Kiana Khansmith
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
trying on a metaphor
Sweet Seals For You, Always
occasionally subtle
Show & Tell
sheepfilms
Today's Document
Love Begins
todays bird
ellievsbear
official daine visual archive
cherry valley forever
blake kathryn
No title available
YOU ARE THE REASON
wallacepolsom
EXPECTATIONS
One Nice Bug Per Day
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
seen from Malaysia
seen from Sweden
seen from Australia
seen from Maldives
seen from Russia
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Spain
seen from Germany
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from Bangladesh
seen from United States
seen from Poland
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
@soft-at-worst
WOLFCANNON is out today!
It's my debut book of very gay poems which I previously wrote about here - and since I've no wish to repeat myself I will simply say that it's good poetry, that I'm proud of it, and that you can purchase the physical edition here for $12 and the digital edition here for free (though if the spirit so moves you, I do have a ko-fi.) Thank you for reading and happy pride month!
hey guess what! my book WOLFCANNON is out on June 17th, and you can pre-order the print edition from kith books right now (link). these are poems about the transformative power of insects, queer toothed loves, regret, and of course: what if the Roman Republic had a giant wolf mecha that you could fuck?
also let's all pause and appreciate the extraordinary cover art my friend & partner @onetomb-art did for this book. it rules. i'm gonna get that wolf head silhouette on a pin and wear it everywhere.
it's $12 for the print edition and will be pay-what-you-want for the digital edition. thank you for your time, and i hope you read it!
Advance Praise for WOLFCANNON:
"CJ Selwyn's WOLFCANNON is primordial. Reading this book feels like reading uncensored scripture. It is violent and marbled in its beauty, like a cracked open clam, wet with muscle and tasting of bloody saltwater. Is this mythical parable, or is it stark reality—all pretense dropped, showing us insectile corporeality? Both, woven together in a tale that leaves you with weeping wounds and the squeeze of a hand that says me too." — dre levant, author of sun eater and icarus rising
"Calypso Jane Selwyn’s WOLFCANNON reimagines myth and memory through a lens that's both devastatingly intimate and ecologically attuned. Selwyn's poems pulse with queer desire and ecological grief, howling at the intersections of personal and planetary violence while still finding moments of tender connection in unexpected places. This collection cracked me open—I found myself recognizing my own wildness and wounds in her startling imagery that refuses domestication." — Megan Kaminski, author of Gentlewomen, Deep City, and Desiring Map
deep beneath the earth, below the subways and burrows of mortal life, below strange caverns and sunless seas, below chthonic palaces of buried empires, there is at last a vast black maelstrom - terra ultima - roaring down to nowhere. i have spent this year walking on that shore in dreams, and listening. most of what i heard there escapes on waking, but some of it i remember.
this playlist is five and a half hours long. it contains 69 songs, which seems the correct number. it is the best halloween playlist yet made, and you may listen to it. do not put it on shuffle.
mom said it's my turn with the five-dollar bill
hello! i've set up a ko-fi. you can give me money if you want. there's no emergency but i am one of those disabled broke transsexuals only just escaping a terrible and dare i say kafkaesque living situation, so it'd help.
WHAT YOU GET FOR THE MONEY
you know i'm gonna keep writing dumb horny reviews of magic card art as long as i stay interested, and when i stop being interested i'll start writing dumb horny reviews of something else.
i got a chapbook called WOLFCANNON coming out this year! it's about what if the roman republic'd had a multi-story wolf mecha that you could fuck. there will be an electronic version available for free, which will always be true of my poetry, but there will also be a physical version available! meanwhile here's the one poem i've bothered to get published in a journal that hasn't since gone defunct, RIP Entropy.
one life-changing* essay every year or so. here's a moodboard for the next one:
...and much more! probably. we'll see! i have so many projects back-burnered at any given time.
