#architecture of the oblique

[remash]

dl1310 building ~ young & ayata + michan architecture | photos © as noted

#architecture #multi family #mexico #board formed #concrete #form #windows #box #oblique #inverted

[paulfc]

Yet more on flat folding and angled Kirigami

1 and 2 are the routine case where the horizontals (crease lines) are parallel to each other and result in a flat folding piece. In 1 the special case is that the centre point of the rectangle sits on the page crease and so the top and bottom bits show symmetry. In 2 the general case is that another crease is required placed horizontally such that AB=CD.

3 and 4 are the special and general cases where the creases that are horizontal in 1 and 2 are angled. In 3 the top and bottom are symmetrical about the mid-line crease. In four a crease line is constructed such that AB=CD and EF=GH, note that AE and DH need not be symmetrical.

Structures can be built across the oblique creases AE, BF, and DH but the verticals of these structure must be perpendicular to them, not the central crease, for flat folding.

If there were a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Copy Paper, they would really hate me since much has been sacrificed while trying to prove to myself that I understand these rules.

#kirigami architecture #oblique creases #kirigami

[mcmansionhell]

a fine selection of bonker facades from the DC suburbs

Howdy folks! In honor of Halloween, here are some of the scariest houses currently for sale in the ever-cursed suburbs of Washington, DC. It's been awhile since I checked in on this particular hotspot, and once more, it did not disappoint.

I'll just get this one out of the way. Long-time McMansion Hell-heads are well aware of this monster estate in Potomac, MD, once allegedly owned by a particular professional athlete who will not be named, because the house should suck on its own merit. The only nice thing I can say about this house is that the designers kept the materials and colors consistent, which adds some unity to what is, in reality, five turrets in a trench coat.

Some things, the economists tell us, are too big to fail. This is not one of them. Let's move on.

Many McMansions exist to mock the concept of architectural consistency and historical continuity. This is one of them. About every single type of expanded second-story window elaboration exists here: bay window, covered balcony, juliet balcony. None of them work. The house can't decide if its 19th century eclecticism or tony DC Georgian/Federal cocktail. The random cupola merely adds insult to injury.

I don't know where realtors learned how to do photoshop, but whoever taught them should have their Adobe licenses revoked. There's a certain type of McMansion I call a "hat house" - which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a house with multiple bays or masses and each has its own special hat. This is one of the most egregious examples because all of the hats are different shapes and scales. Not even the most Disney Theme Park pink sky and fairy lighting can mitigate the controlling aesthetic influence of hät.

No compilation of Bad Facades would be complete without at least one Frankentudor™. Rich people in America really like to harken back to the days of feudalism, yet uglier, more drab, and using materials mostly derived from petrochemicals. The lighting is not helping this house, which is about as gloomy, hulking, and bloated as they come.

I have some fondness for houses that derive new, inventive forms of being ugly. The spread eagle McMansion is one of them, two oblique wings with no real core. A corner lot specimen. This one is especially weird, with the quadruple portholes, the windowless bays, the mall foyer, and the hipped roof that's not quite clipped, complete with tacked on gables. Kind of neat, sad to say.

I know most of you won't agree, but I actually believe this is the worst McMansion of the set. The absolute banality of it, the out-of-proportion everything, the compound-like demeanor, the nonsensical spacing of the mind-numbingly identical windows. The most infuriating part is that whoever designed this had some kind of order, continuity, proportion in mind and just failed utterly at it, like Sideshow Bob stepping on all those rakes. I hate it!!!!

When rich people try to make overly-inflated temples to their dumb piles of money, it's deeply satisfying when they end up looking like this house, which is just a pile of roof and wall tacked on to the worst proportioned portico imaginable. Classic McMansion Hubris. Let us all laugh.

Now we're getting into the more eldritch horror part of the list. Some houses make me wonder if I have the same set of eyeballs and conceptions of what "a house" looks like as other people. This one is playing dress up games with foam stickers. It looks like Steve's shirt from Blues Clues. It abuses the prairie muntins, which is an insult to my chosen hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Bad house.

Not enough time is devoted on this blog to bad modernism, though it would be rather generous to call this house modern. It's more like postmodernism trying to remember what modernism looked like and tripping down a flight of stairs collecting random masses and windows on the way down. Houses like this give modern architecture a bad name. It's borderline libel. Also it looks like it was made out of cardboard.

This brings us to our final, and objectively worst house:

I don't even know what to say about this freak of architecture. I don't know how it came together or why. I don't know what it wants or even pretends to do. It is a horrorshow. Gables protruding from random places, stealth roof fragments, windows too small for the walls they're embedded in, a weird cathedral-like entrance, the mosquito-infested pond, the worst example of realtor sky I've ever seen, all of it is terrible. It's haunted. Trick or Treat, but without the treat.

Anyway, that does it for this installment. If you're curious about more McModern badness, this month's Patreon bonus post will be to your liking!

Happy Halloween and Día de Los Muertos!

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including extra posts and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar, because media work is especially recession-vulnerable.

#architecture #design #mcmansion #mcmansion hell #bad architecture #ugly houses #dc suburbs #90s architecture #2000s architecture #y2k #urbanism #virginia #maryland

[nobrashfestivity]

Massimo Scolari, Addio Melampo, project Oblique projection, 1975 Massimo Scolari used images to manipulate form without using Renaissance or neoclassical styles. His drawings are pure fantasy and often defy explanation. In Urban Passage, geometric forms resembling a house seem to be projected onto a mythical landscape by the sky. In Addio Melampo, these forms emanate from the earth itself. Its title refers both to the name of a dog in an Italian novel and to a mythical Greek man who can see the future and understand the voices of animals, although for Scolari there is not necessarily a connection between the title and the image of a drawing. Addio Melampo is clearly a drawing born from imagination." Bevin Cline and Tina di Carlo in "The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection" (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002). Color ink, watercolor, and graphite on board 11 7/8 x 10" (30.2 x 25.4 cm) Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

#Massimo Scolari #Addio Melampo #drawings

[starcurtain]

Haikaveh Fanfics I Want to Read (Part 2)

<- Part 1.

Part 3. ->

1. The Palace of Alcarzarzaray might be called Kaveh’s magnum opus, but actually, it was more like a kick-start for his career. Kaveh hasn’t known a moment of peace since, with constant commissioners begging for him to choose their projects. The longer his waiting list gets, the more his fame grows and grows... So when a pair of people come out of the woodwork insisting they’re Kaveh’s long-lost parents, Alhaitham thinks it’s only right to be skeptical.

Kaveh agrees (for once), but... they’re so nice to him, and apparently he’s got siblings, and they haven't asked him for anything; they say they never meant to leave him, and they love him, and--and--how could he just turn them away? What if it’s true?

What if he has a real family?

Of course, when these so-called parents start encouraging Kaveh to move back home with them, Alhaitham becomes determined to unravel the lie and show them for the imposters they (almost) certainly are.

It’s only because it irks him to see people twist the truth and get away with it. It’s only because the logical step is to point out obvious manipulations when you spot them.

It’s got nothing at all to do with how empty the house will feel if Kaveh isn’t in it.

Nothing at all.

  Rest under the read more:

2. Okay, listen. The fact that Kaveh and Alhaitham are both 12s out of 10 does not change the fact that they’re also MASSIVE NERDS. The fic is just silly snippets of them being the graduate school gremlins they most definitely are:

Is it even fighting if all you are doing is reciting academic citations at each other?  

