33 @tetchim0n - Tumblr Blog

it’s such a shame that despite the millions of books, movies, and tv shows out there, no one has EVER managed to write a woman well. yeah, believe it or not, it’s never happened, not even once! and since i’m incapable of enjoying characters that AREN’T well written, i’ll just have to keep ONLY enjoying well written men, like tony stark

larkstonguesinaspicpart1

Reading hitchikers guide for the first time was really funny because it was like ohhhh THIS the writing that every unfunny nerd has been trying to emulate from like ‘00-‘12 . But good.

milkchuggs

derinthescarletpescatarian

#tbh my opinion on hichhiker's guide is that while i really enjoy it i feel like Terry Pratchett just kinda did everything Adams tried to do#but better and with more subtlety and greater depth of execution#So while i enjoy and appreciate it every time i pick it up im just kinda like#“whoah i should be reading terry pratchett”#and then i pick up praychett#and im like woah this guy was a fucking genius and did everything adams tried to do but more and better and in such a way to where its#hard for people to be annoying about it bc it possesses a lot of subtlty that#while adams is good he definitely lacks to the extent pratchet has#Also while pratchett practices absurdity he maintains a coherence of theme and idea that while carried by some overarching themes#adams definitley leans into the zany galaxy roadtrip at the detrement of coherence where pratchett generally succeeds

I think the key difference here is that Pratchett was a dedicated writer who wrote with intentionality and focus, whereas Adams was hurriedly throwing up half-baked radio play scripts in between his actual paying job of editing Doctor Who and then later procrastinating severely on forcing those scripts into novel and tv show formats while his agent tried desperately to figure out what pub he was getting drunk at so they could force him to come home and do some actual work.

derinthescarletpescatarian

#imma be so fr#comparing hitchhikers to any of pratchett's work is frankly insane#and makes me think you fundamentally misunderstood what at least one of them was trying to do#like these do NOT occupy the same conceptual space#this isn't one guy doing a thing okay and another guy doing it great#this is one guy doing one thing and another guy doing a vaguely related thing#you wouldn't say spaghetti is mediocre because fettucine is flat#like you recognize that that sounds insane right?

elodieunderglass

Looking at how those posters might have come to this idea, I think a lot of people encountering either Pratchett or Adams without reading other/earlier works probably feel those two authors invented that type of humorous storytelling, aka “stories with jokes in”. They didn’t! They really didn’t!

Pratchett and Adams wrote humour in a long-standing recognisable tradition of humour heavily influenced by the magazine Punch. Both authors clearly had their brain chemistry fundamentally altered by works like 1066 and All That, published in 1931. This was a joke history of Britain, showing some features recognisable to people who can read:

The wordplay, footnotes, arch tone, inaccuracies, long-payoff jokes and running gags, silly names, silly lists, references to shared/pop culture, references to classical culture, social commentary, use of absurdity, etc are features. These weren’t invented by Adams or Pratchett, and people who use them today actually might not be referencing those two authors at all; it’s a style of humour with a very extensive back catalogue, over 100 years old. Fun to read if you enjoy those authors; and since the inventiveness and wit are based on having a moderately clever author who is very well-read, it’s hard to write well in the style without at least being educated in the genre.

unsolicitedopinions0

out of context thing I wrote today

Sun Tzu said to know thy enemy, and I certainly intended to know what MilfLover420 had been up to recently.

unsolicitedopinions0

Blurb for my WIP, follow for more :)

Genre/Vibes: Contemporary YA, Sports Romance, She's the Man but with e-sports.

