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stoopid-turtle · 5 months

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the art of being a skeptical turtle

So this is a personal post more about my experience as a turtle. If you just want to get to the fun list of candies I totally buy into regardless of evidence, just skip down to where the asterisks are. (Consider this like a recipe attached to a blog post)

For those interested in the whole nerdery going on here, let me share that I had a lot of trouble coming to terms with bjyxszd. I wrote a whole series of posts about it to get my thoughts in order. Now I'm fully on the turtle train, but I find myself skeptical of some candies.

This is gonna get super-nerdy so hold on to your butts.

I'm a generally skeptical person. I come by it honestly. My parents literally subscribed to Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptics magazines. They (well, my dad mainly) were capital-S Skeptics. My family talked about logical fallacies, perceptual oddness, and the fallibility of memory over the dinner table.

Please don't back away. I know self-identified Skeptics are typically insufferable. I didn't know this as a kiddo, though, so the whole "thinking about things skeptically" became just my default way of processing stuff. Nowadays, I wouldn't call myself a Skeptic in the way that some in a particularly obnoxious subculture do. But I do tend to be a skeptical sort. I just don't...you know...think it makes me smarter/better/cooler than other folks.

(Actually, it makes me way less cool bc I can single-handedly ruin a fun party by expressing skepticism about something. Nobody likes a wet blanket. I know this)

My bestie in high school always called me Scully to his Mulder. He would believe anything he saw or read, whereas I didn't. Usually, I was right. Like when he totally thought that the Blair Witch Project was real found footage (It's not. Nobody thinks it is now, I know, but it was part of the promo at the time). On occasion, he was right. Like when he told me that some gray clouds we had overheard were from wildfires in Mexico. I scoffed bc, really, we weren't that close to Mexico. But he was right and I learned a valuable lesson on large-scale weather phenomenon. (He's still wrong about there being a picture of a light bulb in the pyramids though)

So, yeah, that's just how I process things. It's second-nature for me. But I reached a point with my generally skeptical outlook where I considered 2 things to see whether I really cared if people were buying into something I thought was false.

The stakes. If a person believes X, what does that lead to? If I don't believe Y, even though it's true, what does that lead to?

There's a whole bunch of political stuff that heightens the stakes. To take a ridiculous (and outdated one), when I was growing up, there was a common story that AIDS hopped from apes to humans because a gay man had sex with an ape and then had sex with other humans. Thus, the AIDS epidemic.

The stakes of other people buying into that homophobic nonsense were (and are) life and death. (If you believe that...uh...bye?) It's something that's worth me being the obnoxious Scully if I hear someone buying into it.

The stakes of, say, my high school bestie believing that The Blair Witch Project was real found footage was...nothing. It just made him want to see the movie more. Nobody was hurt. It didn't matter.

I argued with him at the time, but I probably wouldn't anymore.

The stakes for believing that bjyxszd, here in international fandom, are perhaps higher than the Blair Witch thing. But only barely. If somebody believes in a particular rumor/candy that I don't think is real, it affects literally nothing. We're both still turtles. We have a lot more in common than we do difference with regards to YiZhan. Likewise, the effect of me not believing a candy that may be true is nil. Gg and dd are not impacted in any way.

(I think things may be different for c-fans, but that's not at all a thing I'm qualified to delve into. I can only account for myself in my context)

2. The other thing I consider is the context. That is, how likely are we to know the actual truth?

Scientific claims have a method to test them (and claims that can't be tested are just...not something science addresses). Claims about current events can be researched using journalism methods or whatever. For that homophobic AIDS story, there's ways to prove that it's not true. For the Blair Witch thing...well, the actors went on the talk show circuit for promo so, you know, the real footage myth was quickly lifted.

Celebrities exist in a different context. Like most people, they have a private life that is not accessible to people on the outside. If they choose to open up about that life, then cool. But if they don't or can't do so (like is the case with YiZhan), then they'll try to keep their private life out of sight of fans.

It really hit home to me when I was doing the bts thing how little of dd and gg we saw in the Untamed bts. We see even less of them now. I'm at peace with the fact that I just will never know much about these guys (I wrote a whole post about it). But the fact that there's a big mass of the unknown means that the possibilities are endless. We don't know and we'll never know.

So I don't have any more authority on anything gg or dd related than anybody else does. So why would I attempt to question or dismiss candies that other people find compelling? At the end of the day, there is a truth, but it's not accessible to us, so anything we come up with is just extrapolation.

Which is fine. It's fun. I think there's real stuff going on. (If I didn't, I wouldn't be here) But it means there's no real point arguing about the specific candies.

(and to be clear, I don't see turtles doing this, really. so this is all just me reiterating my own approach to things bc I'm a person who processes thoughts through long tumblr posts apparently) (and it's not a reaction to any particular candy. this post has been in my drafts for ages)

I think I'm a hard sell on a lot of candies, and I'm definitely the fuddy-duddy who just squints and asks a bunch of obnoxious questions about things.

But I ask those questions of myself and don't feel the need to annoy other turtles with them because, honestly, we're all in this boat together. Some candies appeal to particular turtles more than others, and I think we all kinda have our personal preferences for which ones resonate with us. I'm not here to rain on anybody's parade, especially as we all have way more in common just bc we all believe in bjyxszd.

This is all a long-winded way to explain how I think about candies, honestly. Or more, how I assess candies that are new-to-me and figure out whether to buy into it or not. With anything involving bjyx, I also leave a lot of room for there just being an unknown and unknowable. Again, the stakes are low, and if I'm wrong about any particular candy (in either direction), then...oh well? It affects literally nothing.

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So here's the fun part! The list of candies that I fully admit don't have a whole lot going for them (by my stupidly exacting standards) but that I totally buy into just because I like them.

Basically all lip-readings, but especially this one

(if you don't want to click thru, this is the moment from the Nanjing farewell concert where dd and gg seem to flirt about photos while on-stage)

Okay, I know, rationally, that lip-readings are always gonna be shaky. I mean, I've seen Medieval Land Fun-Time World. If I'm honest with myself, I know that the lip-readings are basically fluffy candy.