Saturday night, we are both at home doing nothing but debating over the rules to an ancient word game that we’ve mostly pieced together from the barest disconnected snippets of apocrypha and one oblique reference in a single receipt of sale from 1600 years ago, because we are Normal™. The most normal people in Sumeru, even.  

How Althaitham flirts: Practicing his newest language acquisition by translating nothing but obscure ancient love letters (“Well, they could have had romantic intention but we shouldn’t allow modern interpretations to color our perceptions without thorough analysis of their semantic contexts and candid awareness of the moral obligation of the translator to avoid speculation on connotations which might privilege biased readings--”). Then he heaps his transcriptions all over the top of Kaveh’s desk and chair and bed and...  

How Kaveh flirts: “I built you a bookshelf.”   “I take back every uncharitable thing I’ve said about architecture this week.”   “It is both climate-controlled and self-dusting. Also, it will catalog which books are missing after they’re removed from the shelf and remind you when it’s time to put them back in place so that you’re not tempted to leave your moldy tomes all over my--”   “Wait, who is this bookshelf actually for?”  

“See, I’m allowed to criticize his work, but you, peon, are absolutely not. Here is my 50-page rebuttal of your recent article critiquing the architect Kaveh’s research, in which I will outline exactly why you are an incomparable idiot who should be disbarred from publication ever again. Very uncordially, Alhaitham”  

The only time Alhaitham and Kaveh are unequivocally, indisputably, and inseparably a T E A M: Tavern Trivia Night. (The schedule for tavern trivia night is shortly thereafter altered to: “Any time in which Kaveh and Alhaitham are not on the premises. The management apologizes in advance for last minute trivia night cancellations, but asks patrons to please respect the rule that not even a single trivia question be spoken in the presence of the Light of Kshahrewar or the Akademiya’s scribe.”)

In other words, two geniuses live their very best lives together.

  3. When Prince Alhaitham's viziers started nagging about his lack of spouse to ensure an heir, he dismissed them out of hand. But the truth is, he can't inherit the full privileges of his family's throne (including unfettered access to the kingdom's collection of forbidden records) unless he upholds an ancient peace treaty between his country and their most useful trading neighbor: to become king of Haravatat, he has to marry a citizen of Kshahrewar. Alhaitham isn't the type to bow to social or legal pressure, but if it means he might finally be able to further his research, well, he's willing to swear even a marriage oath to get the knowledge he desires.

But he's not willing to marry anyone unworthy. He's not willing to marry anyone boring, or rote, or feeble-minded, or ill-tempered, or shrill, or under-educated, or ambivalent, or weak, or too polite, or--

If Kshahrewar is going to insist on a political marriage, then Alhaitham will insist on accepting only the best.

But now things are starting to look grim. Prince Alhaitham has interviewed and dismissed (in no polite terms), every eligible Kshahrewar maiden and and no small number of their eligible men besides. For Alhaitham, this is but a formality on his way to further reading, but for the Kingdom of Kshahrewar, real fears are stirring--if they can't find an acceptable candidate soon, the peace treaty that has ensured their alliance with Haravatat’s military-might could dissolve, and already the neighboring powers of Vahumana and Spantamad have been testing the boundaries of their borders...

Entirely out of options, the nervous kingdom gives in and sends the last person they'd want to lose: the Light of Kshahrewar, their beloved architect and most renowned scholar.

But it's all right, because Kaveh has a Plan®.

All right, admittedly, the plan was a lot closer to "Be way too beautiful to reject" than "Argue all night and wake up just to argue again," but hey, whatever works?

(Also known as: The Thousand and One Nights AU where Alhaitham's not quite crazy enough to kill the people he rejects but will crush their self-confidence; Kaveh's not great at telling stories but is great at debate; and the ultimate outcome is still the same very cliffhangery happy ever after.)

  4. If you asked Kaveh Kshahrewar, on-call urban planner for the city of Sumeru, he would expound at length and with several melodramatic sighs upon the fact that his life is fraught with a great many challenges and his fortunes are fraught with a great many (obvious in retrospect) mistakes.

To put it simply, Kaveh will tell you he just has rotten luck.

If you were to ask the High Council of Principalities of the Fifth Ring of the Host of Heaven, they would tell you that Kaveh’s luck is actually quite good... for a person in the targets of the dark legions of Hell itself.

There are some exceptional humans upon whom the wheels of fate are hung, whose very existence is destined to bring beautiful things to the world, to tip the balance in the eternal fight between good and evil firmly toward good. Kaveh is one such person, and therefore all his life he’s been a target of unseen forces that would rather see his light snuffed out.

But that last near-death experience was too close. If Kaveh is left to his own devices much longer, he very likely will perish, long before he’s able to achieve his fated great works for the world. Heaven has to do something.

Alhaitham is a very, very efficient Principality. Maybe the most efficient Principality the Host of Heaven has. But he’s never--not once since the beginning of creation--been called on to actually guard a human. Yes, yes, of course he’s read the manual cover to closing, but...

But no one thought to warn him that they were so very emotional.

“Who are you and what are you doing in my house?!”

“I’m your guardian angel. I live here now.”

“911, I need to report a home invasion in progress! Please send help, there is a lunatic eating raw butter out of my fridge!”

(Or: The guardian angel AU where Kaveh is disaster prone because he is Very Cursed, and Alhaitham is even weirder than normal because his frame of reference for humans is still “wears fig leaves.” It’s a tragicomedy in six acts: Kaveh’s going to change the world for the better. His future is already written in stone. And nowhere in that record is there anything about falling in love with an angel, so Alhaitham knows he’s not supposed to be anything more than a bit part in this grand story.

Too bad Kaveh’s always sympathized with the side characters most.)

  5. During an exploratory trip to the desert ruins looking for remnants of the Deshret Script, lone researcher Alhaitham discovers a strange--and, in fact, magical--teapot, containing none other than a beautiful (but rather noisy) djinn.

“My name is Kaveh.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I’m a djinn.”

“I can tell.”

“I’ll grant you three wishes, if and only if--”

“Five wishes.”

“What?”

“You should grant me five wishes.”

“Why?”

“Because I asked politely.”

“You absolutely did not! Ugh, fine, I’ll grant you five wishes. But only--and I mean only!--if you’ll agree to set me free at the end.”

“All right, I swear.”

But where are they now?! Kaveh is getting desperate. It’s been six months, and Alhaitham hasn’t made a single wish! At this rate, Kaveh will never get free! He’ll be stuck bunking in a house full of tacky furniture, being tricked into doing the laundry and sweeping forever! This is so unfair; how is it even allowed?! Alhaitham is human; he has to have some kind of wish in that stone-thick head of his!

(The truth is, Alhaitham does have a wish. It just can’t be granted.

He swore an oath to set Kaveh free, after all.)

#haikaveh #kavetham #alhaitham/kaveh #kaveh/alhaitham #genshin impact #alhaitham #kaveh #genshin impact fanfic #fanfic ideas #I don't have time I just have ideas

[daisychainsandbowties]

thoughts on autistic beatrice 

i got a couple asks about this, so here we go.

speaking. despite her talent for linguistics, and her fascination with language, Beatrice does sometimes have periods where she is non-verbal. alternates with days where she needs to talk a lot. Lilith usually gets subjected to her talkativeness on these occasions - or rather, she subjects herself to it, willingly. knows how to respond and manage and help when things are a lot. she is quite content to sit and listen and poke fun while Beatrice lets all of the thoughts out of her head. 