YOU WILL STILL BE ABLE TO GET ALL OF THESE THINGS FOR FREE JUST SO WE'RE CLEAR. BUT YOU CAN ALSO ELECT TO GIVE ME MONEY ABOUT IT
if you do, thank you! regardless, thank you all for reading my writing. i have accidentally built a small audience in maybe the dumbest way possible, and i am never going to be good about responding to replies or messages, but i do appreciate all of you, so, yeah, thanks. see y'all next time.
do you ever see a “hot take” and you’re like ohhhhhhhhhhhhh critical thinking is a learned skill and op has not put in the practice
sometimes god grants you the desire to say something radical, the confidence to say something stupid, and the inability to tell the difference
Tumblr 200-Word RPGs 2023
Last November, we did an informal game jam for folks who wanted to write something for Writing Month, but would prefer to write fewer than fifty thousand words of it. You can find the complete list of participants for that event in this post here. There's also an off-Tumblr archive of entries whose authors gave permission for them to be preserved here, if any of those links turn out to be broken.
Last year's collaboration went over well enough that I thought we might dust it off again this year. To be clear, this is just for fun – it's not a curated jam, and nobody's judging winners or handing out prizes..
If you'd like to throw your hat in, just follow these steps:
Step 1: If you're unfamiliar with 200-word RPGs, read a bunch of last year's entries (linked above) or browse the 200 Word RPG Challege archives at https://200wordrpg.github.io/ to get your brain-meats properly configured.
Step 2: Write your own 200-word RPG. If you're not sure whether you have 200 words or not (and with RPGs it can genuinely be difficult to tell!), you can use the word counter at https://200wordrpg.github.io/wordcount to check.
Step 3: Reblog this post and append your 200-word RPG.
Step 4 (optional): Please indicate in your post whether you're okay with having your 200-word RPG archived off-site for posterity – if you don't say anything one way or the other, I'll assume the answer is "no".
(As before, as a courtesy to anyone who's creeping the notes, please restrict non-200-word-RPG commentary to replies and tags until November 2023 is over – let's make the actual games easy to find!)
As Long as We're Here
Whatever your story was going to be, you are now in its epilogue—your small ship is caught in the mouth of a REALITY FISH. The goddamn emergency suits deployed, so it's too late to move your limbs, and in about five seconds the mouth will close.
After that, you will collectively exist only as long as at least one person is MAKING NOISE: hum, sing, pant, cry, say something. Say anything. Your RADIO is broadcasting, so maybe someone back out there will get a signal. But then, maybe everyone who matters is right here.
As soon as the whole crew is SILENT, even for half a second, the fish's digestive system will kick in. Maybe you're gone instantly; maybe you get a few LAST MOMENTS, completely isolated in a pocket dimension. We don't know. It can't really make a difference, can it?
VARIANT: The reality fish has slow digestion, and it will take five or ten seconds of silence to end you. Take a breath, you get to choose when you're done.
[archive yes]
Working on a theory that the reaction of the trendy class towards those who purchase Twitter Blue verification isn't because $8 is really expensive but because $8 is really cheap.
I remember reading an article that says that elites reject previously-adopted fashions (read: blue checkmarks) when they become mass produced and easily accessible because then those fashions can't be used to signal wealth and status any more. Can't find the article, though.
Pretty sure you're overthinking it—Twitter had a feature that marked annoying and tedious accounts, and now that it's been commodified it's working more efficiently than ever.
From the makers of "this meeting could have been an email" we present: this universal moral dictum could have been a personal boundary
A Russian zoo is home to Zita the liger. She is half-lioness, half-tiger and has just had a litter of liliger cubs (half-lion, half-liger).
[image description: a screenshot of a tweet from Tailsteak, it says: “If I write fiction where Theseus and the minotaur fall in love
And then someone else takes my fic, swaps out the labyrinth for a coffeeshop setting
And then someone swaps the minotaur for another mosnter
And then someone swaps Theseus for antoher hero
Is it still the same ship?”
9:37 AM 04 Apr 21
1,042 Retweets 54 Quote Tweets 3,518 likes
end of description]
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER 2 ANNOUNCED
THE ALBATROSS IS BACK………. AND HES FUCKING PISSED
<3 RotAM
The sky turned black, the sea turned black The moon was lost in mist The goddamn albatross was back And he was fucking pissed.
“I asked ‘How are you hale and well? And from the sky descending?” Said it: 'I am a shade from Hell And come in search of vengeance.’