But whatever. I choose to believe them. This moment, especially, I adore (and it does come with dd posting a bare-faced photo after!). I think their big grins while openly flirting with each other on stage just jazzes me enough to pretend.

It's all true. I totally believe it.

Related to this is:

2. Any and all CPN about dd and/or gg seeing turtle signs and smiling or otherwise reacting positively.

I've seen such CSI-worthy analysis of sight-lines to try to establish with precision where dd or gg is looking at the moment they smile/look happy. I have no idea how much any of it holds up, and it's not worth the bother to try to confirm any of it.

But whatever. I like it. I believe it. I'll probably believe it everytime it happens.

3. Advanced Bombology.

So there's some things that aren't in dispute here. We definitely know that gg suddenly cut an Olay commercial ad from a 2 day shoot to a 1 day shoot, and it's a reasonable assumption that he did so to be at the DDU anniversary episode with GG.

The rest is a little fuzzy. The video details dd being kinda grouchy in interviews before the DDU shoot, and it also shares an anon rumor from a person who claimed to overhear dd in a studio restroom arguing on the phone with gg. This rumor came out a year after the event.

The rest of the video is some interpretation of the boys' behavior/mood in the DDU anniversary ep.

So, like, I get that anon rumors a year on maybe aren't the most solid evidence for anything. But whatever, I buy it.

And the interpretation of the boys' mood seems true to me, especially the moment where the interviewer asks gg if they'd discussed his visit ahead of time. Gg def does a sweatdrop, panic pause, look at dd moment and waits for dd's lead to answer. I find a lot of mood interpretation from videos a bit much, but this feels real.

In fact, the whole thing just feels real. Maybe that's why it's easy for me to buy. It feels like a real argument a couple would have.

4. The 5/22 fight during CQL shooting.

I talked about this back when I was doing the bts in order.

In tl;dr, dd gives gg a bit of a brush-off response to something. gg responds by cold shouldering him and then doing some passive aggressive sniping about how dd doesn't want gg to care about him. dd gets upset, then he apologizes, then they go on to watch something on one of their phones.

The basis of this one is some gossip plus a video shot from a distance that requires reading lips. So we know that's already fuzzy, and I know I approached this with some skepticism in my earlier post. That was just to be rational about things so as to be honest with myself.

In truth, I buy it. I buy the argument. I buy the lip-reading. Again, it feels real.

5. GG's card to turtles

This is one of those frustrating ones I'm having trouble refinding. Darn.

The upshot, and I'm going from memory, is that there's a CPN about a card written to turtles ostensibly from gg. This came with some handwriting comparison to try to match the signature to gg's known signature.

This isn't something I'd place bets on, because...seriously, it's so fuzzy.

But in my heart, I believe it for no reason other than that I want to.

6. DD as gg's mystery driver

Okay, there's a couple such incidents. One quite recently. Where gg's driver is mysteriously masked such that you can't see their face.

And, truth, it could be literally anybody under there. But for me, it's dd. No need to give me painstaking comparisons of hands or whatever. I'm fully in on this one.

7. The bone necklace.

Ack, don't hate me for this one!

When I was doing my posts about stuff that had convinced me that gg and dd were still together, I stumbled with the bone necklace. To me, it's the main thing that convinces me, but if I'm honest, it really is kinda a leap of faith thing.

With the ox-head necklace, we have the fancam footage to back it up as being from gg. All we have for the bone necklace is the timing and the precedent of dd having already worn a necklace from gg. That's shaky, really.

In fact, I think I saw some other dd CP claiming the bone necklace as theirs (I saw them also claiming the Leica camera). I think they're wrong, but I don't have any solid proof to say so.

I think the most I can say is that there are much harder evidences that gg and dd are still together. But these typically involve massive privacy violations so I'm not eager to spread them around (I kinda hate that I stumble upon them, tbh). But in any case, it has me convinced, so if I already know gg and dd are a couple, then of course the bone necklace is related.

But on its own, the bone necklace is a leap.

Okay, that all said, since I (finally) had a photo of dd last time I posted, I'm dropping a random gg photo here. Not my favorite, cause pls don't make me choose, but one that hangs out my head throughout the days.

#bjyx #yizhan #considerations of being a turtle #it starts nerdy and then turns into a listicle #no judgment for just skipping to the candies #gratuitous gg photo #they srsly just wrapped him in cables and then that happened #what is his waist yall #and why's there a car driving up his lapel?#still sexy

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olderthannetfic · 8 months

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I had an incredibly odd moment last night at an event night for my dorm. Basically this girl and I were the last people left painting after everyone else had finished, the conversation was going well, and then she mentioned fanfic and how cringy and bad it was. Confused by my fellow nerdy type disliking a core part of nerdery, I admitted that I wrote fanfic, that I loved canon-divergent AUs and I wasn't sure what was wrong. "It's equally fictional either way," I said, which she did seem to pause and think about before acknowledging that was true.

Then she clarified the problem was Boku No Hero Academia. (For full transparency, I have not watched it. Confused, I said, "Isn't that just some shounen series? What's wrong with that? I like shounen." So then she hits me with, "The fandom is gross. That write things that shouldn't be depicted or portrayed." I stared at her, confused. "Like pedophilia."

I admitted, because I felt comfortable with her, that I had written fanfic about CSA and a survivor finding hope for the future, a therapist, true love and his abuser eventually getting his comeuppance. She looked at the painting and not at me. I couldn't tell if she was mad or not. So I added that, over the course of the year and a half of writing it, nine people had told me that reading it had helped them either decide to seek out therapy or helped them realize what happened to them was abuse and that it mattered. And I think it's worth it to make something that makes someone uncomfortable if it helps other people out, and also, the back button is right there. No one has to read something.