Bea has areas of specific focus, and likes to tell convoluted stories to reach her point bc it’s how her brain likes to do things, and Lilith is one of the rare people who will simply listen, who is not impatient. Bea has been trained to think in straight lines, but there is a natural obliqueness to her thought processes. & especially when she is tired and/or hurt it unravels out of her. 

it takes a long time for her to trust anyone enough to actually relax and do that kind of stimming, but once things are easier it’s at least once a week, and Lilith pretty much drops everything to go sit with her in the library or down by the cliff or in the sun by one of the outer walls. this is astonishing to Bea, because nobody in her life has been willing to listen to her talk before, for hours. 

for Lilith it’s like watching the sun rise, & Bea transforms when she’s able to let all of the many myriad & often beautiful thoughts she has find their way out. to have them held and appreciated.

special interests. i think for sure Bea is really interested in math & physics & linguistics & probably a bit of architecture (my girl knew how to convert dirra to feet = math nerd AND architecture nerd, for sure). 

re: physics - Bea is just really interested in the mechanics of the universe, & it’s kind of an adjacent interest when you throw knives, because there is math involved & a bit of physics knowledge, especially for her throws which are from unpredictable distances (usually knife-throwing is done at standard distances with more or less consistent trajectories. whereas Bea throws in consistently unpredictable circumstances, often at moving targets).

she likes spiders and pretty much all fields of biology - anatomy, entomology, biophysics (she was a bit obsessed with gravitational tropism & how they grew plants in space), biochem, physiology of all kinds. definitely used to do architectural sketches for fun. knows all about how buildings have been constructed over the centuries. likes spiders because misunderstood, solitary, & just rlly rlly interesting as creatures. linguistics for obvious reasons. aka ‘if i learn ten languages i will be able to talk to people’ = cue not knowing what to say to people in ten languages. i’m gonna say she likes prime numbers. the mystery of them, the way they are so strange and self-contained.

routine! Bea is big into routine. it helps her to deal with the parts of her life that will always be chaotic - OCS activities are pretty much chaotic by default, because possession and demons don’t keep people-hours. 

she NEEDS to go running every day & Lilith is usually the only one who can keep pace with her, so they get up in the predawn dark most mornings and run until the sun rises. they don’t talk while they run, but they have a sort of silent conversation going on. gentle competition and mutual egging-on. performing stupid little parkour tricks where no one can see them. once or twice they go down by the beach and end up trying to toss each other into the ocean. 

when they get back Beatrice has muesli (she always has muesli, when she can) & she has this specific blue bowl and this specific spoon. everyone knows not to touch it (and Lilith knows too but still does dickhead things like hide it, but she gives it back almost immediately. just likes to see Bea’s face scrunch up like an emoji. she calls it ‘your haughty little stare’. 

Lilith peels an orange while Beatrice makes up her breakfast (picking the banana chips out. ‘why don’t you just get the brand without banana chips.’ ‘you wouldn’t understand.’) Lilith scatters orange peel everywhere on purpose and Beatrice goes around after sweeping them into her palm, which makes her hands smell like citrus (and, incidentally, exactly like Lilith’s, all day long).

time-blindness/interoception. Beatrice loses time. has a habit of going into a trance or just hyper-focussing on things. in those instances Mary or Lilith or Cam will find her just Staring and they always go to fetch Shannon, because she has a knack; she’s a gentle stirring presence, and she goes and puts her palms on Bea’s face and gets her eyes to focus on her. narrows the world down to simple touch. leads with a couple of innocent questions about math or sometimes jellyfish, or any of the topics Bea likes. 

this is what she needs. Mary is the steady voice that pulls everyone together in a fight, but Shannon has the measure of Beatrice. she knows to ask questions, to lure her out of her stupor with positive things. gentle, stirring. usually there’s nothing bad about losing the time, except that she can end up with throbbing headaches from dehydration.

but it’s time her brain needs, to be away from other people, because Beatrice has observed and catalogued and she is pretty good at the social side of things. yet it is exhausting. & sometimes she needs a hour or two to just exist in her own orbit.

eye-contact. when she’s comfy she tends to stray away from eye-contact, just because other body language is better and not so overwhelming as eyes, but martial arts taught her how important the eyes are for betraying intent, so she looks. but if she trust ppl there’s less eye contact. what there is, then, means more. 

she and Lilith are almost entirely absent of eye-contact when alone with each other. they are parallel play pros, and they save eye-contact for fighting, though Lilith is extraordinarily good at NOT giving away anything with her eyes. she can be beating the crap out of two people at once and look like she’s grocery shopping, but when she’s in the swing of things there’s often a manic glee to her eyes. & Bea likes that because it’s uncomplicated and wild and honest. but yeah, Mary occasionally goes to Shannon - ‘hey, do you think Beatrice would know the answer if i asked her what colour Lilith’s eyes are?’

speaking (contd.) Bea does have a tendency to forget about inflection in speech. has a monotone a lot of the time, which other people mistake for condescension. she can be very persuasive, but when she’s comfortable her voice keeps this unerringly constant pitch.

doesn’t tend to have the wild wavers you expect when ppl are with their friends; actually gets flatter & more even the more enthused she is. so she’ll be telling Lilith about how spiders can walk upside down on glass & the pitch, if you measured it, would be a straight line, but this speaks to Lilith’s brain too, because it isn’t jumping on distinctions in sound & getting anxious over it. 

if you pay attention to the rest of Bea’s body language it’s easy to see how excited she is, but that doesn’t manifest in her voice so much. oh she can emote vocally with the best of them (cut to the museum heist scene where Vincent kidnaps Ava) but calm relaxed Bea is going to be rocking that monotone.

food. for the first while in cat’s cradle Beatrice has trouble with mealtimes. it was never her forte - always the first down to breakfast in boarding school, so eventually the ppl setting up just left a bowl out for her & the tureen of muesli, and a milk bottle still slick with dew from sitting on the stoop with all the others. 

it’s the social aspect, mostly, and the change of routine, that get to her. plus Beatrice just isn’t motivated by food at all - for her it’s like, due to interoception, and some sensory preferences, though Bea’s a good soldier and can just ignore texture and taste if she has to. 

she doesn’t like the tables in the vaulted hall or the weird dim lighting, and all the other nuns talking in hushed voices so they become this susurration of sound. so she just skips lunch, or dinner. 

Lilith insists that she could care less, & she only tells Mary because otherwise she’ll get a lecture about responsibility and the new recruits, and also Bea is the best fighter besides her, and she doesn’t want to win just because the little twit forgets to eat. 

initially Mary just insists that Bea goes to meals with her. that doesn’t really help too much; Bea goes where she’s told, but yk you can lead a horse to water, can’t make them drink.

one day Mary goes and sits down next to Bea while she’s reading one day out in the courtyard, & hands her a cup of pudding from a bunch of surplus (and almost expired) MREs that the OCS bulk-bought ages ago. & Bea, skeptical but obedient, open it up & tries it & Mary, privately, thinks it’s chalky and overly sweet, but Bea adores it. she reads the nutritional info and is weirdly psyched by how ‘full of food groups’ it is. (Mary shrugs, but Lilith gets it; she also grew up craving salt and protein and portions larger than a palm). 

