extent, but of late it has become almost omnipresent. As a result, there has been a complete revamping of work in many of the studios.
The bathing beauties, of most of the companies specializing in them, for instance, have become almost things of the past. Some of the fair young things who formerly didn't get much chance to do any acting because the directors kept them busy displaying more obvious charms, have graduated i n t o honest-to-goodness actorines. Some of 'em have taken small parts in m o r e serious productions; some have become leading ladies, and a few have become real stars.
A whole lot more have lost their jobs, and been forced out of the game altogether.
The bathing beauties aren't the only ones affected, though, by a long shot. Sex films, of which, a while back, we had almost a sickening superfluity, have either been toned down to Sunday school standards, or discontinued altogether. And pageant productions in wh'ch the main feature frequently consisted of scenes in which many flowing haired maidens disported clad in a smile, and a girdle - and perhaps a pair of sandals, have just about quit.
And so on, right down the line.
Looking at the censorship question without rancor, there's a whole lot to be said on both sides.
Those in favor of it declare film producers had reached a point where art was abandoned for smut. Mothers and fathers both declared picture plays were getting so erotic they didn't want their children to see them. In fact, they said, they didn't particularly care about seeing such films themselves. Their objections were sweeping, too. They objected first to the titles, 'as being too suggestive. Then they objected to the sub titles, for the same reason. And finally, they objected to the pictures themselves.
Children, they said, grew worldly wise, all too soon, at best, without having such knowledge forced before their very eyes, on the silver sheet.
All of which sounds logical enough.
But, let's hear the other side.
The first argument of the producer against the censor, is the old French adage "Honi Soit Qui Mali Pense" - which is to say, "Evil to him who evil thinks - or, more simply still, "to the pure, all things are pure."
Again, they argue, a film highly objectionable to a prude might, in reality, carry a powerful moral object lesson.
And finally they point to the fact that what some nasty-nice people object to as being sensual is, in reality, mere artistic realism.
Too much censorship, it is pointed out, leaves the film company no material to work with except such action as dramatizations of the Elsie Dinsmore book - which probably wouldn't draw very big crowds.
1. The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden (Winner)
An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge - for readers of Patricia Highsmith, Sarah Waters and Ian McEwan's Atonement. It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother's country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep - as a gust, there to stay for the season... In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known.
2. Fundamentally - Nussaibah Younis
Nadia is an academic who's been disowned by her puritanical mother and dumped by her lover, Rosy. She decides to make a getaway, accepting a UN job in Iraq. Tasked with rehabilitating ISIS women, Nadia becomes mired in the opaque world of international aid, surrounded by bumbling colleagues. Sara is a precocious and sweary East Londoner who joined ISIS at just fifteen. Nadia is struck by how similar they are: both feisty and opinionated, from a Muslin background, with a shared love of Dairy Milk and rude pick-up lines. A powerful friendship forms between the two women, until a secret confession from Sara threatens everything Nadia has been working for. A bitingly original, wildly funny and razor-sharp exploration of love, family, religion and the decisions we make in pursuit of belonging, Fundamentally upends and explores a defining controversy of our age with heart, complexity and humour.
3. Good Girl - Aria Aber
In Berlin's underground, where techno rattles buildings still scarred with the violence of the last century, ninteen-year-old Nila finds her tribe. In their company she can escape the parallel city that made her, the public housing block packed with refugees and immigrants, where the bathrooms are infested with silverfish and the walls outside are graffitied with swastikas. Escaping into the clubs, Nila tries to outrun the shadow of her dead mother, once a feminist revolutionary; her catatonic, defeated father; and the cab-driver uncles who seem to idle on every corner. To anyone who asks, her family is Greek, not Afghani. And then Nila meets American writer Marlowe Woods, whose literary celebrity, though fading, opens her eyes to a world of patrons and festivals, one that imbues her dreams of life as an artist with new possibility. But as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city's cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged.