Looking upset but affect flat, she said that BNHA fans write things that "glorify" pedophilia. And I, because I am a dick with no social skills, went, "Well, don't read it." She clarified it shouldn't be allowed to exist because it "does harm to people". I said that abusers are responsible for abuse they commit, and nothing they read makes them do it. Psychologists, I reminded her, since several people in her family are psychologists, study and witness things much more horrible than we can imagine, which abusers often say are necessary, justified and sometimes kinda cool, and they don't do any of it. Stephen King didn't commit any murders as a run-up to writing about murder.

She went back to staring at the paint and said I didn't understand the harm it was doing, because it was normalizing it. So I pointed out that no amount of movies where killing the bad guy is a cool, glorious, badass thing to do has made murder socially acceptable in society. "But that's killing," was the objection. "Which is violence," I said in return, "just not sexual violence. But if a hundred years of killing the person who wronged you in cinema didn't make people fine with murder, I don't think a fanfic is going to make it that way." She scoffed and looked away. In a gentler tone, I finished with, "I don't think all of the socialization someone goes through in life and everything they've been told in their entire life can be undone by some anime characters."

She did not say anything to me for the rest of the painting time. She left without a word. I thought for sure she was angry with me and we weren't going to take anymore.

Today, she smiled and waved at me on campus like everything is fine and nothing uncomfy happened.

I don't understand. I am, however, neurodivergent, and therefore bad at social signals, so I may be missing something, here. She was never visibly angry at me when we talked, nor did she raise her voice, so I don't think that I was awful, here. However, not saying anything to me for a full forty minutes or even looking at me indicates to me I had said something that made her upset.

Neurotypicals, please advise. What is going on, here?

Well... probably she just had her dumb assumptions challenged and wasn't sure how to feel about it in the moment.

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incorrect-koh-posts · 11 months

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Other than leper king and his heirs which book would you recommend for research on Baldwin iv of Jerusalem?

All right then, buckle up for some nerdery! 😁

I will preface this by saying that I am not a total expert on Baldwin and haven't done a colossal amount of research specifically on him. I could chew your ear off prattling on about the general world of the crusader kingdoms, their politics, and about Raymond III of Tripoli and Sibylla of Jerusalem in particular, but Baldwin isn't my main interest here. Also, as far as I know, Hamilton's study is the only longer academic work centred solely around Baldwin. Hence, in order to learn more about your fav and the world he lived in, I'd recommend reading a little more broadly. Being a king, he is featured (at least in some capacity) in most publications that deal with the Latin kingdoms in the latter half of the 12th century.

That said, have a list:

Piers D. Mitchell: "Leprosy and the Case of King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem: Microbacterial Disease in the Crusader States of the 12th and 13th Centuries", International Journal of Leprosy, vol. 61, no. 2, 1993, pp. 283-91. Pretty self-explanatory. You can find this article on the internet; Mitchell also has a few other publications that deal with medicine in the crusader states, so you might find some additional Baldwin stuff there as well.

Elma Brenner: "Recent Perspectives on Leprosy in Medieval Western Europe", History Compass, vol. 8, no. 5, 2010, pp. 388-406. Has a little bit on Baldwin, might be useful if you want to find out more about how the disease was regarded by his contemporaries.

Helen J. Nicholson: Sybil, Queen of Jerusalem, 1186-1190. Routledge, 2022. This is a really good and really recent one that I was lucky enough to find in my uni library. Of course Sibylla-centred, but gives a good overview of the politics in Outremer and of course has passages about Baldwin in it. Also look into some of Nicholson's other publications if you're interested in the role of women in the context of crusading.

Kevin James Lewis: The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century: Sons of Saint Gilles. Routledge, 2017. Obviously mostly a Raymond-centric source, but it is also relatively recent and has a good chunk on Baldwin in the chapter where Lewis talks about Raymond's time as Baldwin's regent.

Joshua Prawer: Crusader Institutions. Oxford University Press, 1980. More politics to be found here, but very well put together. Prawer was an extremely prolific scholar where the history of the Latin East and the crusades was concerned, so - once again: if you're interested, look up his other works.

Jonathan Riley-Smith: The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford University Press, 1997. Good overview that goes into detail about the mentality among crusaders and aspects of daily life. Again, Riley-Smith is one of the authorities in the field, so looking into his bibliography might be worth a shot.

If you're into military history, the works of Benjamin Z. Kedar, John France - or, if you want something more dated, R.C. Smail - might be of interest to you. They mostly cover general points of Frankish and Muslim warfare or the Battle of Hattin in particular (other than in Hamilton or in some of the primary sources from the crusader period, I've never come across an article on the Battle of Montgisard), but might be helpful if you want to get a feel for what life was like at the time.

Hans-Eberhard Mayer is also definitely worth a look as a scholar, even though his works are a bit older now. However, I'm not sure how much of his stuff you can find in translation - I've only read him in German.

For the physical setting of crusader-period Jerusalem and the material culture, I very heartily recommend two works written or edited by Adrian J. Boas: Jerusalem in the Time of the Crusades: Society, Landscape and Art in the Holy City under Frankish Rule (Routledge, 2001) and The Crusader World (Routledge, 2016). I consult both of these frequently for world-building in my fic writing.

If you want something on the general concept of the knight / chivalry, Maurice Keen's Chivalry (Yale University Press, 2005) might be a good start. For a detailed analysis of medieval courtly culture, I recommend Joachim Bumke's Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages (2000, English translation by Thomas Dunlap). That thing was invaluable when I was writing my BA thesis. And if you'd like to know more about the literary life of the crusaders, there is a recent publication called Literature of the Crusades (Cambridge University Press, 2019) edited by Simon Parsons and Linda M. Paterson that I also found rather good.

For fashion: The various Osprey Military History books are a good choice if you want visual representations of knightly dress. There's also a collection of essays called Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) edited by Désirée Koslin and Janet Snyder, which is one of the better ones I've found, as most books about medieval fashion focus mostly on later centuries. This one might be a bit hard to get through, though, if you don't have some kind of background knowledge about medieval texts or architecture.

