#jupiter jabber

[ganymedesclock]

The more that I (trans dude) participate in "men's things" the funnier it is to me to realize so much of ostensible 'the way guys are' is shaped socioeconomically.

Men "care less about their appearance"? Men's clothing tends cheaper, sturdier, but also more boring and featureless. You have to work a lot harder to find interesting cuts or styles or vibrant colors. Shorter hair is far more forgiving to style- I can roll out of bed and examine myself in the mirror and think 'hey, that bedhead look is pretty solid and workable'. Cosmetics 'for men' tend packaged for bulk and convenience and seldom will tell you what their scents actually are so if you like smelling a certain way you have to work harder to think about it.

Even down to men's underwear has a much thicker waistband so it's more likely to show above your pants! I can dress the same way in the exact same pants with different underwear and one of them shows above the waistline and the other doesn't.

And sure we can argue the idea that this marketing exists because it's what men want (IMO, a bit naive considering how large and powerful corporations are / the very sorry state of the ostensible invisible hand) but then I can point to experience working at a daycare and tell you that every three year old boy wants ponytails and his nails painted and likes purple or pink, wants to be a princess, wants to wear costume skirts and dresses, because those things are exciting and pretty- and when those boys turn four or five and start to shy away from them, their response is not a refinement of taste nearly as often as it is one of anxiety and dread- that he has learned those things attract him unwanted attention or admonishment or scolding.

Boys are taught what is safe to want, what they 'should' want. And as a man who intends to enjoy being a man with exactly as much color and glitter as I please, the hollowness of the facade has never been more obvious. Nor more aggravating, considering how much genuine harm and misery comes from it. Manly dudes who really like being "conventionally masculine" aren't going to crumble into dust if walmart stops differentiating some shampoo brands as 'womanly' and some as 'manly'- and he might decide he really likes the way this fruity sparkle body wash makes him smell.

One of my still most-popular posts is about how gender of choice should be universal, and this is another chunk of it- social forces that, if we're being bluntly honest, are mostly after our money, have a vested interest in trying to tell us what to want. That men 'should' want this, and women 'should' want that, and the vast beautiful sphere of human experience is carved up haphazardly and each half flicked aside, here, this is for you, in casual ignorance that what we may literally need to survive wasn't in our allotted chunk. "Aberrant" men- men of color, disabled men, queer men- are forced to see this more and more dramatically, but it affects even the most normative socially accepted men. And this is men- the people who, in patriarchal, misogynist societies are getting ostensibly the better deal!

[ganymedesclock]

Said this before but it genuinely flummoxes me to never have seen a silent hill style survival horror with a wheelchair user as a central protagonist.

Like, the overwhelming majority of the mechanics of that genre would lend themselves absolutely perfectly to that. The tank controls early in the genre? character handling and turning their chair. The oft-joked part of you can't climb over knee-high obstacles? Well, yeah, even if the protagonist has enough mobility to stand and climb over, unless they can get their chair through with them they're out of luck. The often semi-cumbersome relationship with melee weaponry and use of firearms? A wheelchair user is someone who would have even more reasons to not want a demon from hell practically on top of them- both their body and their primary means of mobility is at risk.

Heck, Silent Hill even loves scattering wheelchairs around and using them as imagery anyway, just put the playable character in one.

Even the way these sort of games often herd and control the player character's movement through the setting, and how they have to solve puzzles to progress- that would have perfect intertextuality with someone who's not just lost in the middle of nowhere but also has to figure out how to, say, get up to a second floor of a space that doesn't have an elevator and they can't climb the stairs.

I know the game Endoparasitic has a protagonist with only one working limb as its central conceit but as-said it baffles me how few games feature mobility-limited protagonists when so many genres but especially survival horror feel like they'd lend themselves perfectly to that sort of thing.

Almost every survival horror concerns itself at least partially with navigating an environment that seems set against you and often having to specifically solve problems to get place to place in crumbling environs.

