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the-blind-assassin-12 · 3 years

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Kar’taylir Darasuum

AN ESSAY ON LOVE IN MANDALORIAN CULTURE

A/N: This post has been a long time coming and I am SORRY for that. The lovely @darkmist111 wanted to know more about courtship and romance as it pertains to the world of Resol’nare, and well... I sort of got carried away with research and head cannons and... well, you’ll see.

Quick links: Resol’nare // Hokan’yc // Mando’a Dictionary

WC: 2.3k

Warnings: mentions of violence, death - they are a culture of warriors, my friends, it’s unavoidable.

thank you so much for this ask and for your patience while i worked on it! oh boy buckle up here we go:

Courtship

Courtship in Mandalorian culture is often a very short time period. Relationships move quickly from one stage to the next, because Mandalorians know better than many cultures that tomorrow is never promised. That being said, they don’t just pair off indiscriminately, and while physical appearance holds little to no weight in terms of attraction, there are other things that do certainly tip the scales.

For someone like Din, brought up in an extremely strict covert with an adherence to The Way of the Mandalore that leaves very little room for interpretation, the most attractive trait a person can have is skill as a fighter. Knowing that the person they are pledging their soul to is capable of not only watching their six in battle, but protecting themselves and any children that might be in the family (foundlings or otherwise) is extremely important to Mandalorians. As such, many courtships begin while Mandos are in the final stages of training, when they begin to leave the covert to go on missions. (See Hokan’yc for Din’s story of young love at this stage in his life, and meet Aashi Zurn, the Mando who bested him in the sparring chamber and won his heart in the process.)

Trust and loyalty are extremely important to Mandalorians when seeking a partner. Marriage in Mandalorian culture is meant to be forever- eternal- as Mandalorians believe that their souls live on after death, and remain connected to their loved ones until the end of time. Depending on the level of anonymity the individuals in question choose as a lifestyle (i.e. helmets on at all times or removed in front of others, names known or unknown), Mandalorians might show their trust in a partner by telling them something personal about themselves, something that they would normally keep a secret either out of pride or protection. This is usually returned in kind, a sort of exchanging of secrets that begins the binding of their two souls together that will continue throughout their relationship so that if/when they choose to marry, they are speaking the truth when they say that they know one another- in a way that no one else ever will.

Some small ways that Mandalorians will show affection or appreciation for one another during their courtship and long into their relationship (because Mandalorians don’t just fall in love and settle, they keep falling deeper into it, letting it grow stronger) include: helping them clean their armor or weapons, tending to any aches and pains from old injuries- most Mandalorians make their own herbal salves that they use to soothe inflammation or to help heal scarring, and sharing from your own personal blend to provide comfort for your partner goes a long way. (This will come up in more than one way in Resol’nare, so look out for that in the future.) sharing or preparing a favorite meal, and in the event that they really want to emphasize their feelings, they will give a piece of their own armor to their partner, showing that they are ready to view them as a part of themselves, ready to protect them with their own life if necessary.

The tradition of wearing the armor of their beloved comes from ancient times, when a Mandalorian fell in love with another who was a member of an enemy clan and had been captured by her people. To protect her lover from those who would kill them on sight just based on the sigil or coloring of their armor, she traded some of her plates with some of theirs so that they could escape unnoticed. Once two Mandalorians are wed, not even blood feuds between clans can come between them, so the exchanging of armor became seen as a sort of intention to marry for many Mandalorians.

Because Mandalorian culture takes root in various other cultures, some traditions from those other cultures cross over into theirs. For example, while no Mandalorian would ever make the mistake of asking a woman’s father for her hand in marriage and Mandalorian women are seen as complete equals and therefore able to make their own choices when it comes to their partners, some clans will still partake in common practices like introducing their intended to their family or announcing their engagement to their families and loved ones before making it known to others in the community. While jewlery is extremely uncommon in Mandalorian culture (unless it is functional, such as a beskar collar style necklace) engagement tokens like pendants engraved with the two names or rings either without stones, or rings with low profile stones inlaid into the bands- in some cases a gemstone will be embedded within the metal on the underside of the band, where it makes contact with the finger- are considered standard in most other cultures, so they are sometimes still exchanged but are in no way necessary to solidify an engagement or an intent to marry.

Marriage

The actual vows exchanged between Mandalorians are short and to the point, and there is no required ceremony, no officiant or witness needed, no record keeping of any sort, so the actual wedding is usually done just between the two individuals in private. Traditionally they are as follows:

"Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar'tome, mhi me'dinui an, mhi ba'juri verde" which translates to "We are one when together, we are one when parted, we will share all, we will raise warriors."

Once the vows are said, the marriage is official and the Riduurok bond is forged and must be acknowledged and respected by all Mandalorians.

Newlyweds will lift the helmet of their spouse once the vows have been sworn so that they may be sealed more intimately. In the case of Mandalorians who keep their faces hidden, this may be the first time that one or both of them sees the other without their helmet. In other cases, the removal of their riduur’s armor is merely symbolic.

Although there are no formalities that need to happen in order to legitimize a marriage, there are of course some traditions and rituals that are completed which Mandalorians believe safeguard and strengthen their bond with their spouse. These include getting specific tattoos, and adding each other’s sigil to armor or weapons.

Riduurok Tattoos

Tattooing is an important part of Mandalorian culture. Regardless of their culture of origin, where they come from, or how they choose to interpret the Creed, it is rare to come across an adult Mandalorian with no tattoos. Even the New Mandalorians under Satine’s pacifist regime continued to carry on tattooing, though not as extensively or ritualistically as the more orthodox communities like the one that Din, Paz and The Armorer come from. For them it was done more for decorative purposes. Though their designs still pay homage to shapes and motifs that are meaningful to all Mandalorians, they also include more aesthetic design elements such as florals, vines or stars.

Typically a Warrior will receive their first tattoo when they complete their training at thirteen; a thick black chevron shaped cuff on their left bicep. This symbolizes that they are part of the larger Tribe of Mandalorians outside of their own clans, and serves to remind them of the duty that they have to protect all Mandalorians. They have to look at it each time they don or remove their armor, and in the abhorrent event that they are stripped of their armor in defeat, the ink serves as symbolic beskar so that they remain protected in the afterlife. Bands and chevrons are added to symbolize achievements in battle or heroic action to protect their covert.(Din has five bands on his left arm, the latest one just below his elbow- his first when he completed mandatory training at 13, his second when he completed additional elite training, his third when helped relocate the covert to Nevarro- see Hokan’yc- his original covert was located on Dantooine- his fourth when he was injured protecting a group of foundlings, and the fifth after claiming the Darksaber. He would absolutely have more bands had he not spent so much time away from the covert. He absolutely will have more bands by the time Resol’nare ends.) For Mandalorians who live a long life or are extremely skilled fighters, it is not uncommon for these bands to cover the entire arm from mid bicep to wrist. If more space is needed, another chain of bands is added to the left thigh ranging downwards. It is said that no Mandalorian has ever completely covered their entire left side, simply because in a war-based culture, life expectancy is cut short.

Mythosaur skulls, clan signets, troop affiliations and words or short phrases in Mando’a are also typical designs that Mandalorians may choose to have done. The Mythosaur is usually tattooed on the back while the right bicep is where Mandalorians will honor their families in their chosen way. Usually it is by adding their clan signet, names of loved ones or parents, or even symbols or patterns that are significant to their culture of origin. ( Navina has a tattoo on her right arm to pay tribute to her mother’s- who was a foundling- culture. It will be revealed in an upcoming chapter so that is all that I can say about that! Din also has the Mythosaur skull inside of a triangle on the right side of his chest, and his Mudhorn signet on his right shoulder.)

Riduurok tattoos are placed on the left side or center of the chest, over the individual’s heart, and are done as soon as possible after marriage vows are sworn. Taking the shape of the Kar'ta Beskar, Mandalorians personalize them by adding their spouse’s name in Mando’a in the empty space in the middle of the design. Like the arm bands, these are also meant to symbolize armor of sorts. They represent the way that married couples remain connected no matter if they are together or apart; that they are one, an integral part of the other, even in death. They also signify the strength gained through marriage, as well as the protection a Mandalorian vows to provide for their partner. Love is seen as something that fortifies, never weakens, and that is represented in this tattoo as well.

(Terrible graphic made with love by me)

This particular tattoo comes directly from a Mandalorian myth predating modern record keeping. Legend has it that long ago, a Mandalorian warrior returned home from battle, eager to see his riduur after so much time away. When he arrived, however, he found only her lifeless form, the soul of the one he had tied himself to no longer inhabiting the flesh and bone of her body. She had been slain, taken from him and from their life together, and it opened in him a new capacity for rage, something far more fierce than fire. It is said that in the moment that the Mandalorian warrior saw what had happened in his absence, vengeance itself was unleashed into existence.

The warrior, fueled by this new urge, this extreme desire to avenge the death of his wife, tracked down the marauders who were responsible for her death and killed them one by one. The last of them, as he watched the Mandalorian take his accomplices’ lives, did not beg or grovel. He could see that it would do no good. Instead, he confessed that he did not think that Mandalorians had the capacity to love so deeply as to inspire such retaliation, that he did not think Mandalorians were open to things that could make them weak, things like love.

“Only fools like you would think that love makes one weak.” he spat at the man. “True love is power, it is strength- it is the joining of two into one and nothing, not even death can diminish it. But you? Death will erase your soul and before long you will be forgotten.”

The Mandalorian warrior killed the final marauder then, and as he did the pure rage that he felt upon discovering the death of his riduur quieted. Instead, he felt her presence, as though she were there to wrap her arms around him. He felt her strength enter his heart, and though he would mourn her loss immensely, he knew that she would never truly be gone, that he would always carry her and that they would reunite when his journey came to an end. As a tribute to his riduur and what she would always mean to him, the warrior etched her name over his heart in ink, encasing it in the oblong diamond shape of the Kar'ta Beskar, symbolizing that she is the source of his strength, a kind of armor that protected him from facing eternity alone. From then on, Mandalorians added the Riduurok Tattoo into their marriage rituals.

Clan Sigils

In the case that both Mandalorians have already been assigned sigils, or if they have sigils that they inherited from their own clans, they will either combine both symbols into one new one, or they will add their spouse’s sigil right beside their own on their armor and/or weapons. (In Resol’nare, Navina’s beskar kal that she inherited from her father- thanks of course to Firo- displayed the sigils of both of her parents, as well as her own name)

If only one of the two can claim a sigil as their own distinct mark, they will extend it to their spouse as they extend every part of themselves through marriage, and if neither one has been assigned a sigil, they will both take the sigil of the first one who is assigned one.

It is completely up to the individuals regarding whether or not they will choose to take their spouse’s name- the important thing is that they are under the same sign, as their sigils are yet another bond that they carry into the afterlife that helps them reunite once both have rejoined the Manda.

THANK YOU AGAIN TO @darkmist111 for this request. I had a lot of fun thinking about and writing this, and it was a great way for me to finally dive back into the world of Resol’nare. :)

Thank you for reading! Please feel free to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from the tags! :)

tags: @something-tofightfor @alraedesigns @pheedraws @valkblue @malionnes @gollyderek @fific7 @becs-bunker @commanderlola @greatcircle79 @cannedsoupsucks @dihra-vesa @marauderskeeper @disgruntledspacedad

#the mandalorian #the mandalorian fic #head canon #the mandalorian HCs #resol'nare #din djarin #oc: navina harsa #din djarin x navina harsa #din x navina #mando'a #courtship marriage and romance in mandalorian culture #this is an essay #with some made up myths #and some hastily made graphics thrown in for good measure #i just really love mando culture #i would swear the creed right now if given the chance #anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk #sorry not sorry for the length of one section in particular

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sarita-daniele · 3 years

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Hi, angel! Hope you're doing alright 💓 (hola ángel! También hablo español :) ) I was wondering if you could give some advices in starting out in an arts career?

Hola amigx, ¡perdón que nunca vi tu mensajito! I’m not on my Tumblr very often and definitely forget to check my messages. Luckily my favorite causita @luthienne told me you’d messaged me!

I don’t know what arts discipline you’re in, so feel free to let me know if the advice I have doesn’t apply to you (and ignore it!). There are so many ways to build an arts career, but I’m happy to share some things I’ve learned through trial and error along the way.

(Outrageously long post below break!)

Educate yourself in arts technique, but also study widely.

Techniques are important in art, but only as important as the concepts behind them. When I was younger, I wowed people by drawing near-photographic portraits, but that technical talent and skill alone couldn’t make me a professional artist. Memorable artwork has not just a how, but a why. It isn’t just the object but the story behind the object, and the meaning of the object in the world. Art is about what interests you, what makes you think, what you most value and want to change in this world. So as you build an arts career, learn the techniques behind drawing, woodworking, casting, writing, music-making, whatever your discipline is, but take time, if you can, to also study history, sociology, anthropology, ecology, linguistics, politics, or whatever else you’re drawn to conceptually. Study as widely as you can.

The studio art program I went through (a public university in the US) was very technique-forward; we signed up for classes according to technique, like printmaking or small metals, learned those techniques, completed technique-based assignments. Then I did a one-term exchange at arts university in the UK that was very concept-forward. We had no technical courses, just exhibition deadlines, and what mattered in critique was the concept. Both of these schools had their strengths and flaws, but what I learned was that, to be a practicing artist, I needed both technique and concepts that I genuinely cared about and could stand behind. If I could go back and change anything, I would probably take fewer studio courses (after graduating, I couldn’t afford access to a wood shop, metal shop, or expensive casting materials, and lost many of those skills) and more courses in sociology, Latin American studies, linguistics, ecology, anthropology, etc., because my artwork today centers on social justice, racial justice, Latinx stories and histories, educational access and justice, the politics of language, and community ethics.

And please know that whenever I talk about seeking an education, I’m not talking solely about institutional spaces. College career tracks in the arts (BFA, MFA, etc., much less high-cost conservatory programs) are not accessible to everyone and aren’t the only way to establish an arts career. You can study technique and learn about the world using any educational space accessible to you: nonprofits that offer programming in your community, online resources, Continuing Education programs. And of course, self-education: read as much as you possibly can!

Know the value of your story.

I come from a Cuban/Peruvian family and grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. My father’s family fled political violence surrounding the Cuban Revolution and came to the U.S. when he was a teenager. My mother was born in Brooklyn to Peruvian parents on work visas and moved back to Lima in her childhood. I grew up with these two cultures present and deeply embedded in our household, in our language, our food, our sense of humor, our sense of history. And yet, some residual assimilation trauma still affected me. I drifted towards the most American things, the whitest things, English authors and Irish music, in part because I enjoyed them but also because those were the things I saw valued in society. I wanted to fit in, wanted to be unique but not different, wanted to prove that I could navigate all spaces. The reality of marginalized identities in America is that our country tells us our identities are only valuable when they can be seen as exotic, while still kept inferior to the dominant, white American narrative (note that this “us” is a general statement, not meant to make assumptions about how you identify or what country you live in).

But as an artist, all I have is my story, and who I am. I wasn’t willing to look at it directly. For years, I avoided doing so. It turns out, though, that I couldn’t actually begin my career until I reckoned with myself and learned to value everything about myself. To fully acknowledge my story, my history, my cultural reality, my sense of language, and my privileges. So I encourage young artists to look always inward, to ask questions about themselves, their families, and what made them who they are.

The reason for doing this is to understand the source from which you make art. Sometimes, however, for marginalized artists, the world warps this introspection into a trap, pigeonholing us into making art only “about” our identities, because that work is capital-I-Important to white audiences who want to tokenize our traumas. This is the white lens, and if anything, I try to understand myself as deeply as I can so that I can make art consciously for my community, not for that assumed white audience.

Know that your career doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s, or like anything you’ve envisioned up to this point.