If you want something less strictly academic and more in the vein of popular history, you might want to try James Reston's Warriors of God (2002) or the much more dated but rather fanboy-ish The Crusades: A History (also sometimes titled The Dream and The Tomb) by Robert Payne, which is very pro-Baldwin.

Other than that, I'll link you an older post about fictional depictions of Baldwin and other assorted good bois and girls from KoH. I hope this will scratch the Baldwin itch for you!

And: If anyone has more suggestions, of course do feel free to add them!

#asks #kingdom of heaven 2005 #baldwin iv #sibylla of jerusalem #raymond iii of tripoli #balian of ibelin #crusades #snippets of actual history #book recommendations #i could add so many more books to that list lol #maybe i'll post a longer list of all the stuff i have read one day

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worstjourney · 4 months

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End-of-2023 Update

I forgot to crosspost my November update from Patreon (in my defence, I was in Norway and then ill) so here is a mashup of November and December, wrapping up 2023 in one convenient post.

Book Stuff

I have finished an outline for the three remaining books of the series. This pass is just making very basic decisions about what gets included and what doesn’t, and roughly shaping the narrative so that I have a basic road map in place before getting creative. Cherry’s 600-page brick is actually quite lean when approached with this lens; I’m trying to let him make a lot of these decisions for me, but sometimes our priorities don’t really align and I’ve had to bring in other sources. Once this bullet-point list is done, then I go back over each section with my storytelling brain turned on, and go into greater narrative detail, so that when I write a script I only have to think about making a good script, and not structural matters. It’s a slow process, but it’s rewarding to feel that, after many months of chasing the whirlwind, I’m finally making forward progress on bringing books into the world.

Events

At the end of November, I made my first-ever trip to Oslo to speak at the 11th annual Roald Amundsen Memorial Lectures, a weekend of intense polar nerdery at the Fram Museum. Other speakers included scientists, explorers, filmmakers and musicians, all unified by a love of polar history, as well as a recreation of the celebratory dinner given for Amundsen on his successful return from the South Pole in 1912. It was a spectacularly good time, and highly recommended to anyone who might be inclined to go to that sort of thing in future. I will have to go back sometime to give the Fram Museum more dedicated attention, as the talks took up most of my time there and I hardly got to explore.

In December, I was supposed to have been a historical guest on a Zoom panel discussing Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica, which started life as the score to the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic. However, too many of us were ill on the scheduled date, so it was deferred to January 15th. I will share the link, when it becomes available, over on Patreon; should a publicly-accessible recording be produced, I will share that here. The panel also includes Polar historiographer Anne Strathie, who will be bringing her expertise on Herbert Ponting and his photographs in particular, and two experts from the States, who will be approaching the material from a biographical and musical perspective, respectively.

An online event which did come off was being one half of the second keynote of Terror Camp, an online gathering that mashes up a fan convention and academic conference. The esteemed nonfiction-writer-turned-novelist Francis Spufford and I talked about writing Polar history, from two very different perspectives. It was excellent fun and seemed to have been received well; I don’t know if the recording is available to those who weren’t registered in advance for the event, but if you’re desperate to see it, it may be worth asking.

Media

I came back from Norway with a stack of books and one DVD. Being ill through the greater part of December gave me a chance to start tackling them, and I’ve written a bit about some of them on December’s Patreon Update, because there wasn’t much else to write. Feel free to nip over there if you’re curious; the post is, like all Updates, open to the public.

If you’d like to hear the guys you mostly only see in photos, you may appreciate this fine programme from the vaults of Radio New Zealand: https://www.ngataonga.org.nz/search-use-collection/search/28712/ It’s RNZ’s take on the 50th anniversary of the Expedition, including many clips from the parallel BBC programme for which my beloved tapes of Sir Charles Wright were recorded. This show also contains a good deal from Tom Clissold, who was living in New Zealand by then, and T. Griffith Taylor. Many thanks to the intrepid Allegra Rosenberg for finding this and bringing it to my attention.

Also hot off Allegra’s desk is the followup to Antarctic Lovebirds, looking at further communications between Atkinson and Pennell, and their lives post-Expedition. I challenge anyone not to be a little bit in love with these guys.

On Patreon

I’ve started doing themed months on Patreon. November’s theme was Scott’s Ponies, and saw the following posts (currently available to Patrons only):

Equine Studies

The Backstory of Scott’s Ponies

A Guide to Scott’s Ponies

The theme for December’s posts was Writing, which included:

The Art of Adaptation

The Master Timeline, Again

Understanding the Characters

The Shape Of The Rest Of The Series

There was also a secret post for the Paper Money tier, who get bonus behind-the-scenes features. The Writing theme will probably spill over into January a bit, but with one or two more visually-oriented posts if I can manage it.

If you want to see what Patreon is like without committing to anything, you can sign up for a week’s free trial at almost any tier, and read as much as you can cram in your eyeballs in that time. You can also subscribe directly to the Free tier and you will get Updates like this, as well as any posts that get made public. Of course, if you feel moved to toss a little cash into the potato pot to support the creation of these graphic novels, that is greatly appreciated, and you get weekly posts in return.

–––––––––

2023 is a mixed year to look back on. On one hand, I did a lot of things; on the other, I made vastly less progress than expected. I think, primarily, I underestimated how much time and energy the publicity rounds would demand; I thought I could juggle that stuff with getting the research in order, and it turns out, I really could not. I think I know better now what sort of events are worth it and which aren’t, but whether I’ll be allowed to act on that knowledge in future, I don’t know. Even excluding the bookselling business, it felt like every time I had a span of work time, something would come up that would keep me from working – December’s illnesses being the latest example, but in a long string of unforeseen somethings that had to be accommodated. I don’t remember this happening when I had a “real” job, and I’m not sure why. 2024 isn’t looking much better in this regard: I already know that January, February, probably May-ish, and possibly September are compromised. I need to figure out how to use these as bookends to keep me focused between times, rather than letting them be derailing distractions. (Any advice here is gratefully accepted.) But I have at least got the ball rolling on writing, so as long as I keep chipping away on that, I ought to inch forward … and once the writing is done, the drawing, which is the fun part!

