*on the table, crouched like a little goblin n talking big w my hands* OKAY but a steddie au in which Steve and Eddie join forces as the first same sex Olympic figure skating pair and they hate each other initially because Eddie’s a free bird and Steve’s a micromanager but then they just realize they’re stupid into each other and and and AND!!!! FALL IN LOVE OOPS!!

thinking about. title belts. how so much of wrestling is about propping up a title belt to make it seem important. like it’s the most important thing in the world. in kayfabe these people are destroying themselves and each other to hold, just, the ugliest accessories, which are basically gold star stickers that say YOU DID IT on them. but you have to protect the belt! you have to make it seem like it matters! because otherwise the whole thing comes crashing down and all you’re left with is the reality, which is that most wrestlers are wrestlers because they really want to make a large group of people care about them

Ces derniers temps, j'apprend à me connaître et comprendre comment je fonctionne parce que baaah, tous les conseils que je vois/ai pu voir/que l'on m'a donné me correspondent pas, ou pas longtemps dans la durée.

C'est pas évident car même quand je cherche des conseils pour neuroatypiques, bah c'est des scientifiques ou parents d'enfants neuroatypiques qui les donnent, donc ça marche pas forcément (et c'est pour les enfants des dits parents la plupart du temps...)

Donc depuis quelques semaines, j'essaye de "suivre mes pulsions". Donc c'est hyper chaotique vu de l'extérieur MAIS au moins j'entame plein de projets !!! Et en avance voir finalise la plupart.

Donc ça concerne pas mal mes hyperfixations du moment (l'apprentissage du japonais, mon dossier pvt ou encore les préparatifs pour le stream) mais également les tâches ménagères.

Bon, pour ce dernier point, c'est pas le plus top car je m'arrête avant que la tâche soit terminée (comme les autres pulsions hein).

Mais au moins, je fais une partie de la vaisselle au lieu de "non, je dois d'abord terminer X chose avant de passer à la suivante" alors que si je fais ça, je pense trop à ma pulsion d'action, et avance pas vraiment ce que je suis sensée terminer avant et ne touche à rien de la suivante. Et je suis frustrée.

gonna maybe play devil's advocate on the depiction vs glorification discourse and bring up how writers letting you know how much they Don't Condone a thing is a really really easy way to break the immersion of the story, and i'm being subjective, but it often comes off a little patronizing. (does anyone else remember hearing "the grinch had an awful, evil idea" as a kid and thinking "we get that you want us to know it's bad, please just say what it is")

this is absolutely not to say writers don't simultaneously Tell A Story and Make A Point all the time, but it's a skill in itself. demanding that every story has a practicable Moral will just get you a lot of beginning authors cramming preachy schlock into their writing, entirely disproportionate to the number of those who set out to tell a story vs those who set out to philosophize and/or proselytize

That thing Tuvok does where someone is talking over his shoulder and he doesn’t turn his head fully around but just inclines it slightly or moves his eyes in their direction like...okay

I think CJ should ditch Andrade and her husband and manage DG, because I would find that funny.

Okay, so: in early drafts of Jules Verne's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo is a Polish guy bent on revenge against the Russian Empire for the murder of his family in the January Uprising. Verne's editor objected on the grounds that Russia was a French ally at the time of the book's writing, and in the actual, published version of the story, Nemo's national origin and precisely which empire he's pissed off at are left unspecified.

Later, in the 1875 quasi-sequel The Mysterious Island, Nemo is retconned as an Indian noble out for revenge against the British for the murder of his family in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 – basically the same as the original plan, simply substituting a different uprising and a different empire. Verne's editor raised no objections this time around, because fuck the British, right? Though Twenty Thousand Leagues and The Mysterious Island aren't 100% compatible in their respective timelines, this version of Nemo has customarily been back-ported into adaptations of Twenty Thousand Leagues ever since.

Now here's the funny part: perhaps as a jab at his editor, Verne made a specific plot point in Twenty Thousand Leagues of Professor Aronnax repeatedly trying and failing to figure out where the fuck Nemo is from. At one point his attempt to pin down Nemo's accent is frustrated by Nemo's vast multilingualism. At another point, he tries and fails to trick Nemo by quizzing him about latitude and longitude.

(To contextualise that last bit, at the time the book was written, there was no international agreement on which line of longitude should be zero degrees, and many nations had their own prime meridians; Aronnax hoped to identify Nemo's national origin by calculating which meridian he was giving his longitudes relative to. Nemo, however, immediately spots the ploy, and announces that he'll use the Paris meridian in deference to the fact that Aronnax is a Frenchman.)

