#Wholesale Three-Piece Cans

[elismor]

I see a lot of posts going by about comments and kudos and hits and...well... I've been thinking about the three quite a lot lately--as both a fic author and someone who spends a lot of my professional life looking at web metrics and determining which are actually important/accurate measures of user engagement.

Mileage varies, of course. And this is all just MY opinion, so do feel free to ignore it wholesale.

What I think when I see someone say that sorting by a hits to to kudos ratio is a good way to find "good" fic:

Hits are a measure of quantity (how many times your story or art has been viewed), but without knowing how AO3 defines a hit, it's actually kind of a meaningless number.  We know that our own views of our work do not count toward hits, but...if my BFF looks at my story 7 times in one day because she keeps trying to read it but getting interrupted...is that one hit, or seven? And if it's seven, then the numbers are artificially inflated because it's really just Bestie trying to get her Codex fix. And...if Bestie looks at it three times today and four tomorrow...is that 7 hits total, or two? 

Some transparency on the part of AO3 could clear this up handily, but until we get that...shrug. All it is is a number that may or may not be an accurate reflection of how many actual people looked at the page your fic is on.  Did they READ it? Or did they nope out?  No way to know.

Kudos are intended to be slightly more qualitative, but there is no way of knowing why the reader gave them. (Similar to likes here on tumblr.) It might be that they loved the piece. It might be a simple acknowledgement that the reader was there. It might even be a pity kudo. We have no way of knowing. It's, again, just a number.

Obviously, everyone is free to interpret both hits and kudos as positive reaction/interaction. I might do that myself if I didn't spend my workdays explaining to people that 50,000 "hits" to the website could be 50K people who came to learn about us or...simply the result of the computer labs on campus having the university homepage set to default.

Bigger numbers are just that....bigger numbers.

Comments are the only objective way to judge how someone is reacting to your fic or art.

So, what then? Sort by number of comments?

You can do that, sure. (I think. I confess I have never once gotten the AO3 search to work as well as people rave about.) But do keep in mind that many authors answer their comments. So, something with, say, 20 comments may be 20 people telling the author they loved it. Or it might be ten people and ten author-replies. OR, it might be three people having a conversation in the comments. You have to look and see.  

Bigger numbers are just bigger numbers.

Okay, fine Elis. What am I supposed to do then?

Look, I'm not your mother or your therapist and you are free to assign whatever meanings you like to these things. I, personally, find "good" fic through a combination of things including: recs, the fandom grapevine, dumb luck, events, and just...reading some of it and not feeling guilty if I nope out for some reason.

This all sounds a little depressing when laid out like this, huh? Especially when you take into account the downward trends in interacting and the rise of folks treating fic and art as content to be consumed. 

Here's what I have learned from writing fic for 30 years (well, 28 and counting):

As an author (and an artist, I would presume), you have absolutely no way of predicting which of your work will land and take hold and which will not. It's alchemy and luck and the weird (and not actual) algorithm of fandom. Sometimes, the piece you whipped out in 30 minutes and posted on the fly will land in the right person's inbox and they will share it and their friends will share it and it will get big.  Sometimes, the piece you slaved over for weeks and weeks will do that...sometimes it won't.  Sometimes your genius manifests and resonates, sometimes it does not.

My personal favorite fic of my own--the one I think is probably the best thing I have done in SW fandom-- has like 8 kudos and 4 comments (2 of which are my responses). Is it disappointing? Yes. Is it an indication that the fic is objectively "bad"? No.

The mercenary in me suggests that if you want to get lots of comments and kudos, you should pick the pairing that is THE pairing in the fandom and write for that--because that's where the eyeballs are, because that's where the connections are.  But that is not why I write, so it's just that--a very mercenary way of looking at things. Not that there is anything WRONG with doing it that way. Supply and demand run the world. If the people want Codywan and you want the people....give them Codywan. No shame in that.

And there is no shame in wanting or seeking validation for your work, either.

But it breaks my heart to see authors (and artists) give up on themselves when they do not receive piles of kudos and comments. It's not you. It's...the luck of the draw. It's...fandom. It's...an artificial and murky set of measurements that have almost no basis in anything meaningful.

Keep writing. Keep drawing. Keep sharing. You are what you make, not how people respond to it.

#let's talk about fic baby #fandom #kudos and comments

[star-bear-art]

[That love is like a star

It's gone, we just see it shining

It's travelled very far]

I have sat in rendering hell on this piece for like. A MONTH!! So worth it. Consider this a manifestation for my love of Wyll Ravenguard (and I haven't even completed a romance route with him yet!)

(Below is going to be me ranting about the state of his route/content in the game. If you don't want to read that, feel free to just stare at the pretty colours and move on :])

But WOOF. So many frustrations with how his route plays (as of patch 4, the last run I completed!) I've seen people comparing the lack of his development Act 3 with Karlach, and I honestly don't think they're comparable at all. Yes, it's obvious there was more planned (I can't even remember how much extra infernal iron we have at the end of act 3), but she at least has a cohesive narrative emotionally. She resonates! Wyll (by no fault of Theo, whose voice acting is stellar).. did not, for us. At the end of everyone else's personal quest, we were practically crying, but by his? We were mostly confused - due almost entirely to the very convoluted and buggy implementation of his story beats. Let alone that the whole wyrmway sequence becomes way more about the Emporer than him, or that his final speech triggered three seperate times for us consecutively, or the mess with Mizora, the Grand Duke, and Florrick after we defied her to save his father. He's given no agency as a character over his own choices compared to the other companions (at some of his most pivotal moments, as tav you choose his future for him without even a roll!) It was so, so disappointing. I love Wyll, especially Act 1 - but you can seriously feel the lack of polish or finish for his character in the game right now. And regardless of the team's intentions, he's the only Black origin character. That shit has an impact (doubly so when you consider how bg3 imports dnd/forgotten realm's well-discussed racism pretty much wholesale). He deserves as much agency and autonomy over his own story as every other origin character, and I seriously hope he gets it, soon. 'Til then, that's the majesty of fandom, right?

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #baldurs gate 3 #bg3 wyll #wyll ravengard #bg3 fanart #tism archive

[writingsbychlo]

Hi!!! So ummm, in a modern au, what do you think each of the batboys would do for living?

hope you are ok<3

i am okay thank u <3

i ended up writing way more than i intended lol so i put it below the cut. this seriously made me want to write some modern!au stuff for them

rhys is a ceo of a company he inherited from his father. he’s spent years trying to make it clean and honest because when he got it there was so much bad politics and hate surrounding his company. his family were not popular at all. rich, but hated. he introduced fair wages, longer maternity leave, clean energy, charity galas, a lot of stuff. he’s now very popular about about 8 times richer because of it. a good sum of that money comes from interviews (where he says things like “I didn’t make improvements for the money, I did it because it’s right. the money doesn’t hurt though, now I can spoil my wife even more.”) and also brand deals because he’s hot and companies like to advertise through him. he gets a lot of fancy watches and custom suits.

azriel worked for rhys’ dad doing shady shit before he died and rhys inherited the company. when they were 13, at a sleepover, rhys dared az to try and hack his fathers company. he did. but he was caught. instead of reporting it rhys’ dad promised not to tell the cops if az signed a contract to work for him when he was 16. poor baby az did it because he didn’t want to get in trouble. the literal day after az’s 16th birthday he cashed that in and had az start hacking for him. which turned into ‘spying’ on business partners and reporting back what they’re doing and who they talk to online. which turned into paying them vaguely threatening visits when azriel had a growth spurt to 6ft5 and broad af at 17. by 18 azriel had definitely been forced to do some illegal shit way worse than hacking but couldn’t get out. he’d practically signed his life over. when rhys inherited the company at the ripe young age of 21, he made azriel watch as every single copy of that contract was shredded. then they took the shredder out into the garden and burned the whole pile of pieces. azriel cried. azriel also decided if he hadn’t had to drop straight out of highschool to work for rhys’ dad he’d have wanted to go to college. he wants to take law now, so nobody has to go through what he did and get stuck. rhys offers to pay for a top university for him. az refuses, he took online night classes for three years while working a low level job at rhys’ firm. he’s now a ‘private investigator’ for rhys and a ‘bounty hunter’ on the side. because sue him, he kinda likes scaring the bad guys, he just never likes hurting the good ones.

cassian owns a boxing gym funded by rhys. he didn’t know it was funded by rhys for a long time. he had ALWAYS had the dream, all through high school he always knew what he wanted to do and he told az and rhys constantly. it teaches self-defence and cool courses like sword fighting and archery and has kids clubs for martial arts at school times. it has women only evenings, it has a teens only evening, cassian always wanted everyone to have a safe space. he’d described it perfectly, and rhys had found him the perfect building for it. and bought the building. and had someone pretend to be a landlord to give him a really low rent agreement. and then also paid if cassian’s designers and decorators to give him low rates. and then bought him a whole load of equipment and said “i found a wholesaler. no you can’t see their website they don’t have one, it’s a CEO to CEO thing.” cassian only found out when visiting az at work one day and seeing all the legally documents in a “cassian” file in azriel’s usually locked desk drawer. rhys has az do the legal work for it. cassian was MAD at rhys. but also touched. but MAD. they had a big argument and he promised to pay rhys back, rhys refused to accept any of it. they argued some more. it ended with cassian getting rhys to increase the monthly rent he pays back and with rhys crying a little bit and clinging to cassian and saying “why can’t you just let me give you things? it’s not like I can’t afford it!”

side note; cassian says ‘I don’t see you forcing azriel to accept expensive gifts!’ to which azriel growls and says ‘he bought my apartment. building. because I said I thought rent was too steep for me back when I was working down a couple floors and going to college too, he refuses to let me pay him proper rent now.’

