notbecauseofvictories

[notbecauseofvictories]

I think the most terrifying part of any relationship is the ongoing awareness that you are going to have to trust someone when they appear to like or love you. There is no objective way to check your status with someone, no app that will say "they like you overall but are mad at you right now, specifically for x or y or a vague z thing that you didn't even clock when it was happening. But! if you send them a nice card and small gift, they will forget about it and return to base level affection"

instead, you have to just....keep having a relationship with that person, doing big and small things with or for them, and praying that you will both be brave and evolved enough to raise x/y/z as an issue if it genuinely is problem.

Mortifying ordeal of being known, down to your very gluons, and disliked.

#this is worse with family I think. because I listen to my family talk about how other members #are frustrating or did a thing and isn't that irritating?? that this person is themselves???? #(I am not blameless in this; I talk about other members of the family too) #but I am 100% sure I love my family. even talking about how annoying they are! I love them. #I can only hope they love me. #or worse - that they put up with me when I'm in front of them but when I leave...? #I live in terror of being That Person for the next generation. #celestial emporium of benevolent knowledge

[notbecauseofvictories]

living saint

#I have to admit that I've never thought of val as a monstrous ostensibly nonhuman thing before. #I've always imagined her one of those neat nondescript women who you've definitely seen before #but never could pick out of a crowd. #but what I love EVEN MORE #is the idea that.....this is what she looks like. this is the-val-of-the-podcast. #the fact that she has a pleasantly neutral human voice. that she speaks human languages; thinks in human terms. #is incidental. in actuality she is a hairy moldering too-tall Thing; cramming herself into wooden chairs #and craning her neck to speak with the populace. #however! she still ''looks'' like a neat nondescript woman. a valerie or maybe a poorly-named valentine. #she has an impeccable mask. it hides all of her. except she's wandering around with a dollar store mask #and a bedsheet turned into something resembling a cape. #then sometimes out of the corner of your eye....you can see her. it. both. #great art op. just fantastic. #the silt verses

[notbecauseofvictories]

"we are running out of stories, but we don't know how to give them up. we're all going to die screaming that we're not really dying, and that we're not really screaming."

#anyway I'm caught up on the silt verses!!! #in a real and serious way....there are very few moral questions that I would automatically find sympathetic #than ''if they don't stop will you make them stop?'' and how complicated that answer can be. #(''we're dying screaming that we're not dying or screaming'' but who is going to keep you from dying? #what other options are there besides ''screaming''?) #on the other hand....listened to this sitting in traffic and behind on work and honestly wanting to tear things #possibly with my fingernails. maybe teeth. #(you think I'm joking but I told an international colleague about rage rooms and she said ''yes! but let's use the office'') #and shrue understood me perfectly. when they beat the ever-loving shit out of carson while knowing #KNOWING. #they would still bow their head and cut their throat when the government told them to. for a family they aren't sure exists!!! #amazing. no notes. #the silt verses

[notbecauseofvictories]

I will say---Pratchett does this with Death too, at least a little bit. But it feels different by virtue of....well, you know, the character being the anthropomorphic personification of death. The too-muchness of death itself is built in.

On the flip side, this does explain why Death keeps having to be not-Death whenever he stands in the spotlight. Mort, Reaper Man, Hogfather...all three feature Death being forced out of his muchness into another role. Then you get Soul Music and Thief of Time which choose to foreground Susan, rather than her almost-but-not-quite omnipotent grandfather.

Whereas, Vetinari seems more like a character who originated with a couple clever lines, but tripped and fell into being The Author. Both he and the author himself are a little bit unsettled by this, but willing to endure so long as it gets them what they want.

I really do think that Vetinari is set up to be a partial authorial stand-in. He's 90% character, but that remaining 9.9999% is just slightly too knowledgeable, too good at surviving, too sharp, too sure. (Too disinterested, too incorruptible, too inexplicably noble for a true tyrant.)

Which is why I think the Discworld series really needs a novel where Vetinari keeps getting older and older, and no one wants to ask what happens next.