4. All Fours - Miranda July
A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey. Miranda July's second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July's wry voice, perfect comedic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman's quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic and domestic life of a 45-year-old female artist. All Fours transcends expectations while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.
5. Tell Me Everything - Elizabeth Strout
It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house next to the sea. Together, Lucy and Bob talk about their lives, their hopes and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, befriends one of Crosby’s longest inhabitants, Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – “unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning. Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”
6. The Persians - Sanam Mahloudji
First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose, who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. She is kept company by Niaz, her young, Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter. In America, Elizabeth’s two daughters have built new lives for themselves. There’s Shirin, a flamboyantly high-flying event planner in Houston, who considers herself the family’s future; and Seema, a dreamy idealist turned bored housewife languishing in Los Angeles. And then there’s the other granddaughter, Bita, a disillusioned law student in New York trying to find deeper meaning by giving away her worldly belongings. When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up being bailed out of jail by Bita, the family’s brittle upper class veneer is cracked wide open and gossip about them spreads like wildfire. Soon, Shirin must embark upon a grand quest to restore the family name to its former glory. But what does that mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered to anyone? And, will reputation be enough to make them a family again Spanning from 1940s Iran into a splintered 2000s The Persians is an irresistible portrait of a unique family in crisis that explores timeless questions of love, money, art and fulfilment. Here is their past, their present and a possible new future for them all.
The place was still not crowded - it was the hour when men who have been up all night meet those who are freshly wakened and ready to start a new day. The sleepy waitress was serving both beef and coffee. There was no noise or conversation, for each person seemed to be alone. The mutual distrust between those who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
This is the first in a series of posts dedicated to helping you free yourself from the ways corporations are using internet users for profit to the user's detriment. I want to encourage exploration and the joy of the internet of my youth - of exploring and finding new pathways. This list is not comprehensive and it may grow to be outdated. Regardless, this was pretty successful on bsky, so I'm porting it over here!
1. Qwant - A very good replacement for Google. It is the most similar search engine on this list to Google's heyday. I get precise results compared to similar searches made on Google.
2. Wiby - Discover smaller sites that are typically made by hobbists or academics. This search engine focuses on sites that are older or lightweight (as in, less bloated by scripts that many modern sites rely on). Good for falling down a rabbit hole and finding blogs or personal websites!
3. Newgle - Search engine for sites that don't use certain generic top-level domains (that is what is the .com in tumblr.com). The disincluded domains include .com, .net and .org. I don't use this very often, and right now it seems to have a problem where it is indexing bsky.social (which is maybe not the kinds of things that someone would want to find while searching it) but nice to keep in mind.
4. Marginalia - Really good search engine for deep-diving and discovery. It's focus is on independence and on traditional information retrieval, rather than the natural-language search that google has oriented itself towards. It is meant as a compliment to other search engines.
5. Search my Site - Independent user-submitted site, great for personal web sites, but does not crawl the internet itself, so it is limited to what is sent in.
These are the one's that I use most and discover much on, but its far from the /only/ search engines out there. Here is a more complete list of search engines for your own perusal.
The internet is a wide place. Don't let corporations fool you into thinking it has been tamed. Instead, think of the corporate internet as a city, paved down and developed highly, but it cannot overtake the abundant wilds of the world.
hi hiii, i saw you complaining about bad owen takes and i wanna ask about your owen takes! What are the biggest misconceptions you see people have about him? What are some things that more casual fans tend to miss/not notice? What do you think of the normal owen and kizu owen split?
feel free to make this as detailed or as simplified as you wish ~☆ i just like seeing people talk about their favorite wizards!
OMG IVE been thinking about how to answer this for days IM SO EXCITED TO YAP!
I will start though that I don't have a lot about Kizu atm, because there's a LOT there but we really don't see Kizu!Owen very often. I know we're a tad behind on event translations, but.... I don't think he's been in an event or card story since Main Story 2 wrapped up, other than Owen's Walpurgis 4koma.... can we have a moment of silence for Kizu!Owen likers? I miss our sweetie. And more.. hi this is Cee after writing all of the below I got really inspired to start working on a handful of character essays so expect those in the tag at some point..