[blessyourhondahurley]

Suptober day 5 - Part 2: Afternoon Into Evening

The long-awaited middle part to Restless, which began here .

Dean and Cas share their special day with their family and friends.

Suptober prompt: Portrait

(Read on AO3)

Half an hour later, they're pulling in to the venue, a picturesque little barn a few miles outside of town, situated on three acres of wildflower meadows and grazing sheep. Dean parks the Impala in the VIP Reserved spot. As he gets out, he gives her a pat on the roof and mutters, “Sam's probably gonna tart you up today, darlin'. But I made him promise not to do anything that'll leave a mark.”

On cue, his baby brother comes galumphing up out of nowhere.

“You're late,” he announces, Bitch Face #12 on full display.

“Keep your knickers buttoned, Samantha,” Dean replies breezily. “We're here now. That's all that matters.”

“Okay, sure, whatever. Well, the rest of us have been working for a couple hours already, but there's still a lot left to do. Cas, you can head inside and talk to Jody. She's in charge of decorations and setup. Dean, you're with me. We've gotta go pick up the booze order.”

The bridegrooms-to-be exchange a quick, dry peck of a kiss, then head off to their respective tasks.

~~~~~

By noon the place is gorgeously tricked out. Flowers and fairy lights adorn every available surface. Rows of folding chairs await guests' butts. Countless bottles of beer and wine are chilling on ice, and the caterers are starting to load in for the massive barbecue dinner.

The setup crew, all their nearest and dearest, sit down together at a group of picnic tables and share a rollicking pizza lunch. Precisely at 1:00, everyone except Dean and Cas heads back to the Bunker for showers and fresh clothes.

“Time to get prettied up ourselves, Sunshine,” Dean drawls as they stuff the last of the empty pizza boxes in the trash can nearby. The grab their garment bags from Baby's trunk and climb upstairs to the private changing area in the barn's loft.

~~~~~

Only the threat of interruption by an overworked Samsquatch keeps Dean from getting a little quickie action goin' with his handsome almost-husband. As fast as Cas can put on the pieces of his tailored suit, Dean itches with the urge to peel them back off.

He reminds himself to save it for the honeymoon, and concentrates on the job at hand. By the time the photographer calls up the stairs for them at 2:00 they're fully suited and coiffed, and ready to get their Blue Steels on. They take some formal portraits first, corny prom-type poses that Dean knows he's gonna treasure in the years to come. The wedding party returns around 3:00 and then there are many many many more photos, both posed and candid. At one point a couple of the more personable sheep get involved, and Cas almost loses his boutonniere to a particularly peckish ewe.

Guests start to arrive a little after 4:00, hunter friends and townies mingling freely, conversation lubricated with generous glasses of chilled sangria and various trays of nibblies. Dean and Cas circulate, sometimes separately, sometimes together. They greet their loved ones, chat and laugh and enjoy the party atmosphere, but they never really take their eyes off of each other.

As the sun starts to sink, burnishing the light to a buttery gold, Eileen rings a bell to call everyone into the barn for the main event. The ceremony is 20% pagan handfasting, 20% Enochian ritual, 20% traditional rite, 20% Led Zeppelin lyrics, and 20% lifted wholesale from Dr. Piccolo's third wedding (the one that had to be annulled after it turned out the groom was actually the disgraced fugitive ex-hospital administrator in disguise.) Dapper in a suit that matches his dads, Jack officiates. Helpless with love, undone with joy, Dean tears up the moment his son begins to speak, and he continues to weep steadily all through the vows and right up to the soggy kiss he shares with his equally-emotional newly-consecrated spouse.

Concludes here

#destiel #destiel fanfic #suptober23 #day 5

[greatunironic]

Hiiiii im back again. (sorry)

I'm still working on the thing! But was wondering if you could tell me more about your Eddies tattoos? I've made a list of the ones that are mentioned in the fic but would love to know more about them! Why a tiger? What's the story behind the stick n poke eye? And what're the Zeppelin lyrics!!??

I really hope you don't mind me asking you more questions!! Slow but steady progress being made over here! And still not at all over how much I love this world/story you've created!!

Thank you!!

okay so hello i’ve had a Very Long Day so the coherency on this will probably be questionable at best but tattoo thoughts for you my lovely friend:

the tiger is an homage to one of my in-laws, a tattoo artist — it’s in a more traditional style, because i always thought that old school aesthetic with a tiger/panther is dope + also i love big cats so i decided project onto eddie lol; tigers have various meanings in different cultures and i thought eddie would probably respond to that, the main ones being that they protect the dead + can ward off evil

also probably a lot of the tattoos are references to my brothers, who are all heavily tattooed, and me just being like “oh J has a rolling stones chest piece + it’s sick” or “H has that Misfits skull as the center of his sleeve, let’s imagine that on eddie but with a tiger instead” and then just stealing wholesale from them lol

stick + poke eye: a product of a drunken evening, more or less, perhaps an homage to an evil eye?? who’s to say (me, i guess) — a warding gesture, watchfulness, always keeping one eye open kind of deal

in a comment on the story, i mentioned eddie + max have matching “trailer trash” tattoos from a grammy after party where someone hired someone to do small tattoos

“to be a rock and not to roll”

someone asked about the tree before and the initials in there, and i still don’t know whose i want them to be — but right now i’m leaning towards wayne

tattoos not mentioned but in my heart they’re somewhere on eddie: dates for the births of barbie + scott (and then terry) as well as wanjeri’s three sons; a twenty-sided die with hellfire written below it in the sleeve, along with a tiny stylized cheerleader with her back to the viewer; a traditional lighter with steve’s initials in it that he had drunkenly added to his sleeve back in ‘95; and —

and then (spoiler alert) in 2012, eddie gets a tattoo of a baseball bat with nails on the length of his left ring finger + steve gets a guitar in the same place

#asks or whatever #stranger things #most remarkable thing

[wumblr]

let's have a hard talk. these insufferable takes on AI are not advancing the discussion. the discussion was miles beyond this "takes work from artist" "consumer boycott must be the answer" dead on arrival poor substitute for an analysis, years ago, when timnit gebru got fired from google, for making what is now, because of her, the trivially obvious observation that large datasets may be too large to manually analyse for bias.

like congratulations. you have hit upon the point of capek's RUR, origin of the word robot, from a hundred years ago. were you going to take another point from back before the dust bowl or was that it? it's not just automation that takes surplus value from labor, it's any increase in efficiency. this is the first textbook feature of the economic model we're living under. luddites genuinely had more sense for nuance when the loom threatened to extract value from their labor at a pace never before seen. this is not that. luddites were producing textiles that people actually bought. you aren't.

aside from that, the implication that this is on par with like, a museum heist, or art forgery (both of which are, by the way, through a lens that includes class analysis, badass) is laughable. you are not selected for exhibition by making posts online, you are participating in a social medium where your continued pageviews are the source of advertising revenue. you are not bourgeoise, you are proletarian. your deviantart was search engine optimized to the point that it was trivial to pull five billion carbon copies of you off google images with like a two-line API call. you are not unique, you are one drop in a lost generation's renaissance. maybe if you don't want your work "stolen" you shouldn't be posting an endlessly reproducible digital copy to the world wide web? it's been seven years since twitter killed vine for trying to set the precedent that collective action can produce wage, can we bring back that level of foresight yet? or are you happy settling for tiktok because they deign to curate a ""creators fund"" for white heterosexuals? go buy a lottery ticket

i've said it before but this is a structured argument, presented to you with two neatly-collimated "sides," one that says every possible piece of data should be available for free for capitalist class to build automation out of it, and one that says pirating endlessly reproducible goods belonging the capitalist class should have harsher punishment. this is intentional, not unique, not new. it's the perverse dialectic of capital. you can only argue a side that benefits it.

the absence of nuanced intersectional perspective here is embarrassing. beyond that it's painfully obvious people are taking it personally, as if you had any chance to make rent as an artist, regardless of what procedural generation or neural networks might do. it's a selfish, blindly individualistic, mass manufactured wholesale bargain basement opinion, one that does not serve to advance any collective good, because it's based in the pipe dream of suddenly jumping three tax brackets to become bourgeoise. beyond that, doesn't it cheapen your art to only ever make saleable products? beyond that, it's painfully obvious none of you have ever tried using a neural network. from computer science or statistical perspectives, these constructs are novel and fascinating (or, the advent of cheap processing power sufficient to allow decades-old theory to flourish, which let's be honest, this power relies on an exploitative global network of rare mineral resource extraction and high precision manufacturing, which is yet one more topic i haven't once seen broached in the months this stultifyingly dull conversation has been ongoing.)

blaming a novelty for the ills of capitalism is nonsense, and it's not why luddites opposed the loom.