#also I will say....pratchett has a thing about death. #it's one I understand! that I sympathize with. but it's also a little like admiring how your friend decorated her house #it's thoughtful and interesting but not nearly as moving as if it were mine. #(why are you worried about death? sounds good to me; just dying that's fine! #much worse if....well you bet on the wrong horse so to speak. #you bet every dollar you have and some you don't on the derby winner #but the whole time you were standing in the middle of the dog track. #now the man in charge has grabbed you; a calculator; and some goons #and is going to make you regret that forever. the kind of forever that the human brain can't conceive of. #that's much more terrifying than dying!) #discworld

[notbecauseofvictories]

Big mistake to go into a career that is 50% reading contracts, when sometimes, the very sight of a contract makes me physically ill.

#though to be honest I think I'm just....burnt out. the last couple weeks have felt like I'm dragging myself from day to day #I literally read 4 books yesterday trying to essentially over-stimulate my brain into getting something done #I woke up at 5am this morning! I will wake up at 5am tomorrow too! #I need a vacation very badly and I'm not even going to plan anything for this one. just quietly sit at home. #sleep past 5am! the dream. #no wonder the company has to secretly manipulate you

[notbecauseofvictories]

THE LIVING HAUNTED HOUSE

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson (1959) / House by the Railroad, Edward Hopper (1925) / The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe (1839) / Haunted House, Paris Painting, Thomas Flint (2015) / Wuthering Heights, John Frederic Greenwood (c. 1924) / Flowers in the Attic, V.C. Andrews (1979) / Flowers in the Attic dir. Jeffrey Bloom (1987) / Flowers in the Attic: The Origin dir. Declan O'Dwyer & Robin Sheppard (2022) / Guillermo del Toro on Crimson Peak in W Magazine / Crimson Peak dir. Guillermo del Toro (2015) / Guillermo del Toro on Crimson Peak in The Sydney Morning Herald

#I'm like 55% sure I've reblogged this before but who cares!!! haunted house my beloved. #the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind

[notbecauseofvictories]

Anyway, Terry Pratchett invented the Our Blessed Homeland / Their Barbarous Wastes meme, almost 25 years before Tom Gould got around to it

#my brain is definitely doing something. not sure what yet. but in the interim! enjoy. #discworld

[notbecauseofvictories]

The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013) dir. Isao Takahata

#a proscenium for our dreams

[notbecauseofvictories]

I really do think that Vetinari is set up to be a partial authorial stand-in. He's 90% character, but that remaining 9.9999% is just slightly too knowledgeable, too good at surviving, too sharp, too sure. (Too disinterested, too incorruptible, too inexplicably noble for a true tyrant.)

Which is why I think the Discworld series really needs a novel where Vetinari keeps getting older and older, and no one wants to ask what happens next.

#an elegy with a bit of six characters in search of an author mixed in that's all I'm saying #discworld

[notbecauseofvictories]

I'm re-reading the Discworld series for reasons, and honestly the most relatable part of reading these as an adult is how many of the protagonists start out being tired, used to their little routine and vaguely disgruntled by the interruption of the Plot. Sam Vimes wants to lie drunk in a gutter and absolutely doesn't want to be arresting dragons. Rincewind is yanked into every situation he's ever encountered, though he'd much rather be lying in a gutter too. (Minus the alcohol. Plus regretting everything he's ever done said witnessed or even heard about fourth-hand in his whole life.) Granny Weatherwax is deeply suspicious of foreign parts and that includes the next town over; Nanny has leaned into the armor of "nothing ever happens to jolly grannies who terrorize their daughters-in-law and make Saucy Jokes"

Only the young people don't seem to have picked up on this---and that's fortunate, because someone has to run around making things happen, if only so Vimes and Granny and Rincewind have a reason to get up (complaining bitterly the whole time) and put it all to rights. Without Carrot, Margrat, Eric, etc. these characters don't have that reason; they're likely to stay in the metaphorical gutter and keep wondering where it all went wrong or why anything has to change.