It's hard not to feel like a loser when you're the mediocre middle child in a family of prodigies. Cameron Day's only escape is League of Champions, where she dominates the solo-queue leaderboards. So when a spot opens up on a rising e-sports team and the team's manager mistakes her for a guy, Cam doesn’t correct him. Not when this could be her one shot at making something of her life. To the rest of the world, Cam is a surprise pick. To the team, she’s a question mark. But to Jacob—their ruthless (and distractingly hot) captain who’s already seen one ex-teammate implode under pressure—she’s a risk they can’t afford. If she cracks, they all go down with her. The only way forward is to prove she’s not a liability, but the key to pulling them out of freefall. And she’ll have to do it under a spotlight she’s spent her whole life avoiding.

goth-queen

cute-catts

prokopetz

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

prokopetz

It wasn't just the hoity-toity ritual magic stuff, either. Popular media often frames a fundamental opposition between the Church and practitioners of the Old Ways™, but on the ground, any given medieval European community's foremost practitioner of traditional folk magic was likely to be the village priest. And again, they very much were not supposed to be doing this. There were some very pointed letters going around reminding people to cut that shit out, not that we're naming any names, Jeremy, and no, "if you invoke the saints first it's fine" is not going to fly with the bishop.

prokopetz

I feel like a lot of folks in the notes are missing a critical piece of context here because they're not clear on what the Church's official position toward magic actually was during the Medieval period.

In brief, the idea that magic is a. real and b. Satanic was not the party line for the greater part of the Middle Ages. Obviously the particulars varied both regionally and over time, but for the most part, the official position of the Church was that there is no power but God's and magic is fake. The Church's principal objection to the practices of divination, spirit-binding, etc. was that they were fraudulent, not that they imperilled one's soul. Sometimes this was even carried to the point that accusations of witchcraft would result in the accuser getting in trouble rather than the accused; after all, if your neighbour is pretending to do wizard shit, that's fraud, but if you actually believe your neighbour is capable of wizard shit, that's heresy!

The hardline "magic is the work of Satan" stance that most folks are thinking of when they think of magic and the Church wasn't particularly widespread until very late in the Medieval period, and is really more characteristic of the post-Reformation era – which adds an extra layer of hilarity to the aforementioned local clergy doing wizard shit, because from the perspective of their superiors, the problem was less "oh no, our priests are consorting with Satan" and more "god fucking damn it, our priests keep scamming people with this wizard shit".

redsparrow12

The Catholic Church, desperately penning their 500th letter to local clergy:

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP TELLING PEOPLE MAGIC IS REAL

prokopetz

The really funny part is that, by all accounts, some of the priests involved didn't even want to be doing wizard shit. Allegedly, they more or less got pressured into it by their congregations, who expected wizard shit of them and wouldn't take "no" for an answer.

qqueenofhades

I've been summoned by @artielu to vet this post, and I'm happy to confirm that it is, in fact, fairly accurate and does represent many of the ways in which medieval people did (and did not) think about gender, witchcraft, religion, magic, and practice. I've written quite a bit on this topic before, probably back when I was teaching a class on magic and the supernatural in the Middle Ages, but it's been a while.

The boring stereotypical Bad Middle Ages take is that medieval people were all howling misogynists and thus were burning Female Witches (and also midwives, out of an idea that medieval people saw all female-led intellectual practice as inherently bad, which is also uh, questionable) at the stake left and right. As I have carped about many times, Witch Trials (TM) as most people think of them were decidedly an early modern invention. The idea of witchcraft as both a) real and b) specifically and evilly female was also in fact a very late medieval invention; it was most explicitly codified in the infamous Malleus maleficarum of 1485. However its author, Heinrich Kramer, was already a raging misogynist and had been chased out of his parish the year before when for some reason, people got tired of him randomly accusing their wives and daughters of witchcraft. The Malleus is well known as a "witch hunting handbook," but people then tend to generalize its late 15th-century conclusions, written by one tiresome misogynist, as completely representative of The Middle Ages Everywhere. The Malleus also contains some anti-sodomitic polemicals, so there are just a whole stew of gender, queer, and other anxieties being represented here in a late medieval context. See i.e.:

Bailey, M. D., ‘From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 76 (2001), 960-90.

