survival is a nasty piece of business

18+ only

[gabriellelioncourt]

"Behold the hands, how they promise, conjure, appeal, menace, pray, supplicate, refuse, beckon, interrogate, admire, confess, cringe, instruct, command, mock and what not besides, with a variation and multiplication of variation which makes the tongue envious." ― Michel de Montaigne

or

13 times the hands made the tongue envious in The Terror for @vvanessaives

[imaginingfromtheblock]

🔪🐭 HE’S FIVE FOOT SOMETHING AND HE’S ROYALTY 🐭🔪

[howtheriddlergothisname]

Socks for the Admiralty's fourth choice for my @theterrorbingo fill 'no one's first choice'

[Ravelry notes inluding the chart]

The visual of the blood and the blues of the ice in the fire hole is just so good I had to play with it with these

[auujehjrgnmuuoingjoskjcnjsjshdo]

Piss on me. Fucking piss on me but do it in the antarctic so that the pee freezes in mid air while you are pissing off a building and the piss turns to spear’s. impale me with frozen urine and then shit on my butt corpse. Im a fat gay and I want to go to Ice Hell ftw.

[orlopsexdungeon]

Cornelius Hickey (& Cornelius Hickey) + text posts

[theterroramc]

“And I imagined her to be a very strong woman, because you had to be, back then, living in that kind of environment, in such a harsh nature. The worldview that they had back then, they weren’t really scared of death, because it was very common. The spiritual life was very, very strong, and very real to them. I imagined that death wasn’t as scary to them as it is maybe to us, nowadays.” - Nive Nielsen on playing Lady Silence Portrait by Aidan Monaghan

[madqueenalanna]

i saw someone on here say that jared harris as crozier does the best drunk acting they've ever seen and i've never really noticed that before but it's actually so true. media will depict "slightly tipsy" or "shitfaced" but you never see the actual alcoholic experience: you drink at such quantity and frequency that your tolerance is ridiculous, but that doesn't mean you're immune. a drunk, lifetime alcoholic will often seem quite normal, very normal to an outsider– not really slurring, stumbling, blacking out, or doing stupid bullshit. but there's always still a tell. it's almost like the uncanny valley, someone who seems 90% normal but somehow, indefinably "off". someone who can go about their life fairly normally, but there is still a wall there, some significant impediment to feeling and living in the same realm as everyone else. someone might look and act normal, but inhabit a different frame of reality than everyone else, and you can sort of sense that distance even if you can't identify it. and this does track w the book, when peglar tells bridgens that a sober crozier is experiencing the world wholly and fully for the first time in decades. it's a really subtle thing, but if you have personal experience– as an addict or someone who's been very close to an addict– it's incredibly poignant and true

[orlopsexdungeon]

stewing in my head lately

Hickey's total rejection of Christian morality, bitterness towards England and desire for personal freedom

how despite how these sentiments may appear at first to be at odds with acting on behalf of the British Empire, they show up again and again in colonial expression, particularly from queer colonialist agents and writers

colonialist conceptions of frontiers as places outside morality, places one could go to escape restrictive morality as well as places one could go to escape toil and drudgery

that this was a conception that painted these places, (particularity tropical islands, like the ones Hickey planned to escape to), as sites specifically of sodomy and cannibalism, acts which the colonialist imagination linked

how Hickey's queerness and cannibalism are linked, both in that the first act of cannibalism he preforms is of his lover, after murdering him in an embrace, and that the same rejection of morality that allows him to love and desire men allows him to consume them with a similar lack of shame

the implication through Goodsir's taunt about Hickey's "mam" preforming butchery and Hickey's philosophy about survival as "a nasty piece of business" that his rejection of morality was necessary to his survival, that if he hadn't spat out morality he would have starved

that Hickey's willingness to practice survival cannibalism where Crozier is not is legitimately more practical and more geared towards survival then giving the dead Christian burials

