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fipindustries · 21 days

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the first lesson

"belief" chuckled the old man as he turned a delicate glass that contained some opulent limonchello "let me tell you something about how wizards trade in belief"

he was bald, with wild curly hair growing to the sides like the branches of a bonsai tree. he was also rather fat, not in a way that made him look flabby but rather round as a whole. his body could be easily drawn as a circle from which his head poked out, if some leeway for stylization were allowed to the artist. he wore a dark suit and dark round glasses as well as a simple goatee.

"do you lock your doors at night with a key?"

"uh... yes, teacher"

sitting in the small round table at the bar, across from him, was his student. a nervous lady, taller than him and far thinner, with a suit similar to his, dark and antiquated. they looked like undertakers. maybe they even were.

"wise thing to do, given your residence"

The student pursed her lips at this but made no comment. for reasons she could not understand her teacher was fond of making fun or criticizing her economic situation. and for sure there was a lot to complain about, she would do as much regularly, but her teacher seemed to be weirdly fixated on this. he would drop comments about it, cheerfully and casually and she would not respond to any of them and little by little the grains of sand would keep accumulating in the back of her head.

"so every night, before you sleep, you lock the front door of your room with a key, you put the key in the locke and you turn it once, and then twice, and you make a habit out of this, so much so that you do it unconciously, it is an automatic gesture with no thought put into it at all. you dont think to yourself 'now the door is locked', is just a truth of the universe, unacknowledged and yet all the same internalized"

"is this a story or is this your speculations about my life?"

"everything is a story if it's not meant to be literally true, maybe it is true, but that is not my intention"

"very well continue, teacher"

"so the next day, when you wake up and need to step out into the world, before doing that you unlock the door. now this is very important, you don't have to take a few moments to collect yourself and wonder if wether you locked your door last night, you dont have to take stock of your memories and recall that indeed you put the key there before going to sleep and locked the door tight, you just unlock the door because it is a deeply accepted truth that the door is simply locked"

"and the only way to unlock it is with a key"

"the only way indeed! very good!"

she didnt need to add that comment, and if it had been simply up to her whim she would have remained silent and let the man continue his lecture. but she had learned that her teacher enjoyed these interjections, however superfluous they might be, he always recieved them with joy and enthusiasm, as if she had solved a mystery or shown a deep insight. this was another of his weird quirks that she entertained simply because they seemed to make her interactions with him more frictionless.

"and now," he continued "imagine one day you go to a party and drink copious ammounts of alcohol, quantities large enough to make you dispossesed of your wits, not that i suggest you would actually do such a thing, at least not on the regular" the teacher gave her an unwanted wink "so your friends carry you back home and you stumble your steps up to your front door and once inside you are so out of sorts that you simply forget to lock the door, after which you fall into your bed and go to sleep"

"is this something about how my compromised state makes me believe for one night that ill be safe even though i havent locked the door or something?"

"not at all, you sleep soundly all night without being attacked, who knows, maybe burglars and robbers were busy in other houses or other parties, getting themselves merry and drunk, whatever the case may be you wake up the next day with no memory of last night, with quite a hangover, sadly there are no pills or medicines that can aid you with your malady at your home, so you will have to go to the corner drugstore to get something to let you handle your headache"

the student pursed her lips once again. there was a drugstore at the corner of her street, so this story not being about her seemed just a fraction less likely, but then again, there were drugstores at the corners of many streets.

"so you unlock your door and step outside, it's a lovely day with the birds singing and the sun shining and you go to the farmacy and buy the medicine you need to handle your hangover, end of the story"

"but how could i have unlocked the door if the door was already unlocked?" she said mechanically, knowing that this was the obvious question the story was baiting.

"exactly! very good my student!"

an overstated praise for a trite question. maybe her teacher just enjoyed being humored.

"for you see, to you it was not a matter of assuring yourself that the door was locked, to you it was simply a truth of the world, as profound and unquestionable as that things fall down"

"i see, and that is the level of belief i have to master in order to do magic?"

"more or less, yes" said the teacher sipping the limonchello.

