myrthing

[myrthing]

we need to take the words gaslight, narcissist, sociopath, empath, psychotic, etc. out of peoples hands man because literally no one knows how to be normal. i am so tired. i am so so tired.

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Best reads of 2023 - A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Rating: ★★★★★

“It's always mattered a lot to me to keep a wall up round my dignity, even though dignity matters fuck-all when the monsters under your bed are real.”

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Throughout my education, people (peers, teachers, and more recently my disability advisor) have made comments to me along the lines of “it’s not fair that you get accommodations when you get As” or “you only get good grades because you get special accommodations” or “well you get good grades so I don’t think you need ___ accommodation” and I think this illustrates something a lot of people don’t understand:

Accommodations are not the difference between me getting an B or an A

Accommodations are the difference between me failing the class or me being able to participate.

To illustrate: people have made these comments specifically about me getting extra time on tests and assignments:

When I use extra time on an assignment, that extra time is not going towards the assignment. That is time that I lost because I was in too much pain to do any work. Even with my extra time, I probably still have less time to spend actually doing work than other people do. The difference is not quality of work- it is the ability to complete work or not complete work.

In other words, If the time limit is 4 days and I get 6 days, that doesn’t mean I get to spend an extra 2 days on my assignment, that means I wasn’t able to do any work for 3 days but at least with the extra time I have 3 more days to use. notice how that’s still 1 day less than everybody else.

This applies to a lot of my accommodations. They aren’t the reason for me doing well, they are the reason I’m able to do anything at all. They are only there to level the playing field and remove barriers- they don’t give me any advantages.

I’ve also gotten a comments about my accommodation to miss class in courses where attendance is mandatory. Somebody told me they “wished they were allowed to skip without an issue.”

I don’t use that accommodation to skip class. I use that accommodation when I am in too much pain to leave my bed. I hate missing class, it’s always more work for me to catch up later than to be there in person. It makes me so anxious that I go in person even when I am in extreme amounts of pain and should probably stay home.

This was kind of just a rant but I feel like a lot of people can probably relate to the sentiment. It was especially frustrating to hear from the disability advisor who is in charge of my accommodations, especially considering the amount of times I’ve had to reach out to her because I was close to failing a course, or had to drop out of a class directly due to my disabilities.

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Treating the Holocaust as a privilege isn't exclusive to white gentiles. I've called other people out on here for acting like the existence of the Holocaust Museum is a privilege when there supposedly aren't any museums dedicated to the transatlantic slave trade or the genocide of indigenous people.

Jewish people have worked and fought viciously for decades to keep people from forgetting the Holocaust; museums, classes, etc are overwhelmingly started and led by Jews. Books and other media about the Holocaust made by gentiles almost always focus on the roles of gentiles in the Holocaust (with extreme exaggerations about the existence of gentile saviors), with Jewish experiences being secondary at best; media focused on Jewish experiences is made by Jews.

Jews have fought tooth and nail, often facing heavy censorship and extreme violence, to keep the Holocaust from being forgotten so that it isn't repeated. And even with all that work, gentile perspectives and opinions still dominate the narrative, often causing great harm to Jewish communities and WORSENING antisemitism.

And then other marginalized racial and ethnic groups blame Jews for supposedly getting too much attention and "stealing" it from everyone else (often while ignoring efforts to increase education about our own communities and histories), even while our communities co-opt the Holocaust and Jewish suffering and pretend that antisemitism is a thing of the past.

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Technophobes need to apologise for "just put it in plain English you stupid machine!" because, well for one the decline in accurate error messages in favour of simplicity has contributed to the rise of tech illiteracy, but also because now whenever an "app" has a net connection error it will pop up a box saying something like "oo ooopsie! Your super duper feed went poo poo. We'll try again soon!" which having said to me by a corporation is about 8 million times worse than having to hear the word "network".

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RIP, "The Man of the Hole." We never knew your date of birth or name.

And after what we did to you, we didn't deserve to.

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Thinking about the dichotomy of "I feel uncomfortable/triggered in the presence of x/y/z environments I would like to be someplace without that" that I constantly see online and when I tell my therapist I really get uncomfortable when people raise their voices around me even if they aren't actually mad and her response of "you can only control your own reactions and emotions, it's not really fair to police others on how they should exist in your presence" and honestly it sucks to hear but she's right.. it's good to have people be conscientious of what triggers you but really it's up to us to do the hard work of building that emotional resilience. The idea of people around me having to be hypervigilant of what they say and do lest I start getting dysregulated does not sound fun at all, I want people to feel comfortable being themselves around me and that means training my dumb lizard brain to chill tf out. Living in a constant state of avoidance sucks ass for everyone involved.

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Larry Rosso (Wet'suwet'en/Carrier Nation), Steller’s Jay, 1981, serigraph print, 14 in. x 18 in.