Mary bulk buys even more of them, & soon the Trio™ start carrying them around. Shannon has a bunch in her backpack, and Mary keeps them in the glove box of the van. Lilith sometimes just has one in the pocket of her hoodie, so that when it’s a Hard Day they can all reliably take Bea out into the sun with a bit of breeze coming up over the cliffside, & pass her a horrible calorie-dense protein pudding monstrosity.

it works, though. once Bea has Lilith to cling to she doesn’t mind going to the official means, & also Mother Superion takes her in her office & tells her she can go to the kitchen or eat in MS’s office if she’s not feeling it any evening. it works, and Beatrice manages to win against Lilith two out of five times in training, and she looks better and more than she has in her whole life, because the ppl around her FINALLY care about what she needs.

touch. Bea actually really likes it. flinches, at first, when Mary throws an arm around her, or when Shannon goes to her after a hard fight and presses their foreheads together, and leaves her sooty thumb-prints on Bea’s cheeks from holding her face. 

Lilith is another touch-starved bitch so they are like two polarised magnets initially, but after a while it changes. Beatrice falling asleep against Lilith in the back of the OCS fan. Bea having a panic attack and Mary climbing clear over the handbrake from the front seat (shotgun) to go and hold her very tightly, and rock her, and just say meaningless nice things.

Lilith like a deer in the headlights watching it, but eventually letting Beatrice braid her hair when her hands won’t stop shaking from the adrenaline. at once point they are hiding from possessed ppl & Lilith wraps her whole body around Bea, pressing them together into the shadows, and Beatrice is just… stunned by the closeness of it all. the lemon and sweat smell of Lilith (Bea starts stealing her shampoo after that). 

eventually she knows how to seek touch, how to ask for it & Bea and Lilith become kind of ridiculous about it (just watch the infirmary scene). they sit propping each other up, side-by-side or back-to-back. Bea with her legs flung over Lilith’s lap, reading out of a book in the library. in church playing ‘one-two-three-four, i declare a thumb war’ while Mary loses her shit in the row behind them. 

Beatrice likes braiding hair, and when she’s upset she just clings to ppl (Lilith starts calling her barnacle and also limpet) but both of them need that from each other, & most of the other sisters are just not Bea’s people; she has her three people (four, almost, when Cam arrives). 

with Mary it’s a lot of rough shoving and headlocks and kicking each other’s calves and ‘hey, think fast!’ followed by Mary chucking something at Bea. 

with Shannon it’s the face-touching, and her arms folding Bea into a hug to end all hugs. & obviously with Ava we have Beatrice the little spoon, & her quiet amazement at how much Ava likes touching her arms or pecking her on the cheek - i don’t think she was raised to believe that people might long to touch her, and where Lilith hid her longing pretty deftly, Ava is much more open about it; it’s part of what shocks her when Ava hugs her very suddenly that first time in Cat’s Cradle after the wall incident - not the touch, but the recognition of Ava’s hunger for it. i think it occurred to Beatrice that maybe Ava could not even remember the last time someone hugged her like that. i think she understands& once they’re together it’s stupid how often they are in contact with each other, but it’s Bea’s love language, i think.

sensory issues. texture is obviously a thing for Beatrice. specifically with food, but also with clothes. you’ll see (in the show) that she tends to favour clothes that are loose around the arms (part of her reasoning being that it’s easier and better to fight in loose-fitting clothes) but yeah she’s not a fan of tight clothing. likes pressure on her own terms. she likes sweaters and tank tops, men’s-section t-shirts because the weird v-shape of women’s sleeves is foul and heinous. she does like to button shirts all the way up to the top because for unknown reasons it feels safe and precise.

sound is not too bad for Bea. she’s used to a lot of shouting in martial arts training (the use of a kiai in kendo is well-established & often super loud. she kind of likes that, shrieking at the top of her lungs with permission) and also gunshots with the OCS. none of it bothers her more than gunshots are just super unpleasant to hear for anyone. 

she does enjoy asmr though. ocean sounds especially (thunder is bad unless there’s a really predictable interval between bouts of thunder) hates those deep-space ones because the bass makes her feel dizzy.

she just also really likes the sound of the people she loves talking. sometimes she can get Lilith to say more than four sentences together & it’s heaven. Ava obviously has her doe-eyed with her ability to talk about anything, to fill silences with good sound. 

Bea HATES to be shouted at, berated etc. but mostly for trauma reasons, b/c of the whole endless night her parents yelled at her before they sent her away. this is part of the reason that silence makes her a bit uneasy, unless she knows what it means. 

silence with Lilith has a few flavours; she has a happy silence, which is like a cat coming to sit in a room with you. she also has a broody silence, which Bea likes too, actually, because Lilith isn’t angry, she’s just filling the room with the noisiness of her thoughts. her angry silence makes Beatrice want to say around too, but only in the hope of mending things. Mary’s silences are usually good, or else they’re about Shannon. & Shannon has her gentle silences and her hidden silences. the fact is that silence for Bea is rarely actual silence, because she is too attentive to the meanings of silence. 

she likes Ava’s version of silence, which is talking. 

is also very very perceptive of sound - Lilith insists you can’t hear electricity OR spiders moving around, but Bea is adamant that you can, actually. she always knows when there’s a big house spider in her room bc they are NOT stealthy. it’s why she likes asmr - esp. in cat’s cradle - because it drowns out the small noises of the convent which don’t get tuned out by her brain.

light can be annoying for Bea. headcanon is that the museum heist sunglasses were not a brand new acquisition - Ava got them for Bea in Switzerland (‘you shouldn’t read in the sun if you’re gonna squint, bea’) because Beatrice got headaches from too much light, & they looked dorky so two birds with one stone. she does appreciate light, though, and loves sitting in the sun. anything that is not like England. she gets weird and sad when it rains too much. also HATES being rained on. fully sulks about it.

finally, stimming! i think when she’s upset Bea would, ideally, self-soothe by rocking. it’s why Mary does it, because Bea’s parents berated her for it so many times that her body freezes up at the thought. 

she likes to braid hair, as i said. likes tapping things, fiddling with things in her hands - reason why she’s so ‘puts hands behind back’ ‘puts hands in pockets’ ‘makes hands hold each other so they can’t do their own thing’. but yeah, in Switzerland it happens a lot more. playing with pens, tapping thumb & forefinger, tapping surfaces (very lightly), AHEM skipping stones. just keeping those guys busy. 

asmr is also stimming, btw. & so is eating the right food for the purpose of enjoying the textures. all of the touching. 

she also has mental stims! that r like… doing equations, or running through facts. counting primes. reciting as much of pi as she can in one minute, imagining a clock face and watching it move. i think so much of her stimming is probably mental, actually. rlly fun stims are finding linguistic patterns in things, or translating things back and forth - so like, from english to french to german to latin & then going back without cheating to see if any changes get imposed by counter-translating directly - also spatial reasoning in general is good stimming. thinking, how exactly would that fall? or imagining things swinging or shattering or anything like that, where you have to extrapolate a bit based on instinct and also knowledge. having to be so internal her whole life would have furnished her with a bunch of them, but i think her OCS family bring so many good visible stims to the surface too!

anyway, those are some of my thoughts on autistic bea. i love her very.

#warrior nun #sister beatrice #autistic beatrice #(in case anyone is wondering yes i am autistic so not speaking out of my armpit here) #if anyone has any others feel free to msg me or tell me in the tags #part of what made me start writing fic for wn was how much i connected to bea's autistic swag #so yea #casper writes #ty anons (and not anons) who were asking abt this

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 22 - The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

This was a fascinating book. Another one I probably appreciate as an art object more than as a story, per se, but in this case that’s not really a knock on it. Or at least, I believe the whole project began as the written accompaniment to an actual visual art display. Which I really rather wish I could have seen, it seems like the right sort of setting and accompaniment would have made this a lot more affecting.