The upshot is that at no point in the course of any of this Sherlock Holmes bullshit does Aronnax ever bring up the colour of Nemo's skin as a potential clue. In light of the book's publication history, this is almost certainly simply because Verne hadn't decided that Nemo was Indian yet. However, taking into account The Mysterious Island's retcon, it retroactively makes Aronnax the least racist Frenchman ever.

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Submitted Prompts #103

Ghost King Danny, has been for a while. (Personally I’m picturing this as something like Blister Pack’s giant Danny but that’s just me.) Ellie still has the wander bug, but as she lives in the Realms with her dad now has access to multidimensional wandering. She happens across some new universe full of superheroes and is intrigued.

Ellie goes to her Dad and is all “Yo, I found this universe, I think I’m going to hang out there for a while.” (For these guys, though “a while” could mean anything from a couple years to decades.) Danny gives her his blessing to use their shared name and sigil in her superhero costume if she wants, and does an eldritch entity’s equivalent of making sure his kid has a couple of quarters in her pocket to use a payphone to call home.

Ellie, known to most in this new universe by the name Phantom, ends up spending some time hanging out with the Teen Titans. She and Raven somehow end up bonding over the fact that both of them are children of mind-bogglingly powerful quasi-eldritch entities that rule over alternate dimensions. They talk about what its like to only have a small piece of that power and the knowledge that they will never ever be as powerful, or about how it’s kinda strange but nice being somewhere where people see them as extremely magically powerful because they are not being compared to the power of their respective fathers. They never get into much detail, but they each feel like they understand each other a little bit better than the other heroes they work with.

It isn’t until several months later they discover that their situations are not the same.

I kind of suspect that any "two state solution" to neither settle on terms no palestinian leadership with any popular legitimacy would reasonably accept nor immediately meet with either expansionist betrayal by israel or massive armed resistance from palestinians correctly anticipating such a betrayal would fail to respect israels "right to exist" in that it would require international supervision so strict as to be tantamount to foreign occupation and regime change, or barring that a quasi miraculous transformation in israeli society and political culture sweeping enough to render its past self virtually unrecognisable

I understand what people mean by prison abolition, but what does it mean in practice to abolish the family? I've never quite got it - who is raising children? How does it work? I'm asking in good faith, I've just always been a bit embarrassed to ask anyone

Like positions that are “anti-work” or against “gender,” the thing being objected to is more detailed and specific than the range of meanings that can reasonably or semi-reasonably be assigned to the word in question (“work,” “gender,” “family”)—which is why these propositions and programmes can have a bit of a PR problem. And, as with all terms that position themselves against something (e.g. "anti-psychiatry"), the term "family abolition" can be taken up by people with a range of different positions who disagree amongst themselves on some issues. In general, though, no one objects to "people living together or being emotionally close to each other" or "children not being left to roam about at random and get eaten by wolves" or anything.

Rather, anti-capitalist objections to "the family" tend to hinge on objections to:

parental rights, or "the special legal powers of parents to control major aspects of their children’s lives," which function as "quasi-property interests" more than anything that is in the best interest of children (link explicitly relates to U.S. law). Parents legally control where their children live, whether and where they go to school, what information they have access to, what level of freedom of mobility they have, what medical care they receive and don't receive, and what they may do with their own bodies, and are legally allowed to physically assault their children.

relatedly, the lack of legal autonomy that children possess (this is also often discussed under the banner of "children's rights" or objections to "adultism").

the positioning of "the family" as the only economic or social "safety net" in an economy and a society which provide no other one (creating an artificial "structural scarcity" of care). In a society which is otherwise dominated by "economic competition between atomized individuals," the family must be relied on—and yet, for some people (whose families cannot or will not provide living space or financial support in an emergency; whose families are abusive and physically or psychically dangerous to be around or rely on; who will not receive help or emotional support from a spouse or family unit without making serious concessions on the level of their personhood being basically respected; Black working-class people in whose communities the nuclear family unit has been deliberately prevented from forming by government intervention), the family cannot be relied on.

the way that the positioning of "the family" as the only safety net therefore constitutes economic coercion that works to keep people (especially women and LGBT, disabled and/or transracially adopted people) in abusive or exploitative situations, and that works to create incentives for working-class women (whose employment is generally less secure) to make themselves erotically desirable to men & disincentives for doing anything else.

the idea that housework, gestational labour & childbirth, and childcare are tasks "naturally" falling to the "mother" ("mother" as a "natural category"), such that the social, political, and economic nature of these tasks, and the economic and political discourses that mobilise the creation of our concept of "motherhood," are obscured.