As a high schooler I imagined that a life in the arts meant me in a studio, drawing and making, selling my work, getting exhibitions near and far, and gaining recognition. It was a solitary vision, one with a long history in the arts, rooted in the idea of individual genius. My career ended up completely different. Today, my arts projects involve teaching, collaborating, collecting interviews and oral histories, and creating public installations, rarely in traditional galleries or museums.

As you work towards an arts career, figure out what does and doesn’t work for you: the kind of art you like and don’t like, the kinds of spaces that feel comfortable and those that don’t. I always thought I wanted to be part of traditional galleries, so I got a job working in a high-end art gallery in Boston during my grad program. Once in that space, however— even though I found the space calming and the work beautiful— I realized that there was something that I deeply disliked about the commodified art world. I didn’t like that we were selling art for over $10,000, that our exhibitions were geared exclusively towards collectors and wealthy art-buyers. The work was often technically masterful, but didn’t move or connect with me on a deeper level, and I realized that was because it wasn’t creating any change in the world. I liked work that shifted the needle, that made the world more inclusive and equitable, that centered marginalized stories (that gallery represented 90% white artists). I liked artwork that people made together, which drew me to collaborative art. I liked artwork that was accessible to everyone, not just the wealthy, which drew me to public art. I liked art exhibited in non-institutional spaces, which led me to community spaces. Since I was in an MFA for Creative Writing, I liked interdisciplinary art that engaged performance, technology, text, that was participatory and not just a 2D or 3D object. Figuring out all of these things led me to apply to my first major arts job: as a teaching artist in a community nonprofit that made art for social change in collaboration with local youth, in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood.

My career path didn’t look like anything I expected, but I love it. The bulk of my income comes from teaching creative writing and art classes for nonprofits, working as a core member of a public arts nonprofit, and freelance consulting for book manuscripts. I love being an educator and consider it part of my creative practice. I love that I’m constantly collaborating with and talking to other artists. I love working with books and public art every day. I publish poetry, fiction, and literary translations, and exhibit artwork I’ve created in the studio and through funded opportunities.

Fellow artists tell me often that I’m lucky, that my “day jobs” are all within the arts. But there are downsides to the way I’ve chosen to structure my career. I’m constantly balancing many projects, and my income is unstable. It’s difficult to save and plan towards the future,. I get by, but financial instability isn’t an option for many artists with families and dependents, with debts, medical expenses, and just isn’t the preferred lifestyle for a lot of people. I know artists who worked office jobs for years to support their practice and gain financial stability. I know artists who had entire careers as lawyers or accountants before becoming artists full time. I know artists who teach in public schools or work as substitute teachers. I know artists who are business owners and artists who work in policy and politics. I know artists who work in framing stores and shipping warehouses while being represented by galleries. These are all arts careers, and I admire every one of them. So as you build your career, don’t feel like it has to look like anyone’s else’s, like there’s anything you “should” be doing. Focus on the kind of artwork you want to make and what kind of work-life balance is best for you, then structure your career around that as best you can.

Any job you use to support yourself can connect to an arts career!

I get asked often by young people looking for jobs what kinds of jobs will best propel them towards an arts career. I believe that any kind of job can connect to and support an arts career, and I know that some suggestions out there in the arts world (like “get an unpaid internship at an art gallery!” or “become a studio apprentice to a well-known artist!”) assume a certain amount of privilege. So I want to break down how different kinds of jobs can connect to your art career:

1) Jobs that allow for the flexibility and mental capacity to create. My friends who work restaurant jobs while going to auditions fall into this category. Who work as bartenders in evening so that they can be in the studio by day. Who dog-walk or babysit or nanny because the timing and flexibility allows for arts opportunities. My friends who are Lyft drivers or work in deliveries. These are often jobs outside of a creative field, but they can be beneficial because they don’t drain your creative batteries, so to speak. You still have your creative brain fully charged, and some jobs (like dog-walking) even allow for good mental processing (you can think through creative problems). As long as the job doesn’t drain you to the point where you have no energy at all, these kinds of jobs can be great because they allow time and space for your creative work.

2) Jobs that place you in arts spaces, arts adjacent spaces, or spaces where you can learn about material/technique. My sculptor friends who work in hardware stores, quarries, foundries, or in construction. My printmaker friend who interned with graphic designers. My writer friends who work in bookstores and libraries, artists who work in art supply stores. My friend who worked with her dad’s painting company and got to improve her precision as a painter, which she then took back to the canvas. My teen students who get paid to work on murals or get stipend payments for making art at the nonprofit I work for. My filmmaker friends who worked on film crews. Friends who worked as theater ushers, in ticket sales, or as janitorial staff at museums. All of these jobs kept these artists adjacent to their artwork, whether through access to tools, materials, supplies, or books, through networking and conversations with other artists, or through skillsets that could enhance their art.

3) Jobs that deeply engage another interest of yours, that bring you joy or can influence your work in other ways. If there’s a job that has nothing to do with your art but that you would love, do it! First, because I believe that the things we’re passionate about get integrated into our art, and second, because any job that gives you peace of mind and joy creates a positive base from which you can create. My friend who worked at a stable because she got to be around horses. My friends who worked at gyms or coaching sports because it kept them active. My friend who worked in a bike repair shop because he was obsessed with biking. An artist I knew who worked at the children’s science museum because she loved being around kids and planetariums. An artist who worked at a mineral store because rocks made her happy. If you have the opportunity, work doing things you like without worrying about whether it directly feeds your arts career.

Because believe it or not, all jobs you work can intersect in some way with your art. You’re creative— you find those connections! A Nobel-Prize winning poet helped his dad on the potato farm and wrote his best-known poem about it. Successful novelists have written about their time working in hair salons and convenience stores. A great printmaker I know who worked in a flower shop began weaving botanical forms and plant knowledge into her designs. The key in an arts career is to see all your experiences as valuable, to find ways that they can influence your art, and to be constantly thinking about and observing the world around you.

As for me, I worked as a tennis instructor, a tennis court site supervisor, an academic advisor, an art gallery intern, and a coffee shop barista before and during my work in the arts!

Let go of objective measures of what it means to be good.

I was always an academic overachiever. Top of my class, merit scholarships, science fair awards, AP credit overload, the whole thing. On the one hand, I grew up in a house where education was valued and celebrated, and my parents emphasized the importance of doing my best in school— not getting good grades, but working hard, doing my personal best, and reading and learning all I could. I loved school. I loved academics. And I’m not saying this to brag, but to lay the groundwork for something I struggled with in the arts.

It is jarring to be an academic overachiever and enter an arts career. I thrived off of objective value systems: study, work hard, get an A. If I worked hard and learned what I was supposed to learn, I earned recognition, validation, and opportunity.

And then I entered the arts. The arts are entirely subjective. We hear it over and over— great artists get rejected hundreds of times, certain art forms require cutthroat competition, etc. —but it’s hard to understand the subjectivity of the art world (and the entrenched discrimination and commercial interests that affect who gets opportunities and who doesn’t) until you’re trying to live as an artist. That you can work hard on something, give all of your time and physical effort and mental and emotional energy to it, only to have it rejected. That what you think is good isn’t what another person thinks is good. That there is a magical alchemy in the act of creation that can’t be taught, or learned, but must be felt, and that you can be working to find that light while actively others try to extinguish it. That you can be good and work hard, yet still not get chosen for the awards, the exhibitions, the publications. If you chased being “the best” your whole life, you’re now in a world where there is no “best”, where greatness is subjective, where the idea of competitive greatness is actually detrimental to artists supporting each other, and where work that sells or connects to white, cishetero traditions is still the most valued.

After struggling with this for a long time, I came to the conclusion that the most important thing to me now is making the art I want to make, the art only I can make, whether or not it fits what arts industries are looking for or what’s going to win awards. If I make art I believe in from a healthy mental and emotional place, doors will open, even if they aren’t the doors I expected. So try to let go of any sense that worth comes from external validation. Learn to accept critical feedback when it is given kindly, thoughtfully, and constructively. Surround yourself with friends and artists who who can talk to about your work, who build up your work and help you think through it rather than cutting you down. Don’t believe anyone in the arts world who thinks they get to be the arbiters of what’s “good” and who has “what it takes”. People have probably said things like that to the artists you most admire, and if they’d listened, you wouldn’t have experienced art that changed your life.

Work to gain skills in basic business, marketing, and finances for artists.

Many artists (at least where I am in the U.S.) go through an entire arts education without receiving resources or training in the financial side of the arts world. Your arts career will likely involve some degree of self-promotion and marketing, creating project budgets and grant proposals, artist statements and bios, sorting out taxes, and other economic elements. I can’t speak to other countries, but for artists in the U.S., taxes can be extremely complex. If you’re awarded a stipend, grant, fellowship, or employed for gigs or one-time projects, you’ll likely be taxed as an independent contractor and have to deduct your own taxes. Through residencies and exhibitions, you may pull income in multiple states and countries, which can also affect taxation. If you’re an artist who doesn’t have access to resources about finance and taxation in your arts program or who doesn’t independently have expertise in those fields, I recommend finding ways to educate yourself early: online resources, low cost courses, or even just taking your financially-savvy friends out for a coffee!

ANYWAY SORRY FOR THE LONG POST I HOPE SOMETHING IN THIS DIATRIBE WAS HELPFUL I HOPE THERE WEREN’T TOO MANY TYPOS AND I hope you have the most wonderful, fulfilling arts career! <3

#resources #writing life #arts life #arts career #visual art #studio art program #mfa #bfa #arts education #i have no chill when you ask me questions like this #long post

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lumikinetic · 4 years

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Mega Spoilers She Ra S4

Under the cut!! Last chance!!

1. Double Trouble

God I love them I love them I love them. As I said on twitter I speculated that Double Trouble was what Catra needed. A friend. Sure, Scorpia was there but she was never gonna recognise Scorpia for who she was and what she meant to Scorpia and true to form, it was only after she realised Scorpia was truly never coming back that she honestly started to miss her. But she was never going to appreciate Scorpia I think because she was too much like Adora. She shows kindness. She shows empathy and love and joy, all the things the Rebellion stands for, all the things Adora left her for and when Scorpia told her she was a bad friend and left her, like Adora did, she became a second Adora in her eyes. Another person who left. Now Double Trouble (who I've been calling Dub, first to save space on my tweets and then it just stuck), they're nothing like Adora. They're treacherous and sneaky and dirty, just like she believes herself to be, like she has to believe herself to be, because otherwise she would have to admit she's worthy of love, friendship, happiness and worthy of Adora, and so Catra feels like she can really be friends with them. She doesn't want to show it because she's still hurting from being burned before but Dub's not having that shit they pick up on it real fast and tease her about having fun. Not even beginning to delve into the genius of using Dub as a narrative device of calling everybody on their bullshit, Dub then finds Catra after her fight with Hordak and gives her the straight facts but what I really liked was they didn't say "I know there's still good in you", they said "you were never cut out to be the bad guy" like that was so smart of them. Dub's thing is that they know everyone, they know how they think and act so they know if they tell Catra she's still good (like Adora keeps saying) her abandonment issues are gonna kick in and she's gonna lose it and lash out. By telling her she wasn't cut out to be a villain, oh man where do I even start?

It's harsh, yes but maybe Catra believes she deserves harsh. If she is told she's still good, that gives hope and she's had too much false hope to ever accept that again

Because Dub can see people for who they really are, they can see Catra has been left too many times. Adora left, Scorpia left, she thought Dub left and they accurately predicted that would break her, Glimmer will return to Bright Moon at some point and I think there might be some reluctant bonding while they're in space, so Dub gave Catra an out. "Everyone else left. You can too." That's what they're really saying, I think.

Putting her down provides a new option for Catra yes, but it's still putting her down. It was mean, true but again, I think it's what Catra believes she deserves right now. And so she resigns. She collapses, defeated and when Glimmer shows up, she says she'd rather die because it's better than leaving, even if it's by her own free will. She's had enough of leaving.

Of course, Catra turns herself right around and trades Hordak in for Horde Prime, pledging her allegiance to a newer, superior, stronger Hordak but she can't unhear what Double said to her. She can't unfeel her feelings, no matter how hard she tries. And that seed will grow and grow in her mind until eventually the time will come where she's gotta make a decision - does she finally leave for herself and shed herself of the Horde or does she continue to play at being the villain, because she knows she doesn't have what it takes to be the hero?

2. Catra

Catra is a princess! Of course she's a princess! The biggest evidence, the cat that can be seen in the corner when Light Hope shows all the princesses to Adora, telling her about the purpose of She-Ra. I have no idea why but the fact Catra's head gear make a metallic sound when it hits the floor when she takes it off somehow made me think it was an heirloom or something, maybe a token of royalty. And if Entrapta doesn't need a Runestone to qualify as a princess, then why can't Catra?! But anyway I think Catra knows she's a princess. She's never going to admit it of course, but she knows. And I think that's where her abandonment issues stem from. The Horde obviously lied to her, like they did to Scorpia and how her family let the Horde have the Black Garnet but Catra is smart, smarter than she gives herself credit for. She figures it out and realises she's been lied to. She doesn't leave, maybe because she's too caught up in her emotions to decide what to do, because she's found someone she can trust in Adora and she doesn't want to leave her, or simply because the easiest thing to do is stay. Whatever the reason, she stays, knowing that her family never actually rejected her but the self-doubt remains and grows. What if they did? What if my family never wanted me? What if they cast me out for something I did? What if they turned me over to the Horde in exchange for keeping their lands safe? And when Adora leaves her, everything she questioned becomes true except the focus shifts from her kingdom and a possibility to her best friend and a certainty.

Along comes Double Trouble. They see she's not a villain. They see she just wants to belong to something. And they put it together too so they plant the seed. What if my family wanted me all along? What if I could leave? Everyone else did. What if I went ahead and did what I want to do instead of what I have to do? And when the time comes for her to decide if she's going to leave and forge her own path, she can decide to head to Adora or seek out her kingdom. If you wanna get really into it, you could say Catra is a representation of her kingdom, like the other princesses are and it gives an insight into what her kingdom might look like and be, culturally. Perfuma controls nature, so she's a very spiritual hippie type person. Frosta is cold and distant (even though she opens up, that's how we meet her). Mermista is uncaring, like the ocean when it kills you and no one will ever know because it is a vast void both above and below the surface I have a fear of the ocean, in case you could not tell. Catra is cunning, proud and vicious. Caring when she wants to be but hostile because she feels she needs to be. Catra's kingdom is probably an outland tribe, not too far off from what the Crimson Waste is like, but with laws and guards and stuff like any other kingdom, shunned from the princess alliance for their unpredictable nature (you might even say the princess alliance left them?) and so have trust issues with princesses. This is why Scorpia was obviously a Princess, because she was so happy and positive all the time like the other princesses but Catra hides it so well because she's naturally mean and calloused. It'd be so dope if Catra was an Anti-Princess, like the Dark Jedi in Star Wars.

Alternatively, she was nice and her kingdom is nice but the Horde rubbed off on her. Either way, Catra's arc ends when she starts to attempt to be good and finding her kingdom might be the first step in doing that. My ideal ending for Catra's character arc, regardless of whether she is a princess or not, is she finds someone or something to help her overcome her PTSD, abandonment issues and anger management problems (I REALLY HOPE IT'S RAZZ) and she joins the Rebellion as a black ops agent, doing infiltration and sabotage missions but she keeps her S4 outfit and everyone just lets her cause they all agree it fucks. (Noelle please give me vigilante black ops Catra but give her therapy first.)

Quick thing I wanted to add before posting after reading back over this - the scene where she removes her head gear and sobs on the floor of the control room. I think she's wondering why she didn't just leave with Adora. Why she didn't just leave to find her real family. Why she didn't just leave to find herself. Why she didn't just leave. And it eats away at her soul every goddamn day she spends in the Fright Zone, but she can't stop now, she's come too far.