Anyway, the basic synopsis of the book is that, sometime in the future, a massive space vessel called the Six Thousand Ship is launched from Earth and ends up in orbit over an alien world, where strange and vaguely eldritch objects are retrieved and brought on board. The story is told through a series of anonymous employee testimonials to some silent and anonymous survey/study/HR board. Crucially, some large fraction of the crew is not human but humanoid, synthetic workers created and programmed by the organization who own the ship.

The entire thing is perfectly designed to convey a very particular sense of corporate alienation, right down to the polite euphemisms used for murder. Especially at the beginning, everything from obsession to grief and nostalgia over never seeing Earth again is always framed as how it might effect ones productiveness as an employee, and to figure out everything that really happened in any given statement you usually have to first decipher the thick layer of corporate HR-ese its buried under. The packaging provides a sort of antiseptic distance that kind of clashes interestingly with what is actually happening at any given point.

Which is, I’m sue, all making a point of the alienation and inhumanity of the modern workplace and the absolute horror of a life that is nothing but work – I think I first heard this book mentioned in the context of people discussing Severance, and I can absolutely see the relation between the two. I’m sure it’s incredibly uncultured of me, but the whole framing device (especially as things moved towards the climax) also just seemed incredibly reminiscent of the audio logs and scraps of text you would find in a video game, providing the backstory of how whatever environment you’re exploring collapsed into the ruined state you found it in. Which is, certainly, an interesting effect to go for in a book.

The objects themselves are almost certainly weighted with deep symbolic meaning that flew entirely over my head, but the effect they had on the various employees is definitely interesting. Things definitely do happen, but in terms of page count the inner musings and angst over the human(oid) condition and how interaction with the objects effects different individual psychologies is what the book is actually really interested is. Being allowed to care for the objects in the way they seem to like becomes an intense preoccupation for some of the crew involved, even moreso than the allocated time with holographic recreations of children the organization starts providing as an incentive at a certain point.

I’m not entirely sure it really does anything with it, but all the ways the book gestures at transhumanism is at least interesting. The humanoids themselves, with their probably immortality and regular mental reuploads and lack of anything outside the Work to contextualize or complicate their life (at least until the objects show up), as well as plenty of mentions of add-ons that the Organization provides its human workers as needed. And just very oblique mentions of ‘transfers’ to positions with very different mental architecture or sense of self or physical/mental autonomy. It’s all a great/creepy vibe, at least.

On the whole book left me slightly cold, but that’s really a me problem more than the book problem. Short enough to be worth a read if it seems interesting, at least.

#the employees #Olga Ravn #sff #literature #book review

[germanpostwarmodern]

In recent years the built and the graphic work of French architect Claude Parent in particular have received increased and overdue attention. With the exhibition „Claude Parent - L'œuvre construite, l'œuvre graphique“ the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris in 2010 jumpstarted the rediscovery of Parent‘s radical oeuvre by providing a comprehensive overview of his complete works. The accompanying catalogue, edited by Frédéric Migayrou & Francis Rambert and published by Editions HYX, still is offers the most complete collection of buildings, projects and drawings by the architect. With great attention to detail the catalogue presents Parent’s utopian architecture from his early, horizontal and vertical-oriented buildings over his famous oblique designs like the Church Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay (in collaboration with Paul Virilio) or the French pavilion at the 1970 Venice Biennale.

Browsing the book one can’t help but be astonished by the radicalism of Parent’s architecture and the fact that a considerable number of his radical designs were actually built. Concurrently Parent’s influence on a range of architects, e.g. Zaha Hadid or SANAA, becomes manifest and underscores just how visionary his ideas were.

In chronological order the catalogue unfolds a feast for the eyes that also is the perfect starting point for an in-depth engagement with this singular architectural and graphic oeuvre. Highly recommended!

#claude parent #monograph #architecture #france #brutalism #architecture book #book

[canmom]

Utena or G-Witch?

as in like which is my fave or...

honestly I need to go back and give gwitch a proper watch through, I fell off watching it when it was airing right before what are apparently some of the most impactful episodes. I definitely mean to do a proper writeup about gwitch when I do.

that said, i mean... I doubt my opinion would change that much. gwitch is a very solid gundam. it's got a lot going for it, it's good TV. but utena is utena. there's nothing else like it, even other Ikuhara shows (not at all to their detriment, it's good that he went on to do different stuff than more utena). it's just shooting for something so weird and interesting and bringing in such specific vibes. it's got crazy formal stuff with the way it uses bank shots and borders and the greek chorus and stuff. it's got the architecture. it's got incredible character writing. it's got ja seazer doing full on alchemy in the soundtrack. it's got an episode where someone turns into a cow. it centres on an oblique metaphorical depiction of sexual abuse and has something interesting to say about it. it declared some of the most iconic imagery in anime, the finale is up there with the akira bike slide for shots that people would subsequently homage. but it's also really funny. and i love utena fans, they're nuts in the best way.

gwitch, for all its nods to utena early on, just wasn't so ambitious. it can't be so experimental, it's gotta be a gundam - a relatively grounded if melodramatic scifi centring on exploited teenagers piloting robots, one which has gotta hit certain series motifs - it's gotta have a masked char figure etc. which is fair enough, I've been really enjoying getting into gundam, gundam is good shit! and gwitch from what i've seen finds good ways to mix up the formula (what if char was the mc's mum). but 'gundam with lesbians' is not novel in the way utena was.

if you wanted to name a more utena-like modern show you might point to revstar, which is straight-up directed by one of Ikuhara's protégés who'd worked on penguindrum, though it took the movie for that to become bold enough to compare at all tbh.

but honestly, while I could point to a lot of visually innovative shows in the last 10 years, nothing can really be 'another utena'. utena is utena! and we're not in the mid 90s anymore, we're v much post utena, we've long ago absorbed utena (and lain and eva and so on) into our sense of what anime is and can be. and of course, anime works differently now - economics, production, social context, etc. I guess it's an interesting question to wonder which works will come to be seen with 25+ years' hindsight in a similar light...

#anime

[abwwia]

Barbara Kruger in her New York City studio, ca. mid-1970s; Photo by Susan Katz for "The Woman I Am" Collection, part of the Archives of Women Artists, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Betty Boyd Dettre Library & Research Center, Washington, D.C.