A more moody, introspective Silent Hill-style title could also make a lot of hay out of the vulnerability that visibly disabled people experience in our world, while a more bombastic Resident Evil-esque approach could have a lot of fun with the protagonist mad max-style customizing their wheelchair as well as the more pointed take of an """imperfect""" person's attitude towards all these clownlords who keep babbling about perfecting humanity by making bigger and worse beefcake monsters.

[ganymedesclock]

I think the funniest thing about villainous mad scientist characters is almost always, to a man, they are also bad at science.

Like they have a stable of terrifying potent mutations that they pushed the limits of blah blah blah blah blah, but those things tend to be suffering horribly, have poor longevity, are disobedient, destructive, and seldom represent the actual capability of what they're actually representing.

Everybody knows that one spiderman comic panel that became a meme of "I don't want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into dinosaurs" but the real irony is that guy's actually one of the more successful villainous mad scientist guys. That guy knows what he wants and is taking meaningful steps to accomplish and refine his model of it (turning people into dinosaurs).

Generally speaking one smart guy who is unwilling to talk to anybody else is invariably being his dumbest self. Even if he's the guy that already knows the most, the most successful way to know more is to teach, share, and connect.

Hoarding knowledge is basically the same as hoarding money. Both of these are things whose value actually diminishes the more of it someone just sits on. Cycling it through a mutualistic system that enriches everybody inside of it isn't just the "nice thing to do" it's actually the smart thing to do. Information, wealth, resources, are generative.

And I get in the case of evil mad scientist guys the point is they're wrong but I feel like way too many works that are very clear that guy's evil and wrong fall short of pointing out they're also bad at being a scientist. FF7's Hojo is one of the most famous evil scientist characters and he's also so violently anti-intellectual that it's a wonder he can find his own butt honestly. That guy isn't curing cancer OR turning people into dinosaurs, he's the world's most overpaid schoolyard bully.

Even his malicious exploitation of Lucretia raises the very plausible question of how many monsters in his personal horror show lab are even actually his work. It's debatable this man actually does any science since we know he's a plagiarist prone to assassinating his competition. And he's hardly the only example of this trope. Resident Evil's Umbrella Inc is overtly a clownshow full of petty infighting, ego problems, cult indoctrination and "we put the zombie serum into the plant. oh no the plant killed us. who could have seen this coming. at least our trustworthy friend doctor Antisocial And Obsessed With Leeches will- oh my god."

Like these characters are intentionally written to be villainous, their wrongdoing is pointed out, but also I feel like not enough stories go on to hit these people where it'd really hurt them by pointing out they're also really bad at being scientists.

[ganymedesclock]

One of my big operating ideologies as an educator is that talent is fake. Let me explain that.

I do not believe anyone has any inherent quality that makes them better or worse at things.

I do believe some people improve at certain things faster than others, but this is not because they secretly have a better stat in whatever. It's because every single human being has a bunch of weird little idiosyncrasies and quirks that will be unexpectedly conducive to something.

For example, I know I am, in a word, floridly lingual. Insofar as tests prove anything I have tested in some preposterously high percentiles for language skills fairly consistently throughout my entire life. I consider myself quite talented as a writer.

This cannot be meaningfully separated from a couple of facts:

-I am autistic and one of the biggest avenues I stim in is words and sounds. This means that on any given day I am spending at least part of it just messing with words.

-I grew up with parents that loved to read and loved to talk, so when they had kids they wanted to show affection or bonding with they proceeded to talk to me a lot, transcribe random silly stories I told them, play with me with accents, read books with me and talk to me about those books, etc etc.

-I was socially rewarded for being Smart Kid that read Big Books

The end result of all of this? Because of habits I had for various reasons, I put in a huge amount of work and practice into reading and writing without thinking of it that way because it didn't 'feel' like work. It just felt like "I like talking about books with my mom", it just felt like "play-pretend stories are the most reliable way for me to socialize", it just felt like standing at the counter warming up a toaster strudel going "creem cheems creem cheems" to myself because the box said 'cream cheese' on it.

