Hello, everyone, this post is to provide a little more info/links about me for those who are curious.
Who am I?
My name's Kalpar, I'm an indie/self-published author of sci-fi and fantasy stories. You can find out more about my books and sign up for my newsletter at my website www.thekalpar.com There are also links to my other social media profiles where I tend to do more of obligatory promotion.
I also have a very, very small Etsy shop where I have a collection of stickers available, which you can locate here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ironhammerpublishing/
What's this blog about?
Honestly, mostly just for personal enrichment. A lot of social media is garbage so tumblr is me looking at things that bring me joy. This includes but is not limited to: Stardew Valley, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Murderbot Diaries, Trains, Calligraphy, and Discworld. Also pictures of minis that I manage to paint.
I reblog. A lot. Be prepared for that.
Tags of Note:
#now that's what I call internet - My personal tag for posts that I definitely want to find in the future. Basically stuff that I consider the sort of thing I come to the internet to see, makes me feel better about life.
#kalpar - Anything that I wrote/created myself and self-promotion posts
#traincore - A friend of mine suggested making traincore a thing. Honestly I tag train things with this. I like trains. My favorite color is trains. Choo choo.
last night I had the experience of "referencing a tumblr post that you think is widely known but turns out to not be as widely known as you thought it was" last night and it was this post. whatever. go my scallops
My spouse and I were talking last night and the jeans problem came up so I want to talk about it with tumblr here.
The jeans problem was the favorite lecture one of my philosophy professors in college gave about the history of jeans and how it ties into capitalism/mainstream culture absorbing and monetizing any counterculture it encounters. So prior to the 1950s jeans were mostly an item of work-wear that you wore on the job as a farmer or factory worker or miner because they were cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. If you were off the job you'd wear what we'd call now dress pants or slacks. This changes in the 1950s when youth culture start wearing jeans as regular clothing, again because they're cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. But then jeans get absorbed by the culture and we start getting designer jeans, acid-washed jeans, pre-ripped jeans, and now we got people shelling out hundreds of dollars for "povertycore" aesthetic. And now jeans aren't even cheap, durable, and hard-wearing.
This came up because my spouse was talking about thrifting and spooky things (two of her favorite things) and how there was this trend of buying a landscape painting from a thrift store which was probably going to end up in a garbage dump and painting a sheet ghost on it to make it art millennials would like. But now you can go to Michael's or Home Goods or wherever and just buy a landscape painting with a sheet ghost on it, mass-manufactured by a corporation. The counter-culture once again being monetized and absorbed by the culture. It's the jeans problem again.
thank you for at least giving an explanation of capitalism's affect on counterculture and stuff like that that doesn't have the overtone a lot of posts explaining this do of (and I'm exaggerating for effect here but less than you'd think) "This is why any form of adopting any sort of aesthetic associated with a rebellious subculture makes you a hypocritical capitalist shill and a truly pure Glorious Revolution has no form of iconography or at least no linking factor that can be commercialized"
I love that people in the notes have pointed out how this phenomenon affects everything from lava lamps and doc martens to whether lobsters are considered an expensive delicacy or a barely edible ocean roach. And you can see plenty of examples of various counterculture symbols being appropriated by corporations and regurgitated as ultra marketable kitsch, like how you can walk into any Walmart and find 1200 identical tie dye t-shirts.
But here's the positive side of that process: counterculture always keeps evolving, and it will always, always, outpace any corporate attempts to commodify it.
And I want to talk about one of my favorite current examples of that process: capitalist whimsy vs anti-capitalist whimsy. Whimsy, in the modern sense, is about intentionally building your life around joy and beauty, and the current batch of "whimsi-suffixes" trends can lay claim to a vast chunk of the social media landscape.
It's often marketed on social media as this soft feminine cottagecore, with fairies and hobbits and sparkles and maximalist rooms full of potted plants and celestial-themed crap. It invokes images of twentysomething white women with flawless skin and perfectly quaffed "messy" beach waves, frittering around in a gingham dress, showing off her meticulously curated collection of tiny expensive objects, her soft-spoken monologue mostly just a shitload of ads for etsy trinkets or that company that will sell you a mattress in a cardboard box or whatever.
But whimsy as a counterculture movement is based on a rebellion from exactly that kind of mass-marketed maximalism. It comes from a desire to get away from everyone who's trying to sell you shit all the time. It recoils from a world where everything is covered in identical hard plastic, and it revolts against the use of hyper-streamlined algorithm-based content feeds. It values irreverent enthusiasm over stoic cynicism, so it appreciates things like weird designs and unique handmade objects, and it prioretizes relying on local community instead of corporations whenever possible.
Corporations, of course, fucking hate this, and their best defense is to Trojan horse their way into that community by luring you through the doors of Target with shelves and shelves of identical star-shaped lamps or twee little teacups in the shape of an animal. This works just enough of the time to be worth their effort.
And honestly, it's okay to buy that cute little teacup in the shape of an animal. But it's better to get it from a thrift store, and better still to pay a local artist or learn how make it yourself.
And it's ESSENTIAL not to confuse owning that cup with doing the work of being in the community.
Besides, I think most people can very quickly spot the difference in the kind of whimsy you BUY--
--btw this is only three screenshots, but it seems like more because they're practically assaultive, aren't they? Every millimeter of every image is vying for your attention at top fucking volume. That huge paragraph of algorithm gaming AI bait from Amazon actually feels somehow violent--
--and the kind of whimsy that you DO.
The first 500 people to use my link https://skl.sh/ashbentley03251 will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare!I like to think someone made
And that gives me hope.