In terms of misconceptions, I think the biggest ones I see are that Owen is incapable of knowingly doing a positive thing. Or that he isn't capable of being kind, compassionate or merciful. (dodges rocks). I get why people who aren't total Owenheads come to this conclusion. It's easy to take what is said about Owen (and the Northies as a whole) as gospel, in fact, I think the Northerner's serve a really interesting role in the thematic relevance of prejudice against wizards. After all, in MS1, the reader gets one small look at Owen after the Calamity battle where he is with the other Northies plus Oz as an introduction, four lines of dialogue and then he is gone for forty-thousand words. While he is off-screen, we only ever hear negative things about him - Heathcliff says he's scary, Cain tells Akira about his eye and to not listen to a thing Owen says, the Previous Sage calls him maddening and creepy and basically every other character who talk about the Northies calling them the Worst Ever. Not a great first impression, and there is a lot of time for that perception to sink in and go unchallenged. And I'll admit, even after they officially make their debut at the party, the Northies don't go out of their way to challenge that perception obviously - why would they? after all, words are a curse and titles a burden; they've all carried the title of Northerner for so very long, can someone please write something about Oz's Balcony speech I think there are a lot of reasons for why Owen's role in the party was so fraught (and I go into them a little here although that post is more part-vent part-summary of an event card spurred by an ex-oomfs twt vague than proper analysis)
But it's not just how long that we are only told of the Northies vices or their lack of defense; even after their introduction and all throughout the stories, trusted figures, like the Twins (which trusting them is dubious...) and Oz, reinforce the idea of Owen being entirely malevolent and insane. Owen is evil because Owen is the Northern Wizard Owen. He seeks to twist your heart into a withering husk. But does he really?
I think the biggest misconception is that Owen's one and true goal in life is to cause chaos and misery, to reap untold amounts of violence. That's a goal he would never deny having, but he didn't deny killing Nicholas either, did he? This perception about what Owen wants (when he doesn't even really know it himself) puts on blinders, where the times that he is benign or even kind or compassionate get overlooked, over explained and twisted into wickedness by other wizards. Those words might be slightly too warm for him, but I know for a fact there is a case to be made for him being merciful and having a more nuanced relationship with killing and death than others would believe. I think there are many events which showcase the nicer parts of his personality (one of my faves is Winter 2022; his part in it is relatively small but it showcases a unique facet of his relationship with lies/truths as well as the gap between him causing misery versus, but we've seriously had so many banger events.)
But luckily, even if one doesn't want to scour through the backlog of miscellaneous events to see these traits on display (or are one of the people who only take Bunta's writing as law of the world), we see Owen act in contrary ways to the ideal of a wicked Northern wizard all throughout the main stories and anniversaries, in big and small ways.
In particular, I think in all of the excitement of the final showdown in the second Anniversary, the details that Bunta had written in regarding Owen's involvement is overlooked. They are, after all, small things compared to the great feats of magic that Akira is witnessing.
Spoilers below for anni2 for any anime-onlys or fandom newcomers, welcome and I hope dearly we get to see that animated one day.
First, and this is so important to me, throughout the fight, Akira states that Owen is keeping one hand on his hat to prevent himself from losing it. At this point, they have already made the transformation into their event outfits. As in most events, Anni2's clothes were tailored by our dear Chloe. Owen does have a bit of a fashionista streak (that's something I think can be missed too, that he has a genuine interest in style) but not to the extent that he is typically that cautious with his outfits. There have definitely been times he's allowed clothes to get ripped, torn or otherwise ruined. So him going to the effort to make sure he doesn't lose this accessory is noteworthy. After all, he does have other hats. While Owen is stated to be using a rapier in this fight, typically the stance used for it has the other arm lowered; as I understand it, that aids balance and power. Owen isn't using the rapier as a channeling tool, he is actively slashing at Oz with it. So, he is putting himself at a disadvantage by keeping his arm in that position. That is - Owen cares more about keeping the hat that was given to him by Chloe than he cares about giving 100% to a fight against the strongest wizard in the world, when he comes from a place where strength is the defining characteristic.
