there are ghosts out in the rain tonight

 I write things sometimes and love too many things for this blog to be organized

[hylianane]

functionally suicidal character saying “I would die for you” to their significant other and its like. I get the sentiment, honey, but if a hot dog vendor told me he’d sell hot dogs for me, I wouldn’t feel very moved now would I

[st-just]

A character trait/dynamic that I'm endlessly compelled by is someone dealing with (or, like, failing to) being the child of people who were too busy being good people to have the time and attention to be good parents. This can be anywhere from 'was a public defender who gave a shit working 60 hour weeks with basically no vacations' to 'left their family behind to join the revolution/war effort and is now a universally beloved martyr-hero who saved/remade the world with their final breath' on the groundedness spectrum. The important thing is a viscerally felt but confused and ugly mess of longing, resentment, and guilt about feeling the resentment.

[peterfromtexas-deactivated20250]

Reenactor throws a spear at a drone

[supapoopa]

What a time to be alive.

[tenthcorner]

“The medieval warrior, realizing the consequences of his impulsive act, immediately approached the owner of the drone and offered to pay for the damage.

The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.

Drone owners have another year to develop a unique “dragon-like” design for their flying machines.” (x)

[kineticpenguin]

I am 100% cooler with this knowing that the spear-thrower realized “oops maybe I shouldn’t have done that” and tried to make it right, and that the guy who the drone belonged to was cool with it

[brunhiddensmusings]

just so everyone knows, this has already been memorialized in a runestone

[stephendann]

Everything about this post blesses those involved with a +4 on their next Today is Good Day roll

[fromaliminalspace]

a rough translation of inscription on the runestone:

On the seventh day of May in the year of 2016 on hither spot the mighty warrior Ulf hath slain a dragon with his spear.

so yeah, happy birthday to this dragon-slaying event and to it only

[nonlinear-nonsubjective]

Happy Ulf Hath Slain A Dragon With His Spear!

[specialagentartemis]

thing I didn't add to the literary criticism terms list but I also see and think about a lot, I just don't have a great name for yet: the thing when sci-fi archaeologists go to a sci-fi planet and there are the ruins of a civilization where everyone has been dead for 10,000 or 50,000 or 1 million years or whatever. No survivors, no descendant communities, no one else living here anymore, just empty ruins. And because everyone is completely and thoroughly dead and gone, only the (usually human) discoverers are left to put together the pieces of what this once-great civilization was like. It's not really the same thing as Big Dumb Object sci-fi, it's very much framed archaeologically: planetbound ruins, artifacts, remnants, ancient scripts. And it's a clean break from the past to the present, no continuity. The protagonists now know this society better than anyone else, because there's no one from this society left to know it. And due to this, they kind of get the authority to make declarations about it, about how to interpret it or what's worth preserving from it.

On the one hand it makes sense because space is the place where you can get the timescales to meaningfully do this. Species that arose and went extinct long before humanity even existed - yeah you can imagine those in space. The speculative appeal is strong. On the other hand, this is not how archaeology works anywhere on Earth. There are always people there no matter where you're digging, and USUALLY they will have some connection to the stuff being dug up. The actual on-the-ground politics of that relationship are very different where you go in the world, but anywhere there used to be people there still are people. And that is almost never true in sci-fi archaeology. And obviously sci-fi allows us to speculate, but it's the pattern you see again and again. No one's interested in speculating an alien archaeological site where those aliens' descendants or anyone related to them are still around in any meaningful capacity. In sci-fi, descendant communities just do not exist. Everybody Died. This place now belongs to no one anymore, except the archaeologists.

That's why I've been calling this trope Extraterra Nullius but that doesn't quite evoke the idea I'm getting at because I'm specifically interested in how it's being done in relation to archaeology.

[elucubrare]

[drafts clearinghouse day]

[2023] this is definitely a very subjective thing, but i always feel very alienated by the tumblr fave trope of "man looks approvingly at violent/powerful woman" as like, the Ideal Couple Dynamic - and yes, that's partly because my ideal dynamic for a M/F couple is Brothers In Arms But Heterosexual, but it's also because it seems very condescending - it feels like it's buying into gender stereotypes while externally purporting to challenge them.

[2026] as an addendum, or to finish the thought, it's because it often feels like it's not taking women's capacity for violence seriously, similarly to the stock joke character of the hyperviolent woman (she's a tiny cute girl but she's got a big hammer! and she threatens people! but it's funny because we all know women don't really have the power to hurt people!).

it also implies that the only way for a man and a woman to be in anything resembling an equal relationship is if she's capable of violence and he's not. and i think that sucks and isn't true.