3. Glimmer

Oh man. Oh man. This Micah/Glimmer reunion is gonna be HEAVY. Truly, the She-Ra fandom is Atlas. Honestly, I wanna say it was Shadow Weaver that started to turn her into Dark Glimmer but I don't think that was it. This whole season, Shadow Weaver has just been like "bro I am just s. I am just sitting here". She's very literally done nothing wrong. She's just been gardening and giving Glimmer magic lessons. Dub is to blame with that. Their twisting of Glimmer's mind set her on that path and all it took was Adora to disagree with her on one thing and she exploded and thought "if no one will fix it, then I'll do it". Her regret at what she'd done on Horde Prime's ship probably means she'll profusely apologise but that's really all there is to say on that issue. Other that, everything I can say about Glimmer will come to me when she meets Micah.

4. Scorpia

Hell yes my baby. Episode 6 was so good. When I think about Scorpia and Catra's relationship, I think about this line by Alex Hunter AKA HiTop Films on YouTube in one of his Spider-Man essays I forget which one (but you should go watch all of them anyway cause they're all really good and go watch his other stuff and support him on Patreon, if you can) about the relationship between MJ and Harry in the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy:

Maybe Harry (Scorpia) loves her (Catra) the best Harry Osborn COULD love someone, but it's not the love she needs.

It doesn't fit Scorpia and Catra exactly so I'll explain. Obviously Scorpia loves Catra a lot but Catra's not the right person she needs to love, nor does Catra need love herself. She will need it, eventually, but right now Catra needs therapy. She needs help before she needs love and she needs to work out her own issues. That leaves Scorpia with a big heart and no one to fill it with. Ironically it's a robot that helps her realise Catra isn't good for her. It's hard for Scorpia to hear but Emily has to show her that Entrapta was her real friend and they had fun together and what Catra and her have is not fun. Then the next step in moving out of Catra's abusive relationship is the Royal Hall. It's here that Scorpia has to admit to herself that the Horde weren't pleasant, if tough, diplomats who simply negotiated ownership of the Runestone. She doesn't even know any of the members of her family except her grandfather and even then she was too young to remember him and she realises that the Horde eradicated her culture when the colonised the place and she's hurt. She's really and truly broken and to make matters worse, Emily is still trying to tell her that her friend isn't really her friend. It's difficult to face these two massive truths but Scorpia hides her pain. Not to run from it, like Catra, but because she's Scorpia, and Scorpia doesn't give up. So she seeks out the princesses. She knows she's a princess so she hopes she'll find some belonging there and she's right. After some understandable hostility, she's greeted. Not very warmly but still greeted. Her first friend is Perfuma, which I think is so fitting because Perfuma is the princess most like Scorpia, she's all about love and positivity and acceptance so of course she's gonna be the first to treat her with an equal amount of kindness that Scorpia would readily give anyone and everyone else. Frosta is next, the princess who knows what it's like to be an outsider, having shut off her kingdom from the outside world for so long and it's at Bright Moon Scorpia finally gets to give a real hug, not one where people squirm out of her grasp. One where she gets hugged back.

Backtracking a little, when Scorpia said to Emily that Catra has been under a lot of pressure and that's why she's acting this way, I don't think she was making excuses for her behaviour, I think she really notices how close Catra is to snapping completely. Since the moment she realised Adora wasn't coming back to the Horde, Catra has just been completely shit on, episode after episode. Nothing goes right for her and it piles on and on and on and Scorpia's been right beside her this whole time watching it happen. Except Catra doesn't have her optimism, she's got spite and rage so she can't handle it as well as Scorpia and Scorpia knows this so even when she admits Catra was abusive and cruel, she still wants to help, because she is a good person. And good people help others, help those in pain, no matter what.

#she ra #she ra season 4 spoilers #she ra s4 #spop spoilers #catra #double trouble #glimmer #king micah #scorpia #she ra spoilers

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breeeliss · 5 years

Note

*bursts into your inbox* WEDDING!!! We could all use a nice allurance wedding snippet 💖💙

//allurance

“lance what are human weddings like?”

he was just on the edge of sleep when allura asked, the hand stroking his hair having stopped a while ago when his breathing deepened. but her whispered question pulled him awake as he tightened the arm around her waist. “mmwha was tha’?”

“weddings,” allura giggled. “tell me about weddings.”

lance craned his neck to stare at the clock on his bedside table. “now? naked in bed at two in the morning?”

allura walked her fingers across his pectorals. “i can’t sleep. i’m still trembling from earlier.”

“really? that good, huh?”

she gently smacked his shoulder as his whole body shook with laughter. “oh shut up. i’m not the one who fell asleep right afterwards. tired you out, did i?”

“never. i’ll always have enough energy for you. and i did not fall asleep, i was just catching my breath. i’m a healthy virile young man, thank you very much.”

allura snorted. “you’re a pussycat, lance. scratch behind your ears just the right way and you’ll melt. you’re very easy to please.”

“how dare. so rude.”

she kissed him on the tip of his nose before settling in between his legs and resting her chin on his chest. “you’re avoiding my question.”

“i mean there are a lot of different types of human weddings. culturally different, you know? you have to be more specific.”

“alright, cuban weddings then.”

“are you doing research for anything i should know about?”

allura nibbled on her lip. “nothing specific, i just…well i don’t know. i just got to thinking that when we got married – ”

“when?” lance grinned. “not ‘if’?”

she averted her gaze, but not before he pressed two quick kisses to her embarrassed smile. “you know what i mean! stop teasing.”

“i’m not teasing. it just makes me happy hearing you talk about our wedding as a thing that’ll definitely happen as opposed to something that might happen.”

“well of course. obviously not now, but i like the thought of us eventually doing it. it feels like such a natural next breath for the two of us. but we’re talking a multispecies wedding, so some thought should be put into it. it’s never too early for that.”

lance smiled. “well i’ve been thinking about our wedding since the day you agreed to go out with me.”

allura winked. “of course you have. now come on! weddings!”

“be more specific! what do you want to know?”

“how do engagements work? do you exchange tokens?”

lance nodded and ran finger down her left ring finger. “we do rings. so during a proposal you would kneel in front of the person you’re proposing to, present them the ring, and hope they say yes. it’s supposed to be a really spontaneous thing. the point is to surprise the person you’re proposing to. but that’s just the engagement ring. during a wedding ceremony, you both exchange weddings bands on top of that.”

allura held her left hand out in front of her. “we don’t exchange anything physical. we do tattoos.”

“like permanent ones?”

“yes. so you have to actually plan a proposal and tell the person in advance. it definitely isn’t spontaneous. you have to agree on a mark that you feel represents your relationship. some people choose old altean symbols, some people do pictures, some do sayings or words, it all depends. each of you tattoo half that mark in the inside of your right wrists to complete the engagement ceremony. then during the wedding ceremony, you complete each other’s marks in front of witnesses.”

lance’s brows went up. “that’s intense. what happens if you separate?”

“we’re encouraged to marry for life, but if a separation happens you just get the marks removed. it’s a bit of a laborious process though.”

lance curled a piece of allura’s hair around his finger. “i actually like that more than the ring. it’s more personal and doesn’t involve shelling out a ridiculous amount of money. you ever put any thought into what you’d want your mark to be?”

“not really. marriage was never on my mind until now. i’ve always thought having a picture as an engagement mark and having a quote being the finishing touch during a wedding ceremony would be nice. it’d sort of leave some anticipation leading up to the actual marriage. but who knows?”

“what are altean wedding ceremonies like?” lance asked.

“well, both the bride and the groom wear blue to symbolize their unending loyalty to each other. they stand before a room of witnesses and a wedding officiant and recite their vows to one another. then the tattooing ceremony. after that it’s different depending on what part of altea you’re from. i’m from the south of the main continent so there we do the hourglass ceremony.”

“and what’s that?”

allura took lance’s hand and gently laid hers on top of his. “so we both pour different colored vials of sand into an empty hourglass and let it run all the way to the bottom. the point is that no matter how many times the sand runs out, the grains will never be separated. it’s meant to show how your love isn’t contained within the bounds of time. it’s limitless. as all love should be.”

lance closed his fingers around her hand and pressed kisses to the knuckles. “that’s gorgeous. i don’t think we do anything nearly that intimate.”

“are human ceremonies different?”

lance squinted at the ceiling and started tracing shapes on her bare back. “well, brides wear white dresses and the grooms wear black tuxes. ah, that’s formal wear for men,” he explained when allura tilted her head. “you typically have a wedding party filled with friends and family that are there for you during the ceremony. the groom stands at the front with the wedding officiant and waits for the bride to enter, usually with her father, brother, or some other important male figure. then when the ceremony starts, the bride and groom recite their vows, exchange weddings rings, kiss, and then that’s it.”

“why white and black for the bride and groom?”

“brides used to wear white to symbolize their virginity, but i think it’s just done for tradition nowadays. definitely not a requirement.”

allura wrinkled her nose. “that’s so distasteful!”

“i mean the reason fathers typically walk their brides down the aisle is because it’s meant to symbolize giving their daughters away. because daughters used to be the property of their fathers up until they got married and became the property of their husbands.”

“lance that’s positively primitive and completely sexist. you do that for tradition’s sake?”

“i mean not everyone does. my family tends to be pretty traditional about that sort of thing. but i also had a cousin who walked herself down the aisle and wore a champagne dress. you can pretty much do whatever you want for your wedding. what matters is the ceremony part. you know, the vows and stuff. your promises to each other in life and in death. everything else is just fluff.”

“i do like that we have that in common,” she conceded. “preparing your own vows of commitment to each other.”

“look at that, we decided on one thing,” lance laughed. “i like the idea of the tattoos and the hourglass ceremony. we should do that. that’s part of your culture and i want to celebrate that with you. i’ll probably still get you a ring though. i’ve been dreaming of buying a girl her engagement ring since i was a kid.”

allura blushed. “i mean i wouldn’t complain about that. i also don’t mind you wearing human formal wear. but i’d love to at least wear a blue dress.”

“of course! you in a blue wedding dress would be damn stunning.”

allura perked up. “ooh! do you celebrate afterwards? what does that look like?”

lance cackled. “oh god, it’s like one huge party. we’re cuban so we invite as many people as physically possible. there’s always a crap ton of cuban food and a huge wedding cake. lots of music and drinking and dancing. you always have one aunt from somewhere that starts the rueda at weddings. we also do this really fun thing where any man who gets to dance with the bride has to pin money to her dress to help with wedding expenses. oh, and they go until super late too and everyone always goes home drunk.”

“is a rueda a kind of dance?”

“yeah, it’s basically a form of salsa. sorry, if you’re gonna marry me, you need to learn salsa. that’s a requirement.”

“alright, fair enough,” allura said. “but then you have to learn altean ballroom dancing.”

“only if you teach me.”

“oh no, i don’t know how the male parts of the dance work. you should get coran to teach you.”

lance frowned. “what? why? if i’m teaching you salsa why does coran have to each me altean ballroom?”

“because i don’t know how to lead and you’d have to be taught how to lead. i only know how to dance the girl parts.”

“aw, allura! that totally sucks! you have to teach me otherwise it won’t be any fun. coran is probably gonna be so extra about it.”

“i mean true but at least you’ll be in good hands. and i’ll be on the sidelines cheering you on and staying very far away from you both!”

lance dig his fingers into allura’s sides and tickled her until she started laughing into the crook of his neck. “you’re the worst.”

she kissed his neck and whispered against the shell of his ear. “you love me.”

“so much it hurts,” he agreed.

allura relaxed against him, staring out at the windows that they’d left open to let in the evening summer breeze. “we’re disgustingly compatible, that was far too easy. we have to argue about something. what cake flavors do you want?”

“it’d have to be earth flavors, so whichever one you wanted.”

“color scheme?”

“up to you.”

“party favors for guests?”

“you can pick.”

allura flicked him on the nose and smiled through her complaint. “lance stop deferring to me!”

“what?” he chuckled. “i don’t care what our wedding looks like so long as you’re the one i’m marrying. you know that.”

allura hid behind her hair. “stop being adorable, i’m trying to plan a wedding.”

“i’m not impeding you from doing that! i’m serious, have full reign. i’ll taste and look at every suggestion you come up with, but we can do whatever you want. start writing things down so we don’t forget and we’ll take it a step at a time.”

“so….we’re really planning this?”

lance shrugged with a dopey smile on his face. “i mean doesn’t hurt to be prepared, right?”

allura matched the smile and learned in for another kiss, this one lingering and lasting long enough to warm her body all the way down to her toes. “right you are.”

lance sighed against her lips. “i feel like i’m dreaming.”

“hold onto that feeling while you still can. wedding planning will quickly turn into a nightmare.”

“no, learning ballroom dancing from coran will be a nightmare.”

“you’re doing it lance.”

“i really think you could teach me if you just tried – ”

“lance i’m not doing it!”

“please?”

“i’m telling coran you have no faith in him.”

“feel free, i stand by my choice, i want you teaching me!”

“i don’t know how, i’m sorry!”

“allura, come on!”

#legitallurance #allurance #allura #lance #voltron #vld #voltron fanfiction #allurance fanfiction #my writing #ask #vixensheart

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booklust · 6 years

Text

Futurelit Vol 5: Grace Byron

This time around, I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Grace Byron, the Brooklyn-based columnist, writer and filmmaker and all-around brilliant, benevolent creative spirit whose recent book release party for NB Carrie Bradshaw (read it here via Epigraph Mag!) at Babycastles solidified my love for her and her work.

This interview was the first time I had the opportunity to conduct a classic interview over the phone instead of over text chat, or as I like to call it for reasons I’d gladly explain to you over a glass of wine, “The Tony Hawk Method.”

This resulted in a truly gorgeous conversation that flows synaptically and always takes surprising directions (Twin Peaks, the afterlife, and a tender moment involving Coldplay that occurs towards the end---when you see it then you’ll understand!). It also brought me right back to the days at my editorial internship where I would transcribe hours of interviews, but in a good way this time. I took great pains to not only get the content and diction right, but to convey the undertones of our exchange that made it so vibrant. Which, interestingly enough, makes it take on the visual form of a text chat.

Check out our conversation at the jump, with gorgeous illustrations by Becky Ebben:

You do a column called “Trans Monogamist” for the Bushwick Daily (I binged that…it’s really dope) and your latest project is NB Carrie Bradshaw (which is out now!). So I’m curious, what sort of came first: your interest in the format of an advice columnist/relationship columnist, or your love of Carrie Bradshaw?

Actually--I didn’t start watching Sex and the City until January 2017, which everyone is sort of super surprised by, and honestly? Me fucking too. Not that it’s a perfect show, but the aesthetic signals that it’s something that I should have seen a long time ago. It took me a long time to get to it. I had heard a lot of the negative stuff, which there is a lot of, and rightfully so. There’s this one terrible bisexual episode where Carrie’s just like, “I just don’t know….he’s bi .” And I’m just like… “Girl, so what.” The point is, the column writing came sort of naturally. I had a column a few years ago at my paper called Queer Art Vibes before I had even seen Sex and the City. And I was mostly writing about art, and capitalism, artists, and things I was finding interesting aesthetically. The last column that I wrote was after I had a break-up, and it was called “How To Date an Anarchist.”

Oh my God

And it got like, no comments. Because most of the columns that I was writing were about trans identity and stuff. I got all these comments like, “Why can’t people just make up their minds about gender?” And I’m just like, that’s completely irrelevant to what I’m talking about. So this column got no comments at all. There’s this huge anarchist population at Indiana University. It just closed down this month, but we had this huge anarchist bookstore that was this huge draw for the punk scene.