and let me just tell you, working with a code construct also does not improve your chances as an artist, which is the main point i wish i could get across. aside from the absence of intersectionality there's also an absence of class analysis, in which context it's, again, painfully obvious that no capitalist has ever cared one whit about art. even when they deign to take on a patronage it's as a backhanded PR stunt, like the unpaid notre dame roof pledges, to offset the ill repute they've accrued from extracting value for personal gain, while contributing nothing except the directive power their birthright of wealth gave them. this is the main critique i had about age of surveillance capitalism -- zuboff seems to think a return to ford-era capitalism, where the rich bothered to endow museums (to curate what they exclude) or pay a livable wage (in order to recapture it as sales), would solve the fundamental problem of value extraction from labor and natural resources for the barefaced sake of the profit motive. unremarkable and unsurprising for tenured faculty of harvard, how else would she sell books? but for some foolhardy reason i expected better from my peers.

your aspirations of small business aren't going to flourish if you suddenly got everything you claim to want and they banned every code construct from competing with you. you are not in competition with capital. you are nothing to it, it will kill you in total indifference without blinking, surely you ought to know this by now, it will bus in scab slave labor from prison to ramp up production despite a boycott in solidarity with a strike, and it's going to remain this way as long as capital survives. whether or not an algorithm or a network or an artifice is involved is irrelevant to the fundamental problem that it's a winner-takes-all game that ended before you were born. unless and until you want to start challenging the police that uphold the state or the insurance trust that pays to replace its points of failure, you're doing surface level armchair analysis on a problem that only the extremely online care about. arguing over what color of icing is on the cake you're never going to be eating while you starve for lack of bread.

and like... i get it. after the pandemic that we're still going through, you want to refocus on the things that really make you happy. but i've got to say, refocusing on art until you starve because you didn't manage to figure out self-sufficience during a recession is a sad way to die. perhaps you should consider the necessity of survival as a precursor to contentment. and to be clear i am saying this specifically because i care whether you survive and because i am interested in the artworks you are making or in your future potential. but you can't focus on that to the exclusion of all else, dog eat dog world and that means every day i have to see someone get ate. now for the last time, for god's sake can you stop yelling "this is because of code constructs" every time a dog eats your purported art commission revenue because it's really hurting MY purported small business revenue, selling products of code constructs,

#this has been in my drafts for THREE WEEKS but i finally saw one too many insufferable takes

[lovelanguageisolate]

Everything Everywhere All At Once succeeds in all kinds of ways no film has any right to. [Light spoilers hereon!] It’s a Hollywood blockbuster science fiction action adventure family dramadey about a multi-generational Chinese American family. Its lineage seems to somehow contain The Matrix, Watchmen, Neon Genesis Evangelion, The Fifth Element, Lucy, Brazil, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and the entire corpus of Philip K. Dick derivati that Hollywood pumped out after Blade Runner., especially Total Recall (based on ”We Can Remember it For you Wholesale”). In other words, it should be the remnants of a half dozen stone cold classics (and a few very trashy bits of nonsensical fun) I’ve already seen, insulting the memory of its predecessors by doing nothing not already done better elsewhere. And yet its freshness thrilled me.

The Chinese American immigrant experience animates the movie’s drama. In fact, much of the emotional economy and storytelling approach of the film requires it to be about the Chinese American immigrant experience. And despite being in no sense Chinese nor an immigrant, I was along for every beat. EEAAO isn’t a pander piece for a specific demo; it uses the balancing act of family life—the specific and specifically Chinese American family life of the Wangs—to explore core, universal facets of the human condition.

Assigning cosmic significance to family dynamics in fiction, especially when it involves ordinary people who aren't clearly supernatural in some way, is a pretty tough formula to swing. But EEAAO works surprisingly well in this regard too. We discover very good reasons why the very fate of humanity pivots around the Wang family. The mother’s struggle to understand her real place in the cosmos and ultimately fight to reach her daughter really is what’s needed to save the day, even though, again, the Wangs are sort of Just A Normal Family, and the TV Tropes aficionado within me can't but be delighted at that.

And there are so many other things the movie does that should be impossible. It’s stiflingly, armrest-grippingly tense and effortlessly lighthearted. It’s saturated with toilet and bedroom humor and channels remarkable gravitas. It has parallel versions of people leading different lives making the same grand discoveries, aware of each other but not. It has sausage-fingered alternate reality people, middle-aged laundromat owners doing world-class kung fu because they stick office supplies up their noses, even though we’re never outright told how this all fits together, and it all makes sense.

And as I kept asking myself how EEAAO manages to do so many impossible things, I kept coming back to three core pillars of its success: (I) the economy of the characterization, (II) its core science fictional conceit, and (III) the way the movie operates according to a kind of psychoanalytic family pattern. [Heavier spoilers from hereon! Go watch the damn thing!] (I) The most reliable litmus test I've found for whether I will appreciate movies, especially as stories, is whether there is good economy of characterization. By this I mean that all the things that the characters say and do, and the spaces they're in, etc., should do developmental work as much as possible as often as possible. In some ways, this is even more important to me than whether the premise of the movie is terribly original or whether the world fits together tidily.

EEAAO is very good at this. The first twenty or so minutes of the movie are an incredibly stressful experience, maybe one of the most stressful I've had watching a movie about something (to that point) pretty mundane. And in so little dialogue, you learn so much about Evelyn Wang—because you see how tough, efficient and pushy she has to be to function in her day-to-day life. You see how she’s been driven to her worldview—which causes her to fall into the broken patterns she does with the people around her.

And this is really great because it's obvious that despite all the compromises, sacrifices, accommodations, and shoves she is constantly making or giving to those around her, the way they and she are left dissatisfied seems hopelessly overwhelming even to an outsider. As the viewer, you're sort of left thinking, "well, of course. How could it be otherwise?"

And from the way that Evelyn zips through the laundromat to the way she tries to meet her father and daughter in the middle on their values while leaving her father confused and her daughter feeling unseen and unrecognized, is just...maybe not totally original, but exceptionally well executed upon.

And the way Evelyn's husband, Waymond, is unmistakably passive in the beginning, and so incredibly resourceful but also deeply and powerfully kind in parts 2 and 3; the way the IRS lady is so detestable for the first half or so of the film but rises to the sympathy of the viewer by the end as yet another victim of the processes that are so far beyond the reach of any particular person; the way the daughter's pretty normal sense of listlessness and emotional confusion is given such galactically dark proportions—they all serve to develop Evelyn's character too.

Because you're seeing them as she experiences them. The film works to validate her experience as yours even while showing how necessarily parochial and limited that perspective can be. It's like really great modernist literature.

(II)

EEAAO is science fiction in the parallel universes tradition. Its core new idea is verse-jumping: the ability to draw on memories, skills, experiences from parallel universes where one made very different life choices.

There are so many ways a plot device like the verse-jumping could have fallen so hard on its face. But it never does. It's pretty difficult to impeach from within the logic of the film and its far-fetched premises. And it buys the film so incredibly much.

First of all, it's just such potent wish fulfillment, and it's the most original entrant in the category that I've seen in years. So so so many people fantasize about growing hobbies and flights of fancy into a level of mastery that would command world renown and the ability to save the world.

But like, it's pretty hard for a movie to be truly kind to that kind of fantasy life. For one thing, we mostly all know that this probably isn't going to happen. Like, how could a dilettanteing hobbyist hope to compete with talented people who were groomed from early on to be world class at something—most of whom fail at it?

And even if you could, who's to say you'd actually be happy as eg. the best kung fu master in the world, especially given what you'd have to sacrifice and how many other flights of fancy you'd have to foreclose?

Yet the movie caters to exactly this want in a way that almost completely silences all of those pretty powerful doubts.

Evelyn’s half-baked hobbies are the thing that she uses to feed the unfocused bit of her soul that hasn't been completely cauterized off by her life and choices, and the price she pays indulging them constantly reinforces to her the need to be so disciplined in life. Yet it’s exactly these hobbies she needs to restore order the universe.

This next bit sounds like mystical nonsense, and maybe that’s because it is, but it’s also psychologically true: the parts of us that we want so badly to shut down but feed anyways out of some desire to be kind to ourselves, or at least not lose our minds, sometimes do turn out to be what we needed to turn to all along. And no experience in life lets us practice inner reconciliation more than those moments where the thing within that we want to crush ends up saving us.

Like The Matrix, EEAAO is an achievement at the level of implicit philosophizing through entertainment (and frankly, with both stories, the philosophizing going on unspoken in the background is generally more interesting than the philosophy that characters drop in dialogue).

(III)

This might be the weakest leg of my argument because it's about psychoanalysis, which I think largely consists of unfalsifiable pseudoexplanations that reveal more of their originators' psychological peculiarities than actual human universals, which has put me off of ever mastering psychoanalytical tradition. At the same time, psychoanalysis asks important questions we don't seem to have great veridical answers to, and many of those questions bear directly on how to tell good stories. This means the language I must use to talk about how EEAAO's story works is language that I not only consider suspect but lack confidence I fully understand, and it puts me in the tough position of not really believing my argument, not wanting to tacitly endorse the truth of the ideas I use, and having no other way to develop my point.

I think EEAAO is so easy to get into as a story because it's kind of psychologically true at the level of Jungian archetypes; Joseph Campbell perennial mythmaking; and even Jordan Peterson Maps of Meaning-style philosophizing about bringing order to chaos and venturing into the unknown.

But it also seems to be psychologically true in a more classically Freudian tradition as well.

Starting with Freud: the conflict between Evelyn and Joy, at least before it's dissolved through an act of love (wonderfully presented in the movie), is like the classic struggle between the Life Drive / Eros (Evelyn) and the Death Drive / Thanatos (Joy).

