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[ E!’s Inside Star Trek: Voyager - Fashion ]

you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid

janmisali

pick whatever option the person you're following who reblogged this post didn't pick. if they didn't say in the tags what they picked or if you're seeing the original post and not a reblog, pick at random instead.

first option

second option

Remaining time: 3 days 22 hours

#first

song-of-the-spheres

Aral Vorkosigan, talking to himself in the mirror at some point during Shards of Honor, probably: "all right you've gotten to first base (fighting alien monsters together) and second base (telling her about your disastrous first marriage). next is third base (proposing to her) and then fourth base (asking her to mercy kill you if necessary). then maybe you can think about kissing her."

Aral Vorkosigan at the end of Shards of Honor, probably: "holy shit it worked?! oh thank God."

#vorkosigan

brontesim

Finished just in time for Pride month

Linocut, flower pot

The reason I reached for genre romance novels for Star Trek is Ive read so so so many of them and I know roughly how most of them convey something about the culture that produced them, in content and structure and what it means for what a culture values in a partner, and in themselves. It’s somewhat easy to use the scaffolding I already know to use existing genre conventions to explain something about the aliens in Star Trek.

I have not read enough murder and thriller novels to articulate what the genre is establishing about culture and values so I can’t be like ‘this is the dime airport novel about women getting sexy murdered but in Vulcan’ because I don’t know which genre conventions are load bearing and which are just more traditional. The murder mysteries i HAVE read are literally just Agatha Christie and maybe a handful of others that are directly inspired by her. I’ve watched a lot of murder television, but that is nottttt the same medium.

unamccormack

Bringing out those tags because so, so interesting, perhaps one of my favourite things, to mess around with patterns of story*. When I sat down with Spock to transcribe his autobiography, we came up with a form for what Vulcan memoir might look like, which he subverts. (There’s some of Sarek’s poetry too.)

Meditations on a Crimson Shadow is described as being set during a future war, so is a Cardassian sf novel. I figured it would surely, at least superficially, tell the story of Cardassian supremacy and permanent conquest, like Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face forever. Except maybe if you were reading it in the basement of your father’s home as your whole civilization implodes around you. Then I thought it might read differently. Or at least you would start the previously unimaginable work of imagining differently.

If historical fiction tries to reconfigure what we think was possible for people in the past, sf tries to configure what we think can be possible to us in the future. They feel very close, in my mind. Can we find sources or traditions in the past that give us succour or hope? What visions of the future are available to us, or do we need to imagine, and how do we map our way there? I think about these things all the time.

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, VI

* Patterns of Story was the title of my MA creative writing module where we read 6 novels and mucked around with them in as many ways as possible. This week we’ll go through one scene in Madame Bovary and see how meticulously it’s constructed. This week we’ll read some post-apocalyptic Kentish dialect and I’ll do my party piece from Ulysses. This week I’ll tell you why Moll Flanders is like the Doctor Who Hartnell-era story “The Sensorites”. This week I’ll explain what I think are the two distinctive modes in the crime novel. And this week we’ll read a modernist novel that you’ll doubt at best or hate at worst but ten years later you’ll email me to ask the title because you haven’t been able to get it out of your head. I loved teaching that class. What an amazing technology novels are. I really do like them, probably nothing nicer than novels.

unamccormack

Oh, just to add that if we go with Harold Bloom (wait! come back!) and read Shakespeare as "inventing" the human, then Garak's blustering that Shakespeare is rubbish and pointless can of course be taken as yet another crock of performative bullshit - not only does he QUOTE HIM TO TAIN (let me throw words learned from my beloved in your fucking face), but Shakespeare represents his encounter with humanity by which we mean Bashir by which we mean the crumbling of Garak's belief in Cardassian supremacy. Shakespeare by which we mean the human by which we mean Bashir rewires (see what I did there) Garak's brain to such an extent that I would not be surprised if Garak regularly catches himself thinking in blank verse.

onetobeamup

I think the concept of crimson shadow as a example of sci-fi literary fiction is genuinely fascinating, bc now I am thinking about the terrible copy cats after Orwell of pulpy shoot em up sci fi dystopias. (Also can’t believe how often I fall for The Canonical Liar who Lies. I’m genuinely so easy to trick.) Novels about surveillance robots and scantily clad beautiful reptilian women, and the concrete pillar of patriotism and nationalism you will always be able to build your identity around. I’m not gonna lie when I was first thinking about crimson shadow I didn’t make this leap of science fiction, I believe I was thinking about the Norse legend of ragnarok, where it’s spoken of in concrete future tense as though it both has happened before and will happen again in a cyclical nature of conquest.