#events #update

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umniamusic · 1 month

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a neurodivergent guide to patching holes in your film nerdery

Where to start, tools to use, and how to mentally approach it.

Start a letterboxd account. You can catalog reactions, date watched, and this can also be used as a place to save “to watch” lists. I use Trakt only for that final purpose because it also logs TV shows.

Anything you can think of to add to the list, start it now. Then, pick 3 people you admire. Ask them what their favorite films of all time are. You will now have an incredibly long list. Ask those same people what the biggest film they can think of from their childhood is - your list will now double. If you feel like it - go look up the 200 films you have to watch before film school. Any title that seems important, or cool to you, put it down.

Do not take on people’s reasons as to why you should watch a film - those have nothing to do with you. Even if they say they think you’ll love it - release that. This is about what YOU think, what YOU enjoy, what sparks joy for you, and not everyone is going to understand the cavernous maze of your mind.

Now, this is important - forget the list. It is there to raise your awareness of the films you may come across in the wild. Trust me - I tried using the list to decide what to watch - you will be paralyzed. You will see this entire enterprise as a chore. You will be tired. You won’t be excited. Just keep the list there, so you know when you’ve sunk a battleship, so to speak - when a film you watched was a film you intended to watch.

Keep adding to the list any time someone mentions a film. Pay attention to the titles and intriguing details each time you add it, so you’ll recognize it if it shows up again, or someone recommends it again.

Pick ONE venue (Indie Cinema nearby, BFI Player on Amazon, searching “classic” or “iconic” on Netflix). Pick ONE regular timeslot (every evening, every Friday, every Sunday morning, every time your partner and you need a break)

Go to that venue, and pick something that sparks joy (this will often be something from your list, by virtue of it being something you recognize)

Shut everything else off and vibe. It can be good to remind yourself that you’re gonna need to leave a quippy review after you watch this, or have opinions about it when asked - that allows me to relax into a “duty” to focus, without feeling like it’s a demand. You have to be able to say why you don’t like something and develop your taste by knowing why you do like something.

Repeat steps 2-8 until you feel insufferably knowledgeable about the ‘classics’. Rebel against conventional wisdom, like me, and the world becomes infinitely more exciting.

💕If you need any more specific advice, or more specific rec’s, let me know in the comments💕

Stay Safe, keep ya mask on, Free Palestine,

UMNIA💕

Easter egg for the eagle-eyed 🪺

17 obscure (!) ‘classics’ for you to add to your list, that I feel are not just worth watching but may actually be the reason the medium of cinema was invented.

Singing in the Rain

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Mary Poppins

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

The First Wives Club

The Sound of Music

The Big Lebowski

A Serious Man

Dog Day Afternoon

Night of the Hunter

Before Sunset (the entire trilogy, in order, but specifically this one)

Cabaret

All That Jazz

2001: A Space Odyssey

Bringing Out the Dead

To Wong Foo, Thanks for everything! Julie Newmar

Frances Ha

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gorogues · 3 months

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t-bombs replied to your text post: BILL MESSNER-LOEBS OMNIBUS LET'S GOOO

It's long overdue! (And I very much hope he'll be making a good income off this collection, which he deserves.)

demonbirdsforever replied to your text post: Ooooh. Someone is a Captain Boomerang fan if they were able to slip that into the artwork. Hopefully the story will be worth the read.🧐

For sure, I really appreciate this sort of subtle nerdery! I'm looking forward to this series, even though I'll probably never play the game. I usually really like John Layman's work.

#t bombs #demonbirdsforever #t-bombs #words

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shirks-all-responsibilities · 11 months

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Thanks @iamskyereads fer the tag!

🎵 Last Song: "Cross My Mind" by Jill Scott and all my other faves from her CLASSIC first three albums. Neosoul was my early-mid-aughts JAAAM in college, memorieeeees!

📺 Last Movie: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, while I try to justify continuing my Max subscription. (Fun fact: Thorin Oakenshield was my first fanfic love, and pretty recently 🙈😊).

🎞🎬 Currently Watching: Gaming captures all my attention these days, but I watched Chernobyl soon after TLOU ended (apparently I wanted EVEN MORE pain 😆) and ever since, on my commute to and from work, I've listened to the official podcasts with Craig Mazin, over and over and over, the reality of what happened is so FASCINATING, I can't stop listening...

💻 📖📱Currently Reading: Scholarship on cognitive science, imagination, and literature/fiction, like the chapters "On Truth and Fiction" and "Patterns of Thought: Narrative and Verse" from the book Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition. The insights offered by the cognitive and biocultural sciences of religion in recent decades changed my life, and I'm gobbling up everything they have to say about why fic is so valuable, meaningful, and an incredibly human product of our complex brains. Fic is not just silly little fake stories about imaginary people, it's much, much more than that, and it warms my heart to find scholarship that is giving voice to that deep down feeling many of us have about its worth and how deeply satisfying it can be, in a way that totally shifts your paradigm and blows your mind, ya know?

🍽 Currently Craving: Indian/South Asian takeout, which I just finished consuming as I type this. 😎

No pressure tags/just saying hello/covertly spreading my fiction research nerdery: @davnittbraes, @imtryingmybeskar, @julesonrecord, @galactic-basic, @skyshipper

#tag game #ask game #personal

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willowcrowned · 2 years

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Any tips for a non-linguist attempting to create a fantasy language?

Hey! So! This is a great question, but not one I'm really equipped to answer. Because I'm not conlanging in the traditional way (by the seat of my pants while drawing on years of linguistics nerdery and advice from internet forums), a lot of the resources I'm using are ones provided to me by a linguistics professor, and therefore, for copyright and doxxing reasons, ones I can't share. What I can do is give you some very basic tips, a non-risky resource or two to help you get started, and a call for other people who dabble in conlangs to supply resources as well.