It was a column that didn’t make sense for where I was writing. But then as I was watching Sex and the City, and as I was doing a lot more dating my last year in college, I was thinking “yeah, this is really important to talk about.” And I started thinking of dating as a political and aesthetic and emotional practice. It’s more using this pop culture phenomenon to let people understand something about what it’s like to be trans and dating. It’s not like it’s me and my three friends that are all going through the same things. Or it’s not like me and my straight girlfriends talking about how our experiences are different. Or me and someone who is nonbinary even talking about how it’s different for both of us. But I do like that element of friendship in it, that element of comradery. But I think it’s interesting now that shows act like there’s this group of 4 friends and they’re all the same. And that was never my experience? You know, there’s always a nonbinary person, a lesbian person, and...maybe a straight man.

LOL the token straight

Right. At least that’s my college experience, where I’ve never had a group of friends that were all the same. There were always at least one other gay or queer person. It’s a helpful lens to think about dating, and think about dating how much it’s changed since the early 2000s. A column is a dispatch from the front lines, like “this is what happened this month! How’s it going with you?” The book [NB Carrie Bradshaw] has a little bit of a more narrative arc to it. But in the columns, there’s no resolution. -----keep reading below------

Right, and that’s what I like about it. There’s endless thinkpieces about dating apps, queer dating, etc, and it’s so frustratingly depersonalized. It’s very strange how the discourse tries to force dystopia instead of actually having a comprehensive view of how people feel. There’s a lot more truth in the way that you present dating than how someone tries to dissect it in a thinkpiece.

Yeah, thinkpieces are weird. I love to read them, but I also don’t know how helpful they are a lot of the time. Especially when they try to draw a definitive statement. In some things, sure, that makes sense.

Like in a college thesis, where you’re forced to come to a resolution for your life, pretty much.

What was your experience working at a college newspaper?

Basically, I came to college, and I was on the media floor--and basically what I thought that meant was cross-genre. But in reality, what it meant was journalism. And then I thought, you know, okay, it’s fine. I thought it was interesting. And so I almost went to join the newspaper as a writer and interviewer, I did a few articles. But a rule was that if you were a writer for them, you couldn’t be interviewed. And that was my biggest problem with it--I knew I wanted to do art. I knew that I wanted to get press. I didn’t want to prevent that from happening.

Right after I came out my freshman year, this guy on my floor was like, “do you want to talk about being gay at IU?” And I was like uh….sure! It was weird because it was my first time being interviewed for something real, and I was talking about being gay. But I was also trying to sneak a pitch for my website while doing it, I was like...go watch it! They promptly cut that out of the interview, though.

Good effort, tho.

I didn’t love that environment. I wasn’t taken with it. I started volunteering at a local radio station where I did stories about lots of things. That was much more interesting and fulfilling than the college newspaper. And my friend was like, “do you want to be columnist--we need one.” Not because I was special or anything, because they really needed one. And I was like, “sure.” So I started writing these extremely leftist columns, like “capitalism is the devil, and here’s why : )”

And I wrote one that was like, “nudity in art isn’t porn,” which isn’t even an extreme opinion. But I started getting all of these comments like, “Counterpoint: nudity in art isn’t not porn.” I was just like wow, I can tell that you really read this column….

People just read titles a lot of times.

Yeah for sure. Our campus was filled with a lot of views of all extremes, and not just anarchists. We also had a militant white supremacist population on campus. There were a bunch of protests from that group over the course of years--it wasn’t just one year, or just this year, which was definitely the worse than the years before. I also got tons of hateful comments from white supremacist groups on my articles. So I was just one of the people on the receiving end of those comments.

But as far as my involvement in the newspaper group itself, I think I only attended one meeting. I didn’t really feel a sense of community at IU that a lot of people there felt. I think a lot of people looked down on what I did because it was so personal. It wasn’t like I was talking about music, or like I was talking about hard-hitting stories. So I wasn’t really a part of the “IU JOURNALISM COMMUNITY.” But it wasn’t like I really wanted to be. I would still sometimes get people who appreciated my work, that came up to me and said “I love this, I love what you’re doing,” but they were usually queer people.

Which is definitely the desired reaction, which is awesome. Talking about your webseries “Idle Cosmopolitan” -- what was your favorite audience, or your favorite venue that you showed it to? And what was that sort of reaction and vibe like?

I wasn’t at all of the screenings. It showed at Bloomington at Planet Nine--which is this small VHS rental/DVD rental video place that kind of reminds me of Ghost World or something. I wasn’t there, but a lot of my friends were there, since it was my home for so many years. I assume it went well. From the pictures, I saw that it went well, at least.

It showed at Sarah Lawrence, which I know very little about how that went. I wanted to be there, but I was scheduled at work. Which is a whole thing about how I’m not a full-time artist. I say that I’m a freelance artist, which means that I make MAYBE 50 bucks a month off of my art. If it’s a good month! So I can’t always go to everything that’s happening. It’s an interesting part about being an artist in this landscape. People expect you to be global, and there’s only so global you can be if you’re working class. Which I think is important to be transparent about. It’s not always fun to be transparent about that, but it’s important.

Exactly, you want to be honest about it, but you want to portray yourself as larger-than-life-to get attention, and at least the semblance of clout (whatever that fcking means). But being an artist, you’re a part of a community, and you want to treat that community well. You don’t want to stunt and act like you’re making a living off of your art when you’re not.

It’s not cool to lie one way or the other. It’s not cool to portray yourself as a poor person if you’re not, and I’m not super poor or anything, but I’m not living off of my artwork, and I make a decent living off of my work as a childcare worker. But yeah, you shouldn’t lie because you’re fooling yourself and making art seem elitist.

There’s the lie by omission, in a way. A lot of people are internet famous, or have a certain persona that makes people say “Oh, I want to be like this person, who so clearly lives off of their artwork.” When in reality, it’s probably a side hustle at best.

Or they live with their parents. Or they have rich parents.

It distorts people’s dreams and plans--it’s important to be responsible about that.

Totally. One show I was at physically was at Secret Project Robot, at this festival of poets, and my videos were showing between poets that were reading their work. So that was interesting---I was the only video artist at the show. And as many things as I have tried--I have written poems, but I’ve never called myself a “poet.” So I thought that was kind of cool to have that multimedia experience, to see my videos projected really large in front of a big crowd of 20 or 30 people. Which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s actually a lot. I remember thinking wow, the crowds are gonna be so big in New York. And they are! But 20 or 30 people is a lot for DIY art. Even if you’re successful, or internet famous--it’s hard to gather a crowd wherever you are.

And it was really cool because people who were actually in the video got to see it, which was cool! Chariot is in it, and he was there, so that’s cool.

There was one livestream and q&a in the UK, which was really cool. And that was my favorite, because the moderator was super smart and always asked good question about the fantasy genre, and its intersections with queerness. It was refreshing instead of questions like-- “Why are you gay? Why is this here?” It was a good convo to have beyond the surface level.

It’s awesome that I saw so many showings of your series was in Indianapolis, in Indiana. You may not see a big crowd--DIY art isn’t an Ariana Grande concert--but What you do see is how it sort of transforms the room, and creates a living space, a community. 20 people is a community. Especially in Indiana.

Right, there’s very established artists and documentarians where the only place they have more than 20 people show up is in their hometowns. Even world-renowned documentarians may struggle to get an audience. Which is awful. But I think that one thing that is happening in the real world is that there are plenty of people I look up to, who are famous, whose twitter gets pretty very few likes! And they may have a huge amount of followers! And I’m like--why am I getting more likes than world-renowned feminist scholars? I think that’s happening in real life too. These people are having talks and showings of their work and sometimes DIY work is a different experience and maybe draws more people than these professional pieces, and there’s a community of people who can see themselves in that as artists.

I agree, it definitely changes the dynamic for people are used to when it comes to art, you think there’s the artist and this huge invisible wall and then there’s the observer, and it breaks down that dynamic.

Right, it changes the power dynamic. The artist isn’t a preacher. What we’ve seen in DIY venues is, everybody is sitting in chairs. The artist is in the front, but everyone is on the same level. There isn’t a stage to walk down from.

I think people are only starting to observe this change, and aren’t sure what to call it yet. Some people see changes like this as the death of something, like the death of some kind of empire of how art works. But especially with this project, I think I’ve not only been an optimist, but a realist in the sense that it’s for the better. So many people are screaming “death to media! Death to print!” and I’m just over here like, “You’re a Baby Boomer, please don’t talk to me.”

Ha! Right. These media aren’t dead, but they’re definitely dying. But I think they’re going to be dying for a while to come. People broadcasting the death of all of these things---like, they’re not dead yet. The Met is gonna be in trouble, but the Met is gonna be around for the next 100 years. The Met’s not just gonna crumble.

Going back to “Idle Cosmopolitan”--I love how it’s a series of very short films. And by short, I mean like, slightly longer than a Vine length. And some people may come across that and immediately compare the series to Vine culture, but my immediate thought was comparing it to poetry, with a lot of tightly-wound content being fit into a small space. So I was wondering how poetry influences your visual work, or how visual work influences your poetry, etc.

That’s interesting. I actually originally applied to go to college for poetry. I never called myself a poet, but I did think about it for a while. When I do write poetry, it’s usually about nature, and viewing nature through the lens of divinity and power dynamics. Which I think is definitely a big part of my video work. The “Queer World” in my piece is a forest. Somebody was talking to me recently, and said that “I think it’s interesting that the queer world is a forest. Do you think of urban spaces as, like, not-as-queer spaces?” I hadn’t really thought about that. But whenever I think of that sort of the afterlife, I don’t think of cities. And what’s our other option, really? Nature. An ocean would be a terrifying destination for the afterlife. I think that poetry is super important, I think when I’m writing anything, I tend towards a lyrical, poetic style. I love hard facts, but I was never super into Hemingway. I always loved the Great Gatsby. Not that I like showy, hyper-stylized stuff; I hated the Great Gatsby movie. But the suggestion of artifice, the suggestion of things like that, I think is really interesting.

There’s ton of talk about heaven and nature and sin in “Idle Cosmopolitan.” I’m sure it comes from a long line of being raised in Christianity, and having read all of the Christian classics. And as a kid, I was obsessed with the apocalypse. Once, I was between 6-9 I remember looking at clocks in restaurants and thinking, “Could this be the hour of the end?” I remember being super into Revelations, and the ghost stories that my friends and I would tell each other, and often confusing them as the same thing.

I think that’s a form of poetry true, a strange, mental form of poetry. I think the afterlife is poetic, because there’s no concrete that you can provide.

I think in terms of modality, I think I’m always writing in the form of the poetic, even if I’m not writing a poem. Even my column--it’s not a how-to column, it’s not a safari.

It’s not MTV Cribs!

Right! Definitely more reflections.

I always thought of videos sort of in musician terms, like “this is my new album---Idle Cosmopolitan.” This is the tracklist, and each has a poetic name, etc. And each year, there’s a self-image overhaul….well, there’s no image overhaul for me this year, but especially in college I was into that idea, where I wanted to amp myself up every year.

But this iteration, for me, was trying to marry these poetic ideals with my own lived experiences, to make it sort of autobiographical, but still have a flourish. I mean, I was watching Twin Peaks when I was working on it.

Yeah, I can definitely see that influence in there. Where there’s that magic-realism, but it’s so mundane. The suspension of disbelief is so well-dissolved into it.

Right as I was starting to write this, I just finished the season of Veronica Mars---I’m not sure if it directly influenced it…

But it was there

Yeah, and watching Twin Peaks: the Return. What I thought was interesting about it was its formal elements. There was this sort of suspension of disbelief present for both the characters and the audience. So then you’re just like, “Yeah, queer spirits! That makes sense!” So, it’s that magic realism that is super appealing. And also the fact that it’s episodic. One of the things about David Lynch that I’m really into is the episodic nature of his work. There’s this loose play with time and narrative, and it’s an experience.

I think what Lynch talks a lot about, especially in later seasons, is agency. But in Sex and the City, for example--Carrie isn’t a bad person, but she’s not necessarily a good person either. She has affairs, runs around doing whatever she wants, she tries to take a break from dating and has a guilt complex where she feels bad about her actions, and also places guilt on other people--it’s complex, which I think is interesting.

Like chaotic neutral, but a little more complex than that?

Yeah, definitely. I’m obsessed with people who are chaotic neutral. I don’t think I’m chaotic neutral, but I’m fascinated by that those people exists.

I’m a super-intense Virgo, Type A, Blair Waldorf type. I definitely pride myself on hard work--which could be problematic--but I have that crawl-my-way-to-the-top sort of vibe.

This character in the webseries, they’re sort of neutral. They’re a relationship writer, but it doesn’t seem like a main part of their personhood. The only thing that they seem mad about is when their boyfriend breaks up with them, which is fair. But they don’t seem to be making many choices, and there’s something very sidekick about that.

I was in this space in my life where I was having to make all these intense decisions--deciding to move to New York, having to make all of these choices about who I wanted to be as a person. The character is the exact opposite, where there’s no movement. There’s a movement in narrative, a movement in place, but it kind of happens to them.

They get a letter, a pep talk from Fate--and they’re just like, “Sure, whatever, I don’t care.” Then they enter the queer world, and they’re like “Alright.” And then the Blue Spirit is the one who was like, “No, this wasn’t actually a good choice.” And they’re like, “Okay, sure.” They never really doubt people’s motives.

There’s a sort of guilt about making choices that Type A people have. Inevitably, if you’re a type A perosn, you’re going to hurt people. Even if you’re not actually hurting them, you’re going to make choices, and choices affect people. There’s winners and losers. So what does it mean for the sort of stoner archetype, this chaotic neutral archetype, when they don’t make choices?

I’ve never been a chill person, so I gravitate towards writing characters that are like that. Because I’m always wondering….what does that feel like?

Right! I feel like it takes a lot of effort to be chill, which isn’t chill. It’s kind of a self-consuming concept. I’m not gonna say it’s the only real binary, but…

Haha, right! Ok back to influences. Actually, as far as the soundtrack goes, I’ve gotten a lot of feedback where people say it reminds them of Sex and the City, and that it’s derivative. Actually, one person said that the soundtrack reminds them of Rugrats….

Stop!!!

Right!? Well, it’s jazz, but it’s sort of this chaotic jazz.

It’s a typical theme song in a lot of ways, but it’s disarming. Which I like.

Some people said it makes them anxious.

It offsets the perceived chill in the series, which signals you to look harder.

Watching it back, I was like...something is wrong. Narratively, there’s something up. But I’m not sure if that thing ever gets hashed out or resolved, it just sort of hangs like a dark cloud.

Which is what’s so great about poetry. There’s always that lack of resolution. People always get angry at that, where they want to feel satisfied...where’s the sequel at??

Do they get the girl or not??

Yeah! It’s how we’re taught to view life. But especially with creative people, it’s paradoxical--they only thing that makes them (us) feel satisfied is poetry, that sort of form that leaves things unresolved.

Totally.

How has the internet shaped your writing?

The internet is definitely fucked up. It was created by the military, and is now owned by billionaires. That’s already strike one. But let’s assume that the internet is also provides a space that provides more access for more people. But it doesn’t provide equal access for everybody. It provides equal access for a relatively small amount of people. You have to afford a computer, internet access--and even if you go to the library, you have to afford to be there.

But let’s say it does level the playing field in that way---even still, people don’t have more of a chance of getting their art noticed because of it. It does mean more people can put their stuff out there, but it doesn’t guarantee more viewers, or more fans, or some utopia.

The internet has become this neoliberal promise of equality. This reveals itself in every aspect---who dominates media, who dominates internet celebrity, etc. This doesn’t discount the fact that there’s fantastic DIY spaces based on the internet, but there’s a lot being overlooked.

The internet as a structure is racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. Even if we go back to technology like photography, for example, it was a technology developed to best depict white faces. It’s so great that the internet creates a platform for people, but that includes creating platforms for neo-nazis on 4chan, for alt-righters to doxx people. The web is pretty fucked up, and it amplifies our greatest strengths, like community. Especially the trans community, which is so important. But it also amplifies our problems, and reveals where we need to grow.