I’ve done a piece before of rugal and ziyal and Jake discussing Star wars franchise as a piece of cardassian literature, with decades of one family either serving or destroying the state, with the filial obligations to the generation before as a repetitive epic, now I really want to revisit it with your incredible class lens of Patterns of Story.

I know there’s something on the bones of murder mystery thriller pulp that could be translated to Vulcan, something probably closer to the Detective kosuke kindaichi books, where it takes you through every single clue and a diagram of the house so you can see the logical leaps and make them yourself, as opposed to a Sherlock Holmes where you only really get the clues after they’ve amounted to a solution. The elements of murder mystery undertone of an empire in decline and a new era struggling to establish itself while ancient secrets come unburied that’s in both Agatha Christie and in Yokomizo is really the part that I cannot figure out how to change for Vulcan culture itself.

The other somewhat silly book genres I’ve been thinking about as I stretch a little outside my comfort zone is medieval travel writing (Marco polo, Ibn Battutaʼs Journeys,etc) as it would appear in really really early warp and pre warp cultures, and hard supernatural horror to lean into fears and anxieties

#star trek

gremlinservant

Just vaccinated three kids and got kicked thank GOD I am selling them today

Edit:

THIS IS A POST ABOUT GOATS!!

silly-signs

Found this one hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Notably, not llama country.

moghedien

I feel like I need to share this because idk if Europeans are familiar with the presence of Aldi in the US, but at least especially in my area they’ve been growing a lot recently. Like Aldi bought out some local failing grocery chains where I live (Louisiana) and have opened Aldis in all these somewhat rural communities and small towns, which for the record I’m fine with

But as a result of this they are advertising a lot more in my area and also in many cases, the people in these areas have never been confronted with Aldi or any European grocery store. So the ads that Aldi is pushing out to its new US customer base feature a cowboy shopping at Aldi who is explaining to new Aldi customers how Aldi works. Like this cowboy is explaining you gotta put a quarter in the shopping cart and why there are very little name brands. A cowboy is how they want to reach their American customer base. They gave us a cowboy

moghedien

Here he is, the Aldi Cowboy

salmonella-destroyer-of-worlds

vafibrearts

Worked on some outreach blocks with Mom yesterday!

My sewing machine is currently at the mechanic, and won't be moved into the new house for a bit, so I had fun playing with Mom's machine instead!

#quilting

norwegianfacecrusher

Behold my Hercules beetle! I took a huge chunk of time away from piecing and sewing in general due to work insanity, but I finally got around to finishing this boy.

The fabric is all second hand: the background fabric came from a local craft thrift store, and the green/orange and brown/gold speckled fabrics are twice reused kimono silks. The kimono fabric was gifted to me by the wonderful Madame Button, who used the original garments to make these gorgeous corsets.

She got the kimono because they were either new dead stock, or in such bad condition that they couldn't be worn. She can't use the fabric once it's cut up smaller than a corset panel, so she's been chucking the scraps at me for a while, and I've finally gotten over my fear of cutting up such beautiful silks. Go check out The Bad Button on Instagram and Facebook and drool over her other gorgeous pieces.

I decided to forgo sandwiching and quilting this because I wanted the piecing lines to be the highlight. For now it's tacked to a plain cotton bed sheet until I can find a nicer frame for it.

Pattern is from Etive & Co on Etsy and I could not recommend their patterns enough. I scaled the pattern up by 200% because I wanted the silks to really shine in this design.

#quilting

augustheart

this tweet is ruining my life rn

thedogist

Moody, mix (6 m/o), Court & Congress St., Brooklyn, NY • “He’s always in a mood. His name was Domino, but I changed it; because of his two faces. He’s normally only moody behind closed doors. I got him from @soulmaterescue in San Diego. He’s from Mexicali. We just did a DNA test but it hasn’t come back yet – mostly terrier. He’s the only one in his litter who had his ears stay perked up. His siblings’ all had dropped.”

#dog