Fanfic reader and writer; find my stuff at https://archiveofourown.org/users/staidwaters. Currently absolutely obsessed with the amazing kdrama My Country the New Age; also slowly working my way through the 250 odd episodes of the delightfully ridiculous epic that is DMBJ. Any of the ideas in my stories or musings are free for other authors and artists to use; just let me know so I can go read it! (Gimme MOAR fan content please!) I assume that empty blogs are spam and block them from following me. if you are new, write a couple posts introducing yourself (nothing identifying or private!) or talking about a hobby or something before following.
Look, I barely use tumblr, and so like zero people will ever see this, but .... please watch the KDrama My Country: The New Age and write fic for it. I'm absolutely obsessed with this show and want more fandom creations to keep the story alive now that it's over.
Ignore the hokey-sounding title. It is epic, and adorable, and and absolutely everything I want out of a show. It has a wonderful bromance/political intrigue story that will rip your heart out, and it is so amazingly done. Gorgeous cinematography, great action scenes, excellent music - I went out and bought the soundtrack immediately- an intricately laid out plot with fascinating, unique and all too relatable characters...
It gets dark, but not in a way that made me not want to watch it. There is a lot of blood and betrayal- but the leads are pure hearted and determined to be good. They may have to compromise their morals to protect the people they love, but they never let it make them become twisted. (They weren't who they had been, but the growth wasn't in a bad direction, in the end.). I guess it made me feel sorry for the leads, but it didn't give me that icky, disgusted feeling that usually goes with shows labled "dark." But you might not want to watch it if you are feeling down.
Still - all you fic writers out there? Please check this one out if you are looking for a new fandom to write in.
I literally started using tumblr again August 2020, after years away, just to promote mctna. Because I was desperate for more people to watch it so more people would write fanfic for it. @_@. Gotta say; no regrets whatsoever. You folks are all awesome.
I assume that empty blogs are spam and block them from following me. if you are new, write a couple posts introducing yourself (nothing identifying or private!) or talking about a hobby or something before following.
I created a backup Tumblr in case I lose access to this one (I have forgotten my password and none of my guesses work, so if I have to relog in and the "forgot your password" doesn't work, I'll be screwed). Anyhow, it is @staidwatrsbackup (note the misspelling of waters) If I ever stop posting here, you can look for me there.
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
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
Here's a sentence that stopped me in my tracks last week: "The statement that 'the cemeteries are full of indispensable people' is just as true of nations, and in particular the US":
https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/16/55382/
The writer is John Quiggin, writing about the fact that, under Trump, the world has raced through a series of seismic shifts in how it organizes itself, rushing to fill an America-shaped void in its dealings.
This is a subject that's very much on my mind. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor and then flipped the table over because he resented having to pretend to play at all. The "international rules-based order" that gave America oversight and control over the world's militaries, finances, trade, and communications was always a better deal for America than it was for the rest of the world.
The long persistence of this system doesn't mean that other countries liked it. The reason the American century endured for as long as it did was that the toll that America extracted from the world was always lower than the cost of making a new system. Just as people stay on Facebook because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, the nations of the world let America control their systems because they feared the cost and difficulty of building a new system more than they resented letting America dictate and tax every part of their politics and economies.
That's where Trump comes in. The price of doing business with Trump is, effectively, infinity. If you buck Trump, he doubles down and demands twice as much. If you capitulate to Trump, he interprets it as weakness and comes back for three times as much. There are no deals to be made with Trump, only temporary measures that last until his next Fox and Friends binge or chance encounter with a ridiculous conspiracy theory.
Take Canada: in 2018, Trump tore up NAFTA – the deal that Bush Sr and Clinton crammed down Mexico and Canada's throats – and replaced it with USMCA, a trade treaty that was even more advantageous to America. Then, within months of his 2024 election, Trump tore up USMCA and replaced it with a chaotic series of tariffs that swung around wildly from 25% to 100% to (as of this week) 50%:
Trump has no coherent reason for this new tariff. Canada has bent over backwards to give Trump everything he wants and more. Despite some high-minded words at Davos about the need for "middle powers" to decouple from the USA, PM Mark Carney has given Trump everything he could ask for. Carney allowed Palantir – a company that makes no bones about being an agent of Trump's will – inside the most sensitive parts of the Canadian military. Carney dropped his plan to charge US tech companies a 3% tax. Carney is firing tens of thousands of civil servants and replacing them with chatbots, the majority of which will be operated by US companies, running on US servers.