And then it raised a ghostly wing The sky was lost in shadow And from the sea, all glistening Rose a goddamn sharknado.” The Wedding-Guest, he rolled his eyes So strange a tale to hear But still spoke on that ancient man The wild Mariner:
“I ran like heck across the deck But the sharks were many and fast I tripped and fell into the sea And there I breathed my last.”
“Hold on now,” said the Wedding-Guest Amidst the festive cheer “If perished ye upon that sea How came you to be here?
How came you to be here with me? O, answer that, I ask!” The Mariner removed his face As if it were a mask
Inside there was an Albatross It gave an awful shriek It slammed into the Wedding-Guest And slew him with its beak.
Farewell, farewell, but this I tell I tell it to thee plain Do not fuck with an albatross Those fuckers are insane.
* * * Bontems Bird did you also find those thin coral strands lashed into your skin at twilight having hurled yourself heedless through cornfields, _____
hey guess fucking what i got a piece out today in entropy
“Three Crow Girls Plot the Destruction of the World”
I thought today about a villanelle I had an inspiration there and then I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel
It’s hard to keep the poems rigid shell On track inside my mind, so when I thought today about a villanelle
I thought about refrains re-rung like bells And how simple it might be to begin; I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel
The line below these two, I brag to tell Is simply coded as =A1 I thought today about a villanelle
And this stanza’s refrain, I needn’t spell It out; it equals A3 and is done! I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel
I planned to use this better, really sell The bit; but flew too closely to the sun. I thought today about a villanelle I wrote this in a spreadsheet in Excel
[Description: The above text is pictured in individual cells in column A of an Excel spreadsheet. The sheet’s title in the workbook is “Sheet Two Villanelle” and to prove the truth of how it was constructed, Cell A23 is selected; at the top of the image you can see that it does not actually contain any text, but just the Excel formula “=A1″. This is probably Art, somehow.]
social media is just oscillating between “cringe culture is dead! enjoy your interests without shame!” and “we should bring back bullying and social ostricization” every couple of months
Hey, remember when we spent the last four years (and especially the past seven months) excusing and legitimizing looting, rioting and political violence as acceptable tactics for people to use when expressing their grievances? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
So how did that turn out for us? Not so good, right?
Like, what the fuck? Is this some kind of punishment? Am I in hell, sentenced to spend the rest of my days listening to rambling amnesiacs wail and gnash their teeth over the consequences of their actions?
One disanalogy is that that the summer protests were pushing for policy changes, and the Capitol crowd were trying to keep their leader in power after a lost election—much more directly attacking the liberal order per se.
But even if we say for the sake of argument that BLM protesters were, explicitly or in effect, radicals aiming to overthrow the republic, and that their tactics were indeed comparable: “They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots” suggests to me that the people who stormed the Capitol don’t see what they’re doing as morally analogous to the summer protests, and were not waiting for BLM’s implicit moral permission. They see themselves as on the side of Order, and that’s as much permission as they need.
So even as someone with philosophically liberal tendencies myself, I think your critique is misplaced, because it wasn’t liberals storming the Capitol.
I appreciate your points, though I disagree with most of them.
Focusing on the legitimacy of a protest’s goals in a discussion on tactics is a logical trap, I think. At that point, we’ve already conceded that political violence is appropriate under certain circumstances and have moved on to hashing out what those circumstances are.
I will concede that BLM and Antifa protesters were not trying to overthrow the republic. That being said, some of them were, for a time, attempting a paramilitary occupation of several city blocks in Seattle with the stated intent of seceding from the union.
With regards to “shooting at patriots”, I suspect that the Capitol protestors are lamenting what they see as a double standard, and are not thinking very hard about the moral analogy between BLM and themselves*. As for “waiting for BLM’s implicit moral permission”, neither the summer protestors nor the Capitol protesters have “moral permission” to riot because there is no such thing as “moral permission” in a society structured on the rule of law.
I myself find authoritarian impulses and authoritarian people intensely frustrating to deal with, but I can’t think of a good reason why only liberals should be allowed to storm the capitol. We could get into Popper’s paradox of tolerance, but I don’t think we’re at the point of existential crisis where that kind of restriction is necessary.
*They’re also whining on the internet for clicks, clout and catharsis, and much of that nonsense does not warrant serious consideration.