Through her life, Evelyn trying to bring organization/structure (Freud: the life drive; Peterson: order; Deleuze: being the tree; Nietzsche: master morality/the Apollonian) not just to her life but ultimately the universe. In all these regards, she is a fundamentally conservative force and is, despite her efforts, not fully integrated. But her conservatism is rooted in a desire to grow something beautiful and ward off the evils that chaos would bring into the thing she's building.

And it’s in this situation, of trying to shape her environment and those of the people around her, of trying to balance traditional values and liberal open-mindedness, that Evelyn drives Joy to feel not just unrecognized (in both the commonplace and Hegelian senses) but unrecognizable.

To hold herself together when all other facets of her identity turn in on each other, Joy turns to irony—asserting the nonexistence of values (Freud: the death drive; Peterson: venturing into Chaos; Delueze: being the rhizome; Nietzsche: slave morality, the Dionysian, revaluating of values).

On all of these levels, it makes sense that Evelyn is Joy's mom. Evelyn sort of starts the story as the Devouring/Tyrannical parent (thesis) and becomes The Hero fighting Joy’s Everything Bagel of disarray and nihilism (antithesis) and fixes things by finding a way of reaching and understanding her daughter, enabling her to retain her traditional role while bringing harmony and reconciliation (synthesis). And the key to this synthesis turns out to be the Wang family dad, Waymond.

When Evelyn is being destroyed by her daughter's Everything Bagel (nihilism), the thing that enables her to revive her thesis is the goofy, kind-hearted compassion of her husband—because by this part in the movie, she has remembered the strength and resourcefulness Waymond is capable of across many parallel worldlines, and she has seen that his kindness and embrace of life’s absurdities is a kind of symbolic superpower. That superpower is ultimately what Evelyn needs not only to save herself but to rescue her daughter from evil, which even (Alpha Universe) Waymond and Grandpa thought was a lost cause.

Dad ends up being what's needed to construct the synthesis, even though Evelyn is ultimately the one doing the synthesizing. And Evelyn falls back in love with him for it. That hopelessly romantic part of her that foolishly chose Waymond as a husband all those years ago turned out to know an important truth: he brought something to the table that would let her rescue her child and those around her and, in Lacanian terms, do the impossible and construct l’objet petit a by the movie’s end. It's really nice. 🙂 (Conclusion) it must be the dream of every director to use AAA blockbuster firepower to tell an amazing new story, and it's so rare to pull off.

So many commercial factors work against bringing the kind of artistic integrity needed to even attempt this to large-scale filmmaking. Perhaps greatest among them, we have the following paradox: to make a great modern myth, you need to take storytelling risks that just usually don't pay off super well. The balancing act involved is a kind of illegible art that even the most effective filmmakers cannot reliably stick, and certainly not where box office performance is concerned. Better, Hollywood has concluded, to just make an entire movie out of Save the Cat! patterns, reverse engineer the broadest possible shared memeplex of the (usually predominantly white) consumer demography you’re trying to reach, and test every plot point in focus screenings.

If EEAAO has been through this wringer, it somehow survived it with artistic integrity intact. While it’s obviously the product of commercial forces, those forces were managed by people who knew what things they wanted to do differently and managed to do them.

And so I surmise that the Hollywood producers and execs who abound in internet legend for the incredible movies that were never made and we will never see thanks to their smoldering hatred of all good and noble were, this time, all of them deceived, for EEAAO is the long-prophesied wonderfully crafted flashy movie forged implausibly in the Hollywood crucible. You obviously should go watch it.

#eeaao #eeaao spoilers #film #film review #long post

[burningthegallows]

ok so I accidentally deleted that one lltg history post I wrote. I genuinely can’t be assed to recreate it because screenshots and evidence and …

anyway. one of the first things that grabbed my attention in lltg were the beautiful sets and costumes — they’re all so well put together. right down to shanjian’s feathered fan.

that led me to a question: western han (202 BCE - 9 CE) or eastern Han (25-220 CE)??

what I found was that lltg uses a mix of both to make it too ambiguous to place. it’s a fun way to do a period piece I think, cause all the history nerds get to go on scavenger hunts, you can play with historical paragons, and there are so many tropes.

Despite one story being lifted pretty much directly from the eastern Han (emperor guangwu, his 1st and 2nd empresses, and his heaps of children), most of it seems to be more western Han.

{as an aside, it bums me out that they took all these details from these three real people, and the one thing they changed was ex-empress’s end. In history she and her son just go on about their lives as consort and prince, and then they’re given a new province to rule over.}

the imperial city in the show is luoyang (true to eastern han; in han 1.0 western han, it was in xi’an), but I think it’s a bit more thrown together than that. And in fact, I think wendi is actually the Emperor Wen of Han.

And I think that because of the 1) emphasis on thriftiness, 2) the fact that Wen of Han was the one to end the policy of wholesale clan slaughter for particularly egregious crimes (does actually make css kneeling in the rain hit different) and 3) other reasons.

The most interesting of which i think is the 7-states rebellion, a rebellion shut down by Zhou Yafu (paragon of military virtue, known for his integrity), who’s father, Zhou Bo, is a Huo Chong-esque archetype.

(In my original post I had an argument about the xiongnu too, but I can’t remember it now. probably something about the length of the war)

The struggle that takes place 15 years before the series could be the pseudo-coup of Dowager Lü (Empress Gao of Han), or it could be the chu-han contention (ending with first han emperor). Honestly though, then beginning of the eastern han does make sense here. wendi tells 3rd princess (I think) that the dynasty is barely ten years old.

(The period between western and eastern han is short and dominated by warlords)

So the world is more familiar to the western han (2nd-1st century BCE) but it def a hodge-podge — which makes it into a fun (for history nerds) scavenger hunt. Spot the trope: history edition!

#I’m still irritated by empress’s death fullstop #love like the galaxy #history ramblings #what did she die of anyway #if she’s depressed put her in the sun #or get her a puppy

[galateagalvanized]

chel those prompts... they are SO GOOD. was very hard to pick, but what about 9? or if that one's a repeat, 19?

Ah, Byte, thank you so much for the prompt!! This one got away from me a bit, but I hope you enjoy it <3 (And welcome to my Stewjon!)

For prompt #19: A spear as a walking stick

So the saying goes

"You know, all this reminds me of an old Stewjoni saying," Obi-Wan says, leaning against their balcony and gazing at the sprawling gardens below. 

"Oh?" 

Cody looks over, curious. Obi-Wan never speaks much of his home planet or its culture; he'd assumed, perhaps foolishly, that Obi-Wan had adopted Coruscant as his home wholesale.

Obi-Wan’s eyes are unreadable when he glances towards Cody. “Yes. It goes: a smart man fears the hidden knife, but a wise man fears the dull one."

Beneath them, the roiling sea of ivy-like plants lies lazy and untamed in the blue-white light of Stewjon’s supergiant of a sun. The garden and the structure that overlooks it have been kept at the barest minimum threshold of livable through the sporadic maintenance of the nomadic trains that, once or twice a solar cycle, eventually make their way here. Cody runs a thumb over the brittle pink sandstone of the stone railing and feels a few pieces brush away as he tries to understand what Obi-Wan is saying. His training had been in information and not metaphor. The war’s problems had been more logistical than literary.

Cody leans over and knocks his shoulder into Obi-Wan’s and attempts to respond in kind. "A dull knife’s not so bad so long as you’re not the one wielding it.”

“Indeed,” Obi-Wan says, as frustratingly non-committal as he was before, and when Cody squints at him for more information, he shakes his head. The gold medallion around his neck swings with the motion and glints strangely in the blue sunlight. Cody has wanted to pick it apart earlier, to hunt for how any voice recording device could survive the sun's erratic emag, but Obi-Wan had waved it off. Cody stares at it, bites back the same urge, and swallows his questions as he runs the words back over in his mind. 

‘A dull knife?’ As much as he hates the Stewjoni tendency towards metaphor and idiom, he has to admit that it’s an effective protection against ever being caught in a lie. How can you find a lie in someone’s words when you can’t even find their meaning?

Wait. “Do you think other Speaker believes he’s doing the right thing? That he’s just—incompetent?"

“I think it’s something we should consider,” Obi-Wan says as a door opens behind them. They turn, as in-sync now as they ever were on the battlefield, and they face the messenger who steps into their rooms as a united front.

“We’re ready for you, Speaker Kenobi,” the man says, and Cody and Obi-Wan step forward together.

—

It’s only the third day of debate, but Cody feels as though they're in the middle of a three-month siege. The air is filled with that same mix of tension, dread, and monotony, although there’s considerably more food.

Stars, he even can’t lean towards Obi-Wan for an explanation like he did that night at the Corellian opera, where the opera house had banned translation devices out of some archaic belief in the inherent beauty of the incomprehensible. Then, Obi-Wan had whispered explanations beneath his breath into the close space between their cramped mezzanine seats, his voice smooth and clever and, honestly, more interesting than the drama playing out a sixty feet away.

Now, Obi-Wan’s the one on stage. And he isn’t alone.

“And why should we continue to pay the Republic’s fees? When Republic protection was the only thing that threatened us?” 

Speaker Catiline’s voice echoes through the open-air auditorium with a gravity and weight that Cody almost envies. It’s a commander’s voice, deep and authoritative, and on the field, it would brook no argument. 

Across the raised platform from him, Obi-Wan brooks an argument.

“Alleged threat,” Obi-Wan corrects, but Catiline shakes his head.

“It is true that a Republic ship entered our airspace and crashed to our surface,” he says. “A ship can be defined as a Republic protection. And regardless of how it got there, that protection killed six men.”