............well, that's not quite true. You get the sense that Vetinari knows how much certain people hate the Plot. And as the person sitting behind the metaphorical lighting board of Ankh-Morpork, he takes no small pleasure in forcing the Plot-haters specifically to stand up, and say some lines.

#I finished guards guards just yesterday and I forgot that vimes and wonse were set up to be mirror images #both boys from the shades of very different natures; who made good (ish) in wildly different ways #also it's interesting reading this books from an adult perspective; my mind isn't blown that these books exist #anymore; plus I've read so many good books since #and they're not perfectly constructed novels! especially these early books; #there are plenty of spots where I can feel the narrative get thin; where there's more handwaving than I remember #but each book IS better and tighter; the jokes are funnier and the irony sharpens; the footnotes are better utilized #the characters are getting more interesting and complicated as opposed to set-ups for jokes. #it's an illustration of someone getting better at their chosen field and that in itself is more impressive than I was anticipating. #discworld

[notbecauseofvictories]

A couple weeks ago I met with my former Handsome Boss and Beautiful Coworker for a drink, because I was downtown and....well, I miss them quite a bit. So we had drinks and talked about work and life and children, and it was wonderful to see them.

Then Handsome Boss asked very casually whether I'd ever come back...?

I had no response.

The thing is, I miss him and working with that team enormously. My loyalty to them is unimpeachable; they are the people I worked with during lockdown, we created a whole book club out of boredom and spit; they could call me tomorrow and I'd pick up the phone, give them whatever they asked. But to be honest....I do not actually miss the work. My current job is broad and under resourced and I'm tired all the time, but I am unequivocally in charge of it. People will do what I tell them to do. I've forged partnerships, I've discovered information siloes and started breaking them down, I understand aspects of our company that even my more experienced colleagues don't see, I have resources that we previously didn't even know existed. I talk to people all across the world and have to worry about global reach, I am trying to juggle about twelve different projects---it's overwhelming but it's also good.

Unfortunately "I'm suffering, but in a way that makes it interesting, weirder and more enjoyable than the suffering I knew when I worked for you" is a singularly strange answer. I wish I had another one.

#also they pay me more. #there is that. #no wonder the company has to secretly manipulate you

[notbecauseofvictories]

carpenter and faulkner are both metalheads they broke into my house and told me themselves and then they ritual sacrificed me to their crab god

#I need to catch up with tsv but in the interim #please enjoy the most objectively correct take on the carpenter & faulkner dynamic #eg faulkner has objectively terrible taste and carpenter hates him but not enough to stop listening to his terrible music #(she will however gleefully share this information with paige at the next opportunity. #she'll probably tell hayward and hayward doesn't even know who faulkner is really #he just makes a mental note to never ever not once even MENTION the playlist he has #where all the songs are titled lower case and have weird parentheticals like (KLR_Remix)(Part 2)(ExxelResponse) #..........that said I am quite sad we'll never get a scene where faulkner and hayward sit at a picnic table listening to music #and hayward is SO earnest in his response that even faulkner - who really doesn't have much of a radar for these things #is slightly embarrassed. for himself and for hayward both.) #the silt verses

[notbecauseofvictories]

Hush, child, darkness will rise from the deep and carry you down into sleep, child Darkness will rise from the deep and carry you down into sleep

#listen. listen you simply don't understand what we were going through in the 00s. #you had to be there man!! you had to be there. #music #arthurian legend

[notbecauseofvictories]

If gazebo deaths are so widespread, why does anyone ever perform at one? Are they forced? Does the siren song of the gazebo lure them closer until standing under it's awning seems like a good idea? Do they simply not know of the danger, the whole gazebo-eating-peoole thing only known to a few select people? Many questions

I mean.......how do you know that the elevator you step onto won't plummet to earth? How do you know that the salad you order at a restaurant won't give you salmonella? That your car's brakes will go on working, even when you're about to crash into the highway's concrete divider?

How do you know that any part of the world you move through won't kill you?