"seems difficult to achieve without extensive use of manipulation, doublethink, brainwashing or psychodelics"

"hmm? what do you mean?"

"that...to internalize a belief that profoundly, seems hard to do without a lot of mental effort, without a rather strong amount of self deception and psychological trickery"

"i really dont know what you're talking about, you just have to believe, is the easiest thing in the world"

"it's... not, it's very much not, to believe, to truly believe, to actually thoroughly change one's mind about the nature of reality, against proof, against evidence is basically impossible"

"is that what you believe?"

"is-" oh, that was the trick. she had to internally stifle a groan. her teacher had pulled another of his dumb rethorical tricks. he seemed to be just as delighted when she failed to catch on as he was when she stated the obvious.

"that is the first belief you have to change, indeed is the first belief that all wizards have to change when they start" he said, chuckling again.

"that is the first spell that every wizard casts" she said, completing the thought.

"now" said the teacher, pulling out a small box with a large lock on it from his cape. he placed it on the small table, in the middle of the glasses, and then he pulled a key from a pocket. he put the key on the lock and turned once, and twice. then he put the key back into his pocket. "i want you to open this box"

the student looked at the box. so that was her challenge, to find the way to believe in her heart of hearts that this locked box was actually open. no, not even believe in hear heart of hearts, not even to know, really. this had to be something that trascended awareness.

she took a big gulp from her beer. she was going to fail the test so she wanted to steel herself to be embarassed.

obviously it was impossible for her to rewrite her brain right there and then and she was not even going to try. there was going to be no clapping while saying that she believed in fairies. that was just not how actual beliefs about the world were formed.

if it was a trick that all wizards had to master, she didnt have the instruction or the tools for how to do it. she looked at the box a little more. her hands hovered over it, hesitating. the moment she placed her hands on it and failed to open it, the test would be done and she would have failed and the was no circumventing that. she just wanted to delay the pie to her face a little longer.

of course, because she was her, she couldnt help but actually pause and still try her best to find the answer to the conundrum. she covered her mouth with one hand and scratched her mane of curls around her head with the other, like she did whenever she was deep in thought. her brow deeply furrowed with concentration.

And then she realized the true nature of her test. how dissapointing. it was a dumb trick of course. she placed a finger on top of the box and said "abracadabra"

She then opened the box.

"marvelous! marvelous! exceptional! very good my student! not even i did better than that when i was faced with the test!" exclaimed the teacher while clapping enthusiastically.

She was well and truly tired of her master's condescention.

"you didnt lock the box when you put the key in, you unlocked it" she said, rolling her eyes "the box was unlocked all along"

"exactly! precisely! the box was unlocked all along, just like the door in my story was locked all along!"

"no! no that is not the same thing!" insisted the student banging the table with her fist "in your story, someone believing that a door is locked changes reality retroactively to make it so that the door was always locked, but in my case the box was actually unlocked all along!" the ruckus made one of the waiters show up with a confused look in his face

"well yes, that is the point, that is what changing reality retroactively is supposed to look like, like it was unlocked all along" the teacher turned towards the waiter "thanks for showing up, what is the cost of these beverages, garçon?"

"that would be 30 in total"

"ah! very well, now you see i am a magician, so allow me a bit of flair" said the master waving his hands around in a very theatrical way "your fee is inside that box being held by my lovely assistant, my dear girl would you hand the box to our waiter?"

She rolled her eyes and gave the box to the poor confused man. who grabbed it and tried to pry it open. but he couldn't.

"um... is the box closed?" asked the waiter, out of sorts.

"oh? it should be opened, try again" said the old man.

the waiter struggled a little more but he could not open the box in any way. finally he turned to the teacher with forlorn expression.

"i give up, what's the trick?"

the old man reached behind the waiter's left ear and pulled out the key.

"here why dont you try with this"

"that is a really old trick" said the waiter while he unlocked the box and pulled out the money from inside it. he returned the box by forcefully pressing it against the old man's chest.

"what i nice lad!" said the teacher, while putting the key into the lock again and turning it once and then twice again. "anyway, where were we?"

the girl was just looking at he teacher, a mix of confusion, annoyance and a little bit of fear on her face.