Bailey, M.D., ‘The feminization of magic and the emerging idea of the female witch in the late Middle Ages’, Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002), 120-134

Broedel, H.P., 'To preserve the manly form from so vile a crime: ecclesiastical anti-sodomitic rhetoric and the gendering of witchcraft in the Malleus Maleficarum', Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002), 136-148

Broedel, H.P., The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)

Harley, D. ‘Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch’, Social History of Medicine, 3 (1990), 1-26

Katajala-Peltomaa, S. ‘A good wife? Demonic Possession and Discourses of Gender in Late Medieval Culture’, in Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by M.G. Muravyeva and R.M. Tovio (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), pp. 73-88

Stephens, W., ‘Witches who steal penises: impotence and illusion in the Malleus Maleficarum’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998), 495-529

It's true that some of the most dedicated practitioners of ritual magic, and scholars and conservationists of magical texts, were monks, churchmen, and other religious figures. Some of them started from the position that God possessed the only supernatural power and any claim of other magic was wrong, but many others did believe that magical power was accessible from a variety of sources, even as this interacted uneasily with related notions of heresy, religion, blasphemy, and (demonic) sin. This represented the complex and shifting interaction between institutional Catholic and traditional/folk magic beliefs, which were never fully assimilated or "erased." It was in fact also popular among laypeople, as magical amulets or charms were highly valued for their supposedly protective capacities. Magic and ritual magic was also widely used in medicine and yes, for sex (people have always been people etc. etc.). See i.e.:

Bailey, M. D., Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Later Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2003)

Boureau, A., Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West, trans. by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2006)

Collins, D., ed., Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West (New York, NY and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Fanger, C., ed. Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Stroud: Sutton, 1998)

Flint, V. I. J., The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Kieckhefer, R., Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Kieckhefer, R. ‘Erotic Magic in Medieval Europe’, in Sex in the Middle Ages, ed. by J. Salisbury (London and New York, NY: Garland, 1991), 30-55

Olsan, L.T., ‘Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice’, Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), 343-66

Page, S. Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2013)

Rider, C. ‘Danger, stupidity and infidelity: magic and discipline in John Bromyard’s Summa for Preachers’, Studies in Church History, 43 (2007), 191-20

I could go on with quite a bit more, but the point is: there is an extensive scholarly literature on this topic, and any depiction of magical and supernatural beliefs in the Middle Ages, especially in popular media, is often the laziest imaginable shorthand for "they all hated women, thought they were witches, and burned anyone who didn't believe in the all-powerful Catholic church." Yet again, this also does vary by time period, as The Middle Ages are not one single undifferentiated block. A twelfth-century author is far more likely to scoff at the credulous fools who think magic is real or can actually compare to the power of God, whereas the early-modern authors, influenced by Kramer, will do far more of the stereotypical "witchcraft is a particularly female-gendered thing and also real, satanic, and evil." And yes, many medieval magic practitioners and enthusiasts were a) monks and the church and b) regular people, because it occupied a complex place in their belief system and was by no means simply evil. This doesn't mean that they were "more" or "less" enlightened according to the also-wildly-erroneous Scale of Perceived Human Progress, but just that they were complicated, stereotypes are stupid, and my kingdom for one (1) single nuanced, thoughtful, or remotely accurate depiction of this in medieval-themed media. The end.

hauntedwhiskers

Pondering my orbs.

sacred-portal

kermitlesbian

fuck i can’t believe i wasted my entire life being moved by art and beauty and the indomitable human spirit ugh i should’ve been making money through internet scams

catasters

100493503004422

I feel FATIGUED like send her to the seaside for her health type fatigue

gjdraws

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS

WHO IS USING THIS

AN APP??? THEY HAVE A FUNCTIONING WEBSITE

THE LAST FUNCTIONING WEBSITE

iguanodonwildman

Reminder that ao3 does not have an app. Any apps you see are third party and are making money off of the writers without their consent. They’re also probably harvesting your data. Do not support this garbage.

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