The first most basic thing I can advise is to figure out exactly what you want your language to do worldbuilding-wise, because that's going to define a lot of where you put your time and effort. For example, I want Dathomiri to recontextualize the awful, ridiculous, deeply misogynistic and cisnormative worldbuilding around the Nightsisters of Dathomir, which means I'm going to need to spend a lot of time thinking about how I want the pronouns and classes to work.

The second thing to do is to figure out which areas of your language you want to be naturalistic (it can be all of them! a lot of conlangs are made that way), and how naturalistic you want them to be. Because languages are incredibly complex, making a conlang as complex as a natural language in natural ways can take years and years and, for people who aren't Tolkien—who btw didn't even end up with a fully usable conlang—usually isn't worth it.

Of course there's room for changing your mind once you've decided on them, and not everything you toss into a language has to work exactly with your goals, but I think it can be really useful to have guidelines to help you decide which things you're going to keep in or throw out.

What you do after you've decided what you want to do is going to depend a lot on your existing knowledge of not just conlanging but linguistics in general. It's common (and best, in my opinion) practice to start with the phonetics of your language—what sounds it contains—but if you don't know how big most phonetic inventories are, or what patterns show up in them, even that can be rough.

Because I don't know where you're at knowledge-wise, and because I'm about the furthest thing you can get from an expert in linguistics, I'm not going to provide any more advice. We could get lost for days in phonetics, and weeks just on what I know of phonology (my current preferred branch), so instead I'll take this opportunity to list some resources:

First, David Peterson's book The Art of Language Invention. It's an easy read, and oriented towards people who know nothing about linguistics, so it's a really good place to start for a crash course in the basic parts of language.

Second, the World Atlas of Language Structures (https://wals.info/). Peterson's book is good for the basics, but it doesn't supply much in the way of typological information (i.e. what features occur in languages + to what frequency and where). WALS is a great database for looking at where different features of language pop up, and how often they do, which can inform a lot of your decisions about how to implement naturalism (if that's what you're trying to do).

Third—and this one both @mandaloriandy, who knows more about conlanging than me, and my professor recommended—is this word generator (https://zompist.com/gen.html). It can be really helpful for figuring out the phonology of your language—how segments are arranged—as you have to enter your phonological and phonotactic rules for it to generate a wordlist. There's also a sound change applier (https://zompist.com/sca2.html) if you're trying to evolve a language forwards or backwards, though that one I haven't ever used.

I wish I had more to give you, but a lot of what I've done so far has come from my own knowledge of phonology or from a few offhand comments from my professor/his powerpoints. I'll put out a call for resources in the tags so hopefully you'll be able to find some in the reblogs or replies, but beyond that google is probably going to be your best bet.

Sorry I couldn't help more. Good luck!

#any and all conlangers or conlang-interesteders PLEASE drop some resources in the replies #conlangs #asks #lunathethestral

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wandaluvstacos · 7 months

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THE ONLY SECONDS THAT MATTER

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE IS UP!

Genre: Contemporary Romance Rating: 18+

Includes: Extensive horse nerdery + cowboys, mxm romance (1 trans + 1 cis), some discussion child abuse, some instances of trans/homophobia (it is rural Oklahoma, y'all), depression, occasional sex scene (but it’s a slow burn for sure)

Victor Ortiz-Bennett had some reservations about moving to Oklahoma, but his late aunt willed him a 70-acre horse farm, and he decides to fulfill his dream of running and operating his own training facility. Victor’s been around the reining horse show circuit for a while, and he’s ready to settle down, travel less, and spend more time with the horses he loves and away from the people he can do without. That is, until he picks up a horse at an auction with a bucking problem he can’t fix, and he has to take her to the one guy who can ride anything– Johnny Stearns, a retired professional rodeo rider.

Johnny Stearns is loud, chatty, eccentric, and fears nothing, exactly Victor’s opposite. However, Victor finds himself sinking into an odd friendship with this new foul-mouthed cowboy without a filter, diving deeper into the mess that is Johnny’s life until there’s no way to extract himself from it. Johnny may talk a tough game, but there’s more to him than he’ll let most people see. Victor knows getting in too deep will mean a rough ride, but if there’s anything Johnny’s taught him, it’s how to stay in the saddle.

Excerpt:

“Who was that person—guy—from last night?”

“What guy?” When Victor saw Johnny’s dead-eyed expression, he continued, “Oh, right, that guy. Just a date. Nothing serious.”

“What do you mean, nothing serious?”

“Well, he lives in Forth Worth and I live in Oklahoma, so—”

“How long have you known him?”

“Less than a week. Why, are you jealous?”

“No. Just wonderin’.”

“Hmm.”

“Seemed kinda…” Johnny rolled his tongue against his cheek a moment.

“Kinda what?”

“Oh, you know.”

Victor raised an eyebrow.

Johnny lifted a hand and let it go limp at the wrist.

“What’s wrong with that?” Victor asked.

“Nothin’. Just didn’t think you were into that sort. I thought he was a girl. Looked like one, too.”

“You have no clue what I’m into.”

“You were into me.”

“And how did that go? God, Johnny, I just wanted one night of uncomplicated fun. Don’t read more into it than there is.”

“You have sex?”

“That’s none of your business. Should I remind you that you were seeing and sleeping with Daisy for two months and you didn’t say a thing to me?”

“We only slept with each other, like…” Johnny had to take a moment to think about it, “twice, and she talked me into it both times. I have a hard time sayin’ no to her. It wasn’t my idea.”

Victor had to laugh a little, even if it came from a place of helplessness. “Right, you just tripped and fell into her vagina, I’m sure.”

“It beats drinkin’.”

“Why are you here?” Victor had to ask, because this conversation was going nowhere.

“I told ya, I felt like drinkin’ so—”

“Seems like it’s partially you wanting to ask me about my date from last night, which you have no right to know about. So if all you want is information on who I fuck in my free time, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“All I’m wonderin’ is why you can run around with this stranger but when I suggested we casually mess around, you acted like I slapped you across the face.”

“Because I know you. It’s completely different.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“Good for you. I don’t.”