Barbara Kruger (#bornonthisday January 26, 1945) is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her collage style that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, consumerism, and sexuality. Kruger's artistic mediums include photography, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, as well as video and audio installations. Via Wikipedia

See also: 5 Fast Facts: Barbara Kruger

nmwa.org/blog/5-fast-facts/5-fast-facts-barbara-kruger

#BarbaraKruger #inherstudio #SusanKatz #artherstory #artbywomen #womensart #palianshow

#barbara kruger #art by women

[trudemaethien]

ARCHITECT/SAFETY INSPECTOR YOU SAY? PLEASE TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT THANK U

I started this for SW rares in 2022 (you know, that exchange where I wrote like 9 fics? 😅🤣) and never finished it; I also accidentally deleted any mention of who it was meant to be for, oops. I give to you the grand total of all my notes (but these unnamed ocs are very dear to me anyway and i think of them often):

epistolary

research reports

academic abstracts

grant proposals

blueprints

project estimates

inspections

citations

…

Arch: what i want to be when i grow up age 8

Insp: excerpt from middle/upper grade school paper on architectural shortfallings (with oblique reference to nonhumanoid accessibility) with precociously pedantic, officious language and spikipedia citation

Arch: college entry essay with lots of soaring imagery metaphors and lofty goals

inspector: homework, the history of parcel surveying on coruscant

grant proposal for: ?

inspector: publishes very dry thesis

arch: doing research, cites inspector

the inspector is slightly older, settled into a career in the republic when it falls and the bureaucracy doesn’t change THAT much. they are nonhuman but humanoid, skilled and hardworking, quiet and not revolutionary. firm and uncompromising in their reports. things begin to go amiss when they correct someone with more ambition than sense. (imply that the lack of safety railings thence forward is caused by this)

the architect is younger, a rising star at the turn of the empire, who admired the inspector through school by way of their body of work. human and idealistic

scathing commentary by inspector made the architect humble and grateful for the logistics and reality of buildings when sketching castles in the stars.

they dont contact one another directly/personally until almost the end.

architect notices that citations of the inspector’s work have gotten scarce and their academic series is overly delayed.

they start digging, making a picture of activity by dates, and they see. the last date was a few weeks ago.

that’s not that long in the grand scale of things, but architect knows this person is meticulous and consistent and unafraid to call a duck a duck and a lack of railings a hazard.

they scrounge some more, discreetly, and find an address. a comm code. a forwarding address. a next if kin that doesn’t exist.

they reach out.

#ask answered #fanfiction #wip title game #wip title tag game #osha #architect oc #safety inspector oc #star wars ot

[bluberimufim]

Hi, and happy WBW to you! (as usual I am @writeblr-of-my-own) Sorry that I missed last Saturday ask, but it was a busy week and stuff happened!

So, for today's question something a bit easier and relaxing: tell me a piece of worldbuilding you are extremely proud of! Go on, blabber about it as much as you like!

Happy (late) WBW!!!

I'm sorry I took so long to answer! I got distracted. For 2 days.

You are about to read one of the nerdiest things you've ever seen.

The dystopia WIP (bc of course this is about the dystopia WIP) is set in a world very different from our own in terms of general philosophy. My inicial concept for it was basically "Hey remember the period in between the two World Wars where people were weirdly obsessed with industry and thought machines were the Best Thing Ever? What if it just never stopped being like that?". If you're thinking "wtf?? I don't remember that???", allow me to exemplify by mentioning that Le Corbusier, the architect poster-boy (man??) of modernism, referred to houses as "Machines for Living" (as in, the house is a machine designed for you to live in it).

But I digress.

And from this idea, I developed a sort of... mainstream art movement, I guess, for the world of the dystopia WIP. It's kind of a mix between two real-life art movements: Futurism and Baroque.

Futurism is all about striving for improvement and technological progress above all else, and actively eliminating all history behind you. The quote that basically became Futurism's slogan is, I think, "a car is sexier than any woman", meaning that industry and progress is the most important thing in the world. The futurists were also obsessed with war and thought that countries should constatntly be at war because it breeds inovation. There were fascist undertones, as you might guess. 'Twas pre-WW2 Italy, after all.

Baroque is all about taking the canons of classical tradition and altering them to fit your style, while displaying mastery over them. It's basically about innovating and expanding on Renaissance-era art. The general idea most people have of Baroque art is the drama and pathos of it all, with oblique compositions and tons of light-dark contrast. It technically started off as catholic propaganda and is regarded by many as the origin/prototype of totalitarian architecture (think Nazi Germany or Soviet Union government buildings).

What would the combination of these two be called? Baroque-Futurism? Futuristic-Baroque? I don't know. And I honestly don't think I will ever need to name it in the story, so I just leave it.

In terms of how this would manifest visually, I've kinda drawn some ideas but nothing too final. I remember making a prototype of a variation on the solomonic column, a staple of the Baroque period.

And this shapes the way the characters see the world. There's a scene (the only scene I wrote, I don't even know where it would be set in the timeline) where two characters are discussing the night sky and they say that a starless sky is beautiful because it means humanity's power (expressed through light pollution in this case) is so great that they can blot out the cosmos itself. There's even a city in this world, called the Humming City, that is considered beautiful and awe-inspiring because there are so many machines and technological equipments running at the same time that they create an audible hum, like the one you hear from home appliances at night when everyone is asleep, but much, much louder.

I literally sound insane. But I had a lot of fun!

#i think this may be getting out of hand #i need to start actually writing the wip #wdym i'm using this ask as an excuse to delay the make me write tag #nooooooo this is 100% normal #this is the type of stuff that makes me want to turn the dystopia WIP into a graphic novel #but I know i'd never get it done if that was the case #writing #writeblr #my wips #the dystopia wip #wbw #wbw asks #asks

[tculvahouse]

'Round the Bend

In architecture, a curving vista may suggest movement. Consider the train ride between London Kings Cross and Edinburgh Waverley by way of York.

The tracks at Kings Cross and Waverley are covered by skylit roofs, and so are just three stations in between: York, Darlington, and Newcastle upon Tyne. Each of these has vaulted roofs, curving with the tracks below. York and Newcastle form simple arcs, while Darlington is straight for most of its length, but with a curve at the northern end.

Because the vaults curve, you see them obliquely out the train window, a glimpse of the continuing journey ahead made present and vivid. Even when you're stopped at the platform, your eye carries you on around the bend.

_______________________________________________________________________

Photos, top to bottom: York Station, by ChrisGrady1975 (CC BY-SA 3.0); Darlington Station, by Adambro (CC BY-SA 2.5); Newcastle Central Station, by Russell Wills (CC BY-SA 2.0).

[apparitionism]

Appreciation

A week of appreciation. I wasn’t going to do this, but then I foolishly had An Idea. (Not a good idea.) So I’ll be writing a Bering and Wells... thing. Rather, a series of things. Seven things. The overarching title is, naturally, “Appreciation,” but each piece of the whole will be a thing unto itself. Mostly.

So, okay, here goes with the day one prompt (Dancing), which led me to what I found to be an illuminating quote (from Christgau, below).

Architecture

Robert Christgau, “Writing About Music Is Writing First.” Popular Music 24 (2005): 415–21.

  One of the many foolish things about the fools who compare writing about music to dancing about architecture is that dancing usually is about architecture. When bodies move in relation to a designed space, be it stage or ballroom or living room or gymnasium or agora or Congo Square, they comment on that space whether they mean to or not. The comment is usually oblique, absorbed below normal levels of ratiocination. And it can make itself felt that way, subliminally inflecting the meanings of dwellings, edifices, and meeting places. But if we want to understand it more fully, we’d best reduce it to words.

  And why is that? .... [A]s we’ve been told ad infinitum from Saussure on down, nothing can be reduced to words, not even words. Writing about writing is also like dancing about architecture.

****

Myka knows she’s not the world’s most poetically inclined person, but she understands the figurative, if clichéd, sense in which any relationship is a dance. Some people probably enjoy the literal action as part of that figurative whole, but while Myka as a rule likes to keep her definitions tight—literal—in this case she’s been relieved that the applicability of “dance” to her romance with Helena has been thus far been figurative. She’s been committed, in fact, to ensuring that the “figurative only” condition continues to obtain.

Until.

(Being in, so deeply and inescapably in, a relationship with Helena has run Myka headlong into an inordinately high number of situations that represent such an “until.”)

“Do you remember—” Helena begins one night, as they’re preparing for bed, and Myka cuts her off with a brief “yes.” Given the architecture of her brain, she could hardly help but do so.