I believe that talent is fake, insofar as no one is inherently good at anything. As someone who professionally juggled babies for six years, have you ever seen a baby? They're bad at everything. Of course they are. They've never done it before and they're using a body made of unshaped gelatin. By the time anyone manifests being 'good at' anything they've been encouraged and coddled and cherished and nurtured.

Which is why all of those things- that affection, that rewarding, that patience, that intellectual scaffolding to make it easier to 'put the work in'- is critically important to give to anything and anyone you want to see improvement at.

[ganymedesclock]

In terms of petty personal opinions I don't think I'll ever be able to get into stuff that uses "Y/N" as a placeholder for the main character. No matter how close the mc is supposed to be to the audience, they're ultimately a separate interface with their own life and traits and ironically I feel like I can relate and care about a character way more easily when that separation is intentionally minded.

This isn't to say I think there's anything inherently wrong with that style of writing, but it's more that I can't evaluate it because the second I see that sort of thing my brain just throws a wrench in like "nope! the fey are trying to take your name, we're disengaging".

It's genuinely always baffled me because given its popularity people are clearly getting something out of it but that something is inscrutable to me. Like, if it brings people joy I'm delighted and glad for them! Just confused.

[ganymedesclock]

I think the thing about a lot of disingenuous arguments about what should and shouldn't be allowed and what's morally important in terms of fandom discussion or ships or whatever, boils down to an insecurity best described in metaphor.

Imagine you go to a restaurant with someone. The expectation is that they will look at a menu and place an order. They may have a special request that the waitstaff can or can't accommodate. They may have to stop you before you even get to the restaurant and let you know that they have a need that cannot be met there, and has to be done elsewhere.

All of this requires them to honestly tell you, and the waiter, what they want to eat. They have to say, "I think I'll have the chicken sandwich." If they do this, whatever their actual order or preference is, it's ok. Yes, there are obvious bad faith edge cases. It will not be hunky dory if they ask you to serve them a human heart. And there are cases that YOU might not be comfortable with- say you're a vegetarian and are uncomfortable with them eating meat right in front of you, "hey, can you have something that's not meat while the two of us specifically are eating together? I understand and respect if you have the chicken on your own time."

But it critically hinges on the other person's willingness to tell you that they want a chicken sandwich.

Imagine if instead you go to a restaurant with someone and they unpocket a sharpie and start scratching out menu items, with a rationale for each one. "Beef is SO bad for you. I've heard too many recalls lately about fish. Everyone knows salads are just pushed by diet culture and you can't have breakfast in the afternoon." And so on and so forth until they've scratched out everything EXCEPT the chicken sandwich. So then, the waiter, looking helplessly at the defaced and nearly useless menu, says "...I, guess you'll have the chicken, then?"

None of it was actually about morals or what's good or bad to consume. All of it was an extended exercise in using ostensibly objective arguments to whittle down the options until what remains is ONLY what they personally want to receive and consume. Because they looked at the menu with a whole bunch of options, looked at other people having burgers or salads or noodles, and parsed it as a threat. And the worst thing is, this attitude is contagious. Imagine one of the things they strike off the menu is something you wanted to eat. The easiest place from that surprised backpedal- because you came here to have some good food, not to get into an argument- is to lash right back out with moral arguments- well, what about salmonella? Screw your chicken sandwich, beef keeps better! I want my burger!

And the more this repeats, the more these attitudes feed each other. At the end of the day, the actual way for people to get what they want is for them to ask for what they want.

I said this was a metaphor, so here's the decoder ring, in the off chance it's not obvious- this is about fandom. This is about ships, and fanfictions, and ideas- this is about people refusing to say "I prefer this ship" but instead "every other ship is immoral, this ship is the only ethical correct answer, and EVERY counterargument that tells me I can't get what I want is the worst faith bad argument."

It turns into "either every single person in this restaurant eats a chicken sandwich with me, or they're asking me to allow them to eat human hearts which is exactly the same thing as them making me eat human hearts."