Thus the objection is to "the family" as a unit of social reproduction under capitalism—as a legal, political entity that structures inheritance, taxes, health insurance, "race" and ethnicity, &c., and therefore works as a sort of interface between the capitalist state and the individual.

So the programme of "family abolition" involves, firstly, the control of the means of production on the part of the proletariat (this is a communist programme—the point isn't to remove the safety net of the family while keeping capitalism in place, but rather the idea is that without capitalism this ultimately abusive safety net ought not to be needed); and then the abolition of marriage as a legal institution; the abolition of parental rights; the putting in place of measures for the elderly and disabled to be cared for regardless of whether they have family alive who are both able and willing to care for them; the forming of social networks at will; and, depending on who you ask, the communal raising of children (which involves ceasing to privilege "parent" as a legal title automatically conferred upon biologically creating a child).

Obviously, toddlers who do not yet understand things about the world including "causation" and "mortality" will need on occasion to be restrained from running blithely into the jaws of wolves &c. The argument is just that coercion of this sort should be legitimately in the best interests of the child; not performed by two people who need answer for their actions, up to and including battery of their children, in no way other than saying that they "plausibly believe this to be necessary to control, train or educate their child"; and walked back in measure as the child gains the ability to assert their own desires.

Probably no one has a perfect solution 100% worked out—life is messy, and we don't know what the future will look like—but having a perfect solution 100% worked out should not be a prerequisite for noticing that the current situation is abusive and untenable.

I’m a big fan of Steve “queer all along but didn’t realize it” Harrington, but in the most specific way possible, which is this: Steve was in quasi-poly queerplatonic relationships with both Tommy and Carol and then Nancy and Jonathan without knowing it. 

Like, Steve and Tommy grew up as close friends, and when Tommy started dating Carol in junior high, Steve just...kept hanging out with him, but now as a trio rather than a duo. Thirdwheeling on dates without ever thinking anything of it, attached at the hip. 

And, so, when Steve and Nancy started dating, Steve really didn’t see anything wrong with the fact that Jonathan sometimes ended up tagging along on their dates, both at Nancy’s invitation to make it a group hang out and sometimes an invite from Steve himself. 

Though nothing explicitly non-platonic ever happened, it’s only later, when Steve looks back on it, that he realizes 1) that he’d had crushes on Tommy and Jonathan he hadn’t recognized as such and 2) there was something eyebrow-raising, in most people’s eyes, about inviting a third person to tag along on your date. 

(He hasn’t broken pattern yet, though. Because now he has Eddie and Robin, his boyfriend and platonic soulmate respectively, and Robin frequently ends up crashing his dates with Eddie. Everyone is fine with this.)

I was rewatching some of the Aeor episodes of C2 recently, and I forgot just how much Caleb and Essek were Like That in their average conversations. Every time they spoke was like “I’m using magic and the war between our respective countries we both have complex feelings about as a metaphor for our relationship but it’s veiled in 6 layers of obscure side speak and discussing atonement and redemption as deeply personal and multilayered quasi-flirting.” The sexual tension requires a literature degree to fully parse and even then it’s iffy if you can get the entire meaning. They were both deeply fucked up magic prodigies and I guess that’s their favorite wavelength to communicate on, that and staring deeply into each other’s eyes. More meaning and certainly more layers of subtext is conveyed through their average casual greeting than is conveyed through a full semester of any given undergrad class. They basically do sexy philosophy dissertations about their sins at each other. Also everyone else at the table constantly watches like 👀👀👀 while happens. It’s beautiful.

Servants and Upward Mobility

This is focused on paid servants in England in the mid-late 18th century. One thing I find fascinating about the structure of domestic service roles was the existence of what essentially we might call a career ladder today. It was not uncommon for a servant to start their career near the bottom of the hierarchy as, say, a boot boy who cleans the shoes and boots of the household, or the scullery maid who does all the dirty kitchen work like scrubbing iron cooking vessels or plucking chickens, but progressively move up the list to better positions.