“Sorry, but you were askin’ for way too much. I know you’re a Californian boy and you think that the whole world is cool with the queers now, but small town Oklahoma is still livin’ in the 1930s. If you wanted to have a cute lil public gay life with a partner, you shoulda moved to Massachusetts.”

#the only seconds that matter #update #patreon #excerpt #my writing #original fiction

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auberylis · 4 months

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Also the post below implies that i'm now posting about DIY synths at my patreon for the specific NERDERY tier, too. This is mostly for people who wish to support my SFCS research that benefits all by being free and open-source. I will mosly keep synthspamming here, but patreon people will be getting some schematic sneak-peaks, early demos, SYNTHFOX commercial stuff updates, etc, etc.

So, if you want to throw $3.50 (three potentiometers worth money) at me for being a cool girl bringing people synth designs, be my guest.

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goddamnitlopori · 1 year

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When I watch a film I like I have to check tumblr for the latest reviews, gossip, fan art, etc. This is still the best place for film nerdery by far.

All that being said I watched avatar 2 and aside from a few plot gripes and being weirded out by a teenager having an old voice because of who plays her, I loved it overall. I am kind of reeling because I was already a fan of the first film and the world building. I'll obviously get a few more viewings in to better get to know the story and such and have a more coherent analysis than *fangirl scream*. So when I saw the initial establishing shot of Pandora I felt emotional for a minute or two because it's been 13 YEARS. I'm finally back on my favourite fictional planet (well moon technically). Plus seeing said world made by 2022 vfx makes the wait more worth it. The first film was starting to look a bit video gamey now the cgi has aged.

#avatar way of water #avatar 2 #avatar #rambling

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soulvomit · 2 years

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Peaked In High School was actually an ND narrative in my social world and it’s actually the “kid geniuses” that this happened to. And almost all of the “kid geniuses” in my world ended up either diagnosed Asperger’s/ASD-1 later and the tiny minority that haven’t, everyone who knows them thinks they are that.

I feel like I knew some gifted ND kids (generally white or Jewish boys) who had been coddled by their Elder Boomer parents as future fucking rocket scientists (maybe even literally; this was actually some serious postwar-boom Military Industrial Complex hangover wasn’t it; the “kid genius” was a leftover mid-century trope), and some special set-aside social world that embraced them - *when they were teenagers.* Some of them were good students in high school and actually graduated early or got into college early and some had been taking college classes early on, or were in intensive academic programs. And some of this could be a Jewish narrative, too, with a lot of model minority/immigrant aspirationalism anxiety in it.

It’s hard to tell what is specifically ND narrative from what’s a cultural problem related to kids being raised with expectations that belonged to a different era and economy, but the nerdy boys actually being the first middle class to be visibly let down by that. (I have some weird analysis of this that takes into account that computers is actually the only outlet for middle class nerdery.

A chunk of these people ended up diagnosed Asperger’s as adults. I know at a glance that a couple more probably were and there were definitely some cerebral narcissists here.

Just a few years past the end of the Cold War, the optic of the nerd would shift from a model minority white collar guy with a clip-on tie, to a failure-to-launch dude in a black trenchcoat. The former was a cultural relic.

The older ones feel like a cultural relic that expected to grow up with a button-down shirt and a pocket protector, and then went into full autistic burnout (but we used to call it something more like prodigy burnout) somewhere between high school and halfway through college, and often moved back home (sometimes with an addiction).

The younger ones never left home to begin with, and sometimes went right onto disability (at the time, usually for an anxiety disorder) after high school.

Practically all of the ones I knew, ended up with an autism diagnosis later.

I don’t know where the autism narrative begins but society change - the ladder getting pulled out from a chunk of people whose whole worth had been reduced to climbing it - leaves off. There is a whole culture moment with the “failed kid genius” narrative at the end of the Cold War.

But it’s not like things were that great for everyone *during* the Cold War given that for every rocketsperg tucked away in an aerospace company, with his support needs being met by his secretary and his long-suffering wife, there was a sister or daughter from the same not-uncommon human neurological heritage (that has weird overtones of eugenic labor caste profiling in its analysis doesn’t it) who ended up a victim of psychiatric abuse.

#whether asd #this analysis leads me into some Ontological Nightmare/kinda manifesto-y spaces I probably shouldn't go #but whole fucking families being on the spectrum and enough of them not actually being fucked over as hard the earlier back you go #is some red pill shit and you know it

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madamemachikonew · 11 months

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An actual thought I had when I was reading your fic, I think it was the first or second time you mentioned the painting, was “oh wow this is too smart for me, this is much smarter than I thought.” Not in a “oh this person is above my level and I am a mere fool, everything is stupid now” way, but in a “this has layers I’ve never even considered adding to my own writing” way. Like usually it’s a reference to songs or movies, not historical paintings or ancient mythology/history. I love how you integrate them into your story as both symbolism, character development, and overall just personal flair. You’ve also gotten my 101 reasons why I love your pants man so not gonna focus too much on him, rip king.

It was kinda weird at first because I was like “but genshin not real world” and then immediately kicked that thought out because this ain’t about that. I’m more used to like extra drama or action in my fics so it did take some time to get used to the slower, calmer pace of the fic, but it’s been worth it. I get really excited when I get the email you updated.

That is all :3

Thank you so much! Honestly, you and the other commenters on that fic are a significant part of why it is so much fun to write. I love hearing everyone's theories and interpretations and some angles or theories that I never even considered when I was writing it.

I confess that this fic has been unashamedly self-indulgent in terms of the sheer nerdery of the symbolism. I am also a lore nerd and am *that* bitch who will *absolutely* click on all the NPC dialogue and artifact lore and read it, so it's been super fun to weave all the Pants tidbits into one place. I do worry that I might alienate readers with it or that the references are too obscure or that people will find it boring (as much on account of the slowness of the slow burn as the nerding out). But so far at least, I think the real world/Teyvat crossover works Ok for this particular story..?

There will be another painting - I haven't decided yet whether it will be in his Fontaine house or a new acquisition when he gets back to Liyue. But I'm going to keep its identity a secret for now.