Cody bristles, his back teeth grinding. By that reasoning, the Separatists could have loaded Republic starships into cannons and launched them at the Speaker caravans—and Catiline could still claim the danger came from the Republic.

But he is still, technically, corect. 

“We didn’t need a crashed Republic ship on our roads. We didn’t even need working Republic ships in our skies,” Catiline continues. “The Separatists could not have taken this planet any more than the Republic could not defend it.”

Cody tucks another protest behind his teeth. Unlike on Coruscant, Stewjon’s courts do not forbid speculation. He keeps a careful eye on Obi-Wan’s hands. Other than the Speaker Medallion, he hasn’t changed any part of his wardrobe. His hands flash from beneath the long bells of his sleeves, and Cody calms to see them warm and steady and Obi-Wan speaks.

“Regardless of the planet’s natural protections, you still benefit from protected Republic trade routes,” Obi-Wan says. “And if we are in the business of speculation, Speaker, I might note that the next martial threat to the galaxy may not take the form of an army formed entirely of robots.” He gestures to the murmuring crowd filling the concentric lines of sandstone benches. “Organic armies, as you may remember, have no trouble surviving here.”

“No need to question whether I remember the histories, Kenobi. But it has been two decades since you learned them, has it not? Perhaps we should hold a Telling and see whose memory is sharper.”

Cody leans forward, curious. He’d known that Obi-Wan’s impeccable memory for stories and language stemmed from Stewjoni practices; he hadn’t realized there were competitions for it, though. He wonders—

“My memory is sharp enough to remember what we are debating, Speaker, and I don’t think it was the histories,” Obi-Wan says, and titters of laughter crop up in the crowd like weeds through duracrete. 

“Mm,” Catiline concedes with a nod of his head more gracious than Cody had thought him capable of. “Perhaps. But your armies never studied here, Kenobi. No army has. No modern army could wage war without their droids and datapads, their terminals and their communication arrays. They would be helpless without all of their technological methods of thinking and remembering. So why should we worry?”

It’s the first time Cody’s heard a Stewjoni native acknowledge the disparity between the galaxy’s technology and their own—or, more accurately, their lack of it. The massive blue-tinged sun hangs high in their pale atmosphere, apparently unremarkable beyond its size and color, but Cody knows better. He wonders what the flares look like from the planet’s surface; he wonders if, given enough time, the flares could become predictable. From the corner of his eye, he thinks it gets a smidge brighter, and he wishes he’d checked the shielding on their dropship a fourth time as he turns his attention back to the stage.

“The modern army of today, perhaps not. But the modern army of tomorrow? Of ten, twenty years from today? I don’t think we can rule it out,” Obi-Wan argues. “The cost of that future security is a simple agreement to remain within the Republic. It seems a small cost to me.”

Catiline laughs. Even his laugh is arresting: deep and resonant. “A small cost? Careful, Kenobi. That statement’s up for review on the Medallion, now. How could the cost be small? When it would invite thousands of your clones to make their residence here?”

Cody sits up, senses sharpening, and he sees Obi-Wan mirror the action in lock-step  from twenty feet away.

“If you have a problem with clones—”

“Not with clones,” Catiline interrupts, and an angry murmur at the faux pas stills as he continues. “With men who were bred and born to combat. They can have no other story in their hearts but violence. You can use a spear as a walking stick, Master Kenobi, but that does not change its nature. He is dangerous. They all are."

Even from this distance, Cody can see Obi-Wan bristle. The line of his shoulders could be used to level a foundation, and his eyes flash an electric blue in the strange sunlight. Cody has rarely seen him so angry.

"And a hammer can build as well as break," Obi-Wan snaps. "Do not forget that some people in this galaxy have managed to acquire more than one use, Speaker."

An excited murmur rolls through the crowd, accented by a few soft claps, and a bell sounds for both order and a break in the proceedings. Obi-Wan and Catiline bow to each other, to the crowd, and to each other again before stepping off opposite ends of the stage. Cody makes his way down the amphitheater steps, and he doesn’t think he’s imagining the relief in Obi-Wan’s small smile when he looks up.

“Cody,” Obi-Wan says, as exhausted as he ever lets himself sound, and Cody resists the urge to put a hand in the small of his back to keep him upright. “They’re calling for an hour recess. Would you mind terribly taking lunch in our rooms?”

“I’ll grab it for us now,” Cody says. “You go on up.”

He gives into the urge to rest his fingertips in the shadow between Obi-Wan’s shoulder blades as he walks towards the food, pushing lightly as he goes.

—

Their rooms are light, airy, and in a state of managed-disrepair exactly the same as the outer balcony. The sheets are fresh, though, and the pallet is clean of bugs even if it is on the floor, so Cody can’t complain. Obi-Wan is sitting cross-legged on the bed closest to the window when Cody elbows his way through the curtain that separates their rooms from the rest of the hall.

“Hey,” he says softly, careful not to spill food or drink as he makes his way over. Obi-Wan must already know that he’s here, but some meditation states are harder to cleanly withdraw from than others. He wants to give Obi-Wan as much space as he can. “You ok?”

“Perfectly fine.” 

Cody wonders if that particular lie will be caught by the council reviewing the Medallion records. If the Jedi Council never caught on, though, he doesn’t have high hopes for Stewjon’s.

Obi-Wan opens his eyes slowly, then shakes his head when he sees the monochrome assortment of square flatbreads, jerky, and small red berries on the plates. “Ah. I’d forgotten how much I didn’t miss the food here.”

Cody grins and tears into a piece of bread. 

“I don’t mind,” he says. “I’m still getting used to food that hasn’t been cranked out of a nutritional vat and baked into a square. It’s nice to get back to my former definition of a square meal.”

Obi-Wan’s answering laugh bounces from the sandstone walls towards the open window and its waving, gauzy curtains. They eat in silence for a few long minutes, both of them still accustomed to the battlefield routine of inhaling as much food as possible before the next alarm or crisis sounds. 

When they’ve both finished, Obi-Wan sits back, and Cody meets his eyes with as much steady calm as he can muster. Obi-Wan draws on the air of Jedi sage as surely and obviously as Cody straps on his plastoid armor.

“Cody… I must apologize for my words earlier,” Obi-Wan says, holding Cody’s gaze. “I hope you don't mind my equating any of you to tools. Relating any of you to objects is to make a shoddy metaphor. All of you are far more than—than your ability to serve a purpose.”

Ah. Ah. Cody is the one who has to struggle not to look away, now. It’s something that Obi-Wan has told him before, but he has never understood it. As much as he wants to believe Obi-Wan, he understands Catiline’s viewpoint more than Obi-Wan’s. The war is over; the clones are struggling to find their place in peacetime. They, all of them, are desperately looking for a purpose to serve. 

Cody is grateful beyond words that his own purpose survived the war.

“It’s fine,” Cody says. He remembers Obi-Wan’s earlier warning about Catiline’s motives, and he wonders, for a brief second, if Catiline really would be doing the right thing by keeping the clones off Stewjon. The clones were at least half the war, and the war never came here. Maybe it’d be best if it never did.

As if he catches the tail end of that thought, Obi-Wan shakes his head. The kindness in Obi-Wan’s eyes, as clear and impenetrable as well water, drives Cody to glance down at the food between them. He won’t argue, he thinks. It isn’t an argument worth winning.

But Obi-Wan’s warm, scarred hands reach for his, and Cody looks up again.

“You know what the Medallion means,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody nods. It’s one more thing he knows but doesn’t understand. “You know I’m not lying. So then, believe me—Cody, you must believe me—that you have far more than violence in your soul. You can be a spear and a walking stick and a hammer, and even if you were none of those things, I would still want you with me. I would want you with me even if you served no other purpose than being in my life.”

The words slide, hot and too heavy, into Cody’s throat and stick there. He can’t swallow past them; he can’t swallow them. The Medallion gleams green-gold in the sun. They are, in a word, unmaking. Impossible to believe, and impossible to refute. 

Catiline’s words ring in Cody’s head, pounding to the rhythm of a new headache. He’d said his piece while wearing a Speaker Medallion too.

Obi-Wan squeezes Cody’s hands. “Okay?”

And Cody marshals himself as he once marshaled armies, and he tucks the wildfire inferno of his emotions and protests back behind the safe haven of his ribcage. He isn’t a Speaker, he thinks. He has no Medallion. No one’s listening for his lies.

“Okay,” he says, and the noon bell tolls.

------

Thank you again for the prompt; I hope you enjoyed it!

#codywan #prompt fills #bytebun #tcw fic #commander cody #obi wan #am writing #my fic #i have plans for Stewjon and Catyline that would take about 25k to write #and i'm THINKING about it!! i'm thinking about it! #so who knows hahaha #maybe i'll write more #explain what i'm talking about in this strange new world #;) wink wonk #until then everyone look up luminous blue variable stars!! #how NEAT #cheers! #my works

[mariacallous]

Keir Starmer has released an op-ed today for the Telegraph in which, in half a line he praises Margaret Thatcher (he also praises Blair and Attlee in the same paragraph) for changing the paradigm in which the UK operated.

Obviously, some have been up in arms about this ‘betrayal of the left’. But as they say the same every time Starmer so much as sneezes, their indignation has long since been drowned out by our indifference.

Twitter (No I don’t call it X and neither does anyone else) might be a bit skittish about it but most people who read the piece will see exactly what is happening here.