"ok, how did you do that" she asked.

"i didnt do anything, you did, you opened the box"

"no, that... that was a trick, the lock is a clever mechanism or something"

"you are thinking like a magician, and i am asking you to think like a wizard, you opened this box, my dear girl, because you believed that it was opened, you already did this trick once, now all you have to do" said the man, placing the box back into the table "is do it again"

she hesitated.

"this is still a trick, right? you rigged it somehow so that if i try ill be able to open the box?"

the teacher laid back on the chair, very satisfied with himself. he crossed his fingers over his belly. she somehow felt that this, out of everything he had done that night, was his most sincere display of pride in her.

"what do you believe?" he said

she reached for the box.

#writing #i wanted to write a small vignette in the world of introduction to magic #introduction to magic

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enby-axels · 1 year

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svsss deconstructs the roles of protagonist and scum villain to reveal that they (bingge and the original shen qingqiu respectively) are one and the same. so i can understand why people who read svsss first think that the same theme applies to mdzs' protagonist wei wuxian and antagonist jin guangyao. but imo mdzs deconstructs these roles completely differently. wwx and jgy do have meaningful similarities, but at the end of the day they're meant to be foils, not identical parallels.

like it's always "wwx is morally grey and exactly the same as jgy" this or "all violence is the same akshually" that, but never "what makes certain acts of violence socially acceptable? whom do you point your sword at: the dispossesed or the gentry exploiting them? when enacting so-called justice, which parties' interests are excluded?"

it matters that wwx's necromancy was accepted during the sunshot campaign, but he was vilified when he protected the wen clan's remnants. it matters that none of the righteous clans care about the sex workers and prostituted women that jgy killed. it matters that wwx only gets a second chance at life because nie huaisang a.k.a. "the head-shaker" wanted to avenge his brother. it matters that jgy died because nhs tricked lan xichen into thinking he was going to kill him, not for anything he actually did. it matters that lan wangji is beloved by the common people for appearing wherever there's trouble, unlike other cultivators. it matters that luo qingyang left her clan, not just because she was disrespected, but because she lost faith in the cultivation world. it matters that wwx understands the necessity of violence to protect the powerless, and laments the self-righteous violence of the powerful.

mdzs isnt a deconstruction of how toxic male power fantasies arbitrarily determine the roles of hero and villain; it's criticizing how those already in power decide who's disposable

#svsss #mdzs #mdzs meta #my meta #whorephobia depiction #wei wuxian #jin guangyao #long post

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tess-talks-inc · 3 months

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Dispossesed, a DDVAU fic

It was warm, when Grian fell asleep. The break room always was warm, even in the cooling winds of fall that cause the trees to shed their leaves. The window was an especially a warm spot, with the sun beaming through the glass panes in a way that would put even the most caffeinated teachers to rest beneath its warm beams.

It was warm, so maybe that’s why he jolted when he felt like he was dunked into a layer of ice. His mind jolted, at least. It felt the same as waking from a nightmare, the same dread, the same sharp vision as every sense of his body felt it was on high alert. However, there was no rushing heartbeat, if he could feel one at all. No matter how much his mind screamed for it, his head did not rise from its position of looking.. down towards a growing mold, barely illuminated by a sliver of light. He was… standing? Why was he standing?

“Oh hello love.” The voice, his voice, called out to the darkening room. Or he hoped it was the room, he couldn’t tell. It was so dark, he could barely see, and that sliver of light was slowly being eclipsed. It shouldn’t be this dark, he thought a bit dumbly. it wasn’t even noon yet, I don’t sleep for that long-

“You’re not meant to be up quite yet.” His voice noted, finally looking up and walking towards a further end of… the hall? It was lined with mushrooms, caps barely luminescent as his feet beat an unfamiliar pace, but the length, the tile… he was in the hall. Why?