I don’t think the internet is the devil, but I think it makes it harder for people to feel like human beings. It mirrors capitalism, and degrades human beings in so many ways where we’re expected to become a brand, which is always tied to capitalism. We’re forced to reduce ourselves to something bite-sized, which is troubling me as a person and as an artist.

When did u start writing and being creative?

I was always drawing. I was super into Pokemon and all the Nintendo games. I was into anything cute and well-designed, like Zelda, and anything involving world-building. I was super into maps, and at a young age, I thought, “I wanted to do that.”

At a young age, I wanted to be a pop star. And I made the boys in the neighborhood be my band. Now I’m thinking that was sort of a strong signal of me being gay, haha. Boys---you’re gonna be in this band, and I’m gonna sing Breakout by Miley Cyrus.

I started getting really into bands. I was really into Coldplay, and I wanted to be Chris Martin.

STOP, ME TOO

I really liked “Clocks.”

ME TOO, when I first heard that, I was like, Now….that’s what I call music.

I also really liked “Lovesong” by Sara Bareilles, which is entirely different, but I was also like...that’s what I call music. Also Paramore and Deathcab, and I was like…..this is also Music. I still love all this stuff

I still listen to all this stuff pretty much on the regular, even though I laugh about it Yeah! And at the time, all of these things were coded as feminine. Even Coldplay, which was, not a boyband, but kind of more healing.

Right, like ~emotional boys~, ~soft boys~, this sort of soft masculinity before it was talked about and memed.

I went from wanting to be a popstar, to wanting to be in bands, to wanting to do comics, and then I was like...I want to be painter! I did a lot of paintings, and then I wanted to be an actor. I was fixated on stardom, on theater. I was in all the plays of my freshman year.

Then I moved schools, and this guy who didn’t even like me and stopped talking to me, but I liked him---I wrote this psycho-opera about him. It was all songs about him, and it was super awkward. I recorded an album about him. He started being nice to me, and then I was just like…...here’s an album…

I was like, that was fun, but then I started to getting into Wes Anderson. And Woody Allen, but #WORST. And then Godard, which was better. Then I started making movies. And I saw 30 Rock, and it confirmed what I wanted to do.

I love how you go from Godard to 30 Rock

I know!! I was very all over the map. Then I started watching more experimental films and wild stuff, so it’s been a journey to where I’m at now.

The wrapping up portion, something I ask at the end of every interview...this is actually the first interview I’ve done that’s over the phone, an actual physical conversation. And the form of how I’ve conducted each interview has really affected it.

How would you describe the future of literature in a tweet-length? Or a sort of verbal tweet length, also tweets are longer now so….yeah….

Smaller.

#nb carrie bradshaw #lit #futurelit #publishing #books #writing #spilled ink #becky ebben #idle cosmopolitan #trans monogamist #queer #grace byron

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palaces-in-every-paragraph · 4 years

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Dear Yuletide Writer 2020

Hello Yuletide Writer!

Thank you SO MUCH for writing something for me. I know I’m going to love whatever you come up with! I truly appreciate the time and effort you are going to put into this. PLEASE do not stress over it; I am really very easy to please and just looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I’ve jotted down some basic prompts here, follow them or don’t–the choice is yours! It looks like my holidays are going to be very, very different and a bit lonely this year, so thank you for giving me a little shade of something to look forward to.

Style Stuff and Likes:

Competency is absolutely my greatest kink. I also have a decent-sized hair kink and love hair-touching/stroking/brushing, etc, as well as any kind of safe touch and praise. I like friendship in love, equal partnerships, ass-kicking females, friends to lovers, grudging respect that becomes not so grudging, fluff and cuteness, light angst (angst over the perfect gift, for example), caretaking, hairbrushing, cuddling and tender kissing, blanket/bed-sharing in a totally platonic way, all the non-sexual intimacy and tenderness, late-night talks, letters. Tenderly-described safe touch makes me squee. I don’t mind sex so long as it’s consensual between adults, well-written, driven by emotions, and true to character. My favorite AUs are coffee shop and library.

My A03 bookmarks are pretty heavy on MCU and Hamilton, my two latest obsessions, but they’ll give you a good feel for what I like, style-wise. I love mission fic/casefic, adventures, unwinding/caretaking after a mission, hurt/comfort with emphasis on the comfort, celebrations, and all the happy things.

I adore setting detail and good descriptive writing. Fall is absolutely my favorite season–so perfect for walks, crisp air, toasted marshmallows, apple orchard trips, cider and donuts, colorful leaves that crunch underfoot, hay rides, cozy sweaters, knitting, lazy weekends, bonfires (or fires in fireplaces) new pens and notebooks, etc. I also love holidays and celebrations–all of them equally, so whatever feels natural to you and the characters is great. Cultural descriptions and events are fabulous, as well as setting, time period, and seasonal details. I’ve been blessed to grow up and live my entire life in a place with four distinct seasons, and as long as I’m not driving in them, I actually adore blizzards and being snowed in. If you happen to live in a place where you don’t have seasons, I’m sorry! But pull up some Google images and describe away and I’ll love it.

Dislikes:

D/s relationships, PWP, A/B/O dynamics (I don’t understand how these work), dark/dystopian or supernatural AUs, kidfic.

Hard Squicks:

Please no rape/non- or dub-con, rough sex, underage, graphic violence, suicide or self-harm, depression, or non-canonical character death. All of the above are major triggers for me. Also, in general, I feel like the world needs to come together and celebrate love and inclusion without judgment. In other words, please use this exchange to make the world a softer place for everyone.

Specific Fandoms/Prompts:

Code Name Verity - Maddie, Julie

This is one of my absolute favorite books ever. WWII is one of my favorite periods to study/read about, so play up the setting and the war and the clothes and makeup and all of those details. I would love to see the early days of the war, how they became best friends and maybe something more. Show me each of them knowing more about the other’s job than they strictly should–Maddie showing Julie how to navigate/fly or fix an engine, Julie teaching Maddie how to communicate in code. Did they write each other letters in a code known only to the two of them? Give me their stolen moments of friendship or dates in the middle of mayhem, nights at the pub, bike rides, perfecting cover stories, meeting each other’s families, days when Julie doesn’t have an assignment and Maddie is grounded because of weather or the need for repairs, sharing newspapers and iced buns and making jokes out of their fears. Show me the cuddling and comforting that goes on after missions/interrogations, saving up ration coupons for special treats, or using up the saved-up rations for something like comfort food. Give me a missing scene from that time that they don’t see each other, during which Julie’s brother Jamie gets hurt. Do they have an umbrella that they pass between the two of them as a token, a reminder of their first meeting? I also love the dynamic between Maddie and Julie’s brother Jamie, so use that if you’re so inclined. Was the whole meeting between Maddie and Jamie a setup on Julie’s part, so that Maddie could be taken care of/stay in Julie’s family if something happened to Julie? Was Maddie’s relationship with Jamie originally meant to be a front for her and Julie’s relationship, which then became something entirely different that grew out of their shared grief over Julie? How does a lesbian couple manage to date in the middle of a war, and particularly World War II? How much pining goes on before it comes to fruition?

American Girls: Kit - Kit, Charlie, Ruthie

My main ships in ths story are Ruthie/Charlie and Kit/Stirling. I know Stirling wasn’t nominated, but I love him, so please feel free to bring him in if you’d like. In my headcanon, Kit finishes school and becomes one of the first female war correspondents during WWII, perhaps doing time in London during or after the Blitz. I love her adventurous, can-do, change-the-world spirit and I also love Ruthie’s dreaminess and how they play off each other. I also like to think that Ruthie grew up, maybe lost a bit of her dreaminess (but not all of it!), and eventually got together with Charlie. And if you happen to be writing a WWII future Kit story for me and want to throw in some letters from characters to other characters, great! I am probably one of the last people alive that prefers to write letters on actual stationery, so play on that all you want! Wartime courtship is one of my favorite story tropes, too!

Sports Night - Casey, Dan, Dana

I just recently rediscovered this, which was my favorite show in its first run. I would love to see some pre-canon with these three together in j-school or some post-canon, like now. What would it look like with Sports Night covering the Winter Olympics? Were any of them in the “bubbles” of pandemic pro sports? Was there a political/ethical debate about pandemic college sports? Were Casey and Dan together in college or were they together off the air and closeted during the show? Was Dana a crack sportscaster who couldn’t get hired as an anchor or sideline reporter because of her sex? How did Dan and Casey try to make that better for her? Give me some backstage shenanigans here if you want, too.

Thanks again for writing for me! I know that whatever you create, I’ll love it.

#dear yuletide author #yuletide #fanfic #exchange letter #fic exchange

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years

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STARTUPS AND TERMS

In the startup world. The problem is, a lot like high school girls. Ok, so written and spoken language are different. If you seem smart and want to do it for more than that: they use their office as a place to work where you can actually get work done. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100% of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't go any faster. But when you do that as an undergrad. Counterargument. If you want to learn programming languages you think employers want, like Java and C. Nerds still in school is a complex mix of lies.1

Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.2 For example, if your software is slow you have to think of startup ideas, because their whole culture derives from that one lucky break. The response rate for spam-of-the-shelf peripherals like a cassette tape recorder for data storage and a TV as a monitor.3 GMail. That's why there's a distinct word, startup, for companies designed to grow fast. Usually successful startups happen because the founders are sufficiently different from other animals as the anteater. Because the software in one day in a couple years be the CEO of the hottest startup in the Valley, half the ideas that implementing it would have led to.4 So in borderline cases?5 There are two ways delivery and payment could play out. I wrote much of Viaweb's editor in this style, and we made our scripting language, RTML, a purely functional language. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

But they're still dragging their heels. And you know why? All the best things that I did at Apple came from a not having money and b not having done it before, ever. Unless you know this world, I thought, I'll see how far I can get with single words. Even the most ambitious startup ideas are terrifying. In this new world. I remember once complaining to a friend. Writing a compiler is.6 The investors or acquirers or if you're so lucky underwriters will nail you first. I saw what appeared to be unrelated tests. No one likes the transmission of power between generations: to encourage the trend toward an economy made of more, smaller units.

Fortunately, this process also works in reverse: as groups get smaller, software development meant a roomful of men with horn rimmed glasses and narrow black neckties, industriously writing ten lines of code a day on IBM coding forms. The founders of Kiko, for example. I was a kid. There is a huge time suck at just the point where it was memory-bound rather than CPU-bound, and since the reply came back through Virtumundo's mail servers it had the most incriminating headers imaginable. One reason this works so well is the second one, the ascent. Because they blame it on puberty. As for building something users love, here are some general tips.

They'd be rewarded later. As Fred Brooks pointed out in The Mythical Man-Month, adding people to a project tends to slow it down. Control the channel and you could feed them what you wanted, on your terms. They're tricked by misplaced ambition. I used to calculate probabilities for tokens, both would have the same justification. By the time King's plagiarism emerged, I'd lost the ability to draw as some kind of decline in the people who are young but smart and driven can make more by starting their own instead of going to work for a company, and his servers would grind to a halt during fundraising, which can be handed off to some lieutenant. 034. The lowest form of disagreement.7 But when you choose a number based on your gut feel, or a salmonella outbreak for a food processor.

Notes

The few people who start these supposedly local seed firms. The main one was drilling for oil, over fairly low heat, till onions are glassy. So far, I have no idea what most people than subsequent millions.

Investors are professional negotiators and can negotiate on the other cheek skirts the issue; the critical path that they can get very emotional. It is still what seemed to someone in 1500 looking at the network level, because it depends on them, because the rich. Unfortunately, not you.

Which in turn is why so many companies that can't reasonably expect to make programs easy to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's hard to say that intelligence is the proper test of intelligence. No, and FreeBSD 1. For example, if the present, and Jews about. If there's an Indian grocery store near you doesn't mean you suck.

This is what approaches like Brightmail's will degenerate into once spammers are pushed into using mad-lib techniques to generate all the rules with the founders don't have the concept of the medium of exchange would not be led by manipulation or wishful thinking into trying to make that their system can't be buying users for more than the type of thinking, but half comes from. No big deal. Or worse still, as far as I explain later.

In fairness, I can't predict which lies future generations will consider inexcusable, I would go farther in saying that if you needed in present-day English speakers have a competent startup lawyer handle the deal for the sledgehammer; if they want.

For example, if you were. The application described here is that any given time I thought there wasn't, because the processing power you can say I need to run spreadsheets on it, there were about 60,000 sestertii, for example, if an employer. Even the cheap kinds of work the upper middle class first appeared in northern Italy and the editor written in C and Perl. Don't be evil, they tend to be about 200 to send a million dollars.

I'm not saying it's impossible to write about the right direction to be at a friend's house for the same reason I even mention the possibility is that it's boring, whereas bad philosophy is nonsense. Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912. An earlier version of everything was called the option of deferring to a later Demo Day pitch, the whole fund. To the way we met Aydin Senkut.

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yasbxxgie · 7 years

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'BLACK' Imagines a World Where Only Black People Have Superpowers

When it comes to people of color taking ownership of their own narratives, the fight for sovereignty has been long and ongoing. In 2013, Steve McQueen became the first black filmmaker to win Best Picture for historical drama 12 Years A Slave, after decades of white filmmakers receiving accolades for their own work on black narratives. The struggle has been similar within the comic-book world: While comic-book companies have recently seemed more eager to put more people of color on the page, they've also showed a reluctance to actually hire them to write, draw, or letter the comics in question. More than ever, though, creators of color are taking matters into their own hands—which is how BLACK came to be. The new comic asks the question, "What would happen if superpowers were real? And what if they were only given to black people?"

Recently, I exchanged emails with Jamal Igle, Kwanza Osajyefo, Khary Randolph, and Tim Smith 3—the creators of BLACK—to hear more about the ideas, production, and challenges surrounding a work that presents such a potentially dangerous question.

VICE: The premise of BLACK is that blackness imbues superhumanity and thereby justifies extreme violence against us—something seen all too frequently in the real world. What were the conversations you had with one another around that? What were you worried about? Jamal Igle: I wasn't worried, particularly because even discussing the base premise would be (and was) considered in some corners as controversial. I walked into the project from the outset with that in mind, so I had no reservations about it. Kwanza, Tim, Sarah [Litt, the editor], and I had a conversation over dinner where we talked about the project in the abstract, and Kwanza and I lined up perfectly on the concept of race, representation, and superpowers.

One of the problems I've had as a comic-book reader and being a casual fan of the X-Men was the idea that the only thing that set mutants apart from characters like the Thing, the Hulk, and the Morlocks was how they were marketed to the public. If Warren Worthington didn't run around in a costume with giant x's all over it, he had enough resources to have the people believe he was an alien—or an actual angelic being. The "First Class" of X-Men were all pretty white kids going to an exclusive private school in Westchester. It's not exactly a bastion of individuality or fear for one's safety, unless you're ginger.

The first cover—a kid in a red hoodie, standing in "hands up, don't shoot" position—is immediately evocative and directly confrontational with white supremacy. I'm curious about what led you and the rest of the team to take such a brute force technique with the covers. Khary Randolph: We don't pull any punches on these covers. They're brutally honest and don't hold back on what they are about, and I think that's necessary when you're dealing with subject matter that's this serious.

My normal day-to-day comic-book work looks nothing like this. It's much more colorful and pop art. I don't normally do political work, but this was personal—to all of us. We knew we had something to say with this book, so from the moment Kwanza and I first discussed what the book would be about, I knew I had to approach things differently. The very limited color palette, the street art feel, the compositions, and the themes are all very deliberate. On a purely emotional level, this was by far the hardest illustration job I've ever had to do, and I'm very proud of how it's come out.

BLACK is monochromatic—black and white—which isn't the absence of color per se, but is definitely in defiance of the color palette of most modern Western comics. What do you feel like you gained from this technique? Kwanza Osajyefo: I felt that BLACK is a story that readers bring their own experiences to. It won't be the same read for everyone. I thought adding color would, in some regard, distract readers and entertain their imagination less. You could read into it as a metatextual absence of color as a reflection of blacks absence in comics.