When, dude, nobody has time for that, this is exhausting, and no one should have to submit their life story to you for you to decide if it's ok for them to eat a burger or not. Just order your chicken sandwich and move on with life. I'm sorry if last time the waiter made fun of you or you went to somewhere that didn't sell chicken or whatever but those are problems that have nothing to do with me and my burger.

[ganymedesclock]

"The duality between real animals and the folkloric body built around them" is such a huge massive topic I cannot even begin to crack it open with a singular tumblr post and I am vastly understating when I say it's a lifelong obsession.

BUT. to pry loose a small chunk of it for just one post.

Snakes are conceptually hilarious to me. Folklorically they are like the evil trope animal and it makes sense. For most of our collective existence as a species, a venomous snake is a scary thing to be on the wrong side of. They're usually small, ubiquitous enough to be just about anywhere, good at hiding, and in an exchange where both of us are horribly surprised to see each other, both parties can pay for it in the worst way.

But my personal experience with snakes has always been a very placid one. One of my middle school science teachers had a class pet corn snake, and not only was the animal itself quite charming- a delicately colored little thing with pink eyes, about an inch and a half thick and maybe two feet long- but it seemed to somehow impart that gentleness onto the class itself. Normally rowdy, wild adolescents would be on their best behavior for a chance to touch the snake. One time it crawled under a classmate's shirt while handled, and he panicked, not because he was in danger but because he was desperately trying to make sure nobody did anything to hurt the snake. It had put its head about where his heart was and seemed to be quite content to be cuddled there to the warmth.

The Minnesota Zoo is a place I've visited so many times it's essentially my godparent, and when I read Harry Potter as a kid (it was an inextricable part of my childhood, much as I'm sure my autistic trans man status would give Rowling an ulcer to think she spurred my desire to tell my own stories which now greatly disagree with her restrictive worldview) it was very easy for me to take Harry's scene of talking to the python in the first book and project my own creature onto it: the Minnesota Zoo's gigantic tropical snake.

While she was never out on a volunteer's shoulders, plenty of zoo volunteers do carry snakes around and offer to let you pet them. A snake's body is dense and muscular, but also has a flowing, almost watery pattern to it. Its flesh articulates in the most extraordinary ways and the smoothness of its scales impart what feels like impossible smoothness.

Ultimately, snakes are not predators to us. They don't hate us. Aggressive snakes act that way about the same way that we would be hostile to godzilla storming through our lives, disrupting the places we live, and hide, convincing us there's no safe quarter and we must attack with everything we've got.

There's a certain alienness to reptiles that I find deeply compelling, more likable for their arguable 'inhumanity' than repulsive. Our mammal sensibilities are rigged different from theirs. And at least when it comes to snakes, I've always found this alienness to create a sense of poise. The movements a snake makes feel so deliberate. They give the impression of moving with intense concentration.

And I'm not going to say this exists in contrast to the folklore of snakes. Anybody who follows my writing or just, knows me, knows I'm a dyed in the wool contrarian who always likes reading a soft side into things stereotyped as evil. Snakes are not misunderstood angels, but they're not devils, either. Instead, they are simply animals, creatures that have the power to hurt us in an unfair world where we have immense advantage. But this power and our relationships with it throughout history have created an immense distortion around the animal as we imagine it.

I like snakes. I know not everybody does. If I have to tie this off with some kind of actionable request, it's a gentle encouragement to explore how we think of animals, the difference between reality and story-told-about-them.

[ganymedesclock]

I don't think I'm capable of creating a joke tabletop character.

I do not mean this as intellectual superiority, nor a cry for help per se. I just think it's funny. I have intentionally tried to multiple times. But the thing about my brain is that I have been making Characters my entire life so at this point I have a little less than three decades of building Guys AND I have a relentless overthink brain because building guys is my primary hobby and if I sit with a concept I will start playing with it.

so I can't actually just, leave anything, out of the box, 'it's just That Guy'. I inevitably start building details and taking them seriously and then I have to explain "well yes this character absolutely started as me going, what if you just played classic OG Skeletor as a tabletop character" and somewhere along the line The Curse got involved.