#thanks for the ask!#localplaguenurse!#genshin fanfic #pantalone #The Serpent #the execution of lady jane grey #paul delaroche

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anneapocalypse · 2 years

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Why Mages Wear Hoods! A Theory (And Also a Theory About the Ancient Elves)

Warnings: Discussion of fantasy imperialism. Otherwise just a lot of insufferable deep lore nerdery. Consider yourself warned.

Hoods seem to be a common accessory for mages across Thedas, from Ferelden to Tevinter (as confirmed on page 73 of The World of Thedas Volume 1). As with "robes," the word "hood" may be used somewhat loosely, and somewhat interchangeably to the word "cowl," both denoting anything from the classic hood to turbans and other cloth headwear.

It should be noted that not all mages wear headwear at all; we see plenty of unhooded mages, inside the Circles and outside. Dalish mages, in particular, do not appear to wear hoods as a general rule; I don't think we've ever seen headwear on a Dalish Keeper or First in the games. It also is worth noting that other classes may also wear hoods or cowls. The Hooded Couriers in Origins are not mages so far as we know. The "elven cowl" which appears in both Dragon Age II and Dragon Age: Inquisition, is seen on elves who are laborers and (so far as we know) not mages. The term "cowl" is sometimes used for what are actually helmets in DA2. The "Helm of the Champion" for a rogue Hawke, despite its name, has the appearance of a hood. But meanwhile the mage Champion armor, which despite its name could hardly be called a "robe," features the classic mage hood. So it's not only mages who wear hoods, but the hood or cowl is pretty much the headwear for mages—Circle, apostate, or magister—across the entire continent.

The World of Thedas states hoods as an essential part of mage fashion in Tevinter almost as a matter of course, which led me to consider the question: why do mages wear hoods, anyway? Why is this particular accessory ubiquitous across Thedas, transcending vastly different fashions and cultures as well as laws and attitudes around magic?

The item description for the Apprentice Cowl in Origins reads: "Circle towers are frequently drafty. The senior enchanters distribute these to the apprentices in the winter. Where they come by the cowls, however, is a mystery." However, this just seems to explain the particular design of the Apprentice Cowl, which closely covers the neck and ears. The Enchanter Cowl in the same game has this description: "This hood is velvet; the embroidery is stitched into protective runes. The feathers are purely decorative." We know, then, that the mage's hood serves both a protective and a decorative function. But protective runes could presumably be applied to any type of light headwear, so the question remains: why hoods?

The Doylist answer, of course, is almost certainly that the designers of the first game made an aesthetic choice common to fantasy worlds and the series has rolled with it ever since. But I think there's a potential Watsonian explanation as well, one that the series might have embraced along the way and will eventually make explicit. So if you'll indulge me, here's my theory!

We have limited visual depictions of the ancient elves or elvhen, mostly limited to artistic depictions such as mosaics in elvhen ruins, but they all seem to have one particular thing in common with each other and with the few surviving elvhen we meet in Inquisition: they don't have hair. Solas, the Sentinels, the mosaic representations of the Evanuris: all bald. (Even Zathrian, who is not an ancient elf but has let his clan believe he has regained the immortality of the elvhen to hide his connection to the werewolf curse, wears his head hairless, so I think this might be a thing the Dalish know or at least suspect.) I lean toward thinking the elvhen didn't have hair until they became mortal, though it's also possible they wore shaved heads as a cultural choice. Either way, though, bald elves.

The Sentinels that we meet in the Temple of Mythal appear to be elvhen who have survived to the present day. They all appear to be bald, and most of them wear hoods as a part of their uniform, regardless of their combat style.

I'm probably not the first to suggest this, but I think the elvhen didn't have hair, and because of that I think hoods were commonly worn in Elvhenan simply to keep one's head warm. They probably had nothing at all to do with magic; they were simply a comfortable fashion choice. When humans arrived and conquered what was left of the crumbling empire, we already know that they learned, or stole, a lot of things directly from the elves, from magical skills to architectural styles. I think hoods were just one more piece of elvhen culture that humans took for themselves, associating the style with magic simply because they associated elves with magic at the time, thus making it desirable. It caught on, and the mage hood spread wherever humans did, and became a part of human culture so ubiquitous that no one even thinks to ask, now, why mages wear hoods all over Thedas.

If the hood's origins are elvhen, why don't Dalish mages wear them? Well, the easy answer is that it's just one more piece of elvhen culture that was lost; they don't remember the origins of the mage hood any more than humans do. Unless preserved by magic, cloth items are unlikely to survive in ruins for decades. A hood also doesn't make as much sense for combat when you live and practice magic mainly outdoors in forests, because it obstructs peripheral vision and could actually pose a danger. But even if the Dalish did know the hood was originally elvhen, there would be no reason for them as reconstructionists to assign it specifically to mages, because in Elvhenan, no such distinction existed. The hood was simply something elves wore.

Arguments against:

There's concept art of Solas with hair. Certainly the first counterpoint I would raise against my own theory. 😉 However, I'd argue that a) concept art isn't canon; b) concept art isn't always made with full knowledge of all the deep lore, especially lore that's yet to be revealed; and c) had they decided to go with Solas having hair in the present day, it might have been because he had the ability to magically change his appearance to better blend in with modern elves. It may have been decided that it was more important to keep him bald to give us that clue toward the ancient elves' appearance. From The Art of Dragon Age Inquisition:

When exploring the final appearance of Solas, we tried many hairstyles. None seemed to evoke the ageless wisdom required by the character more than a bold, bald head. (p.69)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There's at lesst one Sentinel elf model with hair in Heroes of Dragon Age. I did notice this on the wiki! I am not sure how canon we should consider HoDA, and I'd lean toward considering it less canon than the main games and books, but that could be considered a strike against the theory.

So, what do you think? Did ancient elvhen have hair? Why do mages wear hoods from Tevinter to Orlais?

#dragon age #dragon age meta #dragon age theories #world of thedas #elvhenan #blunders of thedas

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