So, I came across this print while looking for some bird art to go on the wall and I just absolutely fell in love with it. I’ve never seen a Steller’s Jay in the Northwest Coast Formline art style before!

Larry Rosso (1944-2006) is a Wet'suwet'en (Carrier Nation) artist from British Columbia in Canada who worked mainly in wood carving, but also made a handful of prints in his career as well. This print was a limited edition of 225.

I love how the wings look like hand prints. I love the colors and the bold lines. I love how much sassy personality shines through in the jay’s pose. He really captures their essence well!

Needless to say, I got the print and it’s on my wall.

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Why do you think so many people say John had good intentions and is a good person but lost his way and that somehow Blood of Eden is equally bad? Sucks about the guys past. Doesn’t change that his current job title is evil god emperor who kills planets

i think the answer to this is two-fold, one part having to do with john's persona, harrow's interpretation of it as the unreliable narrator she is, and how that influences the audience; and the second part having to do with widespread ignorance or misunderstanding surrounding tlt's themes of anti-imperialism, challenging hegemony, and western, especially american, viewpoints of what is considered "violence." tw references to grooming under the cut

all of the in-universe propaganda around john posits him as a normal man who became god, and when we meet him, that is how he acts. he has a very strong, curated persona of gentle kindness. here is how we are introduced to him, in gtn's epilogue:

"Please undo what I've done, Lord," [Harrowhark] said. "I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav." "I can't," he said. He had a bittersweet, scratchy voice, and it was infinitely gentle.

and this is his first page of dialogue in htn:

God stood in your doorway and said, "You've thrown up again, Harrowhark...You're losing all your muscle, and you didn't have much to start with." Your mouth said, with gratifying clarity: "Why does a Lyctor need a sword? Lord, what use can we have of one? I can control bone. I can shape flesh and evoke spirit. I no longer need outside thanergy. Why anything so crude as a sword?" "Nice to hear you're feeling better," he said, "I'm not going to talk philosophy with you, not when you've spent the last three hours venting your gut." (Had you?) "I'm not a monster. Go rinse your teeth. I don't care that you can fill your own cavities, not looking after those things seems wasteful." Swaying on your feet, you rose from the bed like a ghost from the tomb and went over to the nearby sink, where you parted your shitty veil and resentfully rinsed your teeth with antiplaque.

so this is establishing a few integral things: that john presents himself as a gentle, caring man, who pities harrowhark and cares about her wellbeing; and that harrowhark will do anything that he says. there are not a lot of characters harrow would allow to tell her to brush her teeth and then actually do it, but not only is he literally the god she worships, he is a kind, paternal figure who acts like he cares about harrowhark in a way she finds fulfilling. she absolutely adores john, loves going to his room to have private little chats with him, wants his approval, tells him deep, dark, traumatic secrets because she feels close to him. we spend all of htn deep in harrow's mind while she is being groomed by him. he very carefully builds a relationship of trust and vulnerability, and harrowhark is not immune to his machinations at all.

i bring all of this up because i think that harrow's adoring view of john is hugely influential to the audience's perspective on him. (very, VERY similar to how gideon's insanely opinionated and biased narration completely sets the tone of how the audience views the other houses in gtn; i wrote about this regarding third house a while back.) we aren't seeing john as an emperor really, we're seeing him just as a man—and, in comparison to the other lyctors, he does seem the best behaved. mercy is repugnant, augustine is a total creep, and g1deon is...g1deon lmao, not very likable, but john is soft-spoken, polite, seemingly self-aware, and he is kind to harrowhark (or, that's how she's interpreting a lot of his behavior). i've never seen anyone argue that john is totally innocent or anything given that he kills people onscreen, but i do think that harrow's warped perception of their relationship influences readers into agreeing with her. on my first read of htn, before i had any actual context, i ADORED their relationship because i thought it was so deep and touching—but then i finished the book, and i sat with it for a while, and when i reread it i realized how methodical and purposeful everything john was doing to her, the extremely vulnerable position she was in, and how much the progression of their relationship reminded me of grooming. so it took me a second read to realize that john was doing something REALLY horrific to harrowhark, but the first time around i was so taken by how much she loved him!

there is a political dimension to this too, where there is like. a concerning number of people on this fandom who not only refuse to touch tlt's feminist commentary, but actively claim it doesn't exist. there has always been a big problem in fandom culture around shutting down feminist commentary, and it's sad to me that it exists not only in the 2020s on tumblr, but with this series specifically that has such rich and interesting things to say about womanhood and the violence associated with it. john is THE image of a groomer: he is soft and kind and non-threatening, he is so willing to help a vulnerable young woman who desperately needs adult guidance, he's a great teacher and you can tell him anything and he'll hold your secrets dearly. i think it's possible people have trouble reconciling this image with the image they may have of a predator or a dangerous person, but very often this is what people like that are like. it's a crafted persona. it's also a persona tamsyn muir has written about before in works much more explicitly about grooming, namely the magician's apprentice, which has an antagonist named.....john. lol.