Helena, undeterred, continues, “—that hallucinatory retrieval, so long ago, in which the artifact compelled us to dance together?”

“No,” Myka revises. “Aggressively, no.” She puts the aggression into her very posture: her body, she hopes, is refusal.

Helena immediately kicks her poorly set, insufficient legs out from under her: “Liar.”

The kicking: figurative, but effective. Myka has no deniability. “It was terrible,” she says, reexperiencing the frustration, albeit on a smaller scale, both at wanting Helena so desperately and yet seeing no path to having her... and then at being forced to dance. With her. Against her... Myka manages to step back—just barely; it’s a teeter—from entering the memory in its fullness.

“Thus proving my last statement true. Why was it terrible?”

“Because I hate dancing,” Myka says.

“That doesn’t seem to be a lie.” Helena cocks her head—to the right, her “thinking” side. “But does this hate apply in every circumstance?”

“Yes,” Myka says, no hesitation or revision required.

“That too has the ring of truth.” Another head-cock, now (not unexpectedly) left, with an additional raise of chin. That’s the teasing-but-with-an-undercurrent movement. “Yet would it apply even to dancing with me in another circumstance? Given that I’m the putative object of your affection?”

Myka considers keeping her mouth shut but concludes it would most likely be taken the wrong way, given the undercurrent to the tease. Hoping to thread the needle correctly, she says a vaguely interrogative, and hopefully discussion-ending, “No?”

“Perhaps I’ll summon Steve,” Helena says, and it’s a threat—well, “threat”—that identifies the needle as very much not threaded.

If anyone else had ventured such an idea, Myka would have sparked her usual worry about their use of Steve, but he, however strangely, doesn’t seem to mind playing lie detector for Helena. There’s an elusive sweetness to their burgeoning agents-in-the-field partnership; Myka sees it, but she can’t, no matter how she tries, locate its underlying concept.

“Look,” she says, trying to imbue her voice with placation, “even if I wanted to dance with you, which I’m sorry but I don’t, because I hate dancing, I can’t get away from my resentment about having been forced into it by an artifact. I also resent that it was to house music.” She shudders as her brain now rebelliously recreates the experience: earsplitting noise underlain with disturbing vibration, all so loud and so physically overtaking that she could barely formulate any thought at all, despite her desperate need to formulate thought, because her body had found itself forced to press against Helena’s in ways that were infinitely more disturbing and created so much more noise than the music and she could find no way to think herself out.

Helena taps a finger against Myka’s left collarbone, a precise one-two-three-four clearly intended to call Myka back to the present. She says, deftly, “It was at the very least rhythmic. Aggressively.” The echo is playful: a different tack now, jollying. “But tell me,” she continues, still playing, but with focus, “why do you hate dancing?”

Finally, an easy one. “Because I’m terrible at it.”

“What does ‘terrible’ mean in this context?” Less whimsy now: she’s working her way toward something, but Myka can’t tell (and isn’t sure she wants to know) what. “Are you referring to some objective skill level? Some need for instruction? I would think that if one’s partner is willing and able to appreciate one’s movement, one could abandon such—”

“One—and when I say ‘one’ I mean ‘me’—is always observing oneself. Myself. Judging. There’s no such thing as real abandon.”

That gets her a little not-quite-derisive snort. “Of course there is.”

Myka doesn’t—genuinely doesn’t—believe that. Certainly she can move in response to emotion: a twirl to express a settling of satisfaction, a flail of arms to accompany a burst of belonging... but still always with that observing other inside, outside, seeing, evaluating.

That Helena can more fully inhabit a moment is really no surprise. That Helena has a hard time imagining how others’ interiority may differ from hers isn’t much of a surprise either.

Myka sighs and, for the sake of peace, tempers her absolutism with, “Not in public. That’s a bridge too far.”

Helena takes a moment, one involving no tilting of head. It renders her inscrutable. Then she says, “I’m not overly familiar with the American legal system.”

Are they through with dancing as a topic? Myka holds out a (probably vain) hope that they are, so she hurries to offer, “I’m no expert, but I was pre-law for a while, so if you want to know something in particular, maybe I...”

She trails off, for Helena’s head is moving left again as she says, with full disingenuity, “Are you aware of a law restricting dancing to public spaces?”

Myka is both disappointed (that dancing is still the topic) and cautiously pleased (that Helena is inflecting it this way, rather than insisting that Myka revise her feelings about public terpsichory).

Helena goes on, “And yet I doubt such a law exists. Consider a quite private space: for example, a bedroom. In theory, but also, in specific, for here in a bedroom we stand. Certainly it’s a space in which bodies have been known to move.” She says this without a salacious cast, which gifts Myka a quiet space in which to think. About this space. About how Helena moves in it. About how she herself moves in response.

After a time, Helena ventures, “My intent in mentioning that small slice of the past wasn’t to upset you.”

Myka believes her—is happy to believe her. “That’s not my intent either,” she says. “When I respond poorly. To anything... but particularly to a slice.”

“The past has many pitfalls,” Helena says, but not with gloom, as is sometimes the case when the past, as a concept, is at issue.

“It does.” A universal truth, regardless of how it’s said.

Helena shrugs, and she smiles now (her winner’s smile) as she says, “We could dance them away.”

Comedian, Myka thinks, and she laughs. “I honestly don’t think we could. Unless we’re in a musical and I’m not aware of it.”

“Would you be aware of it if we were in a musical?”

“That’s a good question,” Myka says, hoping—obviously against hope, but she goes with it—that they can shift to epistemological inquiry, because Helena does find musicals fascinating... but not all musicals: only the ones in which the numbers simply happen as part of the diegesis. “Like operetta, but more alchemical,” she’s said, and Myka has been glad of her own knowledge of Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as her familiarity with the musicals Helena is newly encountering, so as to understand how Helena is thinking her way to an appreciation, how she is enjoying that thinking.

“If that is a good question, then so is this one, I hope.” Helena holds her head still again, offering no preview of whatever utterance will follow. “Might we dance, such that the pitfalls of the past fall away? For the duration of the dance?”

In those words Myka hears the heft of what Helena tries, always, to keep at bay. “You don’t have to work so hard,” she says, meaning, as far as she knows what she means, that Helena could have just asked for what she needed. For Myka does give in when Helena asks, because another of Myka’s commitments, a far more constitutive one, is to trying—trying—to spare Helena the need to work so hard.

A slight right turn of head accompanies Helena’s response: “But what if I’d like to?” She adds a wisp of smile. “Work hard to change your mind,” she clarifies, though she doesn’t need to, and Myka knows she knows it.

Perhaps in response to all that knowledge, Helena extends her arms. “There’s no music,” she says. “You can very easily pretend it isn’t dancing at all.”

The concession is a jewel: a gift Myka is grateful to know for what it is.

She’s grateful because of another thing she knows: she gets things wrong. So, so often, she takes up situations, thinking to bend them into sense, but errs, twisting them wrong... but she can appreciate this. She can appreciate that Helena needs to know that she has worked hard to arrange for those pitfalls to fall away. For the duration of what may or may not be a dance.

Their arms are around each other. This is what is necessary. Regardless of any movement that might literally be defined as dancing, that is the definitional, essential, architecture.