Essentially, to win elections - now bear with me here - you have to get more people to vote for you than for the other lot.

Sometimes that means fishing in the other guy’s pool. A Tory to Labour switcher counts double basically as it reduces their tally while increasing yours. It’s why well-meaning attempts to win over thrid party voters are usually naive in political strategy terms (With the exception of Scotland and Wales).

The front page of the Telegraph is a great way to find those voters. If you read the article, it sets out a narrative of Tory failures that is as deep as it is comprehensive. It could easily win over some wavering traditional Tories who are long past fed up. It could convince a few more to stay at home and sit on their hands safe in the knowledge that Starmer doesn’t scare them.

But to get that onto the front page? That’s where the Thatcher praise comes in. Starmer’s team will have known that in order to lift this from the swirl of political pieces it is not enough simply to write for the Telegraph, they had to put something eye-catching in there that would get people talking. And would give certain readers permission to be open to Starmer’s argument.

That it would also piss off the left might be seen as a bonus by some in Starmer’s team. That’s a shame I think as - frankly - they need to move on from that phase of Starmer’s three-point plan. But I am never going to win that battle sadly. Every LOTO ever will act factionally and interfere where they shouldn’t. That Starmer’s lot are more successful at it than most does not mean that others didn’t try.

So on those grounds, I have no real problem with Stamer invoking Thatcher.

Nor do I have a problem with him saying that he would like to make changes to the country that are on the scale of those that Thatcher made. We need wholesale change - not least to make up for the changes that she wrought and the long-term damage that still echoes today in our lack of housing - particularly social housing; in our filthy rivers and beaches which can be taken back in a straight line to privatisation of water; and in the austerity brought in by her acolytes as a response to an overmighty city that was started with her ‘big bang’ reforms.

Where I think Starmer has a problem is that this is not an article about having a vision as big as Thatcher’s on economic remodelling or Attlee’s on building the welfare state. In fact, the rest of the article is all about Tory failure and Labour Party reinvention. There is not nearly enough forward vision to claim to be a new Thatcher-level figure.

A while back I wrote the generous and ungenerous cases for Starmer’s approach. This is an extract from the generous part. You will see that I too invoke both Thatcher and Attlee:

I return to this because I think in that piece I did make quite a good fist of setting out how Starmer can be a reforming Prime Minister in a time where high spending won’t be possible. But, here’s the thing. I’m a blogger. I am just an observer of politics. I don’t work for Starmer’s office. So why am I better linking that sense of being as reforming as Attlee or Thatcher to a sense of the future a Labour government could potentially offer than they are?

Sure, maybe I do have the shackles off. I don’t have to get anything past Pat McFadden. But nothing I wrote in that piece was about increasing spending. Instead, it’s about changing the machinery of Britain that we know to be broken.

At the start of the year, I offered Labour a simple slogan I still think they should take up as we go into a General Election year: Let’s Fix Britain. They don’t have to use that particular phrase (although my consultancy rates are VERY REASONABLE and I will explain to them exactly why they should) but they do need to give a sense of that renewal. That means not just talking about how bad the Tories have been or how much they have changed Labour but what the country will look like after five years under Starmer.

Why? Labour will almost certainly win the next election. But honestly, they don’t want to win by default. They need to make and keep promises that really will change this country. We need it.

If they don’t - the scariest thing of all is not that Starmer is invoking Thatcher - it’s that there isn’t a positive reason to vote Labour beyond “Not the Tories”. However mad the Tories are now, when they get their act together, Labour must have something to say for themselves.

[legionofpotatoes]

Speaking of influence on your style in the last post, care to talk about that a little more (or if you have before do you make remember where)? :) Who and what influenced you on your artistic journey, what helped lead the way to develop your style that we love very much and the artwork you create? I'm always glad to see artists and artworks I haven't known before and I'd love to hear about who is/was important to you.

That's sweet of you to ask. I've talked about this, yes, and I feel like I give different answers each time :D been making digital art for over a decade now, and professionally illustrating for at least three. Obsessed over loads of artists both alive and dead in that time, so for the sake of keeping it brief I'll mention contemporaries that I think are my biggest current inspirations? Some of these are illustrators, some are poster artists, all kick ass.

This is gonna turn into a follow-these-people list of recs; if you like alternative illustrated posters with striking color choices, check out Courtney Martin, Matt Ferguson, Tracie Ching, Rory Kurtz, and Olly Moss for obvious reasons. If you're curious to see the type of value grouping and creative compositions I chase after, they're the measuring stick.

If you're interested in what drives my passion for travel posters, see the work of Beverly Arce, Danielle Sylvan, Claire Hummel, or just the entire lineup of 59parks.net;

And for my personal illustration heroes check out Marie Bergeron, Natalie Dombois, Roma Gewska, Sam Hogg, Sibylline Meynet, or even folks who hang around here like @eleonorpiteira and @celialowenthal and @bunabi and @jdebbiel who I hope won't mind me putting them on blast. They're all so incredibly good at many-many different things that I selectively study and obsess over.

That last part is a good way to summarize my entire approach to contemporaries tbh; I live and breathe the joy of seeing these incredible artists put out banger after banger, but you won't see me wholesale ripping one of them off necessarily. It's more of a granular search for interesting bits and pieces I can deconstruct and assimilate. And that sort-of results into what's called my style? I guess?

Either way, go follow all these cool people please!

#painterofhorizons #asks

[artylo]

On Lecturing, Mansplaining, and The Way We Seek Information

What I find profoundly tiring about the senseless perversion of the conversational maxims nowadays is the seemingly insatiable urge for people to lecture others. Doubly so on the internet. I think this is somewhat of a new endeavour in everyone's repertoire, a honest to god brand new learned behaviour in the communal melting pot.

Of course, lecturing someone implies that there is some sense of superiority and of ego. One believes that the other could benefit with having something explained to them, so they do so with a sense of complete entitlement and with no consideration of one's receptiveness towards such an act. I see slighter examples of this online, like under interviews with rather oratorically gifted people like Orson Welles. Just here and there, someone will have isolated some pleasant and articulate phrase as one of the many comments. This in and of itself is not a bad thing - sententiae are after all fit for purpose. What is not to share? These individuals, however, cannot help themselves by just highlighting what they find pleasant to the ear, but the feel obligated to comment further on how "this is some advice a lot of young people can benefit from" or "this is a valuable lesson for everybody to learn right there". How observant. That these are words that the elusive "I" has deemed valuable - words that souls of perceived lesser taste ought to immediately apply. Of course, this seems innocent enough, but to me it speaks to a much larger shift in the way we perceive others and appreciate information.

Surely, if we are listening to or reading the same material, and we then come across the same sententia, which is evidently universally applicable to all facets of the human condition, something that everyone should and ought know, then why surmise that everyone else has somehow missed it. Why belittle the intelligence of your fellow man by acting as if your own intellectual facets are somehow better attuned to what is considered tasteful or profound. If the sententia is truly what you say it is, then shouldn't it be evident to the recipient without further elaboration on why this particular fragment is of vital importance for our species.

There is a whole industry of people who have essentially created a career putting together listicles of advice or quotes from famous people. Just the other day I came across a video, which was roughly about ten or so minutes, which essentially revolved around listing three sentences that were supposedly uttered by Ernest Hemingway, as advice to aspiring writers. This was of course padded for length and supported by several metric tons of visuals and calls to action, which as you might imagine could be a wholly different and lengthy topic of discussion. Yet, surely if I were to seek wisdom from the greats, then I would seek it out myself. That I would find meaning in their work or conversations they had had with their peers, rather than some montage bereft of all context.

The film critique industry has essentially morphed from mostly critique, analysis, and conspicuous marketing, into a factory for ready-made opinion pieces, which viewers eat up wholesale and regurgitate instead of indulging whatever thoughts they might have on the particular film. Dozens upon dozens of "Ending Explained" videos and articles, where people are given objective answers to subjective questions. Works to which many flock to immediately upon the credits rolling, just so there isn't any shred of ambiguity left. Not immediately knowing or being confused causes people to feel excluded from the group - excluded from people that can somehow explain - people who are perhaps confident enough to state their opinion at all, regardless of the consequences, in a way that to the rest of society looks like expertise and some higher sense of wisdom.

We're essentially begging each other to remove all doubt. To blindly trust in the loudest voices of our generation. Not doing so might open one up to being wrong or to being misinformed. In the court of public opinion, those are seen as grievous acts. How dare you not be aware that this is the case! Aren't you a fool!

This makes people afraid to share their thoughts and encourages a capriciously Orwellian exercise in doublethink. The environment which allowed for there to be the public's opinion and the private opinion is slowly being eroded. Conversing on a topic might seem fruitless when there is a video on the topic, which can be shared instead. The material doesn't contain the point - it is the point.

There is not innate reward in being able to synthesise your own thoughts any more. It's much easier to be indifferent after all. It's much easier to plead media illiteracy than it is to open oneself to ridicule. Expressing positivity or negativity towards a work might alienate you from the diametrically opposed group after all. Taste is prescribed, not cultivated.

Recently, I've been coming across a lot of media that mentions mansplaining - the act of a man explaining something, typically to a woman, in a manner seen as patronizing. I feel that that too is a symptom, or at least a more common example of what I'm seeing. In a sense, we want to perceive others' passions and interests as fundamentally their own and as non-transferable. There is no way of opening someone's eyes to something your hold dear without shoving it down their throat or presenting it as the rule of thumb. It creates this inane sense that the people around you are somehow less intelligent and less receptive to things, which you consider to be, of finer taste. That in and of itself motivates people to lecture and to present themselves as holier than thou. To present the information in a way that is mimetically palatable. If a lot of people believe something, then it must be correct. And if it is correct then it must be what people believe.