From what I can see, most people have a pretty keen eye for when a big corporation is just pretending to be one of the Kool Kidz to try and sell you shit. And because those corporations are everywhere, because so many of us are constantly inundated with hypercapitalism, more and more of our counterculture movements are based on anti-capitalism, on learning how to make or remake things instead of just buying them.
Which makes any attempt to capitalize on those movements even more obvious and ridiculous.
Counterculture movements aren't rooted in their aesthetic. They're rooted in a community's shared values. And people will keep finding each other through their values, and they'll keep building communities that don't need big companies, and they'll keep evolving beyond whatever mass produced trendy bullshit has gotten named after them today.
I tried to slip CBD gummies into some kids halloween candy like i saw on the news but the kids recognized them and laughed at me for not having any real weed
These are the sort of people that would lose their life savings to a guy doing three card monte on a street corner if he was wearing a zoot suit and introduced himself as "Vinnie 'Quickfingers' Sanchez".
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database.
Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July.
Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.”
Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check.
A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas.
She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head.
A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April.
The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount.
And the cameras keep falling.
Researchers focused on whether kids that are spanked are more likely to share or, conversely, more likely to have anxiety, years down the li
2021:
Spanking found to impact children's brain response, leading to lasting consequences.
2018:
The American Academy of Pediatrics says new evidence and research not only show that spanking affects a child’s brain development and increa
2016:
Kids who are spanked tend to act out more and have more problems later on.
2012:
A study reviewed more than two decades of research on the effects of spanking and found nothing positive to report, only that physical punis
2010:
A multiyear study shows spanking kids makes them more aggressive later on
I haven’t pissed people off lately by reminding them that ALL types of physical punishment of kids has been proven beyond ANY reasonable doubt to have only negative long term outcomes.
So let me scream it from the hilltops:
Stop hitting kids. End of sentence.
If you think, “but I was hit and I turned out just fine” let me pre-reply: NO YOU DID NOT. You think hitting a child is ok, how the fuck does that qualify as “fine”?????? From one abuse survivor to another: please start healing yourself.
first hot take of 2026: theres 0 point in correcting “improper” grammar in english so long as the meaning of the sentence is conveyed. not only because it’s rude but also because if it is understood by the recipients what is meant, than the language has served its purpose and is, in fact, ‘correct.’
(obviously there is academic/institutional reasons to adhere to a standard but that is because the system demands it and not because there is categorically a correct version of english)
#this is true and something i have believed for years#especially considering that what does and doesn't get considered to be proper english is heavily steeped in racism and classism#however. op i have to know if that than is intentional
excellent tags and LOL no that was not at all intentional, I do that one all the time in speech & writing
Last year I purchased a rather large pile of high quality paper at a Liquidation Sale. For next to nothing it was wild. People have asked how many of these Orc paintings I intend to do. My answer is we'll cross that bridge when I run out of paper.
• The single paintings I've been posting are HUGE, to be sold individually. Each is one of a kind.
• These three smaller paintings are experiments, if they fit on my scanner I can make prints.
• PLEASE BE PATIENT: My Beloved and I are remarrying next week. I won't be able to work on creating a store until November, and I can't guess when it'll be live.
So I had both the fortune and misfortune of being born to two people at the exact center of the bell curve in Most demographic respects— they are white, able-bodied cishet suburbanites— who happen to have a good bit more money than is sensible. This has made them deranged in several very predictable rich people ways— they identify themselves as "Upper Middle Class", they are cheap about dumb shit like buying in bulk and then continuing to eat that food once it expires rather than throwing it out, my father thinks insurance is a scam to steal your money, etc.
So when my husband and I decided to move to the city— specifically to a city with a high Black population, bc that sure isnt irrelevant — my parents became very concerned about Crime. My father got very worried when we asked for the bars that blocked fire escape routes to be removed and gave us several cans of mace that we have given a place of honor still wrapped at the bottom of a shelf somewhere. After the move I got asked a lot of questions about if I was hearing Strange Noises at night (no, on the record). My father was convinced because there were unoccupied houses on our street that we were going to Die.
So all of this primes me for today, when my husband tells me me our grocery delivery is on the porch. I open the door. It is not on the porch. We have a mutual "Well, shit" moment and some confusion because we have a VERY loud dog— my husband had locked the outer door (its a grate) by accident so the delivery guy hadn't been able to knock on the inner door, and so there had not been barking, so it'd taken us half an hour to get out there. I go Well, Shit, lesson learned. Here there be porch pirates. I guess this is what city living is like. I go to shower.
No sooner have I stripped and gone down to get a towel then there is a knock on the door. Dog loses it. I throw on a robe and get the door. It is our neighbor, who was told by another neighbor that we'd left our groceries out, and who'd picked them up to take them inside for us so they didn't get stolen. I pad out there barefoot, in my robe, and he gives me the groceries and as I struggle to get the two bags and keep the robe closed and get the door and keep the dog from running out to make friends and thank him profusely, he's calling "you got it? You need help?"
So, yknow. I guess this is what city living is like. Suburbanites are fucking stupid.
a lot of ridiculous hypocrisy could be avoided if people were more comfortable admitting that a funny retort or dunk is not necessarily morally correct. like very often someone will say something very funny that was also like, a bad thing to say and so many people make themselves look very foolish thinking they have to reconcile that
neopronouns are all well and good but as long as we're adding words to the english language there's much cooler things we could add too. lets add inclusive and exclusive "we." a variant of "we" that distinguishes between "we (including listener)" and "we (including the speaker but not the listener)". other languages have this. Let's add the obviative case to our third-person pronouns so that we can distinguish between two people of the same gender - a him-[salient] and a him-[less salient]. this would make it much easier to write sex scenes where two people use the same pronouns. why aren't our proud pronoun warriors working on this