__________________

I sincerely needed to write a fic based on the most recent chapter of @kitsuneisi 's and @xmaruu11 's DDVAU, because I'm obsessed and Mother Spore is Everything To Me!!! I cannot draw so I offer my measely writing skill as offering and apreciation :D

#hermitcraft #ddvau #ddvau fanfic #fanfic #ao3 #desert duo vigilante au

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fatliberation · 2 years

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Dr. Caleb Luna @chairbreaker, on fat embodiment & divesting from constructions of health

Culturally, we are taught that we can control our health based on our individual choices, including eating habits. As part of this, body size gets conflated with or becomes a shorthand for health, with thinness becoming synonymous with good health and fatness with poor health. To control this, we are taught that eating a particular diet and regular exercise will automatically produce a thin body, and, with that, health.

This is false, for a few reasons:

1. There is no universally healthy diet. People have allergies, preferences & individual needs based on unique conditions. Some people need to eat more meat, some are allergic to nuts or berries, some bodies can’t digest lactose. Food is also culture, & the compulsion to standardize our diets into one model flattens human difference and imposes white supremacist foods & eating habits as the standards the rest of us should ascribe to.

2. There is no diet and exercise regime that is guaranteed to make you thin. Diets have a 95-99% long term failure rate. Exercise has many benefits, including increase in strength, mobility, stamina, flexibility, stress relief, connection to body, and more. But the conclusion it will make you thin is a lie from the diet industry to aspire to white supremacist beauty standards. It fuels the diet industry to make people feel like failures when diet & exercise don’t produce the thin bodies we were promised.

3. Illness is innate to the human condition, & many people who structure their lives around diet culture will still contract viruses, develop cancers & other conditions. There is no diet or exercise regime that is guaranteed to prevent illness or injury.

4. Body size is largely genetically determined. It can be influenced by food intake, but bodies hold what is called a set point that is nearly impossible to change long-term, without extreme & unhealthy measures. Our genetics also determine how we are racialized. Body size is one of many factors in this process, which includes skin tone, body hair patterns, height, body shape, and sizes & shapes of eyes, nose, & mouth. This is all race science; ascribing to these metrics of health through diet and fitness culture is also white supremacy.

There are steps we can take to take control of our individual holistic health, based on whatever goals they may be, but the idea we have complete control over our health is false. The notion that we can & should take ownership of our health comes from Enlightenment thinking that separated body from mind and man from nature. This epistemology teaches us that our bodies are projects that can and should be controlled and shaped through our actions in order to demonstrate our cultural values (allegiance to white supremacy). This is used to organize society into good subjects, who ‘take care of themselves,’ and bad subjects, who don’t. We don’t have dominion over our bodies; we are in relation with our bodies, and with each other.

In the U.S., we live in a deeply unhealthy society founded on anti-Blackness, Indigenous dispossesion & settler colonization. This is bad for the health of all of us. The emphasis on health as the result of individual choices that can be evidenced through the body is a distraction used to pit us against one another as good and bad subjects. Fat, sick & disabled bodies are viewed as failures of the project of self care and, as such, less deserving of resources. This also shifts responsibility to take care of one another, or for the State to take care of its citizen subjects. This is white supremacist & colonial thinking. We are all in relation with one another; we all have responsibilities for one another’s well-being.

Finally, disabled people have let us know that we can become disabled instantaneously through accident or illness; in fact, it is a part of life. If we live long enough, we will eventually become disabled in some way. The emphasis on health devalues disabled people, whose bodies will never achieve these standards. This construction of health is a value of white supremacy, colonization & capitalism: we are expected to be healthy under colonial metrics only to be productive workers for longer. We need to divest from settler formations of health if we want all of us to truly be free.

#fat liberation #anti-fat bias #fatphobia #fatmisia #ableism

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charlesoberonn · 2 months

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the adventure story concept you just posted really reminds me of the dispossesed by ursula leguin :0

So I've been told.

That book has a similar structure but afaik it's not a Hero's Journey type adventure story.

Project Hail Mary also has a similar structure, with the protagonist finding himself in space with amnesia and slowly remembering how he got there.

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cleverwordsandotherstuffilike · 8 months

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Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, Amnesty International said today in a damning new report. The investigation details how Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has control over their rights. This includes Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), as well as displaced refugees in other countries.