This kind of reasoning is indeed very democratic, but is liable to a vocal minority controlling the narrative and essentially prescribing what the majority opinion of a work will be. Worryingly so, this isn't even entirely isolated to fiction. News and information has become too plentiful and too difficult to sift through, so we flock to simple, pre-chewed, and condensed information, where some supposedly learned figure has handily decided what is important and what isn't for us. Being informed is becoming an exercise of trust in others, rather than a search for an objective truth.

Needless to say, what I am advocating for is for you to exercise self-restraint when it comes to satisfying your lust for information or the need to elucidate it in others. Form views of your own, before comparing them to those representing the zeitgeist. Do not seek to eradicate the views of others, so that you might substitute them with your own. Seek understanding in what you perceive as wrong. Question everything, including yourself, the views of those closest to you, and the views of those you deem wisest and most eloquent. Post-modernism is an exercise in individuality, and as we slowly move into an era of post-irony I feel it is going to become ever so important, if not more. In a very meta-modernist way, you might even choose to ignore my assumptions, which would also be valid. Are we there yet? You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.

#conversational maxims #linguistics #sociology #philosophy #critical thinking #mansplaining #ending explained #creative nonfiction #essay #human behaviour #random observations #orwellian #post irony #metamodernism

[queenofbaws]

Climbing Chrash, “You have some weird New Years Eve/Day traditions”

“Boy oh boy, am I glad none of us went to school for psychology,” Chris said as he watched Josh and Ashley both furiously tear page after page out of their notebooks, each one getting an individualized tear-crumple-chuck experience, as though tossing the whole kit and kaboodle together just wasn’t insult enough. “We might have to sit down and unpack some of this if we had. Y’know. Done that.”

“I don’t seem to recall you questioning the wisdom of Ye Olde Burn Pit ten minutes ago, Cochise.” Josh paused for a second, his eye catching on something written on the page he’d only just torn out…and after getting past the first couple sentences, scowled like he’d gotten a big whiff of baking roadkill and shredded it to confetti. He tossed the handful of paper scraps into the bonfire with an Emeril Lagasse ‘Bam!’ then turned back to him. “All fun and games when it’s your shame, huh?”

It was hard to say when it had started, their strange little tradition, but the appeal of the New Year’s Day blaze was hard to deny: While everyone else was sleeping off the festivities of the night before, their resolutions already halfway abandoned by the time the hangover wore off, the three of them hunkered down in the Washington’s sprawling backyard and, well, did something a little more actionable than making themselves a million stupid promises to go to the gym more.

They roasted the old year like a stale old bag of marshmallows.

With a grunt of effort, Ashley dislodged the metal spiral from her notebook and set it aside. Unlike Josh, she didn’t give into the temptation of reading her old stuff, instead wadding each page up into a tight, miserable ball before throwing it into the flames. Already her palms were streaked with graphite. “Yeah, you couldn’t get rid of your old programming notes fast enough, could you?”

“That,” he said, raising his brightly colored energy drink can to his mouth, “was completely different.”

“Wow.”

“Okay.”

“It was! It absolutely was! I just wanted to pretend like the last couple semesters never happened – you two, on the other hand…” He lifted his other hand too late, one of Ashley’s paper balls bouncing off his forehead and falling to the ground. Chris pretended it’d been enough to knock him out, momentarily ragdolling in his chair before grabbing the ball from the dead, crunchy grass and quickly uncrumpling it. His time was short, he knew, so he read as quickly as he could: “‘Only once the moon hung in the air, a bright and mournful face behind the clouds, did she realize her mistake. To be alone? There, amid the danger pressing down around the estate? Why, it was – ’”

“Agh!” Ashley sprang up from her own seat, grabbing desperately at the piece of paper. “That’s not even funny!” she said, her arms stretching and fingers wiggling as Chris, clearly pleased with himself, leaned farther and farther back in his folding chair to keep it out of her grasp.

He grinned a big, cheesy grin up at her. “Then why are you laughing?”

“I’m not!”

“Think you are, Ash,” Josh teased, and neither of them had noticed him getting up at all, but suddenly he was behind Chris, snatching the paper before Ashley could get at it. “‘Why, it was madness,’” he continued in a true crime narrator’s drone, only the shape of his smirk giving the words any emphasis. “‘After everything she’d seen, everything that had befallen her companions, it was tantamount to offering herself as sacrifice to a vengeful and uncaring god.’ Holy cow, Agatha Christie, the melodrama though. I love – hey!”

But two could play at that game. Er…three. Three could play at that game.

Instead of settling for a single sheet, Ashley grabbed one of Josh’s notebooks wholesale, climbing up onto her chair as though that would prevent either of them from snatching it back out of her hands. She turned to a random page, then, without wasting a second, also began reading. “‘Exterior shot. Old house. Just super, super old. The oldest, most crusty house you’ve ever seen in your life. Ivy vines in the brick, cracks in the window, classic stuff, you know what I mean. The camera pushes into one of the windows, past a giant spiderweb full of gross cocoons, obviously, and into the darkness, where we can just barely see something moving. It’s a monster, and baby, it’s got a mouth full of teeth.’” Her eyebrows went up, but she didn’t have time to make any sort of judgment before Josh grabbed her around the middle.

“There’s a reason I’m burning it, Einstein!” Even though he was clearly struggling under her weight (and the ferocity of her wiggles), Josh let out a clipped laugh, waiting until he got Ashley back onto the ground before getting a hold of the notebook. “Out with the old…” he managed to yank it out of her grip and flung it, metal spiral and all, into the hungry fire. “…in with the new. And for your information? That monster? So many teeth. So many. Audiences just aren’t ready for that number of chompers in one mouth.”

“I do not get it,” Chris said again, and that time when he picked up the page of Ashley’s writing, he dutifully fed it into the fire. “You guys spend so much time being creative and junk! You put so much effort into it, and now you just…what? Sacrifice it to the writing gods? Makes zero sense to me.”

Instead of going back to his own pile of shame, Josh took a detour, circling around behind Chris’s chair and draping his arms around him from the back. Without any sort of pleasantry, he stole the energy drink from his hand and took a long gulp of his own, then gave it right back. “It really is a good thing none of us tried to be psych majors,” he joked, picking up where Chris had begun, “because if any of us had, this would probably be where they went on some kind of long, drawn-out monologue about the inherent shame of creating, and how much you start to hate your own crap when it doesn’t come out perfect the first time. Or maybe they’d say something about how taking the stuff that brings you that shame and destroying it so it can never come back to haunt you is the sort of catharsis that – ”

“Sure is a good thing none of us did try to be psych majors,” Ashley repeated loudly, catching Josh’s eye and sticking her tongue out when he raised an eyebrow. “Look, why did you get rid of all your old class notes and exams?”

Chris’s answer was immediate. “Uh, because I never, ever want to think about any of that stuff again. Ever, if possible.”

“Yeah, well.” She threw another few paper balls into the fire, looking more than a little like someone trying to set the world record for fastest snowball pitches. “Neither do I. I don’t want to think about any of this stuff ever again. I just need it gone. Out of my room, out of my brain, out of my life!” When her pile finally ended, and it was only crisped, brown grass that her fingers found beside her, she smiled and relaxed back into her chair. “And now I have more space in my brain for good stuff this year.”

“What she said,” Josh agreed. “Goodbye, shlock of yesteryear, hello award-winning masterpieces of this year. Hope you two are prepared, because this is the year you become little more than arm candy of the guy who wrote the most messed up horror movie of all time. Without ‘Aw Dang, Look At Those Teeth’ holding me back, it’s just a matter of time before Hollywood’s knocking my door down, looking to get a piece of this.”

Ashley zipped her jacket up a couple more inches, huddling down closer to Chris as a chilly breeze tore past them, making the fire dance. “Arm candy, huh?” she drawled.

“Like two wildly different sized Twix bars,” Chris laughed. “Or maybe Snickers. Since we’re, y’know.”

“Don’t.”

“Y’know…”

“Chris, please. Can we not start this year like – ”

He turned to Josh when it became abundantly clear Ashley didn’t appreciate his A-game. “A little nutty.”

“Not going the M&M route, huh? ‘Melts in your mouth, not in your hand?’”

Ashley also stole Chris’s drink, doing her best to hide her smile by taking a drink while Josh played along. “The whole point of this,” she reminded them once she’d finished, “is to get all the embarrassing crap behind us so we can start fresh for the year. I don’t know about you guys, but honestly, I think this sort of childish back and forth is holding us back.”

Chris and Josh exchanged a brief look, both still snickering (a pun which, if either had said aloud, most certainly would’ve been intended). “You, uh, you wanna throw us in the fire then, Ash?” Josh asked. “I mean, if we’re ruining your clean slate with our – ” As he bent over to toss a handful of loose-leaf into the bonfire, his beanie slid off and fell in as well, the flames consuming it with a soft ‘woosh’ of fabric igniting.

For a moment, the three of them simply watched as the hat caught – then really caught – and it wasn’t until the brief spike of flame lowered again that Chris cleared his throat.

“Oh thank God. That hat was really holding us back from starting the year off right.”