Randolph: For the record, I love color. But with this project, not having it lends to the gravitas of the themes that we tackle—and it helps us stand out in a marketplace that's full of oversaturated color. It's a point of pride for us that this is the kind of book and story that really can't be told at the major publishers. We're striving to do something different, and that extends even to the lack of color.

There's some pressure, but also some freedom, in drawing, writing, or creating a black body. How does it feel, emotionally, to work on a project like this? What's the work like? What does it bring to your day-to-day life? Tim Smith 3: If you want to break into mainstream comics, you better know how to draw all kinds of people—but you'll be drawing Caucasians the most. But when you work on a book that's mostly black faces, it will make you slow down and get it right because it's not in the norm of comics. Not every black person looks alike, nor does any other person of any other race. But working on this makes me stop and think about making them look like people. And a part of that is to give each of them a look that unifies and separates them from one another.

I talked to a woman who said she hadn't drawn in years, so when she did draw something, she drew the face of a black woman. Now mind you, she herself was black, but she found it difficult to get some of the facial features to her liking. Looking in a mirror her whole life didn't seem to bridge the gap, nor did looking at her family and friends and TV and books—yet she seemed very comfortable drawing a white face. It's ingrained in our culture: the image of what is to be considered the norm. Artists should break out of the bubble and draw all kinds of people. Test your limits, and don't be told what to draw or settle for what everyone has been drawing. For me, drawing BLACK is a fulfilling means to being an artist and an artist of color.

All of you are men, and while the comic definitely makes strides toward inclusion, the voice and perspective is also rather definitively cisgender male. What conversations did you guys have among yourselves about the absence of women from your creative team? Osajyefo: We're all painfully aware, and it's never lost on me that I need to make extra effort on my contacts list. If black men in comics are unicorns, black women are pegacorns. Fortunately, that's quickly changing.

We were able to have Ashley Woods draw an alternate cover for Chapter One of BLACK that has a Harriet Tubman homage on the cover. I would love work with more sisters on future stories in BLACK, but I'll admit I'm only now just introducing myself.

In one of the issues, a Jamaican man uses the term "batty boy"—a Jamaican pejorative generally meant to target queer men. Could you describe your intent with the phrase and how it fits in with the narrative? That character is SAVAGE, and he's not a good person. He's a hardcore gangster and murderer. I like to write villains who do bad things, so it stands to reason that they also say bad things. Considering he eviscerates people in the chapter that he appears in, why is name calling the focus? Are we that desensitized to violence?

Black characters are not just these one-dimensional tokens to assuage publishers obilivity and pacify readers of color. All that stated, I also know thatIdon't know all the deep roots of all these aspects in blackness, but I wanted readers to have these characters exist.

You guys made a point to have AAVE as a clear part of BLACK's vernacular, which is, as is everything, a clearly political choice. Am I right in thinking you're big believers in showing multitudes to counteract stereotypes? A lot of writers don't use the vernacular, pidgin, etc. Maybe that's a fear of making black characters sound ignorant—or perhaps the issue is that there is not enough diversity to allow for it. Name the last black supervillain from a mainstream publisher. They want black faces on their characters but don't have the internal depth (black people on staff) to show our humanity—good and bad. The fears is backlash of presenting us in a bad light, but they also aren't hiring us in positions to influence that content.

In BLACK, we're attempting to show the spectrum of blackness—on our own terms. I love accents, and black people have them. To me, it would be a disservice to gloss over that for pretense.

What are the elements each of you are hoping readers take from your work on BLACK? What's the one thing you'd like us to pay attention to or notice? Smith 3: This project started as a Kickstarter. I don't know what or where it would have gone if not for that. But we did it there. We were committed in doing it one way or another. But the people wanted it as it was funded so here we are! (Thank you KS and all those helped make this happen!) I want folks to understand that there are no rules to making comics. Whatever you think of the book, know that we got up, did it, and it was accepted and wanted. Now I hope you enjoy something that truly breaks the norm.

#jamal igle #kwanza osajyefo #khary randolph #tim smith 3 #black #comic books #black comic books #vice #vice news #race #racism #representation #representation matters #superpowers #black superheroes #superheroes #hands up don't shoot #white supremacy

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naumit-blog · 4 years

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Best Gift Options For Pune

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#cake #gift #flowers #handicraft #frinza

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linabrigette · 6 years

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EOS Revisited: Investors Take Another Look at the Longest-Running ICO

Another blockchain for smart contracts?

As surprising as it might sound, there’s a respect for incumbency even in the world of cryptocurrencies. As such, when the upstart EOS protocol launched last year with the ambition of improving on innovations like ethereum (themselves just a few years old), incredulity was in ample supply.

Intervening months haven’t exactly helped this perception. But despite the skeptical experts, not to mention the very public derision of talk show host John Oliver, the EOS project has raised more than $2 billion in ether from the sale of EOS tokens, which will power its forthcoming network.

It’s a notable success given the ICO was done differently than most other issuers, starting in summer 2017 and staying open through a series of auction periods through June 1 of this year.

Still, less than a month away from the sale’s conclusion (and the platform’s long-awaited launch), EOS is finding itself back again in the conversation. The price of the crypto token is steadily rising, something that has the interests of investors piqued, especially so given that gains haven’t exactly been easy to find.

The crypto token’s latest pump, though, notably coincided with a bullish report from crypto fund Multicoin Capital, which took a deep dive into the promise of what’s being billed as a next-generation platform for smart contracts.

It’s quite the promise, too – Block.one touts its platform as a faster, cheaper way to execute smart contracts than rivals ethereum and NEO. Additionally, it claims user experience upgrades, such as mechanisms for account recovery and human readable addresses, built in at the protocol level (as opposed to top layers).

Looking at the platform, Multicoin Capital wrote:

“EOS takes a unique approach to creating a highly scalable platform for smart contracts. EOS prioritizes scalability and end-user experience rather than maximal censorship resistance.”

And with that, Multicoin effectively re-opened the debate among crypto community leaders about whether EOS will actually solve blockchain’s scalability problems or is anything more than vaporware. And some, including Ryan Selkis, the founder of Messari Capital, are leaning more towards the later.

Following Multicoin’s blog post, Selkis focused in on the project’s epic valuation, in his on-again, off-again newsletter, The Daily Bit.

Selkis wrote:

“We’re still talking about EOS like it’s a utility token/commodity. I don’t understand why it needs to be held in reserve at an $11 billion valuation pre-launch. Call me old-fashioned.”

Community is key

Part of the reason Selkis and others are skeptical is that the project hasn’t even launched yet.

EOS tokens currently exist as tokens on the ethereum blockchain – and investors have been getting those tokens on a rolling basis – but eventually those tokens will need to be converted into something designed more specifically on EOS and its technology.

But it’s not only that there’s no “utility” for the tokens yet, it’s the individuals engaged in the project that have still captured most of the conversation. For instance, most of the attention on EOS over the last year has stemmed from the involvement of controversial investor Brock Pierce, although he and Block.one officially parted ways in March.

Pierce aside, project founder and CTO Dan Larimer has also taken his fair share of criticism, with many alleging EOS will end up like former projects such as BitShares and Steem, which haven’t quite replicated early successes after he removed his involvement.

Block.one did not reply to a request for comment from BTC News Today.

In this way, some worry about the community that will gather around EOS. Since it’s an open-source project, it’s strength will depend on developers willingness to continue developing it once it is released into the world. But currently a large portion of the tokens are being turned over to large hedge funds to manage and make large investments in the building of the ecosystem, which some believe won’t see the money allocated to the correct things.

Selkis points this out in his post, contending that ethereum growing from developers investing their money and elbow grease makes it a more stable project than EOS, which he argues was born at the height of the unrestrained ICO-mania.

Selkis wrote:

“My bet is that culture and community matters if you want to bootstrap a currency or something valued like it.”

Strength in censorship

That said, Multicoin takes the opposite stance.

As outlined in its work, it believes the community developing around EOS might actually offer an interesting counterpoint to those that gathered around earlier networks, arguing that its community could be more willing to make trade-offs deemed too unorthodox for other platforms.

For instance, MultiCoin wrote a follow-up blog post arguing that EOS may be stronger than it seems by sacrificing on decentralization, contrasting it with protocols like bitcoin and ethereum, which have tended to argue censorship-resistance is a key feature, and thus have effectively employed large networks of individuals who run the computers necessary to process transactions.

In contrast, EOS will only use 21 validators with a slew of backup validators ready to take over if one of those validators fails or misbehaves, though the project’s creators believe these disadvantages are more than made up for by faster throughput.

In this way, it could be argued that neither bitcoin nor ethereum have put a limit on the number of miners that can take part in validating the networks. (Most people agree that it’s too many for even the largest state to roll back the records and censor activities on either blockchain.)

Still, it’s in some ways a minority view.

Spencer Bogart, a partner at Blockchain Capital, wrote a Medium post about decentralization and why there’s really no censorship-resistance that counts if it isn’t maximum resistance.

He state:

“Either these platforms will offer strong assurances (‘permissionless-ness’), in which case they will attract ‘sovereign-grade’ attackers (and ‘platform-grade’ censorship resistance will be insufficient) OR they will embrace censorship and permission-ing, in which case they will end up as less efficient varieties of today’s centralized platforms. Regardless, neither path appears sustainable.”

Existential questions

That said, EOS may in some ways be part of a larger trend that finds newer investors perhaps more willing to pursue novel design choices.

For example, Bogart told BTC News Today that his post wasn’t meant as a specific response to MultiCoin’s report, but to a larger trend he sees in the space, of protocols that trade some level of decentralization for scalability, of which EOS is a good example (but so is Ripple and Stellar).

Bogart’s point isn’t that EOS is worse than ethereum, but that in the end comparing it to ethereum is the wrong comparison.

“People are painting it as the competition is between EOS and ethereum, and I have a feeling that’s totally the wrong way,” Bogart told BTC News Today. “Its competitors are AWS and Azure [the giant cloud services offered by Amazon and Microsoft, respectively].”

Blockchain Capital invested in Block.One, the builder of EOS, and Bogart said he appreciates every effort on the spectrum, but he sees what may be a glut of projects far from either pole.

Still, even with that more nuanced conclusion, he seems unsure of what to make of trend exactly. “I see a lot of people rushing into this middle ground, but what if that middle ground is no man’s land?” he asked.

Looking ahead, however, the market may ultimately play the role of decider.

Major exchange Binance, for example, has announced full support for EOS token conversion, marking an early and notable nod of support from that community. Though, it’s possible that this says more about the risk appetite for investors eager to see multiple large blockchains available for different use cases,

As Multicoin wrote:

“Multicoin Capital doesn’t believe that we will see convergence around a single smart contract platform, at least in the near-to-medium term. Rather, we believe that a handful of dominant platforms will emerge, each offering a different set of features and tradeoffs.”

Event image via EOS YouTube

The leader in blockchain news, BTC News Today is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. BTC News Today is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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#Cryptocurrency news #Bitcoin news #btcoin price today

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cryptobully-blog · 6 years

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Can The Blockchain Turn Pepe The Frog Into Modern Art?

http://cryptobully.com/can-the-blockchain-turn-pepe-the-frog-into-modern-art/

Can The Blockchain Turn Pepe The Frog Into Modern Art?

Illustration by Kelsey Dake

Editor’s note: This article includes depictions of a cartoon character that many deem offensive due to its association with white supremacist groups. Some links in this story lead to offensive material.

Pepe the Frog started as just a chilled-out amphibian with a chilled-out catchphrase: “Feels good man.” That was back in 2005, when he first appeared in a comic series called “Boy’s Club.” When the comic debuted, Pepe and his cartoon roommates dabbled in “laconic psychedelia, childlike enchantment, drug-fueled hedonism, and impish mischief,” according the publisher of a book compiling the strip.

But even cartoon amphibians can go through a metamorphosis. Pepe soon took on a life of his own, and his mischief became much less impish. The image board 4chan.org — a sort of twisted, anarchic incubator for memes ranging from wholesome to hateful — adopted Pepe and relentlessly remixed and repurposed him for far different purposes than the character’s creator, Matt Furie, had intended. Users depicted Pepe as a crudely drawn, bright-green frog with enormous eyes and a wide mouth, often shown looking vaguely sad or slightly sly. He became so broadly popular that he even started showing up in celebrities’ Twitter feeds.

But soon those remixes included hateful messages. Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the frog was co-opted by the so-called alt-right, a loose collection of conservative, populist, white supremacist, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi groups. Pepe became an unofficial mascot of a racist and anti-Semitic campaign in support of the candidacy of Donald Trump. The frog had long since lost its aura of childlike enchantment and had donned MAGA hats and SS insignia. Pepe is now listed as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. Furie lawyered up, trying to wrench his creation back to its original status, but the alt-right fought back. When Richard Spencer, the white supremacist and alt-right figurehead, was famously punched in the face on a D.C. street on President Trump’s Inauguration Day, Spencer was explaining his frog lapel pin, saying, “It’s Pepe. He’s become kind of a symbol —” before being cut off as the punch landed.

Now one group of people wants to make Pepe symbolize something else: the future. Artists and speculators are building a new way to make and sell art, trying to repurpose a cartoon popularized by a message board so lawless that it scared away advertisers and turn it into a viable commercial enterprise.

Gathering in a digital bazaar for Pepe-related images, they’re trying to use the blockchain to create a new kind of art market, one that uses crypto technology and allows anyone to submit their work to be bought, sold and traded. The people involved hope to prove that crypto can be used to shift the art world’s balance of power, putting control into the hands of artists, rather than galleries or commercial third parties. The art that they’re selling, though, depicts that same frog that was featured in so many racist and anti-Semitic memes. But that hasn’t deterred the artists, many of whom believe they’re returning Pepe to his original, chilled-out roots. And they’ve sold over $1.2 million worth of his image in the process. That’s about 100 million in Pepe Cash. Yes, Pepe Cash.

DANK PEPENo. issued: 420

Most of this Pepe buying and selling happens through a website called Rare Pepe Wallet. The site features about 1,600 “Rare Pepes,” with more added regularly. They depict Pepe in all manner of memetic mashups and aesthetic forms. Many, but not all, look like trading cards. There’s smiling blonde Trump Pepe. There’s Pepe as Super Mario. Pepe as the Pope on the cover of Time. Warhol Pepe. Dalí Pepe. Kardashian Pepe. “Futurama” Pepe. Run-DMC Pepe. The Pepe Sistine Chapel. And on and on and on.

The absurdity of this project is not lost on its participants. “We’re using the most secure financial computer application ever known to man to swap cartoon frog pics,” Steffen Cope, a Web developer who creates and trades Rare Pepes, told me.

There’s such a thing as a Rare Pepe market only because of what the blockchain can do: It makes digital assets that are provably scarce. The blockchain’s decentralized record of transactions — a digital ledger — can’t be altered without leaving a public record. That allows for a more reliable accounting of who really owns digital art. Each Rare Pepe carries a finite number of digital tokens, and these tokens are what you really buy or sell when you buy a Rare Pepe. The blockchain guarantees, for example, that there are precisely 420 tokens associated with the image “Dank Pepe” — never more, never less.

This is the same technology that drives cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and, in fact, the Rare Pepe tokens live on the Bitcoin blockchain, making the frog meme tokens as provably rare and as secure as Bitcoin itself.

Rare Pepes are even purchased with a cryptocurrency named after the frog — Pepe Cash — a unit of which is, as of Monday afternoon, trading for about 5 cents. Pepe Cash, which has been around since 2016, is, itself, a Rare Pepe — though there are 701,884,009 units of Pepe Cash in circulation. The currency has a market cap of roughly $37 million.