END

Note:

I hope it’s apparent that I appreciate Bering and Wells as themselves—that is, as characters brought into being by Joanne and Jaime. But I appreciate also that “Bering and Wells” (for want of something better to call this televised catalyst and all it encompasses) has (have?) introduced me to invaluable, treasured friends; produced mind-boggling experiences; and all along motivated (forced?) me to do a lot of thinking, including rethinking my own writing, as well as the claiming of authorship, in contexts that extend well beyond the fanfictional.

I’m not going to enumerate the rules—or “rules”—I’ve set for myself here. Just know that there are rules. Writing is hard: sometimes making it an intellectual puzzle greases the wheels; sometimes it makes the wheels throw off sparks of grinding difficulty. This puzzle has worked both ways for me.

I find Bering and Wells to be, quite literally, something else, and I honestly don’t remember or understand how it (they) caught me. I don’t. Since the beginning, I’ve been playing catch-up with my nervous system—“Wait, how did this happen? What actually did happen?”—and the answer is, “Doesn’t matter, just keep writing it down.” This changed my life. And I am trying, always trying, to write like it did. (Having said that, most of these pieces aren’t as coherent/smooth as I’d like. To my shame. Seven is a lot, but that’s no excuse.)

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Appreciation #Architecture #that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ thing has always struck me as cloyingly facile #but I never sat down to think out why #and I think Christgau gets reasonably close to one reason #anyway I've dealt a lot with dancing #and the body and all #mostly in Ballet AU #and I really have nothing new or interesting to say about the physical practice #outside of that context #beringandwellsappreciationweek #day 1

[do-rey-me]

literally going to kill mr mark z danielewski i cannot believe theres a blue box just describing the architecture that ISNT in this stupid fucking maze that's so oblique i literally cannot wrap my head around it only to end with "picture that. in your dreams" PICTURE W H A T you fuckhead. god i hate this stupid book it's a masterpiece

#rey rambles #this book makes me so angry sometimes goddamn #house of leaves #the navidson record #my posts

[nientedenada]

Ancient Atmoran Animal Totems: True Names and Taboo Deformations

Originally posted on r/teslore.

I've a theory to float with y'all. It arose out of an old discussion between /u/emerson44 and /u/misticsan over whether the Ancient Atmoran Animal Totems were named and/or anthropomorphized as the Divinities.

Emerson: There is evidence in the "ancient Nordic" architecture that the totemic animals all represented an anthropomorphic deity. Take for instance the relief of the hawk etched into the corridor prior to every puzzle door:

http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Ancient_Nordic_Pantheon?file=HallmuralHawk.png

Even granting the hypothesis that these etchings reflect a final phase of development in the totemic religion, why shouldn't this final phase have occurred before the days of Ysgramor, such that the name "Kyne" and all she represents would be known and cherished by the Companions?

"Certain scholars believe these primitive people actually worshipped the divines as we know them, just in the form of these totem animals..." (The Dragon War)

Misticsan: That's indeed a good point: the Hawk totem might have been called "Kyne" too. We see a similar example in Fragmentae Abyssum Hermaeus Morus, where the Fox appears before Ysgramor and tells him "Know thou, mortal, that I am Shor".

There are other sources that suggest the opposite, though. For example, the last remnant of the Totemic Cult in Skyrim was the Ternion Monks, who literally call their Old Gods "Fox", "Bear" and "Wolf". Also, the monks complain that the current Nords call them "cult", "zealots", "fanatics", "worshipers of false gods".

I'm not certain we can take the engravings in the puzzle door corridors as images of the Totem animals as gods. If I saw these images in an real-world archaeological context of a totemic religion, I'd interpret them as shamans. They're humans dressed in animal skins. This interpretation for me is strengthened by the fact that the image for the Dragon totem is dressed like a dragon priest.

But, anyhow, back to the names of the Totems. I was wondering, could this discrepancy between 'Fox' or 'Shor' be an example of Taboo Deformation?

To quote a very entertaining write-up of the theory from an Atlas Obscura article

“Taboo deformation is one possible way for a word to change its meaning,” says Andrew Byrd, a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky who specializes in Indo-European languages. Basically, we are scared of the true names of certain beings or concepts, because to use them might mean we summon them, which we don’t want, or anger them, which we definitely don’t want, or simply make other humans mad at us, which is slightly less bad but still not ideal. The true name is powerful, and we normal humans can’t handle that power. So we avoid using the true name, but sometimes we still need to communicate with each other about those beings or concepts. That means we have to figure out a way to talk about something without using the actual word for it.

A great example of this is the word “bear,” in English. “Bear” is not the true name of the bear. That name, which I am free to use because the only bear near where I live is the decidedly unthreatening American black bear, is h₂ŕ̥tḱos. Or at least it was in Proto-Indo-European, the hypothesized base language for languages including English, French, Hindi, and Russian. The bear, along with the wolf, was the scariest and most dangerous animal in the northern areas where Proto-Indo-European was spoken. “Because bears were so bad, you didn’t want to talk about them directly, so you referred to them in an oblique way,” says Byrd.

H₂ŕ̥tḱos, which is pronounced with a lot of guttural noises, became the basis for a bunch of other words. “Arctic,” for example, which probably means something like “land of the bear.” Same with Arthur, a name probably constructed to snag some of the bear’s power. But in Germanic languages, the bear is called…bear. Or something similar. (In German, it’s Bär.) The predominant theory is that this name came from a simple description, meaning “the brown one.”

In Slavic languages, the descriptions got even better: the Russian word for bear is medved, which means “honey eater.” These names weren’t done to be cute; they were created out of fear.

Is it possible that the ancient Atmoran/Nord true name for the fox was Shor, and "fox" is the taboo deformation? In that case, shamans would speak the true names of those animals: Shor, Kyne, Dibella, Mara, Tsun, Stuhn, Jhunal, Ald/Alduin, Orkey in need (such as during the most sacred rituals), but would refer in common speech to the fox, hawk, moth, wolf, bear, whale, owl, dragon, and snake.

My theory is that this reticence about the true names of the animals receded with the creeping Anthropomorphization of the gods, which must also be influenced by the Nords' neighbours with their freely named gods. The animals' "true names" became the names of the gods, while the animals' taboo deformations became the ordinary animal names.

Further Discussion from Comments:

Misticsan replied: I like that explanation. After all, it's also the same reason that Abrahamic religions tend to use words such as "god" or "lord" (or their many, many translations) rather than a proper name like Yahweh. The very word "god" is theorized to come from an ancient Proto Indoeuropean root meaning "that which is invoked", after all.

I may even suggest an idea about where the taboo came from: the Dragon language.

We know from examples such as the Greybeards' speech at the end of The Horn of Jurgen Windcaller that there were names for the gods in the Dragon language. "Shor" is exactly the same as its Nordic name, for example. While it could be blamed on external influences, we also have "Kaan", which is different from "Kyne" but close enough that it could be its etymological ancestor.

Since we know that Draconic language had huge ceremonial importance, it could be that the names of the gods were reserved for texts and speeches in that language, while being taboo in the vulgar tongue of the masses. Unsurprisingly, after the Dragon Cult ended, the taboo lost its importance and Nords started using the names of the gods more freely, with the occasional linguistic evolution.

This of course doesn't change my argument regarding The Songs of the Return: that it's very likely that they were written long after the events they describe, just like how the Iliad was written long after Greece's Bronze Age.

I replied: Agreed. I'm not sure how it can be argued otherwise, since Songs of the Return has the elves of Skyrim wiped out by the end of Ysgramor's life, and we know they weren't till Harald's reign.

#tes lore #tesblr #Skyrim #Nords #Dragon Cult #niente lore