Unless I’ve severely misread your original post, you called the Capitol putsch “the consequences” of people “excusing and legitimizing looting, rioting, and political violence” over the summer, but I’m saying it’s not. The MAGA mob weren’t playing by rules that left-wingers made; they were playing by their own rules, where BLM are criminals to be shot and they themselves are patriots, ie not criminals, even when they’re in the process of committing crimes. Because again, I don’t think they’re interested in the rule of law, but in order. They weren’t lamenting a double standard, but precisely the lack of a double standard.
I’m not saying that “only liberals should be allowed to storm the Capitol,” just that the left isn’t responsible—causally or morally—when the MAGA mob does so. Because that mob is playing by its own rules, and would still have seen themselves as legitimate and excused if In Defense of Looting hadn’t been written. Tactical similarity (for the sake of argument) does not imply causation.
There is to be clear a separate argument that e.g. BLM would be justified in storming the capital in a way that MAGA is not, because what they’re protesting—impunity for extrajudicial slayings by police—is itself a failure of the rule of law, so lawbreaking on their part could be regarded as a kind of response in kind. This is not, as you say, a justification on liberal terms, but if the police aren’t operating on liberal terms then it seems inappropriate to hold the protestors to them.
It may also not be entirely irrelevant that BLM did not in fact allowed to storm the capital, whereas this crowd was. But these are not the point I was making, which was more narrowly addressed to that you said.
Edit: & likewise could argue that a zone of anarchy is different enough from a competing central government that “secede from the union” suggests an inappropriate conflation. Not prepared to right now though.
We might be talking past each other here. What I’m saying is:
If political violence gets legitimized (action), then the likelihood of political violence increases (consequence).
I think this argument is both obvious and uncontroversial. There’s a long history of humans responding to incentives, and the legitimization of political violence provides incentives for further political violence. For example, the violence that occurred last summer was legitimized through lenient prosecutions; concessions from mayors, governors, city councils and police chiefs; favorable media coverage; and in some cases large financial contributions from NGOs and multinational corporations. Liberals did not cause MAGA to riot directly, but rather contributed to the creation of an environment in which rioting was widely perceived as a rational endeavor with positive outcomes.
In other words, I suspect that the MAGA rioters (either consciously or subconsciously) realized: If you can get money, fame and power from political violence and are at little risk of going to jail for it, then why shouldn’t we get violent? After all, “rioting works”.
Going back to the shooting: Just because conservatives complained on Twitter that BLM rioters were not being shot with live ammunition does not mean that “getting shot with live ammunition” is the standard. To the contrary, the standard that was established over the summer was rubber bullets, teargas and catch-and-release. There were enough examples to suggest that this is how we as a society were going to respond to riots from now on:
Police would not use live ammunition.
Police would not interfere with property crimes, assault, arson, theft or breaking-and-entering.
Police would kneel before protestors in the street to hear their grievances.
Political leaders would surrender government property to the rioters (see Minneapolis Police Precinct 3 and the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone).
Granted, I am simplifying for the sake of argument. Both the BLM riots and the Capitol Hill riot were far more complicated and nuanced than I’m able to grapple with here. And it is impossible to say whether the MAGA riot would still have happened if there were no BLM riots in the summer. But I am asserting that the logic of the BLM rioters and the logic of the MAGA rioters is similar enough that the expected result of creating a riot-friendly environment should be more riots. That is why I believe that the people who helped create that environment but who are hysterical about it now that things have gotten out of hand are either completely oblivious, hypocritically disingenuous or unable to understand how the social environment shapes human behavior.
As I said previously, I am not going to discuss justifications and protest goals, which are irrelevant to this topic.
I dunno, my big takeaway from the summer protests was not “cops are nice.” Like, I think a lot about about this thread: https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1268395872057950208
I’d still say “riot-friendly environment” is a category error, sort of analogous to the NRx use of “demotism” to conflate e.g. liberal democracy and communism. BLM and MAGA’s respective bases don’t have much of a shared epistemic environment! It’s been this whole crisis of civil society for years now; people in the center are quite perturbed. The people you’re accusing of “help[ing] create that environment” are the Terrible Failing Lying Fake News Media; MAGA-world has built like their whole goddamn identity around the idea that they are a) wrong and b) very unfair to Trump’s base. Both of which would seem to preclude the sentiment you’re imputing, which is “guess we could get away with the same thing.”