That’s a lot of money that could potentially be spent on something that doesn’t tangibly exist. So why in the world would anyone buy a Rare Pepe? After all, the only thing you really own when you buy a Rare Pepe is a digital token; the images themselves are freely available and infinitely reproducible. You can copy them, paste them, email them or tweet them for nothing. So why part with your hard-earned Pepe Cash?

“I think the image isn’t the most important thing,” Joe Looney, the co-founder of the Rare Pepe Foundation and a developer of Rare Pepe Wallet, told me. “It’s not the image so much as it’s the whole legend of it.”

By “legend,” Looney meant not the frog’s fraught past but the origin story of the each card’s creation — its artist, its creation date, its ineffable memetic appeal. Sure, the image associated with the token you buy may float around the Web or find its way onto FiveThirtyEight, but you and provably few others are its owners, for whatever that’s worth. (Right now, it appears to be worth a lot — more than 75 individual Pepes have sold for over $1,000, and over 25,000 in all have changed hands.)

RARE PEPENo. issued: 300

But, of course, that legend doesn’t necessarily undo Pepe’s legacy. While the Rare Pepe project is exploiting the blockchain for its digital immutability, it’s also attempting to overcome the nature of the internet itself, which can preserve posts for decades, serving as a kind of fossil record for what would once have been cultural ephemera. Regardless of what the cartoon comes to mean in the coming years, the internet is and likely always will be rife with references to the racist Pepe, the Nazi Pepe, and the Pepe lapel decorations of cold-cocked white supremacists.

The people who trade Rare Pepes are familiar with that tension, though they don’t see it as a reason they should stay away from the frog. I recently found them on Telegram, a messaging app and favorite hangout of the crypto set. I was lurking in a channel called Rare Pepe Blockchain Trading, which at the time had more than 1,500 participants, and I had private chats with about 20 members of the Rare Pepe community. I asked them about what they thought they were creating — and its politics.

One user I spoke with, Steve from Los Angeles, who goes by CryptoChainer, refused to share his full real name. He explained, “Having the first search result of my name come up with Rare Pepe isn’t entirely exciting, but I wish it was.” He added: “Most Americans still probably associate it with alt-right or some crap — 4chan, Nazis, what have you.” But for Steve and other Rare Pepe enthusiasts, Pepe’s appeal lies in part in his versatility — it’s a recognizable meme that allows endless artistic expression while also serving as a rallying point for their crypto community.

Like Steve, many in the Rare Pepe world — including a sizable percentage of the community who don’t live in the U.S. — aren’t very concerned about the frog’s popular connotations. They rejected its racist associations, or were barely aware of them, or were sick of being asked about them, viewing the troubling link as either passé or irrelevant — the artifact of a specific and fleeting moment in U.S. political history. But even when Pepe isn’t partisan, it can still have politics of a certain kind. “I think Pepe best represents the world’s pivot from P.C. and identity politics back to a more inclusive politics and open exchange of ideas,” someone with the username BuddhaNeedPepecash72 said.

JESUSPEPENo. issued: 10

Indeed, most in the Rare Pepe community see the frog as the future of art and art commerce. One Pepe enthusiast said he hoped to create “the first eternal digital open museum.” Jason Rosenstein told me that he’s able to pay his New York City rent with the money he’s made from Rare Pepes. Christine Lewis, who, at almost 60, jokingly called herself “crypto grandma,” came to the community because her friend told her that Pepe Cash was a good investment and that “it’s supposed to be a big deal … in five years, lol.” Another user, PimpingKek, claimed to be the world’s only Rare Pepe agent, identifying hot talent around the globe, getting them set up on the blockchain, and advising them on how to price their work and roll it out to the market. (Kek, of course, is the Egyptian god of darkness of whom Pepe is said to be a present-day avatar.)

Sometimes Pepe’s darkness creeps into the submissions to Rare Pepe Wallet. Anyone can create a Rare Pepe, which means that anything can be submitted as a Rare Pepe. Which is why the Rare Pepe Foundation — whose website tagline is “Blockchain Revolution” — says it takes pains to filter out offensive Rare Pepe submissions before they make it to the Rare Pepe Wallet gallery. (“Trying to be keep it light for now,” the site says in its submission guidelines. “Pepe has alot of bad press.”) Looney said that organizers have blocked the submission of offensive Pepes before, but that they hadn’t needed to recently. “That probably coincided with when it was more in the media as a Nazi frog,” he said.

Even among the Rare Pepes approved for display in the online gallery, it’s difficult to judge how many people might find them offensive, or even whether they’re intended to offend. One work, titled “Trump Wall,” depicts a crude Mexican frog caricature, but Looney said it was created by a Mexican artist, and it has a description that reads, “Pepe not impressed by Trump Wall.” Many others explicitly address politics. There is one titled “Killary Pepe” that features the caption “circumvent any law” under an image of a Hillary Clinton frog sending an email. There is an entire series of Putin-themed Pepes. There are a handful of Trump-themed ones. There is a Pepe take on Clinton’s “I’m With Her” campaign slogan. But many Rare Pepes are so tongue-in-cheek, so caked with alternating layers of irony and truth and absurdity that it’s hard to hear any definite political signal through the noise. “There isn’t a ‘no political Pepes’ rule, so you’ll certainly find them if you’re looking through the directory,” Looney said. “Some definitely toe the line.”

MODERN PEPENo. issued: 100

Art is often political, and good art nearly always provokes. But the specter of Pepe’s past remains. Can the project navigate the tightrope between the perfect memory of the blockchain and the long memory of the internet? The topic comes up in the Rare Pepe Blockchain Trading group from time to time. A representative exchange: “Pepe is a symbol for Nazis,” someone said. “Lol no,” came a response. “Did you know that since racists drive cars that cars are racist?” someone else added sarcastically.

Rare Pepes are now catching the eyes of the art world’s old guard, as well. In January, a digital art festival in New York City hosted an in-person auction of a one-of-a-kind Rare Pepe called “Homer Pepe.” It sold for $39,200. Vice reported that, during the auction, “staff from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art sat silently.”

But for how long?

Coming this later week: How crypto-art and the blockchain could shape the future of art.

Blockchain

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cryptist-blog1 · 7 years

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The Cryptist

Hm. Where do I begin? I guess I'll start with this one sole fact: I don't fully know what this blog will be about, but I think I know. Perhaps it is just a place to log my thoughts in real time, perhaps I actually have semi-decent cryptocurrency investment insights? Who knows? One thing I know, however, is that despite how much I love cryptocurrency, I'm tired of the things surrounding it. I'm the most tired: I'm tired of poorly-wrought articles on international crypto news sites, I'm tired of YouTubers shilling Ponzi schemes as investment advice, I'm tired of companies spiking in valuation because of dabbling in the Blockchain, but not actually bringing anything to it. I'm tired of the tokenization of bullshit, the blockchainificafion of nothing, and innovations that aren't actually innovative, but just innovations for innovation's sake. I'm as tired of traditional finance heads saying that all cryptocurrency is a scam, as much as I'm tired of the actual scams themselves: I'm tired of PM fanatics like Peter Schiff and Nobel winning economists such as Robert Schiller, Paul Krugman, or Boston University's Mark T. Williams, who have all at some point or another compared cryptocurrency to beanie babies, baseball cards, or tulips. You all deserve a slow clap. I'm tired of projects like Lara With Me, Coince and BitConnect that are actually designed to do nothing more than steal vulnerable people's money, destabilize the marketplace, and give cryptocurrency a bad name. I'm tired of marketwatch's fundamental misunderstanding of what cryptocurrency is, as much as I'm tired of trying to explain the shit to them in the comments sections… and finally, I'm tired of the "Bitcoin at 100k/1m/10m" clickbait-as-shit articles that always magically surface every other month or week on REPUTABLE Bitcoin news sites, and are usually based on a proverbial nut hair of information. Oh yeah, and fuck Jamie Dimon.

I guess I should introduce myself. I'm The Cryptist. That's all you need to know. If you are reading this webpage, perhaps you are a cryptist too. If you've never heard the word before, it's simple: it's because I made it up.

The pathology of the word I have made up is relatively simple, the first part, "Crypt" is a play on the word encryption. For about 10 years I have been an entrepreneur, and a self-proclaimed cryptoanarchist and futurist. If you don't know what this means, it means that I believe data should be allowed to be distributed in it's most frictionless, and democratic form, and that the the transmission of this data should, at it's core, be protected by deep encryption. Yes, according to this philosophy, I believe that information should be free for exchange, or that the exchange of value for information should be automated, and at the most minimal impact to the consumer. Furthermore, I believe that the arc of humanity, through technology and innovation, can eventually progress to a society where money becomes inconsequential.

The second half, or the "ist" in Cryptist, is a play on the word enthusiast, but I suppose I should be more specific with respect to what. While I love encryption, I'm ecstatic about cryptocurrency. I'm ecstatic about what it can do for not only markets, but meaningful innovations and the greater world. This time we are in is truly the advent of internet 3.0.

To be a Cryptist, however, you need not be a cryptoanarchist or a futurist, and you cannot merely like cryptocurrency. One must posess pragmatism. It's more than reading feel good articles about what things will be worth, or assessing a hundred technical analysis charts that will tell you a hundred different indicators. Much of cryptocurrency investing, thus, is about internal game. It is about how one identifies value, even when the charts won't say it. It is about how one manages their money and the trading frequency of their portfolios. It's about how aware one is of their emotions during intense price swings. It's about shirking away from a speculative mindset… and it's about loving cryptocurrency. A Cryptist, thus, is a wise cryptocurrency investor. This site, hence, isn't about charts or speculative price structures, but instead, how to evolve into this individual, and the insights that he or she may have about the marketplace.

LET ME BE CLEAR: This isn't meant to be treated as "financial journalism." Choosing to take the information written in this website as financial advice in any form means that you accept the risks associated with investing in general, and are operating entirely of your own volition.

As far as the tone of the site, yes, I'm colloquial, I swear, and I don't care. This blog isn't here to be nice, objective or "professional" despite the fact that day traders are notoriously profane. It's here to weed through the heaps of bullshit that currently occupy what is otherwise an exciting and rapidly developing industry… in turn, I simply hope that I can aid in producing more intelligent investors who know not to be sold by any bubble bursting madness.

So let's talk about the promises I'm willing to make as an author of this kind of information, the expectations that I have, and where do we go from here.

1. I promise that every post will be thoughtful. I feel like this should almost go without saying, but there's a whole lot of filler out there in the wilds these days. I've had a tiny part to do with it on the myriad other blogs I've started in my lifetime. The reality is that when running a blog, the author can feel obligated or forced to constantly keep things updated to appeal to their reader base, or in an attempt to "compete" with larger staffs. While I understand why blogs do that, the purpose of this blog is not for daily info. I can point you to amazing sources if you want any. But what I am saying is I'll put up my thoughts as they come as frequently as they come, but I won't masquerade as a full time journalist. In exchange, I promise that everything I say will be articles of length, and have information and insights that I feel are thoughtful enough to be presented.

2. I promise to NEVER shill a scam.

There are a lot of scams out there in the marketplace, and some of them look very convincing whether they come in the form of ICOs, Ponzi schemes, or joke coins. One thing I will never do is knowingly promote a token or service that I believe could potentially hurt my readers or the general public... Furthermore, I will never knowing promote anything that I think is useless, because that is just as bad too.

3. For every ICO that I do bring to the table, I promise to read the white paper, and provide a comprehensive outlook on potential value proposition. Furthermore, Ill keep my cool about it. Part of the reason why people can't seem to take cryptocurrency seriously is because every headline is concluded with a holy-shit-sized number of exclamation points. I promise to speak my piece, and let you decide on whether or not to get hyped about it. I will try my best to not present anything as get rich quick, and if there are numbers, I'll give you the numbers… from there, you can extrapolate dollars and cents growth potential.

4. I promise to be forthright about any investments that I may be holding with respect to what I'm writing or promoting. While this piece may be legally obligated, there is also just sort of an ethical aspect to all of this. If I'm holding litecoin (and I am), and I write a post that casts a subjectively favorable light on litecoin, keeping that information away from my readers is a very clear conflict of interest.

5. I promise to have fun with it. To be honest, this shit is supposed to be fun. You are supposed to get some good advice out of this potentially, and who knows, maybe even a laugh or two. If you're not having fun, leave. If you want "real financial journalism" pay twelve fucking dollars and read the Wall Street Journal, Subscribe to Bloomberg, or read CoinTelegraph, News BTC, The Merkle, or a bunch of other great blogs for tried and true Bitcoin news... But if you want a smart opinion from a general smart ass, read the cryptist.

What I expect from you is simple: In exchange for my efforts, I ask you for passive compensation. Gordon Gecko, said in the film Wall St., that "the most valuable commodity in the world is information." While this philosophy may fly in the face of cryptoanarchism, the reality is that anarchism is not tenable so long as life exists within the powerful vacuum of a dollars and cents culture. Hence, I believe my method is relatively fair and mutualistic: While I will not run ads on my site, nor will I ask for a subscription, I will use the time that you spend reading opinions pieces from me to mine Monero for as long as you are on my site. I believe that this is the best of both worlds as you do not incur a major upfront cost based on prospective use (and neither do advertisers), and I obtain a tiny exchange of value for the utility I provided by writing the pieces you are currently reading. Feel free to learn about it at Coinhive.

So where do we go from here? Well, you can feel free to look around a bit, or if you are disgusted by my monetization plan, you can leave. However, I'd like for you to stay. Cryptocurrency could benefit from smarter investors with more resolve and a stronger internal game. Furthermore, it could also benefit from someone willing to call bad actors on their shit. I hope to do the same. Perhaps you will be my witness.

Cheers, and thanks for your visit.

-The Cryptist

#cryptocurrency #bitcoin

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palaces-in-every-paragraph · 7 years

Text

Yuletide Letter 2017

A03 Name: LadyReisling

Dear Yuletide Writer:

Oh my goodness, how is it Yuletide season again already? Please accept my apologies for being so late with my letter. A LOT of big life things have happened to me since last Yuletide, and I’m still settling into a new routine, plus matching happened much faster than I anticipated. Please go into this knowing that I’m already excited that you offered one of the tiny fandoms that I love so much and can’t wait to see you make for me.

So: thank you SO MUCH for writing something for me. I know I’m going to love whatever you come up with! I truly appreciate the time and effort you are going to put into this. PLEASE do not stress over it; I am really very easy to please and just looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I’ve jotted down some basic prompts here, follow them or don’t--the choice is yours!

Style Stuff:

I adore setting detail and good descriptive writing. Fall is absolutely my favorite season--so perfect for walks, crisp air, toasted marshmallows, apple orchard trips, cider and donuts, colorful leaves that crunch underfoot, hay rides, cozy sweaters, knitting, lazy weekends, bonfires (or fires in fireplaces) new pens and notebooks, etc. I also love holidays and celebrations--all of them equally, so whatever feels natural to you and the characters is great. Cultural descriptions and events are fabulous, as well as setting, time period, and seasonal details. I’ve been blessed to grow up and live my entire life in a place with four distinct seasons, and as long as I’m not driving in them, I actually adore blizzards and being snowed in. If you happen to live in a place where you don’t have seasons, I’m sorry! But pull up some Google images and describe away and I’ll love it.

Dislikes:

D/s relationships, PWP, A/B/O dynamics (I don’t understand how these work), dark/dystopian or supernatural AUs, kidfic.

Hard Squicks:

Specific Fandoms and Prompts:

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue - Monty, Percy, Felicity, Scipio

It’s really hard to put my finger on what I love best about this series. I love how Monty doesn’t have a foxhole conversion from rich, selfish prat to good guy, but Percy never loses faith in him. I like that it’s light and tropey and yet deals with heavy issues. Show me a slice of Monty and Percy’s life in Greece and what happens after--is there a time when Monty slips back into his old ways, only to be gently pulled back by Percy? And bookish, lovable Felicity is my soul sister. I would love a piratey adventure, with Felicity learning how to really be a pirate and maybe making some crazy, rookie mistakes, or the events leading up to a future time when Scipio decides to step back and make her Captain in his stead. I really, really adore the canon era and setting, so give me Regency hijinks with plenty of action and hilarity, or show me Monty and Percy at Christmas with gifts and a slice of life. Go plot-heavy or go the action route, and I’ll love it.