That did it. Once it was sparked for real, the laughter between them only grew and grew, leaving them to curl up contently against one another and in front of what was left of last year, the fire warm but their hearts warmer. And already, they couldn’t wait to do the same thing again next year.

#until dawn #climbing chrash #chris hartley #josh washington #ashley brown #queenie writes supermassive #new year prompts #taurealis #hehehehe hope you enjoy!!! ;D

[archfeyworkshop]

Let's start with worldbuilding rambling, shall we? Above is the world of Arturium, what is ultimately a five-year project that has gone through...three and a bit iterations and two editions of gaming. So let's summarise quickly:

When I started GMing for TTRPGs, I made the big mistake of making a whole world from scratch for three weeks and ended up absolutely in over my head. I was a worse storyteller and world designer, and I don't think I even have the original map, made in Hexographer, anymore. At the time it was so much simpler too - the pantheon was pulled wholesale from Eberron despite knowing nothing about it, I had more cities in some places and fewer in others. For the time it wasn't bad but...it wasn't a world exactly. More a caricature.

The next iteration made some big changes. I laid out much clearer overviews of each nation, and threw out a lot of the Eberron gods in favour of my own. I kept one or two that I appreciated, but the new pantheon still kept the dual-domain style of the old pantheon, and a couple of higher powers like Asmodeus and Mephistopheles remained even today. The Hells just don't feel the same without them. That was the first glam-up on the map too.

I had a drawing program, go figure. It looked better than the original but was essentially a redraw, and continued with the geographical issue of me not being very aware of how terrain formed. But it was mine. And was still...pretty empty. It was made during my first campaign which ended up running for three years, which ended up taking place over two continents and a lot of lore that was ultimately altered but not quite abandoned.

This most recent iteration and a bit has been the most substantial and worthwhile one. The pantheon got properly cleaned up with the last of the remnant gods being remade into entirely personalised ones, and resulted in the map above. Between iterations I had picked up bits and pieces about how terrain was loosely shaped, and that resulted in the remade mountain ranges and rivers. National borders became properly contained by natural terrain and we got some actual islands. It was the biggest change that took the world into feeling like proper terrain, breaking things up like landmasses that have drifted.

At this point all the nations got fuller updates on their individual cities with a paragraph for each, and a more complex interaction with the world around them. A topic for another post, perhaps. Keeping things at a macro level for now though...a number of species got reworked or renamed, or cut out entirely as I decided they weren't doing anything in the setting ecology. The Crayshaw Mountains got renamed to Agryphida, and then mysteriously disappeared from the earliest ages of the world...but that's its own story. Oh nine, there's the entire reworking of the timeline getting shorter and shorter too...welp, there's going to be a lot to talk about, much of it that will never make it into campaigns, so here's as good a place as any.

That's the final thing I'll talk about for this start post, I reckon. When I started my setting it was a D&D 5e setting. Now, thanks to my own system preferences, it's been adjusted to Pathfinder 1e. But I mean, with all the holes in 5e...that wasn't too difficult. It did force me to assign proper mechanical domains and alignments to the gods.

But I'm writing this quite late at night. A world has a lot of stuff you can do with it and plenty I want to talk about. Hell, there's plenty to do with a breakdown of each nation, the history I'm still writing, how the species interact. There's an entire dissertation I could write about how the northern nations on Almahd came out of one bit of art of a Lamia in a crop top...

So I'll leave you with that. The promise of much worldbuilding rambling and character design in the future. Probably tall and wide.

#worldbuilding #pathfinder1e #ttrpg #oc #fantasy #pathfinder #art #fantasy world #oh god I have so much lore to write #maybe this will convince me to get it done ffs

[braceletstea]

A little something for my fellow creators. Obviously this is primarily about friendship bracelets but still! You, the creative person reading this, YES you, you should charge more for what you make! I also need to charge more! Life under late stage capitalism is hell and until we achieve fully automated luxury gay space communism we need to make enough to live on!

Alt text under the break.

Eight slides, each light pink with leafy background designs and black text. The handle @/braceletstea appears on each slide.

Slide one:

How Much Should My Bracelets Cost?

Slide two:

Here are some factors to consider:

-Materials (Are you charging enough to cover the cost of supplies?)

-Time (Think about how long it takes you to find and purchase materials and design your piece, as well as how long it takes to make it.)

-Experience (If you've been making jewelry for 10 years you should charge more now than you did when you started!)

-Hidden expenses (Are you charging enough to cover shipping? Transaction costs?)

Slide three:

Some of this is hard to calculate! I don’t time myself when I’m knotting, and I don’t always remember to record how much my materials cost.

Different creators have different methods of calculating how much to charge for each piece. My method may not work for you, and that’s ok! You’re welcome to tweak it, copy it wholesale, or disregard it entirely.

Slide four:

I'll be using this design (my variation of 98916 on BraceletBook) for the upcoming examples! It has 14 strings and 8 colors.

Screenshot of a friendship bracelet pattern based on the new disability pride flag: solid diagonal stripes in pastel green, blue, white, yellow, and red, outlined in charcoal and with an alternating diagonal stripe in light gray.

Slide five:

Bracelets

For bracelets, I take the number of strings, multiply by two, add the number of colors, and round up to the next multiple of five.

Since we have 14 strands and 8 colors:

14*2=28

28+8=36

36 rounds up to 40

So I would normally charge about $40 for a bracelet in this pattern.

Slide 6:

Keychains

For keychains, the main difference is that I multiply the number of strings by 1.5 rather than by two.

Since we have 14 strands and 8 colors:

14*1.5=21

21+8=29

29 rounds up to 30

So I would normally charge about $30 for a keychain in this pattern.

Slide 7:

Bookmarks

For bookmarks, I multiply the number of strings by 1.5 and charge a $5 fee if my client wants a tassel.

Since we have 14 strands and 8 colors:

14*1.5=21

21+8+5=34

34 rounds up to 35

So I would normally charge about $35 for bookmark in this pattern.

Slide 8:

Final Remarks

Thanks for letting me share some of my knowledge with you! I hope you're able to put it to good use. Feel free to share this infographic, but be sure to credit me for creating it. If you would like to tip me for sharing my expertise, you can find my venmo under @robin-hood-199

#friendship bracelets #artists deserve better #I made this mostly for instagram #where one of the many pandemics is fiber artists grossly undercharging #and you gotta have pretty pictures if you want to get anywhere #but if you find it helpful please use it! #and know that I support you and whatever art you make and you deserve to make more money off it than you think you do #because art is a skill and art is work #robin's art

[literaticat]

On Edelweiss, there's a tab of wholesaler info that says how many cartons are on order or in the warehouse. Is this an early indicator of the planned print run of a book? (Number of cartons x number of books per carton= print run?)

Wow that's a DEEP CUT lmaooooo -- I had to very much hunt around to find that tab. (If you are on Edelweiss, and you pull up a title, and you look at NONE of the masses of info on that first page but rather press the little arrow-burst looking thing next to the title, a pop-up window comes up, and at the bottom of the list of links in that window, there's one that says "wholesaler info".) Is THAT what you are talking about?

If so, I do appreciate your sleuthing, but sadly for you, Nancy Drew, you've got the wrong end of the stick.

Wholesaler info has nothing to do with print run, and the number of books on order at a given warehouse has nothing to do with cartons. I've pulled up the wholesaler info for a book (which is not out yet) so you can see what I mean:

First of all: What is a wholesaler? Wholesalers/Distributors such as Ingram, Baker+Taylor, Bookazine, etc, are kinda "middlemen" -- they warehouse a ton of books (like, literal airplane-hangars full of millions of titles), and bookstores and other accounts can buy basically any in-print book through them.

However! Most bookstores get their initial front list orders (like, all the books they are getting for the upcoming season from, say, PRH or Harper or whatever) through the publisher, because the discounts are better than through the wholesaler. Additionally, most regular restocks of backlist from publishers go through the publisher for the same reason.

Ingram and other wholesalers are important for what you might call "mixed orders" -- the store has special orders to fulfill or just needs some random backup copies of books and wants, say, three copies of a Harper book and two copies of a Chronicle book and one copy of a PRH book, and they need them sooner rather than later. So instead of waiting until they have enough to fill a single publisher order, they'll do an order from Ingram (or another wholesaler) for those books, because Ingram stocks ALL of them in one place. The discount is a little less optimal, but the books will get their faster and without having to wait to fill a minimum order. (This is also how a tiny store or a gift shop who doesn't regularly order enough from individual publishers may get their books, or how a school or library will get orders of mixed books from many publishers, etc etc. Additionally, bookstores like Amazon who DO have warehouses still use Ingram to fulfill orders for books they don't have in stock and may not be able to get in a timely manner.)

So now you know what this even IS, I will tell you that this graphic shows how many books (BOOKS, not cartons of books) are on order at Ingram warehouses across the country. There are four main Ingram warehouses -- Chambersburg is east coast, Ft Wayne is midwest, Roseburg is West Coast. LaVerne TN is the main one, and covers the south and anything the other regional ones can't get to.

But Ingram -- though a very large distributor/wholesaler -- is NOT the ONLY distributor/wholesaler. How many books they have on hand or on order does NOT show you how many copies of the book the PUBLISHER has on hand in their warehouses, or how many copies any OTHER warehouse might have on hand or on order.

So... no, is the answer. (Unless you were actually looking at some other piece of info I couldn't see on Edelweiss that was NOT the "wholesaler info" tab!)

#wholesalers #book distribution #edelweiss