Sure, Canada's imposed some retaliatory tariffs on US products, but that's just a way of making everything Canadians buy more expensive, which is a weird way of punishing America. It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can in the hopes that the downstairs neighbour says "ouch." Meanwhile, Carney has consistently ignored US interference in Canadian politics, including the tsunami of dark money pouring into the Alberta separatist movement – a bid by Trump to literally steal an entire province.
Give Trump everything he asks for and he'll demand more. Deny Trump anything and he'll demand more. Sign a contract with Trump and he'll break it. Send Trump an invoice and he'll stiff you. For Trump, "the art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: renege.
This is why – as David Dayen writes – there will likely be no peace deal in Iran for so long as Trump is in office. Why would the Iranians sign any deal with Trump when they know Trump will break it?
Last Christmas, I gave a speech in Hamburg about "the post-American internet" that the rest of the world has the chance to build now that Trump has zeroed-out all the value it used to get from playing by America's tech policy rules, even as Trump has weaponized US tech companies to attack world officials who buck his agenda:
After that speech, I wrote a book (The Post-American Internet) that Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in August 2027. In the book, I describe the role that "trusted third parties" (T3P) play in complex transactions. Think of an escrow agent who holds onto the deed for the house you're buying from the seller until you hand over the money, and then forwards the deed to you and the money to the seller.
The more complex a transaction is, the more it needs a T3P. For most of the past century, the US has been the world's T3P. Most of the world's transoceanic fiber optic lines make landfall in the US and interconnect to one another in US data centres. Most of the world's international transactions are conducted in dollars and are cleared through US-controlled platforms like SWIFT. Through its aid programs, the US sets the health and public services agenda for billions of non-Americans, and the US has military installations in more than 100 countries. The US trains the world's militaries, it supplies (and withholds) information from the world's intelligence agencies, and it runs the IT infrastructure powering the world's government agencies and critical infrastructure, from tractors to medical equipment.
Right from the start, the US was never an entirely trustworthy "trusted third party." There were plenty of moments where the US abused its control over its "neutral" platforms to serve the American national interest at the expense of the countries that relied on those platforms.
But those violations were either covert or carried out under some kind of legal rubric ("the rules-based international order"). You'd probably continue to trust an escrow agent that obeyed court orders to hold onto the money after handing over the deed. That trust might persist even if the escrow agent withheld the money on the say-so of a DA or sheriff, even without a court order. You might even continue to trust the escrow agent if they sometimes said, "I'm going to hang onto this money for 72 hours because I think there might be something weird in this deal."
Same goes for the escrow agent who has a secret side-hustle with the local land-registry office and realtors that lets them skim a few points off every deal and scoop up the best properties through a shell company. Provided you never find out about this, you'll happily hire that escrow agent to handle your property deal.
Trump is the escrow agent who keeps the money and the deed, then announces he did it because the seller was a fentanyl dealer and the buyer was a lizard-person; and then publishes a long screed on Truth Social calling everyone who criticises him a terrorist, promising to do it again next time.
Even if you need to sell your house, and even if Trump is the only escrow agent you can find, you're just not going to trust him with your deed or the money. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again."
Back to Quiggin: the US was the world's indispensable nation, and the cemeteries of history are full of indispensable nations. As Quiggin writes, Europe and Ukraine have largely given up on US military protection from Russia and are building their own capacity, already surpassing the US in drone and artillery capabilities. The US can no longer credibly provide missiles and anti-missile defenses, not after Trump used up America's stockpiles in his pointless, endless war in Iran.
Quiggin notes that the consensus case against the EU as a military power held that Europe "lacks the capacity to project power globally" and that it is "too disunited to act effectively." Per Quiggin, these only matter if you believe that the post-American military order will look and act like the American system that Trump just trashed. Trump has a chud "Secretary of War" who kidnaps foreign leaders and can't reliably get oil through the Strait of Hormuz – if that's the dividend from "unity" and "projecting power," you can keep it.
On finance, Quiggin notes that the EU is racing to break its reliance on SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard, and the more Trump weaponizes these against institutions like the International Criminal Court, the faster this transition will go.
America's load-bearing private institutions – like the Big Four accounting firms and the bond rating agencies – have self-immolated, thanks to decades of lax regulation by successive US administrations through scandal after scandal. Quiggin points out that there's no reason to replace these giant, structurally important (but terrifyingly unreliable) cartels with trustworthy versions. It's cheaper and more robust to rebuild our economy so that it no longer serves the finance system, returning finance to "its pre-1970s role as a provider of a relatively limited set of services to the real economy."