[quickweaves]

Dead Sea, Palestine under the Moon

[quixoticanarchy]

I do think it's kind of funny how john green wrote a book about tuberculosis that brought a lot of renewed attention to the subject and he's since become the darling of the tb world, speaks at tb conferences, my dad and every other tb researcher I know is absolutely smitten with him, and they'll be like "we love this guy! have you heard of him??" and I have to be like well yes, I have. for other reasons

[respectissexy]

One thing that has made me a much more well-adjusted person is a clip I once saw of Hank Green saying that anyone can be in amazing shape as long as being in amazing shape is one of their top three priorities.

(This is obviously a generalization that isn't true for everyone. But it is true for most people and I'm proceeding from there.)

This "top three priorities" framing has genuinely reduced my tendency toward jealousy and self-comparison a lot. Now when I feel envious of someone’s spotless, aesthetic home, I think to myself, “Having a spotless, aesthetic home is probably one of their top three priorities. It’s definitely not one of mine, so I shouldn’t expect my home to look like that.”

Or when I see an influencer with a body that takes a ton of work to maintain: “Maintaining that body is obviously one of her top three priorities, because it’s her livelihood. My livelihood is my brain, so I’m never going to prioritize my body like that.”

It also helps me to identify areas that I actually DO want to prioritize more. I realized in recent years that my envy for my friends who prioritized writing more than I did was NOT going away, so I started to prioritize writing more. (Not top three, but higher priority than it has been in the past.)

[unspeakablearchives]

(Source: Sen the donkey)

[watersunshine]

Jenny Holzer, “Signs,” 1988. Scanned by me.

[heedra]

really losing my patience for any 'feminist' statement to the tune of 'we need feminism because women fill a fundamentally different and necessary role than men and will be better at doing x y or z'. like actually i think we need feminism because it is an unbearable death of the spirit by inches to exist in a world where you are not seen as a fully realized human being because of a single cultural determination, and because a world that enshrines such things creates systems that are fundamentally sick to the core

[scientia-rex]

My greatest tragedy is that I literally always want a nap, right up until ten pm, when I feel utterly alive and electrified.

[scientia-rex]

It’s 10:31pm and I will live forever. What do you mean I have to be at my doctor’s appointment at 7:10am. Who are you. Why are you Satan

[allthewhumpygoodness]

Hey so I know we All Know This but I will NEVER be over a character being feverish and delirious and making No sense. I will never be over a glittery-eyed, shivering, distressed character weakly gripping another's arm and asking them questions they don't know the answer to, and probably don't mean anything at all. I will never be over characters calling out for people either long gone or right next to them, but unrecognizable in their delirium. I will never be over a character crying in frustration and fear over something in their head they can't explain to whoever is helping them, and all they can do in return is stroke their hair and shush them gently.

[httpcomet]

They did this to my beautiful wife harrowhark nonagesimus for 500+ pages </3

[tlirsgender]

Being critical of your interests is sooooo fun when you have the critic gene & then you sound kind of insane to the average tv watcher when you're like "this is my favorite show, It's Racist" & then you try to clarify what you mean & get that [Speech (legendary) - FAILURE] "the racism is really interesting though"

[tlirsgender]

[Speech (legendary) - SUCCESS] I find the sociopolitical context of pulpy old sci-fi born circa the civil rights movement really fascinating to analyze especially when it was progressive for its time but still reveals the writers' unexamined biases in the subtext

[sqbr]

Them: So you're saying its bad and I shouldn't watch it?

Me: I mean depends on your tolerance for this type of racism, but like I said it's my favourite show, it def has some great parts if you're up for it.

Them: Oh so it's not racist.

Me: It absolutely is.

Them: So you're saying racism is ok??

Me: No.

[mikkeneko]

[gyrovagi]

unethical nonmonogamy where god is the third

[hazbeenandeggs]

This is the plot of Harrow the Ninth

[thememedaddy]

[yournewfriendshouse]

[bumblebeebats]

The crazy thing is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you asked me on any given day "Would like to see a picture of some genitals?" my answer would be "😰 No, that's... No, thank you. I'm okay, actually." I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who do engage with the penis side of the internet, but personally, I've spent the better part of two decades doing all I can NOT to have pictures of dick and balls or sexy bikini babe buttcheeks blasted onto my retinas constantly. And yet... to be denied the penis? To have a jumped up pile of javascript tell me, a grown adult with an air fryer and an outstanding council tax bill, that I cannot be trusted to withstand the sight of a bare nipple unless I let it scan my drivers' license? I will move heaven and earth to see that fucking nipple, friend. I will walk a thousand miles barefoot on hot coals before I give you big brother bitches my passport number. A thousand miles through the desert with five VPNs just to press my face up against the glass and see the last uncensored picture of two My Little Pony Characters sixty-nining each other, and I don't even want! to look at it! But I will! I must! for the sake of our fucking democracy!