And then, more troubling---if the people who are tasked with reviewing elevator safety, food safety, car safety, chose to occasionally (occasionally! not all the time, of course not, they're reasonable) look the other way, and let someone hurtle towards their doom....would it be so bad? With that one terrible sacrifice, the inspector ensures that the elevator never breaks, the salad is never rotted, the car will work every. single. time. Or at least, every other time but the first.

This becomes even less clear-cut when the elevator has preferences, when the salad revolts against being eaten with a fork, when the car contents itself with gas every day except the one where it wants blood. Gallons of it.

It's an important precept to remember, in the keeper community. Not every offering laid across a gazebo's wooden planks or iron latticework is accepted. Sometimes, a jazz quartet performs---and despite the keeper waiting with baited breath for the moment of reckoning, the quartet ends their set, packs up their instruments, and leaves. Sometimes, the keeper will find small animals strewn around instead, hallmarks of a gazebo perfectly uninterested in its human audience. (It's uncommon, certainly, but see Leeman et al. 2018 for a longitudinal study on USian gazebo feeding habits.) Not every gazebo wants to swallow a dance troupe whole; some of them prefer stalking prey like loiterers and the homeless, while others will opt for a marching band over a Shakespeare in the Park, for reasons unknown.

Per American Association of Canopy Keepers guidance, unaware victims seem to satiate gazebos for an average period of 2.4 years, compared with knowing victims' 1.87 years; therefore, best practices recommend ignorance. Fortunately for them, at the end of the day, "will this kill me?" is a numbers game, and to borrow a phrase---

Boy, are we bad at math.

#this is very very satisfying. #''what if you could shove all of your feelings about capitalism and families and public programming into one shape?'' #this is that. anyway we're going to call it #dark pavillionism #because it's fun and I need something to tag all this nonsense with

[notbecauseofvictories]

obssessed with Mark Pavillion XIII being paranoid and also correct. The Cassandra of gazebo researchers!! This is the peril of being annoying at local government meetings! (anyway I now need this novel too, please write it thank you in advance)

The worst part---or the second worst part, since the first worst part is obviously the fact that the gazebos will rise up once more and demand a bloody toll for all the years of peace they bestowed on their less-than-grateful adherents---is that Mark Jr. has to eventually come down off the stage. He has to stick his poster-board charts under his arm, and catch the bus, take that to the train, and then wait for his cousin Sam to pick him up at the station.

He has to go to family dinner. That's definitely the second worst part, after the probable large-scale slaughter.

There's nothing Mark hates more than the sight of the whole Pavillion clan, gathered around the table. Boasting about their recent schemes to coax garage bands out from basements, charm puppeteers into taking a gig that's long past any child's bedtime. They are the Pavillions, after all! Marcus Pavillion the First was there, he worked with President Washington himself to create the first American gazebo; he corresponded with the Italian masters of the casina, married a woman from the Bavarian Schöns ("The Dianatempel was ours, did you know?" Mark's mother liked to say at parties, then smile coyly.) The Pavillions have been keepers almost as long as there have been structures to keep, theirs is a rich and storied history.

........Mark does not appreciate this. Mark spends most of his time at the kid's table, trying to avoid conversation about whether gazebos prefer to eat in solitary dignity, or to tear into a visiting chamber ensemble with a full audience. It makes him uncomfortable when Kimmy, his youngest cousin, starts scrawling red lines around her smiling clown---"He's being eaten!" she says cheerfully.

Mark does not ask follow up questions.

The problem---after problems one and two, already mentioned---is that he doesn't know if there's any stopping this. With the odd exception (e.g., the 2004 incident that resulted in Hurridge, Minnesota being carefully removed from US maps) gazebos seem content these days to snack on the occasional piano player, with a couple rambunctious kids as an digestif. But Mark has been tracking these things. He knows that the incidents are gathering closer together, both in time and in location. He knows they're getting less easy to predict, less easy to hide, less easy to excuse. His family might sit around the table and complain about keeping 4-5 gazebos happy, but Marcus Pavillion died trying to appease just one. Those times will come again---are coming. Are here. Mark's got the numbers to prove it.