On manufacturing, Quiggin points to the twin facts of Trump's chaotic tariffs and China's "economic nationalism," which have put the EU in the centre of a new trade order. Here, too, we're getting something new, not a Made-in-Europe version of "the failed globalist dream of the WTO" nor "Trump’s attempts to extort surplus through bilateral bullying":
As I said, Quiggin's article has been rattling around in my mind ever since I read it last week, but there's one area where I think Quiggin's got it wrong: the relative difficulty of building a post-American internet.
First, because Quiggin says that the real challenge is building a post-American AI. Sovereign AI is, frankly, nonsense. If Trump turns off all of your country's chatbots, nothing changes. If Trump orders Microsoft to shut off your country's access to Office 365 (as he did to the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian judge who pissed him off), your country would simply cease to function:
In the face of these real, non-speculative, immediate, grave threats, focusing on AI – the money-losingest technology in human history, which has consistently underperformed relative to its boosters' promises – is just misguided. If you really want an "AI strategy" for your country, it should be this: wait for the bubble to burst, then buy hardware and talent at fire-sale prices in the wave of ensuing bankruptcies, and use them to extract more performance from free, open source models.
The real digital challenge is building apps and data centres to run everyday administrative, telecoms and e-commerce software on, and then moving your country's, ministries', companies' and households' data over to the new platforms. The hardware and software are challenging, but ultimately straightforward. Raising capital for data centres is just a matter of convincing people to invest in being a kind of landlord, which is among the easier sells to make (and there's plenty of investors who are looking for real alternatives to getting sucked into the AI bubble).
Getting the apps is hard, but there's an army of technologists who are ready for more, after decades of doing fake startups for a Big Tech company to "acqui-hire" and/or toiling to improve ad click-throughs. These people yearn to follow Steve Jobs's injunction to "make a dent in the universe" and they are being chased out of Silicon Valley by ICE chuds who want to send them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.
There's plenty of talent and capital for the taking.
The real hard part isn't writing or running the code – it's extracting the data, replacing the firmware, and bridging new systems – like post-American social media platforms – into the existing ones. This part is hard because every country in the world has agreed to a trade deal with America wherein they agreed to make it illegal to reverse-engineer US tech exports, in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Trump has made the case for abandoning these deals better than I ever could have:
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:
Stinky sets the stage for the post-American world order. It is now more expensive to stay in the America-led economic system than to throw it away or replace it with a non-US-Centric alternative. He is also accidentally promoting renewable energy worldwide by making fossil fuel pricing and availability unreliable. Good work, Donny Boy!
having free control over our endrocrine systems and the ability to change our genitals is currently inextricably tied to trans rights, and for good reason, but frankly i don't think it even needs to be. it should just be a matter of bodily autonomy, and that should be universal. if a cis dude wants tits and a pussy i think that would be fine. if cis women want a dick or nothing at all that should be allowed i think. people shouldn't need to be transgender to be allowed to change their bodies. free the nipple, enlarge the nipple, remove the nipple. whatever the fuck you want. i dont know if there's a term for this belief but i hold it very strongly. everybody biohack yourselves NOW
The way all the 2020s have done so far have been making me categorically against every new generation of tech that comes out is insane. Like I'm from a technological boom generation, saw the first portable phones, nokias & blackberries & flipphones etc, and the first smartphones, and the first ipods & ipads & tablets in general while still having cassettes & DVD & MP3 players around so I know how all of it work, I had computer classes in high school, I did the transition between home desktop computers to laptops and back to gaming computers. But then they started to put internet in your printer & microwave, everything has ads & AI now and every update is worst than the last. I literally loved technology and they ruined it
HOUSE RENOVATIONS (quiet sigh) Just saw your tags and— this userbase is older than a lot of folks think, eh?
i spent part of today browsing through online furniture store websites and looking at their dining room sets and despairing because to me all the furniture just looks like expensive IKEA.
I am trying to STOP living like a perpetual grad student; isn’t there anything that doesn’t look like it was rendered with 20 year old 3D software?
I'm straightup taking up woodworking and building my own. Is it cost or time effective? No. Is it the only way to get what I want that isn't made out of chipboard bullshit? Yes.
Every now and then I post a safety PSA because it really really bothers me to watch people doing things that seem like not a big deal but actually get a lot of people dead or badly injured. Don't stop your car on train tracks. Don't walk out on ice when there are signs saying thin ice (especially with babies in strollers!)