Part of why this was the case was that it was typical in England to hire servants for one year terms at a time. Often they'd be hired at festivals on the quarter days of the year, which as part of the festivities would often include what today we'd call a job fair. For some reason, Michaelmas (September 29) seems to be the most common as far as I can tell. I had never really thought about why that might be until I started planning this post, and I now wonder if it might have something to do with that being right around when harvest time usually comes in England. I could easily imagine people, especially young people, being on the cusp of another labourious harvest and thinking that maybe they could find another job instead. Related tangent: There are a number of remarks in the period that servants from the northern parts of England were considered to be much more respectful than servants from more populated, urban areas. Those communities were (at least considered to be) a lot stricter about remembering one's place and respecting your social 'betters', and their behaviour as servants was believed to reflect that. Some people would actively have their agents look to hire people from those rural areas, and apparently it was easy to attract potential employees: there are a number of remarks about how when a fancy carriage would drive through a small town, with the fancily-liveried footmen riding on the back, it would bring young people to stare in awe and want to be part of that. Which as someone whose interest in domestic service started in part because of my obsession with livery, I can understand. Anyway, back to the main point: because they often served one-year terms, there was an annual chance for both parties - the servant and the served - to review and determine how to move forward. A servant who was favoured might negotiate for a new position in the household, at least one step higher on the ladder (if not more), and they had leverage because they could leave the field entirely or possibly go off to a new household and find a higher position there. There was also a practice of asking for your master or mistress to provide a "character", essentially what we would today call a reference: a letter to show potential employers detailing their behaviour and skill in their role. Certainly there were times that some employers refused to give a good character, and sometimes that was explicitly because they wanted to keep the servant because they were a valuable asset to their household, but it was considered part of the obligation of the master class to be honest in these.

And it is not at all uncommon to find people who have served many different people/households throughout their career. The most I have seen is 28, although that's slightly misleading: that was a man who decided he wanted to travel, so hired himself to gentleman going on journeys for the duration of the trips, many of which were only a couple months. (The book he published, which he wrote about his travels and the "exotic" places and people he encountered, is interesting, and for my purposes super helpful because he turned out to be a narcissist and wrote a lot about himself, including his career as a servant. It's the only quasi-memoir of a paid servant from this time I am aware of. I might write a post about it/him sometime. I digress.) [continued in next post]

thots on astrology? related, thoughts on mbti?

k i like that you guys just pop in my inbox from time to time and invite me to run my mouth about topics and concepts. like truly what else is this website for.

anyway astrology (& sorry, most of what i know here pertains specifically to europe in the middle ages onward) is genuinely such a bizarro historical case of a science whose core epistemological presupposition (a geocentrist and specifically anthropocentrist cosmology) has completely fallen out of favour in both popular and professional discourse, and i don't think most people appreciate how weird it is for astrology to continue existing with this degree of popular and mainstream participation lol. like most fringe science actually bothers to have some semblence of its own reactionary epistemology to fall back on; astrology just doesn't seem to care. it would be like if the medical guilds fully endorsed the position that blood is circulated in the human body by the heart, but then also recommended as treatments for clotting disorders medical practices that only make sense on the supposition that the liver is the origin of all blood and is continuously creating more of it. like no other science that i can think of tries to have it both ways to the extent astrology does. like, one reason phrenology and eugenics are bad comparison points here is because they're very much copacetic with post-enlightenment naturalism and evolutionary transpositions in the social sciences. astrology, like, intellectually is not and yet here it is anyway. ideology innit.

anyhow i assume the reason you asked about this in conjunction with mbti is because today's astrology is largely purporting to provide psychological analysis and is therefore more similar to a system like mbti than to the historical use of star-reading as a predictive science. obviously both astrology and mbti are deeply reactionary in this respect and belong to a larger trend toward attempting to categorise, measure, and taxonomise the psyche, tho an important difference here is that mbti has hereditarian elements, which no form of astrology that i know of does. i think astrology's shift in the personal-psychological direction has to do with a few different factors, including medical astrological practice (orthodox in the european middle ages, then varying degrees of heterodox from the early modern period onward) and self-help movements in the 20th century.

but in any case it, mbti, and similar attempts at psychometry are, like, staggeringly essentialist in conception and practice, and i do think their current popularity reflects some deeply reactionary tendencies amongst people who often (not always) consider themselves otherwise progressive or leftist. it's honestly kind of worrisome how many people will jump on a project that explicitly aims to define static and immutable human 'types' as long as it's dressed in quasi-spiritual or psy-scientific terminology. like i do think we all need to pause and think about the ideological ends and consequences of how we talk about each other and our bodies, minds, and birth circumstances 😵‍💫