Then, ironically, this hat then serves as a way for Owen to shield his heart from the western wizard once the fight is over. As the fighters are recollecting themselves and going off to lick their wounds, Owen stumbles in pain. To everyone's surprise, Chloe catches him. This is a moment of kindness, but it is also a direct acknowledgement of Owen's current weakness. Yet, despite such a thing being a direct jab to any Northerner's pride, Owen barely lashes out at him at all. Even though he was irritated from the results of the battle, he simply stares, likely just as surprised as everyone else that someone would support him, then tells Chloe to leave him alone. Akira says an expression of hurt crosses Chloe's face and, seeing that, Owen pulls the hat over his eyes and looks away before disappearing.
Owen would have the entire world believe he loves misery of all kinds, loves being the cause of it. These negative emotions are the driving point of his magic and he certainly just used a lot of mana in the fight against Oz. So, why would he just walk away - not just walk away, look away - from a chance to not just push back against Chloe's kindness, but a way for him to generate negativity and "refuel"? An argument could be made that his lack of his typical wordy rejection, laden with insults, is just a consequence of the fight - he's tired, humiliated, not even desserts can lift his mood. Owen just wants to go and sulk.
I think if that was the case, this would be an isolated incident. But we see him look away from or react similarly to other's true multiple other times. He looks similarly irritated (or even guilty) in his affection story after he told Akira he hated them.
This post is getting pretty long so I'm going to wrap up quickly, but another incident happens during the fight that I think should be focused on more:
When faced with the opportunity to kill Arthur, and deal a horrible wound to Oz's heart by doing so, Owen hesitates. The wizard who doesn't care about anyone or anything, who is alone completely, who loves violence and bloodshed, who wants to see nothing more than Oz's face twist in agony has a chance to inflict utter despair upon many of the wizards in the manor
and he hesitates.
What a crazy good character. I could make an essay off of a single line of Owen's dialogue if needed, he's so seriously rich in layers.
Other things I think can get missed: his sentimentality (see: his efforts to keep his hat, but also how he has reacted when handed certain gifts (also talked about that above), the multiple times he's exorcised or otherwise helped souls move on (unfortunately one of my favorite examples is a now-deleted card story if anyone backed up his 2nd mahopa or would be interested in translating it..), the multiple times he acts as an impromptu teacher for the younger wizards. There's definitely more and I can expand on all of these but I'm getting sleepy... thank you for the question and feel free to let me know if i should clarify something or if im forgetting something major.
THANK YOU FOR THE QUESTION!
[INDEX] Sonatina of the Perverse and Intoxicating Service (Completed)
"Even if I'm laughed at and ridiculed, I like living freely as I please, however I feel like it. If I can't do that, it’s better for me to just turn to stones."
Characters: Shylock, Owen, Oz, Mitile, Akira.
I don't know what I'm reading 80% of the time I translate this because it sounds like a fanfiction but apparently, it's not.
Also, should I warn that there is collar and chain involved....
This Sonatina is actually a really interesting read because honestly, we rarely see these two interact. Although I feel the "similarity" between them is a bit forceful (as individuality is something all wizards have anw and not just them), the portrayal of Shylock in this event is well done. I always like his crazy side more than the gentle, polite side because we all know he is not just your local friendly bartender. So, seeing him bet his life just to make an "according to keikaku" moment at the end, is pretty awesome.
Wish they could dig more deeply into Shylock's loneliness tho.
my girl wronged by the narrative, my girl haunting her own story, my girl dead in the first act, my girl the blank in between the lines, my girl the phantom of the past the apparition of the future