Today's PSA is .... escalators. I know that sounds incredibly stupid and harmless, but I have seen SO MANY really bad accidents on escalators over my life and...well, earlier this summer someone I knew saw one that ended with a fatality, and today I encountered an escalator with the end covered in big pools of fresh blood on my way to work. (There were used bandage wrappers too, so I assume an ambulance had been there to get the victim, but the building safety team hadn't even arrived yet to block the area off, much less start cleaning.)
So! Escalator stairs are metal points and can do a LOT of damage if you fall hard onto them at the wrong angle. Public places with lots of escalators like train stations, airports and malls all send people to the hospital almost every week (at least the ones I know about. I haven't seen like, worldwide statistics).
Thus! Please learn where the stop buttons are for any elevators you use regularly, hold all bags securely, exit quickly and get out of the way of anyone behind you, and make sure you don't have anything loose near your feet (like loose shoelaces or extra long flowy clothes)! Take an elevator instead (where possible) if you have a lot of bags or feel unbalanced.
There are three main causes of escalator accidents:
Someone puts their bag or cart or stroller LOWER than them, they aren't holding it well enough, and it falls down the stairs, knocking everyone else down like it's a bowling ball. Sometimes a person leaning on a cane or walker will have their device slip, making them fall, and the person themselves becomes the bowling ball.
2. Someone pauses just after getting off the escalator to decide which direction to go, the next person can't exit and is forced by the moving stairs to crash into them, the next person crashes in to them, everyone falls down, and the people behind them on the escalator are all knocked backwards with varying degrees of force.
3. Something someone is wearing gets stuck in the escalator tracks and the person is trapped. I have actually never seen this (I think modern escalators have a lot more safety devices than old ones), but I've heard enough horror stories that I wince whenever I see an escalator with someone wearing a flowy skirt dragging on the ground, untied shoelaces, or accompanied by a dog who has long flowing hair covering their feet.
Anyone know the Thai music scene of the late 90s well and want to help me find an old musical?
In about 2001, someone played the soundtrack to a Thai musical for me. I loved it so much that they found my enthusiasm for it hilarious, and they gave their tape to me. (They had seen it performed a few years earlier while on a year long student exchange to Bangkok - it must have been sometime between 1997-2000. They brought the tape back as a souvinear, but they weren't as enthusiastc about it as I was.) I played that tape constantly until the ribbon eventually wore out (I left it in the car even in the heat of summer and the cold of winter, which I'm sure didn't help) and had to toss it. Unfortunately everything on it was written in Thai, and this was the pre-internet era so I didn't have access to a Thai-English dictionary (yes I probably could have ordered one from the public library intercity loan program, but I never did; I never even knew enough to realize Thai is an abugida (kinda alphabet-like) and thus I could have transliterated the title pretty easilly - I assumed it was more like Chinese with a bazillion characters).
As a result, I have never known what the the musical was called, or what the plot was, or anything besides that the music was great. Lately I've really wanted to listen to it again, and I thought maybe someone here might know it?
90s music in the US was grunge, but the musical's sound was much more like the rock of the 80s (in the US). Emotionally it hit the same beats for me as like, Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer, or Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero, but I know very little about music, so it is 100% possible it was a diferent genera. (I classify music more by how they make me feel than music style.)
The inside cover had a picture of a stage with a lot of purple and red spotlights and I feel like the costumes were very flashy with sequins and stuff, but I think that might be what I expected based on the music more than actually shown in the photo. It felt kinda like it was following the wild success of The Phantom of the Opera and Cats by doing a Thai rock opera, if that makes sense.
And that is the totallity of everything potentially useful I know about it. Some other probably unhelpful bits:
The music was so diverse I kinda thought it might be more like that ABBA movie Mama Mia!, where the songs existed first, and then someone strung them all together into a narrative in order to make a play.
I vaugely recall that the person who gave me the tape hadn't seen it in Bangkok, it was some other city. But perhaps it was just on the other side of the city from where they lived or something. They had been traveling around playing tourist the weekend they saw it, anyhow.
They thought it was a musical, and the songs frankly felt like it, but it is possible that it was just a rock concert designed to tell a story as an artsy hook for the music or whatever (although it has so many performers that seems less likely.)
Um, you know how Thai music is kinda gentler on the ears than US music tends to be? Like, I feel like Jeff Satur fills kinda the same sensually aggressive and transgressive role as bands like, I dunno, The Cure? Evanescence? X-Japan? , but his stuff like...has less exclaimation marks? It is softer and like... the sense of danger is coming from the side?, instead of feeling like a direct attack? Anyhow, I feel like a lot of Thai music is like that, but several of the songs in the musical I'm looking for were more direct in a way Thai music doesn't seem to be often. Which was part of why it felt Phantom-inspired to me. (Phantom kinda does something similar - it's rock made in the era of hair metal, and you can tell, but it's not ...hard? So they are both like super restrained US 80s music.)