which doesn't fucking matterrrrr because Hickey is still deeply impractical, his colonialist violence towards Indigenous people deprives him of a chance at a better source of food (one that, unlike human meat, has actual anti-scorbutic properties), and the entire voyage is trapped in the arctic to die together, the colonialist conceptions that got Hickey onboard doomed him from the start

or, from a slightly different angle, Hickey was doomed even before he boarded by the implicit order of execution he was running from ('I can't go back'), even without being stuck in the ice he would never reach his tropical paradise escape because that did not exist. England successfully executed Hickey in the end, all he managed to do was delay his death for a few years and take part in the systematic murder of Indigenous people in the meantime

how, with some admirable exceptions, by and large historical queer colonialists who chafed against Christian morality and sought out frontiers for personal freedom where unwilling or unable to disinvest themselves from empire and whiteness & interacted with the source of their freedom as primarily a destructive force

[tuunbaaq]

this post on fandom racism in the terror by @/sesamie is mandatory reading. definitely topical for when the real fitzjames' jawbone was found and everyone was blorbofying an actual colonizer lol

[vladcvnt]

The Terror S1.E8 "Terror Camp Clear"/Excerpt of "Our Lady of the Flowers" by Jean Genet

[getsloud]

“common misconception: hickey acts like That in episodes 9 and 10 bc he has lead poisoning and other general brain problems. actually, he is just New Boot Goofin' (sponsored by fitzjames)” — @stovepiperat

[theterroramc]

Writer’s assistant Alex Eldridge on Twitter

[nerdsandbabyteeth]

Tuunbaq

[alexanderpearce]

Out of Flavour: Tasteless desires from an avaricious empire

Sue Kneebone, 2023, here shown at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery for Twist.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin led a costly polar exploration in which no one survived. His wife, Lady Jane Franklin, financed numerous search parties, some of which left canned foods on the Arctic ice in the desperate hope that her husband would find them. Other strategies included capturing Arctic foxes to which notes were attached to tell any survivors where to find food.

When reports from later suggested the crew resorted to cannibalism, Lady Jane requested Charles Dickens redeem her husband's reputation by reporting the crew's remains were not mutilated, but they had died 'passively' from cold and hunger.

... While the cans reflect poverty and thrift, Kneebone's zoomorphic cutlery set evokes the unquenchable greed and folly of the British Empire ...

In 1845, Tasmania's ex-Governor Sir John Franklin travelled with his own personalised cutlery set on his costly and ill-fated Arctic expedition.

The litter piece references Lady Jane Franklin's travels through the wilderness of lutruwita/Tasmania, where she was carried by convicts on a sedan chair/litter.

[terrorcamp]

Davechella #12: Cornelius Hickey

This week on Davechella, Dave's brought us a tale of two Hickeys... 👀🎶

Playlist 1:

Playlist 2:

Here's what Dave wanted to share:

One crucial question became apparent immediately: Is Modern Hickey receiving any psychiatric or other help that Show Hickey had no way of getting? Rather than answer that question one way or the other, I decided to challenge myself to prepare two playlists--one for a Modern Hickey who has not received any kind of diagnosis or treatment, and a parallel playlist for a Modern Hickey who has, or is. This made choosing tracks an even more delicate exercise because I wouldn't want to suggest through my musical choices that people who are navigating mental health challenges without treatment are ominously doomed any more than people who are in treatment are magically healed. In the end, the two playlists are closer in tone than people might at first expect--not binary, but different by degree. There are index points in the playlists to help underscore some of this nuance. I hope people find this an interesting way to think of Modern Hickey. I felt moved by, and connected to, both versions equally.

Last week, Paul Ready picked Gurrumul's "Wiyathul" for Goodsir's playlist.

Only three more playlists to go! Catch up with past weeks at this handy summary page. And as ever, see you in the #davechella tag! ✨❄️

[laissezferre]

[letterful]