the other part of your question has to do with john's own narration and, i think, a lack of understanding around his politics and what tamsyn muir is trying to say about working within the system. i already wrote an essay about why i think john is a neo-liberal, but i'll sum it up here: in john's chapters in ntn, he insists he wants to save the planet. he insists this over and over again, yet when we meet him he is actively working on an integral aspect of the evacuation effort, counter to his own ideals. he is working within the system that created the climate crisis to begin with in order to further their goals to completely abandon the planet; then, he has a conflict with them and forms a group of followers that consist of his extremely well-educated STEM buddies, a cop, a nun, a lawyer, and a hedge fund manager—the EXACT same kind of people who ran the christofascist, capitalist global system that landed humanity in this predicament in the first place. but john frames all of this like he is doing something revolutionary, and here's where it splits off: he is a very emphatic and passionate narrator and it is extremely easy to believe that he is telling the truth, because all of this is very true to him; and i also think that this neo-liberal, toothless lack of challenging hegemonic systems is an incredibly mainstream contemporary opinion irl right now and on this website, and so people agree with him. the idea that *the system* is the thing that is wrong and that needs to be completely dismantled is WAY too leftist an opinion for i think a lot of people, but i do think it is what taz is arguing. everything john was doing was completely wrong from the very beginning, but i think it took material violence (ie cow wall) and crazy cult aesthetics for the other shoe to drop for a lot of the audience. but john was never a good person and nothing he was ever doing was going to be effective in any way. tlt-universe anarchists hate him

the "boe is equally bad as the nine houses" is where it starts getting like. red flag fascistic opinion for me. that stops being a book opinion and starts making me question what you think about like real life politics. i think people think this because boe does horrifically physically violent things on the page, notably the burn cages, but the empire's violence isn't so immediately shocking. sure, ntn is set in a city that is falling to pieces and at war with itself because the cohort forcibly migrated thousands of people from different cultures into one shit area, but people really don't seem to understand that as violence. there is so much evidence of empirical violence in ntn—scarred refugee children who hang out at the dump, gang wars, regular mass shootings, and air pollution so bad people have to wear masks anytime they step foot outside, and then taz juxtaposes it with boe's very concrete actions like the burn pits and violent, threatening break-out militia groups. but i think that, when it comes to a western and ESPECIALLY american audience that grew up during the iraq and afghanistan war and were fed a steady diet of propaganda demonizing the people who were fighting BACK against the US military after it invaded their countries unprompted, that guerilla-style violence reads as "worse." but it isn't, it is entirely justified and not even close to comparable to the violence that the nine houses spreads on a daily basis by virtue of just existing. tlt is very blatantly commenting on imperialism and the kinds of things imperial violence pushes normal people to do, and boe is a very clear reflection of irl anti-empire insurgency groups. but in the west we have been trained to view groups like this as the enemy and as backwards savages, fighting against the sophisticated and powerful empire that is just trying to maintain order, and i think this propaganda really permeates into the fandom's perception of boe. i don't really know anything about new zealand history, but i do know that the maori fought hard against the british and it wouldn't surprise me if this informed taz's decisions regarding boe too, considering how much of tlt is explicitly about new zealand, as stated by the author.

so...yeah. i think the answer to this question is somewhat due to tamysn's skill in writing really convincing unreliable narrators that warp the narrative in ways that can make it hard to parse for a casual reader, but like. it is mostly because tlt's politics are pretty leftist and most people....are not. they're either not interested in the politics because they don't understand them, or they're not interested in the politics because they actually challenge their worldview and it's a shipping buzzkill.

[myrthing]

William Alberto Huaman Vilcatoma

Guilin Mountains China

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Reading a book about slavery in the middle-ages, and as the author sorts through different source materials from different eras, I am starting to understand why so many completely fantastical accounts of "faraway lands" went without as much as a shrug. The world is such a weird place that you can either refuse to believe any of it or just go "yeah that might as well happen" and carry on with your day.

There was this 10th century arab traveller who wrote into an account that the fine trade furs come from a land where the night only lasts one hour in the summer and the sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, people use dogs to travel, and where children have white hair. I don't think I'd believe something like that either if I didn't live here.

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if not, winter by sappho // ampio orizzonte by ettore tito // lesbos by sylvia plath

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FJSJFJAJFJAHFOSJHDJAJDHAHDJAJDHA

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People on my street and their garbage crimes, pt 1.

#why. why would you do this.

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Ever see a baby alligator get dizzy?

#BABY

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sheep girlfriends. ewefriends if you will

#myrthing sheepsona