I don't understand the support for Israel's cruel oppression of Palestinians. They shoot children.

The worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiplied by 1000 times, it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossesion of the Palistineans. Gabor Mate

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chillyfeetsteak · 4 months

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i saw ur reading the dispossesed.. i reading the dispossesedd.d..d.d.. too :3 :3 twinsies

it's very good, books are delicious

#asks

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zuko-always-lies · 1 year

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I’m not really a fan of Harry Potter at all, even by the loosest of standards, but I’ve had a very odd thought. Of course, J. K. Rowling is an absolutely terrible person in multiple ways and I’m not sure if I should perpetuate the fandom and the work from which she draws her power from, so I’m a little uncomfortable even stating my idea. On the other hand, it’s not like I’m putting money directly into her pocket and my idea is based around utterly subverting the cruelty and bigotry of her work, so I think I’ll tentatively share my thought--I can always delete later, I guess.

The core of the thought is simple(and not friendly to many of the “Good” characters in Harry Potter or the least bit compatible with canon): What if Tom Riddle was a good guy? What if he was a hero?

In my idea, Tom Riddle shares much with the canon character. He was a poor orphan who grew up unloved and unwanted, very much failed by the Wizarding World’s system. He’s ambitious, cold, calculating, and not infrequently engages in extremely offsetting behavior, leading a few of those whom he interacts with to believe he’s soulless. Due to his upbringing (and perhaps due to reasons inherent to him), he struggles to love, and perhaps he can’t really love others on a personal basis. The only advantages he has are his incredibly ability and his charisma.

Yet if there is one thing that truly matters to Tom, it’s justice and equality, and as he grows as a wizard and gains his education at Hogwarts, he encounters a society based on cruelity, violence, discrimination, hierarchy, and hatred, a society based on slavery, a society which justifies everything it does as “tradition” yet which seems to discover new “ancient” traditions of cruelity every year. All the “good” people Tom knows seem to entirely OK with all of this, but he’s never been able to make himself feel comfortable with it, and the more he learns and the more he reads, the less sense it all makes to him and the less justified it seems, especially since he’s always on the verge of being on the outside himself. He strives to accomplish great things, but more and more he realizes that, in the Wizarding World, that requires actively working to perpetuate the system and its cruelities, and he reaches a point where he realizes he can no longer do that.

And so young Tom Riddle dedicates himself to overthrowing the system of violence, no matter the cost. He has no Death Eaters as followers, but he gathers support from all those he can, using his own ability as a means to attract outsiders. The dispossesed--Goblins, Centaurs, Giants, Werewolves, low-class people, House Elves, etc.--flock to his banner in large numbers, and their preexisting movements come to ally with him. Yet Riddle also draws support from people like him, whose hearts have been gradually been awakened and whose eyes have been gradually opened to the injustice of the system. Ideologically diverse (after all, William Cobbett was a conservative Tory who, despite himself, became one of the most radical politicians in Britain and one of the greatest advocates for the working class), the movement’s members share a common belief that the current system cannot be allowed to continue, no matter the cost.

And the cost is immense. Those in power derive their power from the cruelity of the system, and they’re very good at making others buy into it for paltry rewards. These people will not give up easily, or perhaps ever. And if Riddle has one flaw above all others, it his willness to believe that the ends justify the means. The struggle is a long, bitter, and bloody one, and ultimately Riddle fell in battle just as it seemed like his movement was finally on the road to victory. In his absense, the conservative government was able to triumph, and the repression has returned, harsher than ever. Although some resistance continues, all hope seems lost.

However, little does the government know that Riddle, at an immense cost to himself, bound his soul to the world so that he could return and continue the struggle even in the event of his death. It’s taken much longer than he’s anticipated, but now he’s returned, and he doesn’t know how to give up. The war will reignite, and in the new conflict, those in power(like one headmaster controlling the center of education...) will not hesistate to use and sacrifice even children in their quest to protect the system.

TLDR: Tom Riddle isn’t a fascist, but instead he’s John Brown, and he’s not going to let anyone forget it.

#strange au idea I had #Very odd I thought of this

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