When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.
But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.
As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.
The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork. In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.
That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.
News - Retrocrush just announced a bunch of new titles coming to their free streaming service in June 2020, including the Black Jack OVAs, Dear Brother, the 80s Astro Boy adaptation, and more! Check out the link above for the full list!
10 Female Written Short Stories Everyone Should Read
I have seen a post circulating for a while that lists 10 short stories everyone should read and, while these are great works, most of them are older and written by white men. I wanted to make a modern list that features fresh, fantastic and under represented voices. Enjoy!
1. A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri — A couple in a failing marriage share secrets during a blackout.
2. Stone Animals by Kelly Link — A family moves into a haunted house.
3. Reeling for the Empire by Karen Russell — Women are sold by their families to a silk factory, where they are slowly transformed into human silkworms.
4. Call My Name by Aimee Bender — A woman wearing a ball gown secretly auditions men on the subway.
5. The Man on the Stairs by Miranda July — A woman wakes up to a noise on the stairs.
6. Brownies by ZZ Packer — Rival Girl Scout troops are separated by race.
7. City of My Dreams by Zsuzi Gartner — A woman works at a shop selling food-inspired soap and tries not to think about her past.
8. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — A family drives from Georgia to Florida, even though a serial killer is on the loose.
9. Hitting Budapest by NoViolet Bulawayo — A group of children, led by a girl named Darling, travel to a rich neighborhood to steal guavas.
10. You’re Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore — A history professor flies to Manhattan to spend Halloween weekend with her younger sister.
callout posts in 2014: this user is sending mean messages to people! please be warned!
callout posts in 2015: this user is stealing bones from cemeteries for witch rituals!
callout posts in 2016: this user Actually A Nazi
callout posts in 2017: this user watches an anime I don’t like
callout posts in 2018: i went through this user’s youtube like history and found a video from JonTron that they liked in 2012, proving that they’re a bad person
callout posts in 2019: this user plays E-Rated Video Games, which are meant for children, which seems pretty sus to me idk :/
callout posts in 2020: this user stole 5 gallons of purified water from the New DC Resistance Camp and was last seen headed towards Sunken Brooklyn
Every mornings seagulls flying over the Barcelona city and I always want to capture the awe of seeing them hovering in front of my eyes, painting frame by frame on paper and tvpaint, gouache, charcoal.
If you’re a longtime reader of my blog, you’ll know that AIs are consistently terrible at humor. Whether it’s a very simple neural net learning to tell knock-knock jokes, or a more-sophisticated algorithm trained on tens of thousands of short jokes, they tend to get the rhythm and vocabulary correct, yet completely miss the point.
In a previous experiment, I trained a simple neural net on a collection of April Fools pranks and noticed that most of them end up being pranks you play on yourself. Figuring that this sort of solo prank might be useful for this year, I tried a much more sophisticated neural net, one that didn’t have to learn all its words and phrases from scratch. The neural net, called GPT-2, learned from millions of web pages. Using talktotransformer.com, I gave it a short list of pranks and asked it to add to the list.
Here are some of the neural net’s suggested pranks.
Self-prank? New hobbies? Performance art?
It often seemed like the neural net thought it was supposed to be doing its best to suggest recipes or lifehacks.
Step 10: Fun in the Shower
Fill your bathtub with cold water.
Take the jar of sawdust out of the freezer.
Dump it into the water and stir to add some texture.
There are more AI-generated pranks than would fit in this blog post, including some that are such terrible ideas I hesitated to print them here. Enter your email and I’ll send them to you!
My book on AI explains why this is all so darn weird. You can now get it any of these several ways! Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore (has signed copies!)
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