(Reblogs requested in hopes of reaching someone who knows 90s Thai musicals.)
Carry on Wayward Son just came on, and its been so long since I saw SPN that I listened to tge whole thing without feeling much of anything emotional at all.
whenever i look into a historical monarch who doesn’t get talked about much and is just kind of a blank spot in my understanding of the historical narrative, 95% of the time what i find is pure white hot blistering capability. a pencil pusher for the ages. a 39 year reign with no more than three hours of sleep a night. there aren’t any good stories from his reign because he systematically caught and stopped all catastrophic good stories before they could start. you shrimply must respect it
(Above is not a real recipie, but it'd prob make an edible cookie. I set up the ingredeants in decreasing numerical value, not actual size, because that makes it easy for me to memorize. (I can intuit whether flour is in cups or tsp without it actually being memorized.)
one of the reasons I love mushishi is that the part of Japan much of it is set in reminds me SOOO much of southern appalachia, particularly the smoky mountains. and mushishi knows that people be falling off cliffs in the dark. that episode is the realest "community that lives on a thickly forested mountain" rep I've ever seen.
the summer hikaru died also does this well, by which I mean, it has a guy just going up a mountain in the dark and slipping and dying. and! ☝️ there is still Supernatural Stuff, which I think satisfies the human feeling that a meaningless death is the Site Of An Occurance, like, we have this NEED for a death like that to have some kind of significance, psychologically. and this does that while also not denying the mundanity of death. the supernatural thing did not cause the death. nothing sinister GOT Hikaru. slipping in the dark got Hikaru. the death is not lessened or softened or made less real due to the existence of the supernatural thing. the dead person is still dead. they're gone. you can't get them back.
it just makes real that human feeling of like, something HAPPENED here. it can't just be THIS, can it??? it has to be SOMETHING --
anyway I love media that threads this needle and hikaru does it really well and so does the mushishi ep about the mushi that puppets corpses that die on that one mountain. I'm putting together a list of good media rep of people falling down a hill and dying and it contains two things but it could contain more. with your help
Im a guy am i allowed to support free the nipple. I mean obviously yes, im aware that its beyond sexist that they cant but i also just like tits. I think woman should be allowed to be shirtless wherever a man is but at the same time do i just think that because im straight?
Hey man I think you can do both. Like I appreciate man tits and those are legal p much everywhere, but if I was ogling people or touching folks without permission or clutching my pearls whenever I saw a nip it'd be a different story
It's not so much "do I think boobs are hot and do I enjoy seeing them" so much as it is "do I think it's reasonable that what I personally find hot shouldn't get to dictate how others dress"
All u really got to be careful of is how u support- cause yeah,it may come off as skeevy if u get too excited about it.
But the drum we're beating here isn't "STOP EXPERIENCING FEELINGS", it's "YOUR FEELINGS AREN'T MORE IMPORTANT THAN MY BODY" and "THE HUMAN BODY IS NOT IN ITSELF OBSCENE" and "WOMEN'S BODIES BY THEMSELVES ARE NOT PORNOGRAPHIC"
And for the love of GOD don't get me started on letting people breastfeed their kids
Also llike. As a baby-steps thought excersise, consider this:
Picture the LEAST attractive person with breasts you personally can imagine. If your knee-jerk reflex is, "I no longer support that person's right to be topless", that's a Gratification motive paired with a Disgust motive.
The key is to move AWAY from Self-Gratification and Disgust and TOWARDS "Equality".
Self-gratification is something we encourage in our view of women so strongly that it almost becomes invisible- to the point of detriment to BOTH sides, which is what bedrock stone-bottom Feminism exists to address.
Your grandmother should be just as commonplace being topless at the pool as your grandpa. Your sister should be able to take her shirt off when it's scorching out and still be as safe and blasé as your brother. Seeing a mom whip out a tit on the bus to feed her baby should be as commonplace as a milk bottle.
The foundational idea is, "the primary purpose of a woman's body is for women to live, not for others to pick apart for approval".
I want to live in a world where a young woman can go out and get groceries or walk to a friend's house or go swimming without being interrupted every five minutes by the stranger living in her skull demanding that she appear beautiful at every possibly moment