Code Name Verity - Maddie, Julie

This is one of my absolute favorite books ever. WWII is one of my favorite periods to study/read about, so play up the setting and the war and the clothes and makeup and all of those details. I would love to see the early days of the war, how they became best friends and maybe something more. Show me each of them knowing more about the other’s job than they strictly should--Maddie showing Julie how to navigate/fly or fix an engine, Julie teaching Maddie how to communicate in code. Did they write each other letters in a code known only to the two of them? Give me their stolen moments of friendship or dates in the middle of mayhem, nights at the pub, bike rides, perfecting cover stories, meeting each other’s families, days when Julie doesn’t have an assignment and Maddie is grounded because of weather or the need for repairs, sharing newspapers and iced buns and making jokes out of their fears. Show me the cuddling and comforting that goes on after missions/interrogations, saving up ration coupons for special treats, or using up the saved-up rations for something like comfort food. Give me a missing scene from that time that they don’t see each other, during which Julie’s brother Jamie gets hurt. Do they have an umbrella that they pass between the two of them as a token, a reminder of their first meeting? Was the whole meeting between Maddie and Jamie a setup on Julie’s part, so that Maddie could be taken care of/stay in Julie’s family if something happened to Julie? Was Maddie’s relationship with Jamie originally meant to be a front for her and Julie’s relationship, which then became something entirely different that grew out of their shared grief over Julie? How does a lesbian couple manage to date in the middle of a war, and particularly World War II? How much pining goes on before it comes to fruition?

The Martian - Beth, Beck, Mark

You could go with either book characters or movie characters here, because I love both, but I prefer the book for its ending and for Mark’s hilarious dark humor. I would love some Beth/Beck before the rescue. Tell me how he helps her deal with her survivor’s guilt, maybe brushing her hair and tucking her into bed? Do they watch Mark’s videos together and is Doctor Beck all “JFC, he’s going to kill himself before we even get there?” Show me the hilarity that goes on between all of them in mission prep and what inside jokes come on that long trip back to Earth, and please, please give me all of the Beth/Beck shenanigans. I was so disappointed that the room-sharing didn’t make it into the movie!

Hidden Figures - Dorothy, Mary, Katherine

Kickass girls doing science is my absolute JAM. Show me these ladies encouraging each other, cheering each other on. What was the NASA application process like? How did they all meet and become friends? Does Dorothy steal library books for Mary to help her through her engineering classes? Are there after-hours study sessions? I don’t ship anyone outside the canon here, but I’d love to see woman solidarity and friendship and other life details of the time period.

Mary Russell Series - Russell, Holmes, Mrs. Hudson

The first book in this series is my favorite, so I’d love a pre-marriage casefic. How soon after Holmes met Russell did he know he was dealing with not just a teenager, but a teenager who is in every way his intellectual equal? How much did he miss her when she went away to school? We see one time where Holmes shows up on Russell’s doorstep while she’s at Oxford, but were there others? Did he ever give her a test that involved chasing him from bolt-hole to bolt-hole in London, changing disguises as they went? How much did Mrs. Hudson know of what they got up to, and did she simply shake her head at the strangeness? Did she do anything to temper the way Holmes treated this young woman whom he was suddenly keeping as a pet and protegee?

Thanks so much again, and Happy Yuletide!

#exchange letter #fic exchange #yuletide

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palaces-in-every-paragraph · 7 years

Text

Femslash Exchange Letter!

A03 Name: LadyReisling

First of all, thank you SO MUCH for creating something for me. I know I’m going to love whatever you come up with! I truly appreciate the time and effort you are going to put into this. PLEASE do not stress over it; I am really very easy to please and just looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I’ve jotted down some basic prompts here, follow them or don’t--the choice is yours!

Style Stuff:

Competency is absolutely my greatest kink. I also have a decent-sized hair kink and love hair-touching/stroking/brushing, etc, as well as any kind of safe touch. I like friendship in love, equal partnerships, ass-kicking females, friends to lovers, grudging respect that becomes not so grudging, fluff and cuteness, light angst (angst over the perfect gift, for example), caretaking, hairbrushing, cuddling and tender kissing, blanket/bed-sharing in a totally platonic way, all the non-sexual intimacy and tenderness, late-night talks, letters. Tenderly-described safe touch makes me squee. I don’t mind sex so long as it’s consensual between adults, well-written, driven by emotions, and true to character. My favorite AUs are coffee shop and library.

My A03 bookmarks are pretty heavy on MCU and Hamilton, my two latest obsessions. I love mission fic/casefic, adventures, unwinding/caretaking after a mission, hurt/comfort with emphasis on the comfort, celebrations, and all the happy things.

Dislikes:

D/s relationships, PWP, A/B/O dynamics (I don’t understand how these work), dark/dystopian or supernatural AUs, kidfic.

Hard Squicks:

Specific Fandoms and Prompts:

Code Name Verity - Maddie, Julie

This is one of my absolute favorite books ever. WWII is one of my favorite periods to study/read about, so play up the setting and the war and the clothes and makeup and all of those details. I would love to see the early days of the war, how they became best friends and maybe something more. Show me each of them knowing more about the other’s job than they strictly should--Maddie showing Julie how to navigate/fly or fix an engine, Julie teaching Maddie how to communicate in code. Did they write each other letters in a code known only to the two of them? Give me their stolen moments of friendship or dates in the middle of mayhem, nights at the pub, bike rides, perfecting cover stories, meeting each other’s families, days when Julie doesn’t have an assignment and Maddie is grounded because of weather or the need for repairs, sharing newspapers and iced buns and making jokes out of their fears. Show me the cuddling and comforting that goes on after missions/interrogations, saving up ration coupons for special treats, or using up the saved-up rations for something like comfort food. Give me a missing scene from that time that they don’t see each other, during which Julie’s brother Jamie gets hurt. Do they have an umbrella that they pass between the two of them as a token, a reminder of their first meeting? Was the whole meeting between Maddie and Jamie a setup on Julie’s part, so that Maddie could be taken care of/stay in Julie’s family if something happened to Julie? Was Maddie’s relationship with Jamie originally meant to be a front for her and Julie’s relationship, which then became something entirely different that grew out of their shared grief over Julie? How does a lesbian couple manage to date in the middle of a war, and particularly World War II? How much pining goes on before it comes to fruition?

MCU: Peggy, Angie, Dottie, Natasha, Maria

Agent Carter is absolutely my favorite of the MCU shows, and I was so sad when it was cancelled. See above about my WWII obsession. I love the dynamic of Peggy and Angie and would love to see them sneaking around the Griffith or enjoying Howard’s house. I think that Peggy capitalizes on Angie’s acting skills at some point for something minimally dangerous but mission related, perhaps even without telling Angie what was really going on until later. And speaking of such things, what is Angie’s reaction to her newfound knowledge that her BFF is a super-spy? How does she help Peggy keep in tune with civilian life and help her unwind after missions? I also love that Peggy and Dottie are basically two sides of the same coin. Would Dottie ever turn sides and act as a double agent for Peggy? Do they ever get to a point where, even if there’s not love, there’s a grudging or not so grudging respect for the other’s craft? Would a rehabbed Dottie give Peggy espionage advice?

I really feel like Peggy and Nat have a special connection--it works best with Nat’s comics background, but I love my mental images of Peggy handling Nat’s onboarding with SHIELD, helping her reconcile her past and find her way and not carry a ton of guilt, and carefully handing her over to Maria. I tend to OTEveryone in the MCU, so go wild with whatever characters you like in whatever way you want. I prefer espionage to action, and please, please don’t bash anyone--I ship Peggy with all the things, too: Peggy/Steve, as well as Peggy/Bucky/Steve.

West Wing: Abbey/C.J.

West Wing is a new fandom obsession for me, but these are my two favorite ladies in that show. I love how Abbey plays the matchmaker for, like, everyone, and I adore C.J. in every capacity. I’m still in the early seasons, but I feel like these two ladies have been looking out for each other for a very long time. Did C.J. help Abbey find her platform and her voice as First Lady? Help her pick out her inauguration dress? Does Abbey ever worry that C.J. works too hard and doesn’t have a social life or might settle for less than she deserves because of her job stress?

C.J. is such a strong caretaker and I feel like she probably had to fight her way up in the ranks to get any cred in a male-dominated profession, a male-dominated workplace. President Bartlet obviously has the utmost faith in her, but did he come to that on his own, or how was Abbey involved in that staffing choice? Were they girlfriends/gal pals in college until Abbey went to med school and C.J. went to J-school, and was working for Abbey’s husband just a cover for staying close? I love this show so much, so play with whatever background characters you like, too. (Do the assistants ever get on C.J. for being basically the only female senior staffer before Mandy came on board? How did she handle that, and how much help is Abbey?) Give me all the West Wing shenanigans, and I will be a happy, happy person.

Anne of Green Gables: Anne/Diana, Anne/Katherine

I truly love best friends in love, and there’s no better pair in fiction for that trope than Anne and Diana. I love how Anne encourages Diana to let her imagination fly and Diana keeps Anne as grounded as possible. What would it have been like for them if Diana had gone on to college with Anne? Would she have left early to get married, or planned to do so and then decided not to because of Anne? I like that Diana encourages Anne in her writing--what passion does Anne encourage Diana to follow?

For Anne/Katherine: Was Katherine just playing hard to get all that time? Did she shy away from Anne because she was head over heels in love and didn’t think that Anne would ever want her? I love that Anne wore Katherine down--show me that period from Katherine’s perspective! But was there ever a dark night for Anne when she almost gave up on Katherine? I love the setting of Green Gables and PEI and Charlottetown, so countryside rambles and social outings and other fun would be very much appreciated.

Again, thank you so much for your time and creativity! I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

#femslash exchange #fic exchange

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palaces-in-every-paragraph · 7 years

Text

Fandom 5K Letter!

A03 Name: LadyReisling

First of all, thank you SO MUCH for writing for me. I know I’m going to love whatever you come up with! I truly appreciate the time and effort you are going to put into this. PLEASE do not stress over it; I am really very easy to please and just looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I’ve jotted down some basic prompts here, follow them or don’t--the choice is yours!

Style Stuff:

My A03 bookmarks are pretty heavy on MCU and Hamilton, my two latest obsessions. I love mission fic/casefic, adventures, unwinding/caretaking after a mission, celebrations, and all the happy things.

Dislikes:

D/s relationships, PWP, A/B/O dynamics (I don’t understand how these work), dark/dystopian or supernatural AUs. Please no kidfic.

Hard Squicks:

Specific Fandoms and Prompts:

Code Name Verity - Maddie, Julie

This is one of my absolute favorite books ever. I would love to see the early days of the war, how they became best friends and maybe something more. Show me each of them knowing more about the other’s job than they strictly should--Maddie showing Julie how to navigate/fly or fix an engine, Julie teaching Maddie how to communicate in code. Did they write each other letters in a code known only to the two of them? Give me their stolen moments of friendship or dates in the middle of mayhem, nights at the pub, bike rides, perfecting cover stories, meeting each other’s families, days when Julie doesn’t have an assignment and Maddie is grounded because of weather or the need for repairs, sharing newspapers and iced buns and making jokes out of their fears. Show me the cuddling and comforting that goes on after missions/interrogations. Give me a missing scene from that time that they don’t see each other, during which Julie’s brother Jamie gets hurt. Do they have an umbrella that they pass between the two of them as a token, a reminder of their first meeting? Was the whole meeting between Maddie and Jamie a setup on Julie’s part, so that Maddie could be taken care of/stay in Julie’s family if something happened to Julie? Was Maddie’s relationship with Jamie originally meant to be a front for her and Julie’s relationship, which then became something entirely different that grew out of their shared grief over Julie? How does a lesbian couple manage to date in the middle of a war, and particularly World War II? How much pining goes on before it comes to fruition?

Agent Carter: Peggy/Angie, Peggy, Ana, Edwin

Agent Carter is maybe my favorite TV show of all time. I love the dynamic between Peggy and the girls at the Griffith, and I love how Angie never gives up on Peggy, even when Peggy isn’t sure how to be a friend and a spy at the same time. How does Angie react to her the revelation of the real nature of Peggy’s work? What was Angie up to in Season 2? Show me the two of them living in the Griffith or Howard’s house, shopping, Peggy teaching Angie some tricks of the trade to get around the strict rules of the Griffith, friendship, shopping, dates, ways to sneak out, Angie bringing Peggy out of her shell and into an easier integration of spy and civilian. Or Angie coming to California and getting involved with an investigation of Thompson’s death along with Peggy and the Jarvises, wittingly or unwittingly.

For Peggy, Ana, and Edwin: Play up Ana’s role and competency in this threesome. Do they investigate Jack’s death together, with the SSR boys in the background? I love how all three of these characters are fiercely competent in their own ways. Give me a fix-it for Ana’s tiny role of worrier-in-chief and make her as kickass as she deserves to be. Also, please please please give me all the post-canon in this fandom because I might go insane from not knowing who killed Jack Thompson and why. Feel free also to use any characters you want in the background or the foreground because I seriously love all of them.

MCU: Nat, Maria, Steve, Sam, Bucky, Peggy, Clint

To put it simply: I adore the MCU. You can really mix up any of these characters or any of the ones I didn’t mention in almost any way you want and I’ll love it. Given the revelations in Age of Ultron, I am dying to know what really happened in Budapest. I love how Sam really “gets” Steve and Bucky in a way that no one else does. Show me Bucky coming out of cryosleep to banter with Sam and remind Steve not to take himself and his life too seriously. Mix up Nat and Steve assuming that Nat wasn’t Steve’s first kiss since 1945, and Peggy was. Show me Nat bonding with Peggy, who gets her in a unique way. Show me Nat and Clint adopting Peggy as their unofficial handler, consulting with her before missions and debriefing with her after. For this fandom, I prefer espionage action over fight action. But really, do whatever you want with as many characters as you like.

Hamilton: Hamilton/Washington, Hamilton/Burr

Let me say upfront that I tolerate the daddy kink that pervades this fandom, but it isn’t my favorite thing. I don’t mind modern AUs here, but really, really, really love the canon era. I enjoy Washington as Hamilton’s hero and mentor and and Burr as his relentless competitor in any era. UST fluff on any front is good here, as is the fight/make-up scene when one pushes the other too far. How many drafts did Washington write of his letter that basically said “I messed up when I sent you home, come back please?” How long did it take him to figure out that he wanted the cannon-stealing daredevil to be his secretary? (We know that Hamilton was a helluva writer, but did Washington? How so?) Take me behind the scenes of the Levi Weeks trial with Aaron and Alexander, or inside Burr’s head during Non-Stop (was he actually hellaciously worried that Hamilton was legit going to work himself to death and hang them all out to dry--afraid not that the Constitution would fail, but that Hamilton would fail?) and the whole thought process of his decision not to participate in the writing of the Federalist? Give me the life and hard times of the Revolution, slice of life, camp life, the good, the bad, and the ugly--the horrors of war are a good spot for unexpected light in the darkness, like indulging my caretaking/HC kink. Or anything really.

The Martian: Beck, Mark

And again, another place to play with the HC and caretaking kinks and play up the humor. Show me all the training shenanigans, Beck taking care of Mark after they rescue him, or watching his video journals and being all like “JFC, he’s going to kill himself before we get there” or whatever. I love Beth/Beck too, so feel free to bring her in, or any other characters. Show it all the setting love, Mars science, awesomesauce.

Thank you again, so much! See you on the other side of the swap!

#exchange letter #fandom5k

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