And again, when you listen to how MAGA people characterize their own behavior, they describe it as categorically different from what BLM was doing. Whereas the lesson that you’re suggesting they learned relies precisely on their seeing what they were doing as of a kind with what BLM was doing, viz “rioting.” The analogy is in your head, not theirs.
Hey, remember when we spent the last four years (and especially the past seven months) excusing and legitimizing looting, rioting and political violence as acceptable tactics for people to use when expressing their grievances? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
So how did that turn out for us? Not so good, right?
Like, what the fuck? Is this some kind of punishment? Am I in hell, sentenced to spend the rest of my days listening to rambling amnesiacs wail and gnash their teeth over the consequences of their actions?
One disanalogy is that that the summer protests were pushing for policy changes, and the Capitol crowd were trying to keep their leader in power after a lost election—much more directly attacking the liberal order per se.
But even if we say for the sake of argument that BLM protesters were, explicitly or in effect, radicals aiming to overthrow the republic, and that their tactics were indeed comparable: “They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots” suggests to me that the people who stormed the Capitol don’t see what they’re doing as morally analogous to the summer protests, and were not waiting for BLM’s implicit moral permission. They see themselves as on the side of Order, and that’s as much permission as they need.
So even as someone with philosophically liberal tendencies myself, I think your critique is misplaced, because it wasn’t liberals storming the Capitol.
I appreciate your points, though I disagree with most of them.
Focusing on the legitimacy of a protest’s goals in a discussion on tactics is a logical trap, I think. At that point, we’ve already conceded that political violence is appropriate under certain circumstances and have moved on to hashing out what those circumstances are.
I will concede that BLM and Antifa protesters were not trying to overthrow the republic. That being said, some of them were, for a time, attempting a paramilitary occupation of several city blocks in Seattle with the stated intent of seceding from the union.
With regards to “shooting at patriots”, I suspect that the Capitol protestors are lamenting what they see as a double standard, and are not thinking very hard about the moral analogy between BLM and themselves*. As for “waiting for BLM’s implicit moral permission”, neither the summer protestors nor the Capitol protesters have “moral permission” to riot because there is no such thing as “moral permission” in a society structured on the rule of law.
I myself find authoritarian impulses and authoritarian people intensely frustrating to deal with, but I can’t think of a good reason why only liberals should be allowed to storm the capitol. We could get into Popper’s paradox of tolerance, but I don’t think we’re at the point of existential crisis where that kind of restriction is necessary.
*They’re also whining on the internet for clicks, clout and catharsis, and much of that nonsense does not warrant serious consideration.
Unless I’ve severely misread your original post, you called the Capitol putsch “the consequences” of people “excusing and legitimizing looting, rioting, and political violence” over the summer, but I’m saying it’s not. The MAGA mob weren’t playing by rules that left-wingers made; they were playing by their own rules, where BLM are criminals to be shot and they themselves are patriots, ie not criminals, even when they’re in the process of committing crimes. Because again, I don’t think they’re interested in the rule of law, but in order. They weren’t lamenting a double standard, but precisely the lack of a double standard.
I’m not saying that “only liberals should be allowed to storm the Capitol,” just that the left isn’t responsible—causally or morally—when the MAGA mob does so. Because that mob is playing by its own rules, and would still have seen themselves as legitimate and excused if In Defense of Looting hadn’t been written. Tactical similarity (for the sake of argument) does not imply causation.
There is to be clear a separate argument that e.g. BLM would be justified in storming the capital in a way that MAGA is not, because what they're protesting—impunity for extrajudicial slayings by police—is itself a failure of the rule of law, so lawbreaking on their part could be regarded as a kind of response in kind. This is not, as you say, a justification on liberal terms, but if the police aren't operating on liberal terms then it seems inappropriate to hold the protestors to them.
It may also not be entirely irrelevant that BLM did not in fact allowed to storm the capital, whereas this crowd was. But these are not the point I was making, which was more narrowly addressed to that you said.
Edit: & likewise could argue that a zone of anarchy is different enough from a competing central government that "secede from the union" suggests an inappropriate conflation. Not prepared to right now though.