Walking back from the bus stop, Mark finds himself looking up and---suddenly stops dead outside a lot that's been vacant almost as long as he's lived in this neighborhood. There's a safety fence around the property now, and silhouetted in the light is a brand new sign. UNDER CONSTRUCTION, the sign states, above a sketchy outline of a park. COMING SOON!

In the center of the picture sits a gazebo.

#this is very very. fun. I am having a lot of fun. #so just. ignore me yeah? #dark pavillionism

[notbecauseofvictories]

Just read your gazebo tags and I'm now very desperate for this story it's just! Such a fun concept!

The wiki entry for gazebos says they're related to "pavilions, kiosks, alhambras, belvederes, follies, gloriettes, pergolas, and rotundas" plus possibly the holhuashis in the Maldives, which leads me to think that various guild members.....maybe went a little overboard with the taxonomy. I mean, it was the 19th century! Everybody was naming butterflies or measuring skull shape or pinning Amazonian beetles---you can hardly blame the zeeb-keepers for getting into the spirit.

Even today, the international conferences can get very dicey when it comes to such things---back in '97, the Italians got very offended by a Turkish keeper, who tried to insist that a kiosk and a pergola were functionally the same breed. Thankfully, only 9 people died. (17 if you count the unfortunate waitstaff.)

I'll also note that the American Association of Canopy Keepers (AACK) has been having a very polite, extremely chilly fight with the British Association for Rotundas & Follies (BARF) practically since the American gazebo was recognized as its own distinct breed. The Brits continue to insist that there's no meaningful difference between the 17th century garden houses at Montacute, and the American summer house at Mount Vernon; the Americans, meanwhile, insist that the Brits simply do not know what they're talking about, and come back once you've invented something as nourishing and enriching as the barbershop quartet.

#I know nothing about gazebos half of this is from wikipedia but goddamn I'm having fun #dark pavillionism

[notbecauseofvictories]

One thing most people don't realize about Gazebos is how bloodthirsty they used to be until the 1930s or so. It used to be that in order to appease your average small town gazebo you had to feed it 4-5 marching bands a year, or roughly 2 dozen barbershop groups. Noawadays? Throw it a steely dan cover act every 6 months, maybe a bridal party every few years if you're actively trying to court its favor, and you're pretty much in the clear. And the crazy thing is nobody knows why they calmed down, or that their appetite for flesh won't return to its 19th century heights one day. It's actually an increasingly popular theory among modern Gazebo researchers that we're at the tail end of a period of dormancy and it's only a matter of time until they start howling for blood again. And if/when that does happen there's the question of whether our modern zeeb-keepers are really ready for the task of booking enough sacrificial acts to meet that increased demand. Guild policy has gotten lax in the century since the heyday of Dark Pavillionism and a lot of local keepers refuse to even look at newer research that threatens to upset their status quo. Kind of scary to think about

#so ''the heyday of dark pavillionism'' makes me immediately want this novel #where everything in the us is exactly the same except apparently there's a guild of zeeb-keepers running around #and every year at the industry summit Mark Pavilion XIII gets up and rants for twenty minutes #about the increases of gazebo activity going unnoticed in their communities; how the last thing anyone wants #is another event like the Uprising of '94; or the Massacre at the Jackson County Summer Faire in the 00s #meanwhile half the audience rolls their eyes; the other half has taken a smoke break #rather than try and decipher mark's spidery handwriting on his (frankly almost illegible) graphs #but also the idea that at the heart of this....every small town in america was created via blood-soaked pact with a vast and terrible force #and in return for feeding it you get a town and a pretty gazebo. if the gazebo is also an altar #on which the local cover band will be sacrificed because you couldn't convince a touring group to stop by? #well that's just the price of living in a beautiful safe small town. #who'd want to live in a city where you might be killed randomly? no no...it's better to die for/with/within your community. #(also this DOES seem to gesture toward a world where touring music groups are also trying to cleverly evade #the gazebo minders who seek to entrap them and the towns that want to eat them. #which to me sounds like even more fun.) #for my own purposes #dark pavillionism